A Step By Step Guide To Building Your Own Online Income!

2010 Edition
Copyright 2010 DIYOnlineProfits.com All Rights Reserved Worldwide

DIYOnlineProfits.com 2010 All Rights Reserved Worldwide

LEGALS
Copyright No Part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanically, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the author. Printing of the book is allowed for personal use only. For information regarding permissions, write to Webvertise.com.au Pty Ltd, PO Box 1444, Noosaville BC, QLD 4566 Australia, or email to [email protected]

Disclaimer While the author and publisher of this book have made reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no liability with respect to loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused by reliance on any information contained herein and disclaim any and all warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy or reliability of said information. This book is not intended to replace the manufacturers product documentation or personnel in determining the specifications and capabilities of the products mentioned in this book. The manufacturer's product documentation should always be consulted, as the specifications and capabilities of computer hardware, websites and software products are subject to frequent modification. The reader is solely responsible for the choice of computer hardware, websites and software. All configurations and applications of computer hardware and software should be reviewed with the manufacturer's representatives prior to choosing or using any computer hardware and software.

Trademarks All trademarks displayed throughout this book are trademarks of their respective owners. Nothing contained in this book should be construed as granting any license or right of use of any trademark displayed in the book without the express written permission of Webvertise.com.au Pty Ltd, the relevant affiliate or third party owner.

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CONTENTS
Chapter 1 - Introduction................................................................................................................................ 7 A word of warning before we continue......................................................................................................... 8 Understanding the idea of residual income versus one time income........................................................... 9 The investment factor....................................................................................................................................10 A low risk opportunity to make money online with a high income potential.............................................11 Chapter 2 - Overview............................................................................................................................. 12 Why build high quality content rich websites?.............................................................................................. 12 So how do you go about creating a website.................................................................................................. 13 But how do you make money from this process?..........................................................................................13 Understanding the power of affiliate marketing........................................................................................... 14 Become an online publisher.......................................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 3 - Choose A Topic.................................................................................................................... 16 But how do you choose one topic from the thousands available?................................................................16 But dont always go for the biggest returns at least not to begin with........................................................ 19 Still stumped for a topic idea?....................................................................................................................... 20 Chapter 4 - Register A Domain................................................................................................................22 Where do you go to buy your domain names?............................................................................................. 22 What options do you have when choosing a domain name?........................................................................ 23 What are the advantages and disadvantages of using these two types of domain names?......................... 23 So how do you get to the stage where you have a domain name ready to register?....................................25 Buying a domain through GoDaddy.com........................................................................................................26 Chapter 5 - Set Up Hosting..................................................................................................................... 29 Setting up your hosting account with Hostgator........................................................................................... 29 Chapter 6 - Do Keyword Research.......................................................................................................... 32 Keyword density............................................................................................................................................ 33 Keyword variations........................................................................................................................................ 34 Keyword competition.................................................................................................................................... 34 Choosing your keywords................................................................................................................................ 35 Long tail versus short tail keywords.............................................................................................................. 35 How to find out how many competing pages each keyword has.................................................................. 36

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CONTENTS
Chapter 7 - Write Or Order Content ...................................................................................................... 38 The importance of quality content ............................................................................................................... 39 The two ways to get content for your website ............................................................................................ 39 Writing your own content ................................................................................................................................ 40 Getting someone else to write your content for you ................................................................................... 40 Posting a job on Elance .................................................................................................................................... 41 Chapter 8 - Install WordPress ................................................................................................................ 43 The Benefits of using WordPress for your content rich sites ........................................................................44 You can save a lot of money using WordPress for your sites ....................................................................... 44 Installing WordPress ......................................................................................................................................... 45 Chapter 9 - Set Up WordPress ............................................................................................................... 51 Understanding how to navigate your way around WordPress ..................................................................... 51 Making the initial essential changes to your new website ........................................................................... 52 Changing the privacy settings .......................................................................................................................... 52 Setting up permalinks ....................................................................................................................................... 53 Adding a ping list to your website .................................................................................................................. 53 Understanding the plug in system .................................................................................................................. 54 Chapter 10 - Install A WordPress Theme ............................................................................................... 55 What is a theme? .............................................................................................................................................. 55 Which theme should you choose a free one or a paid one? ..................................................................... 56 How to install a free WordPress theme ........................................................................................................ 57 Configuring your free WordPress theme ..................................................................................................... 58 58 Widgets what are they and how do you use them? .................................................................................. 59 How to install a paid for WordPress theme .................................................................................................. 60 Chapter 11 - Post Content On Your Site..................................................................................................61 Setting up categories on your WordPress website ....................................................................................... 61 Posting your content in WordPress ................................................................................................................ 63 Comments and pingbacks ................................................................................................................................. 66 Scheduling articles to be published in advance .............................................................................................68

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CONTENTS
Chapter 12 - Apply For Adsense And Set Up Adsense And Other Monetization ................................... 70 Some quick reminders before you apply for your Adsense account .......................................................... 71 Applying for your Adsense account ...............................................................................................................72 How to use Google Adsense ............................................................................................................................. 73 How else can you monetize your website? ................................................................................................. 77 Clickbank .......................................................................................................................................................... 77 Commission Junction ........................................................................................................................................ 79 Amazon Associates ........................................................................................................................................... 80 Promoting your products in a different way .............................................................................................. 81 Chapter 13 - Set Up Analytics And Google Sitemap.............................................................................. 82 Getting access to your Google Analytics account....................................................................................... 82 Setting up Analytics on your website ............................................................................................................. 83 Adding the Analytics code to your website .................................................................................................. 84 Making the most of your Google Analytics account................................................................................... 86 Google Webmaster Tools ................................................................................................................................. 87 Adding a sitemap to your website ................................................................................................................... 88 Chapter 14 - Introduction To SEO And Link Building Setting Up One Way Links ................................. 89 How do people find websites? .......................................................................................................................... 89 What are back links? ......................................................................................................................................... 90 Linking from the right sites ............................................................................................................................... 91 An introduction to anchor text ......................................................................................................................... 92 Chapter 15 - Submit Site To Directories ............................................................................................... 94 How to get your website listed in web directories ..................................................................................... 95 Chapter 16 - Submit Site Feeds To RSS Directories ............................................................................... 96 What are RSS directories? ............................................................................................................................... 96 Submitting your site to RSS directories........................................................................................................ 97 Chapter 17 - Bookmark Your Site With The Top Social Bookmarking Sites ........................................... 99 Digg ................................................................................................................................................................... 100 StumbleUpon .................................................................................................................................................... 101 Moving on to other social bookmarking sites ............................................................................................. 101 Chapter 18 - Submit A Press Release To Announce The Site .................................................................. 102 How to write a press release......................................................................................................................... 102 Submitting your press release ....................................................................................................................... 106

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CONTENTS
Chapter 19 - Write And Submit Articles To Top 10 Article Directories ................................................. 107 How to create a good article .......................................................................................................................... 109 A good title ....................................................................................................................................................... 109 A summary ........................................................................................................................................................ 110 The body of the article ..................................................................................................................................... 111 A resource box ................................................................................................................................................. 113 Outsourcing your article writing ..................................................................................................................114 My view on article marketing ........................................................................................................................ 114 How many articles should you write? ........................................................................................................ 115 Which article directories should you be submitting your articles to? ....................................................... 115 Chapter 20 - Blog Comments And Forum Links .................................................................................... 116 What are blog comments? ............................................................................................................................... 116 Creating good quality blog comments ....................................................................................................... 117 Using Google Blog Search to find suitable blogs ........................................................................................ 119 What are forum links? ..................................................................................................................................... 119 Chapter 21 - Web 2.0 Link Wheels ...................................................................................................... 121 Squidoo ............................................................................................................................................................. 121 How to use Squidoo to promote your website .......................................................................................... 122 Hubpages .......................................................................................................................................................... 123 Creating hubs on Hubpages ............................................................................................................................ 124 Other Web 2.0 sites you can submit content to ........................................................................................ 124 Chapter 22 - Build Profile Links ........................................................................................................... 125 Filling in your user profile .............................................................................................................................. 125 More advanced link building techniques .................................................................................................. 126 Chapter 23 - Rinse And Repeat ........................................................................................................... 127 So how do you make more money and build up a four figure income each month? ................................ 127 Chapter 24 - Final Thoughts ................................................................................................................ 129 A summary of your new money making plan ............................................................................................ 129 Maintaining your sites ..................................................................................................................................... 130 Resources............................................................................................................................................... 132

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INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION
Can you imagine how good it would feel to be earning a few hundred extra dollars every month? Would that make a difference to you and the way you live your life? Of course it would it would make a difference to everybody. But unless you go out and get a higher paid job it's not going to happen. Or is it? Make no mistake there are other ways to earn money other than by doing a regular job. And the method I am about to share with you will enable you to earn money in a hands free way once you have everything set up. You owe it to yourself to find out more about this, because it's real, it works and I personally use it all the time. Hundreds of extra dollars in your bank account isn't the upper limit of what you can do either. If you really want to devote some time and effort to this, you can earn in excess of thousands of dollars instead. You might even end up getting rid of your day job altogether and I'm sure you're probably reading this now and thinking about how good that would be! There is no limit to this. The method I am about to share with you can be repeated as many times as you like. I make an extra $1,000 to $2,000 every single week by putting this method into action. I do other things to earn money online too, but this is my bread and butter.

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INTRODUCTION
Just take a moment to imagine how you would feel with an extra $1,000 coming in every single week. No worries about how to make ends meet or where to find the money to pay for those unexpected expenses. And you can run this right alongside your regular job as well. You won't have to give up work to make a go of this, so you'll have that regular income you are used to rolling in all the time. If you put the effort in and make this a success and you can if you really want to you can give up your job and do this full time.

A word of warning before we continue

This isn't a catch or a let down I simply want to make it clear that you shouldnt undervalue the material you are about to read. This 21 step plan is enormously valuable and I personally use it to produce a passive 6 figure income. There is something else I want to mention here before we press on as well. This is a good solid plan, it's worthwhile and it works I'm living proof of that but it does require some work. If you are expecting to just read this, do half an hour or so of work and then sit back and rake in the money, well I'm sorry but that simply won't happen. You can indeed earn unlimited amounts of money by putting these methods into practice, but you do need to put some work in for that to happen. This is particularly true to begin with, because you will be spending time reading about each step and finding out how everything works. You will need to have some understanding of what you need to do and what order to do it all in. And then you will need to put everything into practice. But dont assume that these early stages in which no money will be coming in are a waste of time. You will be laying the foundations for what is to come, and if you get them right youll unlock a fantastic source of income that will just keep on coming. Does that sound worth shooting for? Of course it does. But too many people expect to jump online, spend five minutes throwing something together and then rake in the cash from it. It would be great if it was that easy but it isnt. You do need to put some effort in. The other type of person who struggles is the person who sets themselves a deadline of a week or a month to make money online. If they havent achieved a good income by the end of that tiny time period, they chuck it all in and say that it doesnt work.

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INTRODUCTION
Patience, determination and effort are all needed here. If you can come on board with all of those you stand to reap significant rewards in the months to come. I will be giving you all the knowledge and information you need; all you have to do is read it, understand it and act on it. So here is what I want you do to for starters, before we get into the 21 step plan itself. I want you to think about the idea of learning a new skill. Wouldnt you like to build a skill that can reward you in a financial sense for many months and years to come?

Understanding the idea of residual income versus one time income

Id like to introduce this idea to you now, because it underpins everything I will be teaching you. I dont know how many hours a week you work, but lets assume youre like most people and you work a 40 hour week. You might get paid per hour, per month or a salary per year, but every one of those hours equates to a set amount of money. This is what we call one time income. If you get paid twenty dollars an hour, youll get twenty dollars for every single hour you work. If you work 40 hours youll get $800. If you only work 30 hours one particular week, youll get $600 - $200 less than you would have got for working a full week. Now just imagine working a 40 hour week for yourself, building your very own online business by using the methods I am going to share with you. This opens up the door to residual income. This is money that can be earned on an ongoing basis. So lets say you build a website and it takes you eight hours. That equates to one full working day as an employee in our previous example. And that would have resulted in being paid $160. Now lets suppose this website brings in $10 a day. That sounds like a bad deal at first glance doesnt it? Youve spent eight hours slaving over that website for ten bucks a day. But just think a little bit further ahead for a moment. The website is earning you ten dollars every single day not just for one day. After just sixteen days you will have earned the same amount from this one site as you would have done for a single days work as an employee. And on day seventeen and every day beyond that, youll get another ten dollars for your troubles.

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INTRODUCTION
Can you see how this works, and how residual income is what you need to be striving for every single day? This is exactly what you will be learning how to do with my 21 step plan. Being an employee pays you once and once only for the work you do. But with your own online business it can pay you over and over again for work you did a long time ago.

The investment factor

Lets talk about investment a little bit now. Youre probably expecting me to tell you that youll need thousands of dollars available to sink into this online business now, but that isnt true. I want to talk about investing your time as well as a small amount of cash in order to make this business work. First of all it will take time to start getting some income from using this method. When you create a new website it can take time to get it ranked well within the search engines so enough people can find it. The more visitors you get the more money you will earn from the site, but those visitors will build over time they wont all arrive on day one. Start out right now with the mindset that it will take you several months to start making real progress. Three to six months seems like a long time to many people, but let me ask you this. If I said you could start building a site today that would be earning you $500 every single week in five years from now, would you be interested? Im guessing you would. That kind of money is worth waiting for, isnt it? And you will find that you can start bringing in a few dollars here and there on a weekly basis long before then as well. Over time it compounds and builds as your traffic builds. This means that in three to six months from now, you could be enjoying a small income from your website (or sites). As far as investment in a financial sense is concerned, you need to think about the practicality and logic of trying to do everything for nothing. It is true that you can make money online without spending anything to do so, but it is a lot harder that way. It also takes longer. So if you are in that group and you dont want to spend anything to make something, you might want to reconsider that point of view. If you are still unconvinced, think about all the other businesses that get going with start up capital every single day. These types of businesses would not expect to make it into profit immediately. They would feel successful if they did so during the first year or two. And even then they would only expect a profit per year of around 15% to 30%.

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INTRODUCTION
Lets compare this to what you can expect from following my 21 step plan. You can invest a few hundred dollars or a few thousand if you wish although there is certainly no need to go to that extent if you dont want to or you dont have the funds. But whatever you do invest you are likely to make a 100% return in that first year possibly more and it will keep on paying you for years to come as well.

A low risk opportunity to make money online with a high income potential
I firmly believe this is one of the best ways to make money online. I myself am focusing more and more time on doing exactly this building more sites and making more money as a result. I have even shown a few of my friends and family how to do it as well! Compare this to all those sales pages you see online, promising you the world and some very high returns for no work at all. Do you believe those? You shouldnt in fact you should be very wary of them. You wont make millions at the touch of a button. You do need to put some work in to succeed. Believe me there is plenty of money to be made online, and I am going to show you how I do it and how plenty of other people do it too. But it doesnt come without some effort. And finally Dont believe everything or everyone you read! I have had plenty of occasions where I have read some advice or information by a so called expert and then found it was completely incorrect. There have been other occasions where information relating to a specific subject was no good for the topic I was working on. What you should do is to take all the information you find even the information I have provided for you here as information to be tried and tested. Look at it as an idea of what works for me. Then consider it, test it and prove that it works for you. Tweak it if you need to so you know how best to use it. Some people habitually fall into the trap of buying up all the latest products launched by the big gurus. Dont do that theres no need to. Instead test this plan as I present it to you, follow it diligently and find out exactly how it all works. If you do this and you are prepared to work for it, you will make money from it.

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OVERVIEW

OVERVIEW
Are you ready to learn how you can make a good income online? I hope you are, because I am about to share with you how you can make that dream a reality. The secret to earning potentially thousands of dollars a month from the internet just as I do is to build content rich websites. And that is what I am going to teach you. Now if you dont have much experience of earning money online or even having your own website or blog, dont worry. Its natural to panic and think this isnt for you or it is too complicated for you to get to grips with. But believe me when I say that building a website doesnt have to be hard. Its actually quite easy when you find out how its done! Tell me this can you write a word document? If you can, youll be able to build a website. Its really very simple and I dont want you to be put off at this early stage because you think it is something you cannot do. You can. Im going to show you how, and it will all be in a proper step by step format so you wont be overwhelmed by too much at once.

Why build high quality content rich websites?

Every single day millions of people hop on the internet to look for information. Most of them will do so by going to a big search engine and entering search terms relevant to what they want to find. Millions of searches take place every minute of the day. Even now as you are reading this, millions of people are looking online for all kinds of things from pet toys to paediatricians and recipes to reading glasses. These people all have one thing in common though they all need information. They have questions, they are looking for answers and they want as much good information as they can find to help them. And if you can provide it for them by creating a website that is rich with content, you will get the visitors you need to make money.

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OVERVIEW
So how do you go about creating a website?
Well go into this in much more detail as we progress through each of the 21 steps to come in my plan. But for now suffice it to say that the process starts by choosing a topic. You then need to find out what people want to know about this topic. For example, lets pick making money online as a topic. What do people want to know about that? They want to know as you do the best way to make money online. They might want to know how much they could make from their efforts too. And you can bet there are plenty of other questions people have on this subject. What you need to do then is to discover the answers to all the questions that people have on that particular subject. These will provide you with the material to put on the website when you create it. The website must then be ranked in the search engines so that people will be able to find it when they are searching for answers to the questions they have in mind the very questions you have answered on your website. If the site ranks well, the people it is aimed at will find it and visit it and that is exactly what we want to achieve.

But how do you make money from this process?

When people arrive on your website they will start to read the content you have created for them. But you will have more than that on offer. Placed strategically around that content will be a number of adverts and links to various products that are related to the subject of the blog itself. Visitors to your site may see these and click on them to find out more. In essence then you have a chance of earning a few cents when a visitor clicks on an advert, or perhaps even a few dollars or more if they click on a product link and buy something which results in a commission for you. Every website you create and build could have several different ways that you could earn money. And while a few cents here and there might not sound like much, it can add up to an awful lot once you start getting a decent amount of traffic. Well be exploring how to do that later on in the process.

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OVERVIEW
Understanding the power of affiliate marketing
You may have heard of affiliate marketing before, but you may not be familiar with just how big a market it really is. This is a massive multi billion dollar industry, and there are plenty of people all over the world who are making a healthy second income from it. In addition there are other people who dont work a regular job any more instead they simply concentrate on earning a good income from creating websites and making the most of affiliate marketing on a full time basis.

Basically affiliate marketing is all about selling the services and products created by other people. Let me give you an example so you can see how it works in the context of the sites we are going to be creating. Lets say you want to create a site on golf and various golfing techniques. You could look for products that you can sell via links, banners and other adverts on your site. So for example you might find a handbook someone is selling about golf that offers you a 25% rate of commission for every copy you sell. If someone goes through the link and buys a copy as a result of visiting your site, you earn your 25% commission (or whatever the percentage might be). And when you consider that each website you build could have several different products on it instead of just one, you can see the potential there is to make a lot of money. Remember I make between $1,000 and $2,000 every single week by using this method. You could too.

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OVERVIEW
Contextual advertising is something else you will become familiar with over time. This is the name given to the small adverts that appear on websites that are served by companies such as Google and Yahoo. Contextual advertising is how big companies like Google and Yahoo make all their money. They are more than happy for you to take a share of their earnings because without website owners agreeing to show the ads on their sites, they wouldnt be able to make any money from them at all. All you need to do is to sign up for free for the Google Adsense program for example, and you can start monetizing your website very easily indeed. What you can do is to add Google Adsense to your golfing site, for example, so your site shows adverts which are relevant to golf. This improves the chances that people will click on them, because they will be relevant to their interests. Even though they will be leaving your site when they click on an advert, you will be earning money from them as they go!

Become an online publisher

No, you wont be a publisher who publishes books and magazines; one who manages a variety of different websites instead. But just as a traditional publisher earns money from advertising, you will make money from advertising too. They sell ad space in their magazines and you will make space on your website for adverts that will make you money when someone clicks on them. And just as with a traditional publisher, you will publish articles and content that people want to read. The ads you will put next to these items are what will make the money for you. Finally, if you think that this way of making money online is still not worth considering, think about this. The type of sites Im talking about making have led to some huge businesses that are recognised all over the web. Take About.com for instance. This is a huge website that has articles and pages on all kinds of topics. And it also has sponsored links and adverts that bring in revenue for the company when anyone clicks on them. So dont doubt how far you could take this if you really wanted to. You may not make as much from your sites as About.com and WiseGeek.com do, but you can certainly look forward to a four figure sum each week if you work towards it diligently enough. Dont think that because they are making so much there is no room for you. Im relatively small fry myself when compared to About.com but there is no doubt that I love that extra $1,000 to $2,000 every single week and you can look forward to loving that extra cash too.
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STEP 1

CHOOSE A TOPIC
So here we are with the first of our 21 steps in this plan to create content rich websites. The first step is perhaps the most important because everything else will follow on from it, and it is to choose the topic your site will be about. You can pick pretty much any topic for your site, and just to prove it here are some examples:

Job hunting Fly fishing Blogging Various hobbies Gardening Growing your own vegetables Making your own home brew

And you can add virtually anything you like to that list too, since there are literally thousands of different subjects to choose from.

But how do you choose one topic from the thousands available?
There are two schools of thought here. The first one says that you should stick to what you know, because you will have more knowledge of it. This will make it easier to put together a website that has good information and advice on it. It also makes life easier if you have some interest in the subject you are basing a website on, because it wont feel like a chore to actually put it together. The second school of thought says that you should ignore your personal feelings and likes and go for those subjects that have the biggest potential for profit. For example, it seems like everyone wants to know about how you can make money online (thats why you are reading this, after all!). But you probably wouldnt find as big an audience for a topic such as making your own honey.

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STEP 1
Personally speaking I prefer to go for the middle ground. It does pay to have at least a passing interest in the topic you choose, because you will be spending a lot of time working on your site and creating suitable content for it. There is no doubt that writing about something you have a basic knowledge and interest in will often result in better writing. Remember that content creation is going to provide the backbone of your site, so if you don't feel comfortable writing about the topic you have in mind, go for something else at least for your first site.

You also need to think about what kinds of terms people enter into Google when they are looking for information about your topic, because you will need to target specific keywords for the topic you are working on. Again, a basic knowledge of your topic will help here. We'll go into more detail about keywords and content creation later on in two other separate steps. My preference for the middle ground also allows for paying some attention to the commercial intent of your site. You will want to make your very first website as easy and pleasurable to create as possible, which is why choosing a subject you like is a good idea. But it should also be a subject that has the potential to bring in at least a small amount of income every week in the long term. It needs to be able to attract the attention of a significant group of people who might be interested in buying some of the products you will be promoting alongside your content.

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STEP 1
As such it pays to think about the people you are focusing your site on. What is their intention? What are they searching for? If someone is searching for chocolate brownie recipes for example, they are looking for information and they aren't very likely to buy something. As soon as they find a free recipe for those brownies, they'll be off to the kitchen to make them and that doesn't translate into any revenue for you. This is what we mean by commercial intent. The person wanting a free recipe isn't looking to buy something. You might still make a few cents out of them if they happen to click on an ad on your website, but that is about it. The site would have a low % of people who click on any ads, or follow any affiliate links to purchase anything. So what you need to do is focus your attention on a topic that allows you to tap into a group of people whose commercial intent is much higher. For example, we could try cheap car rentals in Miami. That is much better because anyone looking up that phrase is clearly going to be interested in renting a car in Miami. All you would have to do would be to create some fresh content that gives them advice on renting a car in Miami, and you're off. You can also try and find an affiliate program for a rental agency or business in Miami, add a banner or link to your website and you'll make some money every time someone uses that service. Product based websites are also usually really good for making money from. By product based I mean, something like Computer Monitors, or Flat Screen TVs, or Lawnmowers, Bed Mattresses, Ironing Boards, Cookware, Haircare, Washing machines, things like that. Things that people only really search on when they are looking for something to buy, they might be looking to find the best brand, or the cheapest price, or to compare features or whatever. But they are usually somewhere in the buying cycle, and are usually happy to click on ads and gather as much information about the product they are searching for as they can. And you will benefit from the click throughs you will get for a topics like this too. Because it is more specific and it will very likely lead to sales, there will be more competition from advertisers for that term. You could expect the five or ten cents you earned for chocolate brownie ads to leap up to around forty or fifty cents for a car rental ad or even as high as two or three dollars per click for high priced items. That's a ten to one hundred fold increase and all because you focused in on the commercial intent of your audience.

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STEP 1
Dont always go for the biggest returns at least not to begin with
This might sound like a contradiction after I have mentioned the idea of trying to get better returns for your choice of topic. So lets delve into this in a bit more detail. Put simply, bigger returns usually mean a larger amount of competition. The most highly paid traffic of all surrounds topics such as finance, home loans, insurance and lawyers. If you focus your site on one of these topics you can expect to earn several dollars per click instead of several cents. But needless to say that very fact leads to a lot of competition. Every marketer will aim at these topics and it is very difficult to create a site on one of these subjects and rank it highly enough to succeed. It isnt impossible by any means, but it isnt the best or the easiest topic to start with. Leave this until you have gained some experience and focus on lower hanging fruit that is easier to grab instead. You can find out how to create a good site and then replicate it with a more ambitious topic later on. Another way to find ideas for topics is to browse through Amazon.com or Ebay.com see what people are bidding on or buying. These sites can also provide you with affiliate links to their products which can increase your income from your traffic, so product based sites are often great money makers. But how do you find out which subjects are bringing in a decent income? The solution is to use a free tool supplied by Google its called a keyword tool and you can find it at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal When you visit the page you will see a search box. To get started, type in the topic you are thinking of using, fill in the anti-spam box and then click on the get keyword ideas button. You will see a list of associated keywords and terms people have searched for in the past, along with the search volume itself, i.e. the number of people who have searched for each term. If only a tiny number of searches have been performed for a particular term, you will see not enough data appear next to it.

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STEP 1
At the top of this list you will see a box which prompts you to decide which columns you want to see and which ones you dont. Click on the drop down arrow and select show all to do just that. This will reveal a column which shows you the Estimated Avg CPC. CPC stands for cost per click. This is quite revealing because you can see what people are paying to receive a click. The rates will vary all the time but just to give you an example I tried typing in the phrase car rentals. The phrase airport car rental was costing twice as much as the phrase discount car rental quite revealing! You should remember that the amounts you see are not the amounts you will receive if you build a site around that subject and someone clicks on an ad using that phrase. The amounts show you what someone will have to pay if they want to get clicks on those particular phrases. For your purposes you need to think about earning 20% to 30% of the cost per click for each term. So if someone is paying $3.50 for a click, you can expect to earn around $0.70 to $1.05 for it. I should make it clear here that this is just a basic idea of what you can earn. The exact percentage is not known as Google understandably doesnt disclose how much we will get paid for each click we achieve with our sites. But make no mistake it is a good business model and there is plenty of money in it to make a very good income for ourselves, so dont worry too much that Google is getting richer too!

Still stumped for a topic idea?

Not to worry Ive provided a list below that should get you thinking. You dont have to choose anything from this list if you dont want to. If you have something in mind that you love and have a real passion for, its as good a place to start as any. Just bear in mind what we have learned in this step about finding a balance between a topic with commercial intent and a topic with an interest for you.

Business interests Financial interests Sales & PR Basic computing Computer software Protecting your computer Pets / Pet Accessories Cooking / Cookware Gardening / Gardening Tools
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Growing your own fruit and vegetable Personal security Colleges & Universities Dating Tips & Advice Family relationships Any aspect of health or fitness Self improvement Positive thinking Goal setting Finding a job online Learning how to do something new Improving a skill of some kind Any type of sport or Hobby Products, Products, Products

Ive tried to include a good spread of subjects here some of which are more focused than others to give you an idea of what you have to work with. You can focus in more tightly on a topic as well if your research shows that it is worthwhile. For example in the earlier example I gave you, I focused on the keyword cheap car rentals in Miami. This is far more targeted in nature than simply car rentals, which could appeal to anyone looking for car rentals anywhere on the planet. But remember that lesser known topics like this which do go into more detail can actually be easier ones to opt for. You will get less traffic to a site on a lesser known topic, because fewer people will want information on it. But this means there will also be fewer sites out there to compete with. This makes it easier to rank more highly in the search results. As long as there is enough traffic for you to make an income from, you will have a good topic to focus on. Dont worry about ranking too much at the moment though. Well cover that in more depth later on when we delve into keyword research in more detail. For now, the aim of this step in the 21 step plan is to choose a topic you feel happy working on and writing about.

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STEP 2

REGISTER A DOMAIN
So here we are now with step two of your 21 step plan, which is to register a domain. Your brand new website is going to need an address, and this is what a domain name is the address at which your website can be found. Whatever you decide to choose, it will begin with http://www. After that you choose the name you want and choose which suffix you want to add to it. For example, some common suffixes are .com (used by American companies and those that want to appear global in nature) and .com.au for websites that want to be recognised as being registered in Australia. Every country has its own variation, so for example the United Kingdom uses .co.uk. Personally speaking I dont believe the country specific domains are the best idea for the types of sites we are building. The only reason to do so would be if you wanted to create a website that was aimed at people in a specific country. The best suffixes to use are .com, .net, .org or .info. (I usually try and get a .com) You need to think about how you will get access to the highest ad revenues in order to get the most cash out of your site. In order to do this you will mostly target US traffic, because the best returns will always be from the English speaking market, including the US. I should say though that it may be worth you exploring traffic from other countries later on, when you are more established and you understand more about how this all works. I have seen plenty of high paying clicks from traffic that originates in places like Australia and the UK, so the money and the potential to earn from these locations is definitely there. It isnt something I have explored personally though, so I can only offer it up as a suggestion for later on. All the advice I am giving you in this 21 step plan is focused on getting the best out of US clicks and the US market. This is king when it comes to the internet, so bear that in mind.

Where do you go to buy your domain names?

Youll hear different people recommending different companies, but personally I use www.godaddy.com to buy most of mine. This is a huge company and they are very reliable; Ive never had any problems with them and you can buy each domain name you need in just minutes. Its all done online and there is no hassle at all. Ive got several hundred domains registered with them now.

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STEP 2
What options do you have when choosing a domain name?
Its amazing how many people choose a domain name with very little thought or research. And yet this is something you are going to be stuck with for quite a while. You can change a domain name once a website is developed and attached to it, but it isnt an easy job and it can severely affect your existing traffic flow as well. In short, it isnt something you want to be doing. So a little time spent deciding on the right name now will save you a lot of headaches and disappointment later, even though youll understandably be eager to get going. Lets take a look at the two main options you have for a domain name:

A keyword domain A brandable domain

What do I mean by keyword domain and brandable domain? Well lets say you wanted to create a website about dog training. Your research will unearth plenty of good keywords and one of them could be something like dog training tips. Now a good keyword domain name from this would be www.dogtrainingtips.com. In contrast a good brandable domain might be something like www.thedogshouse.com. The latter example is more general but it still focuses on the subject and is more of a brand that you can follow through on, rather than a simple keyword phrase.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using these two types of domain names?
You may already have decided which type of domain you want to go for. But before you go ahead with it lets explore some of the pros and cons for each one. The biggest advantage of a keyword domain is that it can help you rank higher in the search engine results for that particular keyword or phrase. The disadvantage with a keyword domain is that they are generally harder to find nowadays, domain investors (domainers) have already bought up most of the popular or semi popular keyword domains, so the one you are looking for may not be available.

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STEP 2
There is also no guarantee it will remain a popular keyword. You could put a lot of work into figuring out the best performing keyword for your audience and choose that as your domain name, and a few months from now it might change to something else. That could affect the performance of your website, and your income from it as well.

So what about brandable domain names? How do they figure in this? Are they better or worse? The big advantage is that if you can build a good brand it will stick in peoples minds and they will automatically think of it when they think about the subject it is related to. Think of any of the big brands around today and youll see its true. When you want a nice cool drink of coke, youll think of Coca Cola. You may not be able to establish a brand name that is quite as memorable as this, but there is no harm in trying to come up with something that will be remembered by your core audience. If you succeed you will get repeat visits without even trying. Plus by using a brandable domain name, you are able to build your site out and target many popular keywords and other related terms. Of course it is up to you what domain name you eventually decide to choose. Similarly you can go with any domain name registrar you want to use, but personally I recommend www.godaddy.com.

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STEP 2
So how do you get to the stage where you have a domain name ready to register?
Let me provide you with a few easy steps here as they will make the whole process a lot easier for you. You can come back to this every time you create a new website too, so you won't be in danger of forgetting anything important. Firstly your domain name should reflect the subject you are going to base your website around. So if it is a site about dog training you should pick a domain name that has something to do with dog training. This applies regardless of whether you want to opt for a brandable domain or a keyword domain. It's a good idea to brainstorm a list of possibilities when it comes to choosing a domain name, rather than going for the first one that comes to mind. You may also find that the domain name you decide on isn't actually available. This means that someone else has already thought of it and registered it instead. Whenever you try to register a domain name all the existing names will be checked to make sure it isn't a duplicate. Sometimes you will strike it lucky first time; other times it might take several attempts to find something you like that hasn't already been claimed by someone else. If you do have trouble trying to find a domain name try adding some words onto what you already have. For example let's suppose you want to build a site on the topic of cosmetic surgery. It's fairly obvious that someone will already have claimed www.cosmeticsurgery.com, so you would have to think of something else. You could try

www.cosmeticsurgerycenter.com or www.cosmeticsurgeryinformation.com or www.yourcosmeticsurgeryguide.com and so on...

You will still have that key phrase cosmetic surgery in the domain name. But you are adding in one or two other words as well to keep it relevant and make sure you can still get a good domain name. The domain industry itself is a booming marketplace. When you start to explore it a little you will be amazed by what you find there. Most of the best domain names have now been taken, and this is especially true when it comes to single word domains. Some people have registered single word domain names that have later sold for millions of dollars!

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STEP 2
As hard as it may be to believe, all of these bestselling domains were bought for a small fee to begin with mostly by savvy marketers who knew the eventual value of what they were buying. Some people even make good money out of what is called domain flipping. This is basically the act of buying a domain and then flipping it to someone else for a higher sale price. Personally I use a combination of brandable domains and keyword domains, depending on the topic of each site I am building. It just depends on the site and what is available when I come to build it. Dont worry too much about the domain name you end up with though. The business model we are following here means it is less important to us than it would be to a company that was advertising its website on television. In that situation people will see the advert, see the website address and have to remember it. This doesnt apply with our business model. Instead people will find our website by searching on Google, Yahoo or another internet search engine. They dont have to remember the name because they will be looking for information and hopefully our site will come up near the top of the listings. They will then click on it to visit it and see what they can find there. They never have to remember the domain name at any point. With that said though they will still read and consider the domain name, and it will factor into their decision about whether or not to visit our site. Remember that even if our site is ranked at number one in the search engine results, there are nine more organic listings on that same page, and the person who has searched for that information could choose any one of them. So in short the domain name you choose needs to be relevant, but it doesnt have to be as memorable as it would be if we were advertising on television or on the radio.

Buying a domain through GoDaddy.com

Lets take a look now at how you can buy your domain name through GoDaddy.com. There are four simple steps to go through, and well explore them all here. When you arrive on the home page at www.godaddy.com, you will see there is a big search box on the left hand side of the page. This is where you can find out if the domain name you want to use has already been taken.

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STEP 2
This consists of two parts. The first part of the box has a space into which you write your domain name exactly as you want to use it. So for example if you want to use dogtrainingtips all as one word, type it in exactly like that. If you want to put dashes between the words like dog-training-tips then type it in like that instead. The second part of the box is a drop down section which allows you to choose the suffix i.e. .com, .info and so on. The default is set to .com. One thing you need to remember is not to put the usual www in front of whatever you want your domain name to be. If you do you wont be able to see whether the name has been taken or not. If you type in cosmeticsurgery and click on the go button you will be able to see what screen you will get when the domain name has already been bought by someone else. Most interestingly, you will also get a list of alternative suggestions underneath it. You dont have to choose any of these but one of them might be suitable for your needs so do take a look at them. You can also perform a new search without going back to the main page. When you find a domain name that is available, you will see a screen that has a big green tick and the name itself in large letters next to it. The current price will also be given, and next to that youll see an add button. If you click on that a pop up box will appear, showing you that you have one domain pending registration.

This is a good way of doing things, especially later on, because you may get to the stage where you want to buy more than one domain name at a time. In this case you can select all the domains you need and pay for them all in one hit, rather than having to buy them all separately. Youll also save money if you buy a certain number in one go.
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STEP 2
For now though, we just want the first domain name. Click on the link which says continue to registration and wait for the next screen to load. This will be the register screen, and if you already have a GoDaddy account you can sign into it here. If not, create a new one by following the steps they give you. Once you are signed in, you will find yourself at the third step which needs to be completed. This is where you can customise your domain name. The standard type of registration is included in the price of the domain, but you can protect your personal information from being found by others by upgrading to either Deluxe or Protected registration if you wish. If you simply want to register the domain you have settled on without opting for any additional services, just scroll down to the bottom of the page and select the no thanks option by clicking in the little circle to highlight it. All you have to do then is to go to the checkout by clicking on the continue button and make your secure payment. Congratulations, you have just bought your very first domain name! One final note make sure you save or memorise your log in information for your GoDaddy.com account (or whichever other domain registrar you decide to use). You will probably be using it quite a lot once your first website is up and running and you want to press on with creating more.

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STEP 3

SET UP HOSTING
By now you should have bought your first domain name and be ready to progress to the next step. In this step we are going to setup our website hosting. Having a domain name is only the first part of getting your website up and running. You also need to find a server to host your domain name. Your domain name is going to be hosted by a server, and the cheapest option available to you is to share a server with lots of other users. When you buy your hosting, the server your website will be hosted on will be taken care of by the company you use. I use Hostgator.com for my hosting, and I thoroughly recommend them. They are a massive company with plenty of experience, and they host millions of websites on lots of different servers. As with registering your domain name, you can use any hosting company you wish. I am merely recommending the one that I use and have never had any problems with.

Setting up your hosting account with Hostgator

The first thing to understand is that Hostgator offers several different types of hosting. They each have their own benefits depending on what you want to achieve, how many websites you want to create and what your budget is. For example, at the time of writing you could get a single domain hosted by them for less than five dollars a month. And the good news is that you can upgrade your account to a more advanced one whenever you find it necessary to do so. This means you can start with the cheapest plan to get your first website up and running. Once it is bringing in some cash you can invest some of the money in a more advanced hosting plan if you want to build more sites. If you plan on building multiple sites from the start, then your best bet is probably a reseller account. the cheapest option will cost you around $25 a month, and will comfortably host up to 100 websites. So how do you go about setting up your hosting account? Its really quite simple, so lets go through it step by step now. On the home page you will see a link near the top of the page that says web hosting. Click on that and scroll down when the next page loads. You will be able to see the choices of hosting plan you have available.

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STEP 3
Im going to assume you will opt for the Hatchling plan to start with. You can see the price for each month of hosting you get in the box, but if you click on the drop down arrow you will see that the hosting gets even cheaper if you commit to it for a longer period of time. For example, $4.95 a month secures your hosting for a three year period. Once you have selected what you want, click on the order now button underneath. This will take you into the Order Wizard, which initially gives you two choices to go for. You will need to select the one that enables you to use your existing domain name.

To do this, open up another tab in your browser and log in to the account you created on www.godaddy.com when you bought your domain name. When you have logged in you should see the domain you bought listed on your account page. Copy the first part of the domain name minus the extension, .com or whatever you chose and paste it into the space given on Hostgator. Then you just need to type in the extension into the second box on the Hostgator page. Click on next to proceed to the next step. Your yearly billing amount will show on the next page, according to the length of hosting you have chosen. Click the calculate totals button to do just that. At the bottom of the next page you will see it automatically ticks the box to make you a new customer. So assuming you havent already got your hosting sorted out, continue to the next step to create an account with Hostgator.

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STEP 3
You need to fill out the next page completely, making sure all essential fields are filled out as required. You will also be asked for your payment information here, so make sure you are on a secure web page and enter everything as requested. Once you have paid for your hosting you will receive a welcome email containing your log in details and also the names of the nameservers. This might sound confusing but it is fairly straightforward to do. Let me show you how. You should still have your GoDaddy.com account page open, so go back there and locate your domain once again. You should see an option to view in domain manager underneath it. Click on that and go through to the next page as this is where you need to go. Tick the little box that appears to the left of your domain name and then take a look at all the little icons that will just have appeared at the top of that section. Do you see the one that says nameservers? Click on it this is the page you need to visit to set up the nameservers yourself. The correct option should already be selected it should say you want to host your domain with another provider. You will see name server one and two are compulsory, and you should have those two nameservers given to you in your email from Hostgator. All you have to do is copy and paste them in one at a time and then click on the OK button. Thats it! You have just bought your hosting and directed your very first domain name to point to your host. Sometimes this change can happen almost straightaway perhaps within an hour or two. But other times it can take two or three days for all the nameservers across the internet to change and recognise the new server. So be patient and move on to the next step in my 21 step plan while you are waiting. Incidentally it is fairly easy to find out whether the change has occurred yet or not. If you open up a new page in your browser, try typing in your domain name. If it cant be found then the change has not yet fully taken place. If you get a Hostgator landing page however, youll know it has been done and you can get on with developing your brand new website.

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STEP 4

DO KEYWORD RESEARCH
In this section we're going to take a closer look at keywords. Keywords will be essential to the construction of your website and the material you add to it. But before we look into that aspect of creating your site, let's explore how keywords work from the point of view of people using the search engines. Search engines basically give people the help they need to find what they are looking for. There are millions upon millions of websites and web pages all over the internet, and that makes it difficult to find the most relevant sites for your needs, unless you happen to know the exact URL for the site you want. This is why people use keywords to help them find the best sites for their needs. If they want to find a new credit card they will type credit card into the search box. If they are looking for information on reducing their heating bills they will type that into the search box instead. The idea behind creating these content rich websites is that we are focusing on one particular group of people each time. So lets suppose you decide to build a site about digital cameras for beginners. What you need to do is to focus on the kind of keywords that your audience is likely to use to find a site like yours. If we target our websites towards the keywords people are searching on, we have a better chance of our sites showing up high in the search results for those terms. This is how we connect with our audience and start building traffic to our sites. But it isnt just a question of finding the best keywords to use. In order to understand keywords and get them working in your favour, its important to understand three things. These are:

Keyword density Keyword variations Keyword competition

Let's take a look at each one in turn so we can find out what they all mean.

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STEP 4
Keyword density
This term relates to the number of times a specific keyword appears in a specific portion of text. So for example lets say you write a paragraph in two different ways. The first attempt contains the word bubble twice, and the second attempt contains the word bubble four times. This means that the second paragraph has a higher keyword density for that word than the first paragraph.

If you look into the subject of keyword density online you will see that different people have different ideas about how high or low your keyword density should be. You will normally see it expressed as a percentage though. So for example lets say you used the word bubble twice in a paragraph that was exactly one hundred words long. The paragraph would have a keyword density for that specific word of 2%. The important thing to remember is not to go too high with your keyword density. If you do you run the risk of having your website penalized by Google for overstuffing it with keywords. This is because it could be viewed as spam. The basic rule of thumb is that your website content should not suffer through the need to cram in more keywords. It should always be natural and flow properly. If it doesnt and the keywords start popping out at you at every turn, you know you have overdone it.

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STEP 4
Keyword variations
This is another important aspect to be aware of. For every keyword you come up with, there will be plenty of variations on it that you can also use for your website. This doesnt necessarily mean you will want to use them all, but it does pay to know how many variations there are. The Google keyword tool can help you to find these keywords. When you go to https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal and enter your keyword or phrase in the search box, you will see a small box underneath it. It says use synonyms. Make sure this is ticked so you can get variations and alternatives for the word(s) you have typed in. Keyword variations are very important because they can bring new traffic to your website. For example you might use the phrase dog training for a website which deals with that subject. But if you focus too heavily on that phrase alone you will miss out on visits from other people who are looking for information on dog training, but have typed in some other variation on that theme. For example they might have typed in how do I train my dog? So find as many keyword variations as you can and use the best ones when you start putting your site together.

Keyword competition
Its always important to think about your competition. Yours wont be the only website out there giving information and advice about dog training, or whatever topic you happen to have decided on. So you always need to consider whether the keyword you are thinking about using is going to have a lot of competition or not. It makes sense to try and aim for the keywords that everyone searches for the ones that have a high volume of searches every month. But this is a big mistake. It seems like a good plan to begin with but the problem is that every other website owner has the same idea. So there could be millions of websites all trying to rank for the same keyword. This means there will be a lot of competition against you to try and get on page one of the search results for that keyword.

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STEP 4
By opting for keywords that have less competition you will be able to get your website ranked much higher in the search engine results. This will give you a better chance of receiving more traffic to your site and more click throughs on your ads as a result.

Choosing your keywords

So now we come to the stage where we have to select the keywords we are going to use for our website. We know now that keywords with a high level of search traffic arent usually the best option, because of their high competition. So we must focus on those with a medium level of search traffic , but more importantly a low level of competition. If you are still wondering why the most popular keywords wont work, try thinking of it in this way. It is much easier to rank in the top five places in the search results for a low to medium volume keyword. It is much harder to rank on page five, let alone page one, for a high volume keyword. And we all know that people rarely go beyond page one in the search results to find sites with the information they want. In fact 90% of searches never get beyond that first page. Your goal is actually to get into the top three search results on page one of Google for your particular search term. If you can do this you should receive a decent flow of traffic from it. So basically, if you target low competition keywords with a low to medium amount of searches, then chances are that you can rank well for some of them, and you will get some traffic. But if you target high traffic, high competition keywords, chances are you will not be able to even get close to ranking well for them (not without years of work) and you will likely get no traffic at all. So, I would rather get some traffic from low level keywords, than no traffic at all from higher level keywords.

Long tail versus short tail keywords

I bet you thought keywords were just keywords. Well they are, but they come in two main types long tail and short tail ones. And really these two names describe them both adequately.

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STEP 4
Short tail keywords are simply very short ones. They are usually only one or two words long. Credit card is a short tail keyword and so is discount. In contrast, long tail keywords are longer. Credit cards with low interest rates is a long tail keyword and so is discount offers on jeans. Long tail keywords are usually much easier to rank for, because they have much less competition. Short tail keywords are usually high in traffic and thus high in competition. But there is another interesting point about long tail keywords that makes them worth using. People who type in phrases like credit cards with low interest rates are clearly looking for something very specific. They have already decided what they want to get and as such they will be a much easier group to sell to. If someone types in the phrase credit card (which will be much harder to rank for anyway) they are only in the first stage of looking for information. This means your site may not have what they are looking for, even if you do succeed in getting them to visit it. As a general rule we should try to target long tail keywords as they are more focused and tap into a more targeted audience. But remember they should still have a decent search volume with lower competition.

How to find out how many competing pages each keyword has
This might sound like a difficult process but Google can help you find out what you need to know in just a few seconds. All you have to do is to type in the keyword phrase you want to research in inverted commas. This is very important. If you dont include the inverted commas you will get results included that have any combination of your search words in any order. The inverted commas means you will only get back results which have that exact phrase in them. This will show you the competition. So how many results should you be looking for? Ideally you should look out for keywords that get a minimum of 500 to 1000+ searches per month and have less than 10,000 competing results. They are the best keywords to target, and should be relatively easy to rank for.

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STEP 4
If you can't find any, then you can look outside these ranges, just be aware that the higher the competition, the harder it will be to rank for it. What to look for: We want to find about 10 long tail keywords to build our site on. That means that we will build 10 pages on our website, and have each page target a particular keyword. So, have a search around, see what kind of keywords are available in your chosen topic, and see if you can find 10 suitable keywords before moving on to the next step.

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STEP 5

WRITE OR ORDER CONTENT

So you now have a domain name, hosting and a list of keywords to use when you start creating your new website. The next most important aspect to think about is your content. We need to create content for our sites because that is what people will be looking for. Everyone who searches for a keyword or phrase via a search engine is looking for information, and that is what our content must provide. They need to get some value out of our site, otherwise they wont hang around long enough to click on an ad or two, or buy something from us through an affiliate link. Content is usually provided in the form of articles, and these can be on all kinds of different topics that branch out from the main subject of the site. This is one thing to bear in mind dont stray too far from your topic, but make sure every article is related to your central theme. This is where our five to ten keywords come in. Now you have that list of keywords ready, you will need to write one page of content about each of the keywords you have decided to target. So if you have five keywords you will need to write five articles and if you have ten youll need to write ten. Its as simple as that.

Your content should be around 500 words long each time. This is a nice and very common length of article for a website. It is long enough to cover a topic thoroughly without boring the reader but it doesnt go on for too long either. Dont worry too much if your articles come out slightly shorter or longer than this; just use the 500 word mark as a rough guide.

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STEP 5
The importance of quality content
Before we go into more detail about how to create your material (or how to get someone else to do it for you) its important to think about the level of quality you need to really make your site a success. Unfortunately some people think that all you have to do to make money from a content rich website is to create any old rubbish and put it on a web page. Just a few words here and there, overloaded with keywords, is enough to provide great value. Or so they think. I cannot stress enough the importance of creating content that is worthwhile, useful and valuable. Whenever you are writing new content ask yourself whether the person it is aimed at is going to get real value out of it. If they cannot read any decent material on your website they will very likely go elsewhere. Not only will you lose your traffic, you will also lose the chance to make a sale from them. We do not just want to put out a string of garbage websites with no valuable content in them. You can certainly make some money doing that, but believe me when I say Google has a whole team of people working full time trying to weed these sites out of their index. This means there is no point producing garbage as it will eventually get found out and banned from the search engines. Besides, wouldnt you rather create something more worthwhile that can earn you more money for months and years to come? Producing good quality websites does pay dividends over time. They are easier to rank more highly, you will find it easier to get natural links to them and you can make more money with them in the long run as well. Plus you will be helping your visitors by giving them the information they are seeking, as well as an ad to click on for a place to buy or learn more.

The two ways to get content for your website

Here are the two best options you have available to you: 1. 2. You can write the content yourself You can outsource the writing to someone else

Lets look at each of these in turn.

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STEP 5
Writing your own content
Some people are quite happy to write their own articles, but it does depend on how good a writer you are. You dont need to be capable of winning a Pulitzer Prize to write good content for websites, but you do need to have a good grasp of the English language. Most of your visitors will be English speaking and this is the market we are targeting. Youll find it helps to plan your articles out in advance before you actually try to write them. You will need a good title that contains the keyword you are focusing on for that piece, and then you need to elaborate on the title in the main body of the article. The writing style you want to aim for is something quite relaxed. You want to get the information across in an efficient and straightforward way. Dont try to impress people with hugely long words as it isnt necessary. A good tip is to put yourself in the shoes of your readers. What do they want to learn from your article? They have typed in a specific keyword the keyword you are using in your article and they have arrived at your site as a result of their search. Try and figure out what they were looking for and then give them that in your article. If you repeat this for every article and keyword you want to target, you should end up with a good number of articles to put on your website.

Getting someone else to write your content for you

Luckily you dont need to worry if writing isnt your forte. There are plenty of writers out there who will be only too glad to create your articles for you. This will cost money of course, so if you want to go down this route you need to figure that into your budget. Its worth mentioning too that fees for writing articles of this nature vary immensely. But you do get what you pay for. A lot of marketers have tried to get their articles written very cheaply and been disappointed with the results. Im not saying you should opt for the most expensive writer you can find far from it. But it is important to find a writer who is talented, efficient and charges a fee you can be happy with.

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STEP 5
A good place to go to in order to find a writer is Elance. You will find this site by visiting www.elance.com. There are lots of writers available for work on this site so you should easily be able to find the right writer for you. Some have full time careers as writers while others simply do it to earn a few extra dollars here and there. They are happy to provide the articles for you even though their name wont be shown on the finished product because they will get paid for doing so. You will be happy because you get the content you want without having to write it yourself.

Posting a job on Elance

If you have decided this is the way you want to go, you will need to post your article writing job on the site. On the home page there is an option near the top labelled post job. When you click on this you will be asked to sign in. The second option is to be used if you dont already have an Elance account. Just type your email address in the two boxes and then continue on to the next page. There are four simple steps involved in posting a writing job on Elance. Firstly you will need to describe what you want. Its worth spending some time on making this as good as you can and as descriptive as you can. The title should contain key pieces of information about the articles you want written, as the writers who use the site will be searching for work that appeals to them. So for example you might put something like this: 10 keyword articles on dog training required This immediately gives people a good idea of what to expect. Youve got plenty of room to add a description for your job as well, so this is where you need to be informative about what you require. Its a good idea to specify native English speakers only; otherwise you may get writers whose first language is not English. This could result in badly written articles that wont be of any use to you. You may also wish to ask for a revision after the articles have been written if necessary. Specifying this in your job posting means that anyone who applies for it will know this is part of the job. If you assume it will be okay and you dont actually say so, the writer could refuse to do it because it wasnt originally in the job description.

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STEP 5
The bottom line is to be as clear and informative as possible. You should also specify whether you are paying by the hour or by fixed price. The latter is safer as you will know exactly where you stand. Dont set your payment too low though, otherwise you will only attract those writers who are scraping the bottom of the barrel. The better writers expect better pay, and will not apply for jobs that dont attract those higher fees. You should also make it clear that once the articles are completed and you have paid for them, full copyrights to them will be transferred to you. This means the writer will no longer own them. If you wish you can put your own name to them as the author too. It is very important to state this otherwise you could run into trouble. Once this first comprehensive step is completed, you will need to create your user account. When this is done all that remains is to choose which type of posting you want and double check everything is correct before confirming the job post itself. Then all you need to do is sit back and wait for some offers. With any luck you will receive several bids on your job. Consider them all carefully before you make your selection. Ideally you should look for a writer who specialises in articles. Choose someone who has a track record and some experience in writing for online markets. This will help to ensure you get a good end product. If you can find someone who has already written articles on the subject matter you are focusing on, so much the better. Use your judgment to see who would be the best fit for the job. The good thing about Elance is that if you find a good writer who provides exactly what you need at a good price, you can use them again in future. Every writer will have a profile page, and near the top of the page you will see a dark green button which says get a proposal. You can use this to contact them with your next job posting details. So you see creating content for your website can be done in two ways. And even if you start out by writing your own content you might eventually opt to get someone else to write it all for you anyway. If you are bringing in enough money from your content rich websites to warrant paying someone else to provide the content for all your new sites, why not go ahead and do it? In the meantime you can be researching your next set of keywords and getting ready to publish another website.

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STEP 6

INSTALL WORDPRESS
Now you have married up your new domain name with your hosting account, and have your keywords and content ready to go, the next step is to install Your content management system (WordPress). I know this sounds rather complicated but as you will see it is really very simple and only takes a couple of minutes to do. There is no need for you to be an expert!

Most beginners to the idea of creating content rich websites think they need to learn a lot about the technical side of building them. Its true that there are a number of different ways you can build a website including learning all the html code that creates web pages. You can literally build a website from scratch using this code to create every single little bit of each page. But more recently WordPress has become a commonly used tool for creating all kinds of websites. It is more commonly associated as a platform for creating blogs but as you will see you can use it to create good content rich websites as well, and that is exactly what we are going to do here.

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STEP 6
The Benefits of using WordPress for your content rich sites
Once you start using WordPress you will see just how easy and versatile it is to use. For starters you can style it however you like. There are lots of different themes you can use, so even if you end up with a hundred different content sites no two of them will ever look the same. There are also lots of different plug ins you can use with it. Each plug in has a different purpose, so you can use any kind of combination of them for different sites depending on your needs. For example you could install one that creates a map of your site with no work on your part. This will enable your site to be indexed in the search engines more easily. There are countless more plug ins to use as well, including ones that help get rid of spam comments, give you stats on your visitors and much more besides. Ill go into more detail about the various plug ins available and point out some of my favourites later on in the course.

You can save a lot of money using WordPress for your sites
Its quite amazing to think that this incredible tool only came about in 2003. In the intervening years however it has grown into something that millions of people use all around the world. It is a convenient and easy alternative to a content management system and there are several others you could use instead if you wish. Personally I find WordPress the best and easiest to use for my purposes because it is very user friendly and easy to get to grips with. Youll see this is true even if you have no experience of anything like this at all. I used to pay thousands of dollars for developers to build my custom content sites for me. But now I can make thousands of dollars more in profit simply by installing WordPress. The script is free and within seconds the job is done. So lets see how its done, shall we?

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STEP 6
Installing WordPress
So lets now see how we can install WordPress by using the CPanel on your Hostgator server. CPanel literally stands for control panel, which is where you can manage and control various aspects of your websites and associated email accounts. Incidentally even if you decided to go with another host, these instructions will apply to them too. Just follow them step-by-step and you will soon have WordPress in place and ready to use. Start by opening up a new tab in your browser, and type in your domain name. So for example if you have registered the domain www.dogtrainingtipsrus.com, you should type this in. Before you hit the return button though, you need to add a forward slash thats the / symbol and cpanel at the end. So this is what you will have: http://www.dogtrainingtipsrus.com/cpanel You should then see a small box pop up in the middle of your computer screen asking you for your username and password. These will be the ones you have to log into your Hostgator account, so type them in and log into your CPanel.

Youll see several sections on your CPanel but the one you are looking for is called Fantastico. You should find it part way down the page. Click on that and wait for the next page to appear.

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STEP 6

Fantastico really is fantastic because it will automatically install a script in this case WordPress for you, instead of you having to do it yourself. So, take a look at the column on the left and you should see a heading that says blogs quite near the top. Underneath that you will find WordPress as one of the choices. Click on it and go to the next step.

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STEP 6
The panel on the right will change to reflect that you have chosen WordPress. Youll see a couple of sentences in that panel, which are in blue type with one of them being underlined saying new installation. This is the one you want so click on it. This will change what you see in that panel once more.

The installation location will already be filled out as your domain name. You can leave the install in directory part blank. The next section down is more important as it requires you to enter a username and password for this particular WordPress installation. I cant stress enough here the need to come up with a good strong username and password. Its amazing how many people think oh, Ill just use admin and admin for now and change it later. And of course they forget to do it. Remember that if anyone can guess your username and password they can get instant access to your account. And if they do that they can change anything they want, not to mention spamming your website with useless comments that promote their own services. So take some time to come up with a good strong and long username and password. Use a combination of numbers as well as letters and use upper and lower case to make it even better. You can always keep a written note somewhere safe so you can remember it.

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STEP 6
Once you have done this you can go on to the next section, which is titled base configuration. Do not worry about the complicated sounding name you only have a couple of simple things to do here. First of all make sure you enter an email address in the box provided. It should insert the one you used to sign up with Hostgator, but if you want to create an email address that is attached to that domain name you can do that too. For example, you could use [email protected]. You need to change the site name too, as it will appear as something like this dogtrainingtipsrus.com. Instead think of what you are going to call your website and type that into the box. In this case I would probably type Dog Training Tips. It needs to be something general that describes the site and tells people what they will find there and also uses a main keyword to help attract visitors. You can add a description of your site too if you wish, but if you cant think of anything just leave it blank for now.

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STEP 6
All you have to do then is to install WordPress by clicking the button at the bottom. And thats all there is to it! Once the installation period has been completed you can log into your WordPress control panel whenever you like via your browsers address bar. To access your new blog admin simply type in your domain name and then add /wpadmin to the end of it. So in our example you would enter this into the address bar: http://www.dogtrainingtipsrus.com/wp-admin

You will then see a log in page for WordPress, so type in the username and password you came up with before and click on the log in button. You will then see your WordPress dashboard for that site.

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STEP 6

So you have now installed WordPress on your website. Congratulations! Its a big step and you can now press on and take a look round. Ill be pointing out some of the most important aspects of WordPress and how to use it in the next step of this course.

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STEP 7

SET UP WORDPRESS
You are doing well so far! Youve got a domain name, some hosting and you have now installed WordPress onto your site. You can now go about setting it up so that it is exactly how you want it to be. Its worth having a look round the dashboard at this stage as well the admin section, if you prefer as you will be seeing a lot of it over the coming weeks. Once you have logged in you will see your dashboard appear in front of you. It may not look much to begin with but as you start making changes to your site and adding new material to it, you will see it changing accordingly. It is very easy to get the hang of how to use it too, so lets have a look round to see what we can find.

Understanding how to navigate your way around WordPress

When you log into your dashboard you will find all the main sections you can visit as the owner of your website on the left hand side of the screen. These are easily accessed simply by clicking on them, and you will notice that if you hover your mouse over some of them a small arrow appears pointing downwards. This allows you to expand that section without going into it immediately. Basically the dashboard allows you to manage the content of your website. For example you can easily do the following things:

Add new pages to your site Add new articles and content to your site Add plug ins to your site

If you decide to allow comments on some of your websites you can also do that via your dashboard. In reality you will find it quite easy to become familiar with WordPress and how it works it really is very user friendly. There are a lot of other things you can do as well, but well focus on a few essential things to get your site up and running as efficiently as possible in this section.

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STEP 7
Making the initial essential changes to your new website
Take a look at the left hand side of the page. Right down at the bottom you will find a section labelled settings and it is this one we need to start with. Click on it and you will go into the general settings page. This page starts with your blog title. You can change this simply by overwriting what is already there just remember that whatever changes you decide to make, click on the save changes button at the bottom of the page once you have finished. You can also add a tag line to the site if you wish. This is basically just a few words that tell people what your site is all about. They should add a bit of depth to the title rather than saying the same thing in a different way. Next up you will see your WordPress URL and your blog address. These are one and the same, but you will probably notice that they dont have the www. bit in place. Just click on the address between the http:// and the rest of your website address in both cases and add in the www. Then remember to save your changes! You can also check your email address for this particular site here, which I suggest you set to admin at (@) whatever your website URL is. With those few simple changes done, lets now move on to do a few more things.

Changing the privacy settings

Were still staying within the settings part of WordPress now, but we need to go a bit further down to adjust the privacy settings if needed. You get just two choices on this page one allows the search engine bots in and the other doesnt. You need to make sure you select the first option, the one that says everyone should be able to see the site. If you dont you wont be able to get your site found and indexed by the search engines. And of course this is very important to do as you want to get as many visitors to your site as possible. And once again, make sure you select save changes to do just that.

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STEP 7
Setting up permalinks
First of all Im sure you are probably wondering what a permalink is. It is basically a shortened term which means permanent link. It is a link to a page on your website which will always be there. So for example if you publish an article to a specific URL, people know that they will always be able to find that information at that URL. This means you want to be sure your permalink structure is user friendly. And this is very easy to do, thanks to the ease of use which comes with WordPress. Just underneath the privacy section in settings you will see the permalinks option. Click on it to see the options you have available. It is important that you do this right at the beginning to get the best structure right from the start. This will help with SEO search engine optimization and also you wont end up spoiling any existing links you will have if you do it later on. Click on the custom structure option and make sure you only have the following characters in the box: /%postname%/ This will mean that after your main website URL the only information that will come up as the remainder of the URL is the title of that page. Remember to save your settings and that is all you will have to do to get the best permalink structure for your website at all times.

Adding a ping list to your website

So whats a ping list, I hear you ask? Well it is quite simply a list of services that will be updated whenever you publish something new on your WordPress website. A ping list is good news for you because it is one of the easiest ways to get the word out about your website. Think of it as a way of automatically telling lots of people you have published new content on your site without actually having to do anything.

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STEP 7
To find the right section of your blog simply go into the section in settings which says writing. Scroll down and you will see one update service already in place. I use a number of pinging services which are available in the resources section of the members forum. Simply copy and paste them into the box on your WordPress page it is right at the bottom and click the save changes button. Now, every time you publish something new or update your website, every single one of those services will be notified automatically.

Understanding the plug in system

Plug ins are one of the best parts of the WordPress system. You can go to http:// WordPress.org/extend/plugins/ and have a browse to see the full range. Plug ins allow you to do lots of things with your website that you wouldnt otherwise be able to do. Think of WordPress and its plug ins like toys. When you first unpack WordPress out of its box, youll see you have got the basic starter set. But there are plenty of other things you can get plug ins that can be added to your starter set in order to turn it into something completely different. There are thousands of plug ins you can use, but some are inherently more popular than others. You also dont need loads of them on your site just a few of the best ones will suffice. There are plug ins to enable people to recommend your site to the social networking and bookmarking sites; still more to enhance your performance in the search engines, and more still that will provide a complete site map for you. We cover each of the plugins we recommend in future steps.

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STEP 8

INSTALL A WORDPRESS THEME

Now that you have WordPress installed on your website, you will want to make sure it stands out from the crowd. The beauty of WordPress is that you can make it look completely unique when compared to other websites. One of the key ways of doing this is to use a WordPress theme.

What is a theme?
Basically a theme decides how your overall site will look. Themes can vary in terms of colour schemes, how many columns your site will have, how big the menu section will be, how image friendly it is, and so on. If you go to http://WordPress.org/ extend/themes/ you will be able to take a look at all the current themes that are available through that website.

This is just a fraction of what you can get though. WordPress is an open source program meaning that anyone and everyone can create plug ins, add ons and themes for it. This means that you will find other websites which have a series of WordPress themes available that have been designed by the website owner. Some of these are free and some you will have to pay for. The WordPress.org website only contains free themes, and at the time of writing there were over a thousand of them available there. Basically speaking then, a theme will change the whole look and feel of your website. This means that it is very important to choose the right one. Take some time to search through the various themes on offer and see which one feels right for your needs. It pays to think about the topic of your website rather than choosing the theme that you personally like the most. Lets run through some examples here to show you what I mean.
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If you had a website focusing on childrens toys for example, it would be a good idea to focus on a theme that is bright and vibrant. Look for primary colours too, since many kids toys use these to appeal to their senses. A website about gardening would ideally use a theme that has natural colours. Greens and browns would be perfect; perhaps you could find a theme which uses trees or leaves in the graphics as well. One final example is a website focusing on photography. This might work well with a theme that gives a bit more room to images as well as text. Im sure you get the idea. Think carefully about what your site is focusing on and who you are aiming to attract. Then pick a theme that will appeal to them. This should help you bring in more traffic and keep it for longer as well.

Which theme should you choose a free one or a paid one?

There is no right or wrong answer to this. There are some fantastic free themes online today that are being used by a lot of different people for many different reasons. Similarly there are some wonderful paid ones as well. It is really up to you whether you want to use a free one or you want to allocate some of whatever budget you have to buy a paid theme. Themes you have to pay for will generally be of even higher quality and be more functional than the free ones. With that said though the free ones are more than adequate for you to start with. Dont feel like you have to pay for one if you dont want to. Just remember that if you opt for a free theme it will usually take a little longer to get it set up and working properly. I would recommend that if you have the money and you want to have a professional looking website, go and get a premium theme and make the most of it. However with that said if you dont have the money, a free theme will be fine for starters. Once your sites start making some money you can use that cash to invest in a paid theme if you want to. Personally speaking I use premium themes. I bought a developer licence from www.studiopress.com that gives me access to all of the themes they currently have available. They currently have around fourteen different themes and as I have bought a licence I will get all of their future theme upgrades for free as well.

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STEP 8
Their themes look great and they lead to very professional looking websites. And remember, this is what we want professional websites with good quality content on them to draw in the visitors. They also have a full support forum with instructional videos on how to use the themes and tutorials on how to set them up to begin with.

How to install a free WordPress theme

If you take a look at your WordPress dashboard again, you will see that on the left hand side, part way down, there is an option which says appearance. Click on the small arrow to the right of the word and you will be able to view the different options you have in that category. One of them says themes. When you have chosen a theme you will be able to see it here, listed as your current theme. So you see you can change the look of your website as often as you like. Generally speaking though once you have chosen your theme you shouldnt have any need to change it. The only reason might be if it starts looking old and tired after a long while; then you can look for a new one to freshen it up a bit. So lets get on with finding out how to install a free theme. In the appearance section you should now be on the themes page. On the left hand side you should see an option to add new themes. Click on it so that you can visit the install themes page and see what is available. You will see that there are a number of ways you can search for a new theme. Right at the top of the page you should see a number of easy ways to search for a basic type of theme. For example you can see all the newest themes available, or you can look at the featured ones or the most recently updated ones. There were fifteen in the newest section when I visited, all of which were very diverse and could suit a number of different uses. If you have something more specific in mind, you can use the feature filter system to search for all the themes that match your requirements. For example if you have your heart set on a theme with three columns and a black colour scheme, you will find a few suitable alternatives once you hit the search button. You will also notice that apart from searching for a specific colour or column layout you can also search for themes, which have certain features. One of the most important examples I could give you here is theme options. Some themes allow you to make quite a few changes to them, whereas others allow none at all. If you want to make some changes then make sure you tick the theme options button so you can only see those themes.
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STEP 8
Each option will have a small screenshot of that theme, along with a short description of it. You will also see two buttons directly underneath the picture install and preview. Clicking on the preview button will open a window on top of the screen you are viewing and show you exactly what the theme will look like. If you like what you see, simply click on the install button. Another window will pop up containing a screenshot of the theme and an install now button at the bottom. Just click on it to follow through with the installation. When you do this the page will change and a series of sentences will appear in turn, telling you that the theme is being downloaded and installed onto your website. But even though it will tell you it has been successfully installed, you will still have to activate it. This takes just one more click this time on the activate key. The following page will tell you that the theme has indeed been installed successfully. But there is a quick and easy way of checking it and confirming that the theme is active on your website. At the top left of your dashboard, next to the name of your website, you will see a visit site button. Click on that with the middle button of your mouse to open it up in a new tab, or simply click on it to open it on that page. You can always go back afterwards. You should see the basic theme you have just installed.

Configuring your free WordPress theme

There is no set of specific instructions here since every single WordPress theme will be built slightly differently. Some do not allow you to alter or configure them at all. But if you have chosen one that is configurable you can access the appropriate settings on the appearance section of your dashboard. Look for current theme options or producer standard options. It will all depend on how the theme has been set up. One of the things you will be doing very soon is to add Google Adsense to your website. This can be done under the producer standard options page or the current theme options if it is allowed. And obviously you want to allow it since this is one of the ways you will be making money with your new website.

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There are all kinds of configurable aspects you might come across in this section of each theme. Some enable you to change the position of the header and the sidebars, while others allow you to add your Twitter username in order to get more followers from this social media site. It is probably best to simply familiarise yourself with all the options you have with your own theme at the moment. You can always come back and make alterations later on.

Widgets what are they and how do you use them?

Before we go on to cover how to install a paid or premium WordPress theme for your site, I just want to mention the use of widgets. Widgets are things you will become very familiar with on WordPress, and there are a lot of them to choose from. They can help enhance the appearance and usefulness of your site, so its worth mentioning them here as they can be integrated into whatever theme you choose to have. You will find your choice of widgets underneath the appearance heading. Just click on the widgets option to see all the widgets available listed in the centre of the page. On the right hand side you will see your sidebars these are the sections which appear to the side of your site. Which side they appear on and how many you have will depend on the theme you choose and what it allows. One of the most useful widgets is the text widget. I use this if I need to insert an image of a product that people can click on to visit that site and buy it. All you need to know is the HTML for that link and you just copy and paste it into the HTML text box. There are lots of other good widgets as well though, including the recent comments widget and the categories widget. Bear these in mind as we progress through the rest of this course. To select any particular widget to use on your website, simply click on it, hold the button on your mouse down and drag it over to whichever sidebar you want to use it in. All you have to do then is let go. Each widget will open as a box when you drop it in, but you can just close it until you are ready to use it. As you can see, using these widgets is very easy and you will soon get the hang of it when you need to add a few of them to your website.

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STEP 8
How to install a paid for WordPress theme
If you have decided to go for a premium them and invest in your website in a more serious way, you will need to know how to install that theme quickly and easily. When you buy this kind of theme, you will buy it from another website altogether, and it will come in a zipped format. You will make your payment through the website and you will usually then go to a download page that enables you to download the theme you have just bought. The theme itself should normally be in a zipped file, so just download that file to your desktop so you can access it easily. Once you have your desired theme log into your website via the WordPress sign in page and go to the appearance section again. Click on themes just as you did before and select add new themes once again. This is where it changes slightly. Instead of browsing through the free themes or using the feature filter, simply click on upload from the list of options near the top of the page. You will then be asked to install your chosen theme. This should be in a zipped folder, which should be the format you received when you bought the theme. Click the browse button, locate your desktop and click on the theme. Then click on the install now button. As with the free theme everything will be done for you at this stage, and the theme should be unpacked and installed in seconds. As before, you just need to activate it by clicking on that button to install the theme onto your website. And once again you can open your site up in a new tab to make sure the theme has installed successfully. With paid for themes you will often see an editor option under the appearance section of your site. This grants you access to the style sheets that have been used to create the theme. You can use these to alter certain aspects of the theme if you wish, but they are not for beginners to dabble with. If you are happy with your theme you should leave it as it is for now until you gain more knowledge of what you are doing. You can still use widgets with it however, if it has been designed to allow for them. So there we are two ways to install a theme onto your WordPress site. Once you have got your chosen theme in place, its time to move on to the next step in our 21 step plan to create content rich websites that will earn you money.

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STEP 9

POST CONTENT ON YOUR SITE

It has probably seemed like a long journey already just getting to this point. But Im sure you will agree that everything has been fairly straightforward so far. Ill try and keep that in mind and continue in the same vein as we press on with the next stage in my 21 step plan. This stage is all about posting content onto your website. Weve spoken about this before and found out how you can create your own content or get someone else a professional writer to create it for you. I cannot stress enough just how valuable content is. And more than that, you need to have good solid and worthwhile content to populate your site with. If you go for cheap and easy content that doesnt give good value to your readers, you wont earn as much money from your website. Its as simple as that. So concentrate on making it as good as you can. You may have heard the saying content is king and I would certainly subscribe to that belief. And as we are about to see, getting that content onto your website is very easy when you are using WordPress.

Setting up categories on your WordPress website

First of all you should think about whether your website will need categories. Most websites do have some kind of category system as it enables their visitors to find the right kind of material they are looking for. It may depend on what kind of theme you have chosen however, and what your website is about. Setting up categories is a very straightforward process. From the dashboard of your website, you will see that the top section is called posts. Well look into this in more depth in this step. Click on that little down arrow to the right hand side of the word and you will see the categories option at the bottom of the short list. If you select the categories option you will go into the main page where you can do all the organising and creating of new categories and indeed deleting old ones at any point if you wish.

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Its worth having a brainstorming session before you start coming up with suitable categories and typing them into your WordPress site. There is no hard and fast rule as to how many you have, but try not to have too many. I think it is better to have half a dozen posts in each of half a dozen categories, than to have a single post in each of twenty different categories. The first version is a lot meatier looking to those who are visiting your site.

A lot will depend on the subject you have chosen though. Your categories need to be on topic and not straying from what you are writing about. And they also need to be quite general in nature. For example if you have chosen to write about dog training, you wont want to have a category on training Labradors. If you do you will need to set up different categories for every other dog breed as well! Instead you might set up a category on training puppies, and another one on training adult dogs. You might also add a category on finding trainers and training schools, and so on. These are all valid areas of the subject matter and yet they all still provide you with enough room to provide several articles on each subject. Remember too that you only need a handful of categories to get started with. You can come back to your site at any time and add a new one as you think of more. So just do enough to create a good variety of categories to start with half a dozen or so perhaps. Once you have jotted a list down, it is time to put them into WordPress itself. On the category page you will be prompted to add a new category straightaway. Think of a descriptive and accurate name for the category; this should be easy as they pretty much explain themselves, i.e. training puppies. Put this into the category name section.
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You dont need to put a full stop at the end. Next, go down to the next box which is the category slug. This sounds a bit odd but it is very easy to do. All it means is that you need to be sure the category name is URL friendly. This is how it will appear when someone views a post from that category. It should be all lower case letters with no capitals, and you should use hyphens to separate the words, like this: training-puppies The category parent comes next, but the chances are you wont need to worry about this unless you want to build a really big site in the future. Basically a category parent is a main category, which has sub-categories appearing underneath it. So for example dog training could be a main parent category, and underneath that you could have two sub-categories of training puppies and training adult dogs. In order to set up a sub-category you need to create the parent category first. With each subsequent category you set up, you then get the chance to select the parent category from the list. You can also add a description for each category if you wish, although this is not really necessary. You might find that the theme you are using doesnt show it anyway. Once you have finished simply click the add category button to confirm your new category. It will then appear on the right hand side of the page and you will be able to see it if you scroll back up to the top. You can make changes to an existing category at any time you like. Simply head back to this page and hover your mouse over the category you want to alter. You will see an edit and a quick edit option. The normal edit option opens up your category in a new page, giving you the same choices as before. The quick edit option allows you to alter the name of the category and the slug in the same screen. Just remember to save your changes whichever one you go for.

Posting your content in WordPress

Now you have some categories sorted out, its time to post your first piece of content to your website. Each new article you add to the site will be called a post, as WordPress was initially purely for blogging and thus refers to each new item as a post (like a blog post).

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It is important to understand the difference between pages and posts however, as you will also see the option to add new pages as well as posts. Pages are different from categories as they represent specific areas of your website. For example your site may consist of five pages:

The home page An about us page A terms of use page A privacy policy and disclaimers page A contact us page

These are all essential pages and you will need to include all of these. Every website you have should include them. They should vary slightly between your sites though, otherwise you may end up with duplicate content issues and be penalised as a result. The reason why you need these pages is to protect yourself and your interests. The terms of use basically tells people under what terms you are operating the website. So for example if it should drop out and become unavailable you cannot be held responsible and so on. Another important point would be to say that people should research and check all facts before they actually act on them. They may not do so but you must state this kind of thing otherwise they could sue you if they try something and you have not warned them you are not responsible. It sounds frightening but in reality provided you include the right pages and the right warnings you should have nothing to worry about. The point is that these will all be static pages on your site. As such they will appear at the top or the side of every page, depending on the nature of the theme design you have chosen. Some people get confused between the idea of pages and categories. Pages should be reserved for important sections of your site as I have indicated above. Categories enable people to find and access information on a specific subject that has to do with your actual website topic. I recommend that you use pages for all the vital stuff and posts for your actual content. The categories will come into play very soon as you post your content, so lets move on and see how this works. When you want to add a new article to your website you need to go to the posts option on the left side of the page and click on add new. This will open up the new post page. Its a good idea to write your article beforehand in notepad if you can, rather than writing it directly into the screen. This is because if there was to be a power cut or something similar, you might lose your work.

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As you can see your first task is to enter a title for your article. Once you have done this, click in the actual post box underneath and you will see a permalink has been created for your title. This should be in the format you have already set up. All you have to do then is copy and paste the rest of your article into the space given. You can play around with the content a bit if you like by using some of the options in the narrow strip which runs across the top of the box. This enables you to use bullet points and bold type in some places for example. Dont feel you have to use all these though; its just good to know they are there if you should need them. If you want to add an image to your articles you can do so quite easily. Just above the box and below the title you will see the words upload/insert. The first tiny image next to that is the one you need to click on to add an image to your article. This will open up a new window which enables you to find an image you have stored on your computer. You can also find one that is stored online if you have the rights to it. Images are good as they add more interest and make your website more eye catching. Just be sure you have permission to use them. They should either be your own images or you can download some for free from the website www.sxc.hu. Make sure there are no conditions to downloading any pictures from this site before using them though. Most photographers will accept a link back to their profile in return for using an image, for example. There are also sites like www.istockphoto.com that sell you the rights to use photos and images. They have thousands of images to choose from and only usually cost a few dollars each. Once your article is in the box you can add an excerpt underneath to pique peoples interest if you wish. Again it all depends on your theme as to whether this will be shown. On the right hand side of the page you will see your categories ready and waiting to be chosen. Tick the one that your article sits in most happily and then add some tags to your article as well. Tags are words that describe the content of your article. So for an article about finding a good dog trainer you might use dog training and dog trainer as suitable tags. Finally the publish button is at the top on the right hand side. It is set to default to immediate publication, so as soon as you hit the publish button you can go to the home page of your website and see the new article there.

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Now all you have to do is carry on adding new articles to your site to give people more to read about!

Comments and pingbacks

Because WordPress is essentially a blogging platform it is set up to allow comments on your articles. It is up to you whether you want to allow comments or not. There are advantages and disadvantages to them. They are good because they encourage people to get involved with your site and to give their opinion on what you have created and written about. They also enable you to build a community rather than just having static web pages. This means you will stand a better chance of having people coming back to your website over and over again to re-read comments and articles, and add more comments of their own. People also love seeing pages with lots of comments already on them. It is too tempting to pass up the opportunity to jump in and add their own opinions, joining and taking part in the conversation as they do so. It is good for us to allow comments as well because it helps to add new content to our websites. The search engines will pick up on this and realise that our site is valuable because it is attracting a lot of attention.

But comments are not always welcome and they do have a downside. For starters there is comment spam. These are irrelevant comments that bear no relation to the website's topic and are posted with the sole purpose of gaining back links to the site owned by the commenter. You would be amazed just how many of these comments you are likely to get if you have comments switched on.

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Dont let this put you off allowing comments though if you really want to. There are plug ins that you can use with WordPress that will capture all the comment spam for you. This ensures it does not actually get posted on your site. You just have to sign in now and again to make sure you delete all the spam out of your account. Ultimately it is up to you whether you want to allow comments on your website or not. If you do I would recommend you make them on approval only. This means you have to allow each comment as they are made. You will receive an email to tell you someone has left a comment, and you then decide whether or not to allow it. Make sure this is the case by selecting the discussion option in the settings section of WordPress. A short distance down the page you will see that it says Before a comment appears Make sure the box stating the administrator (thats you) must approve all comments, and save the changes on the page. Personally speaking I allow comments on some of my sites and not on others. A lot depends on the topic of the site and whether there is any real value to be gained in allowing comments on it. You also need to consider how much time it will take you to moderate comments over all your sites (assuming you eventually have more than one). Ask yourself whether it is worth doing for each individual site and make a decision for each one separately. So that is what you need to know about comments. What about pingbacks? What are they and how do they work?

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Pingbacks are basically notifications that your content has been linked to from elsewhere. So lets say for example you have a WordPress site and I have a WordPress site, and I decide to link to one of your articles on my site. You will receive a notification that I have done so, and that means you now know you have an incoming link. If you didnt have pingbacks allowed you wouldnt know you had that link. You can decide whether or not you want this to happen every single time you post a new article. Right at the very bottom of the page you will see a discussion section. This has two options one allows comments and the other one allows pingbacks. You can set the global settings on your WordPress site to say yes or no to either of these on a general basis. Weve covered how to do this with comments already. Pingbacks are done by going to the discussion option in the settings section. Under the default article settings you can tick the box to allow notifications from other websites and blogs. This should be ticked automatically as the default setting, but you might want to check it to be sure. You can also change the pingback and comment settings for individual articles if you wish. Simply uncheck the boxes at the bottom of the posting page.

Scheduling articles to be published in advance

One of the great things about WordPress is that you dont have to be there to publish content on specific days and dates. Lets say for example that you have amassed a batch of 25 articles to put on your first website. Now you might decide you want to add ten of those articles to begin with and then publish the rest gradually over time. This should help the search engines to see that your site is regularly being updated. Search engines will always prefer fresh content to static content, and they often give more relevance to websites that they see are regularly updated in this way. So once you have added your ten new articles to your website go back to the add new post option and add another one. This time though you arent going to publish it straightaway. You are going to schedule it for a date a week from now instead.

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Insert your article as described before and then go to the top right of the page where the publish section is situated. But this time, instead of hitting the publish button, click on the edit button next to the publish immediately command instead. The date and time will drop down underneath and you can then edit them to reflect the date and time you want the post to be published. So if you are going to schedule it for a weeks time, simply change the date to reflect that. You dont really need to change the time at all. Once you are done click on the OK button and the publish button will change to a schedule button instead. Once your article is ready, click on the schedule button and the article will be stored ready to be automatically published on that date. This is a good tactic to use because you can get several weeks or even months worth of material ready to publish all in one hit. You then dont have to worry about that site again for ages. Ideally you should think about an ongoing content plan, adding at least one new article to your site each week. Its up to you how often you add new content of course; I dont follow this rule with every site I create. I have some sites I add content to all the time like this, whereas I also have others I never update at all. It just depends on the site topic and how much time, money and effort you want to put in. Just remember that regularly updated sites will typically do a lot better than those that are created and then never touched again.

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APPLY FOR ADSENSE AND SET UP ADSENSE AND OTHER MONETIZATION

You have come a long way already with this plan, and you now have a site built and looking good, and it also has some content on it. You may also have set up some more content to be published in the near future using the schedule feature in WordPress. Now we will find out how you can actually start to make some money from your website. You may remember earlier on before we started on the actual steps I talked about how you can make money by putting Google ads on your website. Were going to find out how you can do that in this step.

You will need your current website in order to apply for the Google Adsense program. This is how you will make some money from displaying adverts on your website. I am sure that if you have visited a number of websites in the past you will have seen blocks of adverts on their pages with a small message at the bottom, which says ads by Google. This is how your own Adsense ads will appear on your site.

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The Adsense program is very smart though because it will choose your ads based on the content you have on your site. Basically speaking the program looks at your content and locates keywords to find out what your site is all about. It will then intelligently display the best ads for your needs. This means that you have the best possible chance of your visitors clicking on the ads, because they will be relevant to what they want to find out about. So for example if your site is about dog training, the ads will be relevant to dog owners and dog related subjects. If you have a site focusing on making money online, the ads will be related to that subject instead. Once you have the ads in place on your site you dont have to do anything to keep them appearing. The advertisers that run relevant businesses and promotions based on your subject matter will bid to have their adverts included on a relevant website including yours. The highest bid gets the advertising spot, and that advert is then automatically served on your site. These are called automatic bid auctions because they happen automatically. Google Adsense is the easiest way to get paid advertising on your site. If you wanted to do this yourself you would have to find appropriate advertisers, agree terms with them and then get the ads onto your website. With Google Adsense all this is done for you and you get the highest paying ads from your sector as well, so you will get the best revenue possible. You may know that Yahoo also offers a similar program to website owners, but since this is only available inside the US at the moment I have not had the opportunity to try it. But you might like to try it yourself if you live in the US to see how it works and whether it compares to Googles version.

Some quick reminders before you apply for your Adsense account
You are about to apply for your brand new Adsense account. But before you do it is worth mentioning a few important points. Firstly you need to make sure your website is looking as good as it possibly can, because the people at Google will take a look at it before they allow you to display your ads on it. It should look professional and have valuable content on it. This is another reason why you should take some care over your content. If you dont you may be rejected for the Adsense program, and then you will have to find another way of monetizing your site with similar adverts.

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Google's terms also state that the site must be active for six months before applying for the adsense program. We have however seen sites newer than 6 months which have been accepted, so it's not a definite rule as far as we know. It is also vital to make sure you have all the necessary pages such as a privacy policy and terms of use on your site as well. If you dont it could lead to you being rejected for the program. If your site is rejected initially, its not the end of the world, you can always keep working on it, and re-submit it in a month or so. So with that brief caveat in place, lets move on to see how you can join.

Applying for your Adsense account

So the first step is to apply for your account. Go to https://www.google.com/ adsense/ and you will see an invitation to sign up now on the right hand side. Click on that button to go through to the sign up page. The first thing you will need to fill in is the URL of your website. Make sure you add the home page address here without the http:// part, so for example you would type in www.dogtrainingtips.com. Select English as your language and tick the two boxes below it before continuing on to the next section. You will need to fill out all your contact details as requested in the form, and you will also be asked to confirm you do not already have an Adsense account. You are only ever allowed to have one, and this account will be used for all the future websites you set up and monetize in this way. You will soon see how this is done, and how you can keep everything under one account and still be able to differentiate between your websites. Once you have filled in the form and submitted your information, all that you have to do is wait to be approved. It can take as much as a few weeks to be approved but recently some friends of mine were approved in just a few days, so hopefully it wont be too long before you can access your Adsense account for the first time.

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How to use Google Adsense
So once you have been approved and you have your log in details, go back to the website URL I gave you before - https://www.google.com/adsense/. This time, instead of clicking on the sign up now button you can sign straight into your account from there. Once you are signed in you will find yourself on the main page of your account. This is where you will be able to see your Adsense earnings totting up over time. But first you have to get some ads onto your website, so lets see how you can do that now. At this point, you should take some time to go through the Google Adsense Help Site, which can be found here: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/ The help site covers pretty much everything you need to know about Adsense, and how to setup an implement it properly, as well as some optimization and ad placement tips. There are lots of ways and places you can add Google Adsense adverts to your web pages on your website. Well look at one of the easiest ways to do it initially, which is to copy and paste an ad block into one of the sidebars on your site. Remember the text widget I mentioned in an earlier step? Well be using that here. At the top of the page you are on in Google Adsense you will see four choices. The second one is Adsense set up, so click on that to see what is involved. Select the Adsense for Content option, as this is what you will need to use.

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You will see that you can choose between ad units and link units, but for this example well stick with the default, which is ad units. Just click on continue to go through to the next stage. The next step is to choose your ad format. Now if you are going to put ads in your sidebar they need to be around 120 pixels wide. If you try and go bigger than this you will find that they dont show up. If you click on the down arrow you will see you have a number of pre-set choices to choose from. Well opt for the 120 x 240 vertical banner for the purposes of this example. Remember that the width always comes before the depth.

Next you get to choose the colours you want to use for your ads. This will automatically be set to the Google default palette. But you can change this if you wish so that it fits in with the colours of your website. Have a look at some other sites online so you can see how they do it. For example if you have a gardening site with shades of green and brown, you could make your ad title green to match and your URL brown to match. There are countless options here, but make sure that whatever you choose can easily be seen by whoever is reading it.

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Whatever you come up with, click the preview Adsense unit to see how it looks. A small box will then pop up showing you what will appear on your website. If you are happy with it then you can continue on to the next stage. You can also alter the font and font size, but for this example well keep it as it is. Some of the settings on Google Adsense really dont need to be altered unless and until you get some experience and you want to start experimenting a bit more. As you can see your corner style can also be changed. So if you dont want square corners to the ad block they might clash with your nice rounded WordPress theme style for example make sure you go for rounded corners instead. Click on the continue button at the bottom of the page once youre all done and move on to the next stage. The next step is concerned with channels. Now for our purposes you will want to think of a channel as a specific website. This is so you can track how your ads are doing on this site and every subsequent site you create. If you didnt do this you wouldnt know which sites needed work and which ones were doing just fine. Underneath the box that says all channels you will see a link that says add new channel. Type the name of your website into the box which pops up and OK it. Once you have selected your channel you are almost done. All you have to do now is give a name to the Adsense advert you are creating. So for example you might put something like sidebar widget one, if you have two sidebar widget text boxes and you want to differentiate between them. Then just click submit ad and get code. The code is what you will need to paste into your WordPress site, so sign in there now and go to the section on widgets. If you havent already put a text widget in the sidebar, do so now and then paste the Adsense code into it. Just remember to click on the save button before closing it. One key thing to remember is not to put anything in the part of the text box where it says title.

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This might be good for some items you want to put in there, but Google does not like you to announce their adverts in any way, and you might lose your account if you try and encourage people to click on the ads. So leave that bit blank and just insert the Adsense code below. Your first Adsense ads should then appear in that sidebar when you next view your site. It may take a short while for the ads to become relevant to your site, but once they do your visitors will be able to view ads that are related to your subject matter. Every time they click on one you will earn a few cents in your Adsense account. Indeed if you view your site immediately after adding the ad block to it, dont worry if it doesnt appear there at all to begin with. Until Google takes a look at your site and recognises that you want relevant ads to appear on it, they may not pop up at all. Dont worry they will appear within a few hours at the latest.

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You can also add Adsense ads to your actual blog posts there are some plug ins available that let you do this and it is worth having a look for them if you want to do this. You can also insert your Adsense code into the basic files for your WordPress theme but this is a lot more advanced and you need some knowledge of style sheets to do this. For now, start off with your ad blocks and perhaps take a look at a plug in and go from there.

How else can you monetize your website?

You may remember that near the beginning of this course I spoke about getting people to buy products from your site as well as just clicking on ads. Google ads will earn you a few cents for every click depending on the subject but you can also earn several dollars if someone decides to buy a product you are promoting on your site. But where do you find these products? There are a few key places you should sign up at for free to find suitable products for your website. You can sign up for these regardless of what site topic you have opted for as there are literally thousands of products available to use here. Lets take a quick look at each site to figure out how you can sign up for and use them.

Clickbank
This site sells lots of downloadable products so you will be giving your visitors the chance to buy and receive something straightaway rather than waiting for it to arrive through the post. At the top of the home page at www.clickbank.com you can find the sign up option. This is a very straightforward process so fill in all the details required, agree to the contract and terms and conditions and sign up. Once you can access your account you will be able to look for products to sell. From your own home page dashboard, select the marketplace option at the very top of the page. This is where you will find products. The categories will be listed on the left hand side so if you spot the relevant category click on that. Otherwise you can just use the search box near the top of the page. All you have to do is type in one or two keywords dog training for example and then hit the search button.

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Your results will then come up on the next page. There were nearly three thousand matches for dog training when I looked! A clear percentage is shown on the right, which tells you what your commission percentage will be. A lot of them are 50% or above, and it can go as high as around 75%. Look for a product which has 50% or higher to maximise your return from anyone who buys the product.

Click on the title of the product to see the sales page for it. This will help you decide whether to link to it from your website or not. You should always look for a professional looking site if you can it will help your cause immensely. Once you have found a suitable product click on the promote button to open up a new window. You will need to enter your username and password for Clickbank again. Once you have you will see the code you need to add this product to your website. Copy and paste the blue line of type into your text box widget, just as you did with the Adsense code. Remember you can add as many text widgets to your site as it will allow. Save the text box and you should then see the advert on your site when you refresh that page. To find other products you can carry on and repeat the process again. Clickbank is very easy to use and hopefully you will soon make your first sale.

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Commission Junction
This works in a similar way to Clickbank in that you can get the ad code for various products to insert in your website. There is a lot more versatility here though, as you are about to see. On the home page at www.cj.com, click on the publisher option and sign up for a free account. This is quite an easy process and just requires that you go through each step in turn.

Once you have your account and you can sign into it, do so and find your first product to sell. In order to use Commission Junction you have to apply to be accepted by each individual advertiser. Most of the time you will be accepted either instantly or you will have to wait a short while to be accepted. On rare occasions you may be rejected but dont worry. There are literally hundreds of companies waiting to promote their products with you, so if you are knocked back just go and find another company to work with instead. Click on get links near the top of the site and you will see all the advertiser categories on the next page. The fastest way to search is to look for a keyword. Try trying in dog training to see what comes up. When I looked for this I found four potential advertisers to work with.

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If you click on the view links option next to each one you can see what kind of links you can use. Clicking on the products link means you can see what they sell as well. If you like what you see tick the box next to the advertisers name and click on the apply to program button. You will either be accepted there and then or you will have to wait for a decision. Once you are accepted you can start using some of their buttons and banners. Some will also provide text links. When you are on the view links page you will see the option to choose either html or JavaScript at the far right of each link. This opens up a separate page and the code you want will be at the bottom. Copy and paste it into the required space on your website. Thats all there is to it.

Amazon Associates
Right down at the bottom of the Amazon home page at www.amazon.com, you will find a link to join the Amazon Associates program. This enables you to sell any product from the Amazon website and earn a commission for doing so. Follow through the sign up process and get your account for free. When you are signed in you will see there are countless options for promoting Amazon products. Go to the top of the site and choose from links and banners or widgets to start with. Links are a good way of linking to a particular product on Amazon, whereas banners allow you to link to a general category. The links are often the better way of maximising your chances of a sale for our purposes, so lets take a quick look at those. Click on add product links now and choose whether you want to search for all products or a specific type (i.e. a DVD for example). Add a keyword or two and then search to see what you can find. A list of items will appear and you can then click the get link option to get the code for that item. As with Google Adsense you can customise the colours to suit your site as well. The widgets section is excellent if you want to have something a bit different on your site. For example you can add a few products to a carousel widget when people hover over it with their mouse it will spin round to show them each item.

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Its worth spending some time familiarising yourself with what you can do with the Amazon Associates program. With this and the other two companies I have mentioned you can find all the links and products you need to help you make a lot of money from your websites. There are dozens of other affiliate networks out there that you can use to monetize your traffic, not to mention thousands of individual sites who run their own affiliate programs. It's just a matter of doing some searching, finding sites that offer the type of products that would appeal to your readers and then looking to see if they offer an affiliate program.

Promoting your products in a different way

Finally, another way to take advantage of promoting specific products is to write about them. You can think of an article about the subject of a product you have found, for example. Lets say you have found a downloadable home study course on dog training. You could write an article about this way of training a dog (in general, not mentioning the actual product) and then add the code for the product to the end of the article when you insert it into WordPress. Alternatively you could add the code for the product somewhere in the middle. Experiment and see what works best. So now you have lots of ways you can monetize your website. Remember though not to overdo it and have more ads and products than content. Your articles should always take up enough space so that people dont feel as if they are being pushed to buy something.

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STEP 11

SET UP ANALYTICS AND GOOGLE SITEMAP

So far we have concentrated on creating a good quality site and making sure it has lots of worthwhile content on it. But of course no matter how much work and research you put into it you wont know exactly how well it will be received until you actually launch the site and see how people react to it. But how do you do this? As you might expect there are some ways of finding out who is visiting your site, which pages they are looking at and how long they are spending on your site in total. And of course you also want to know whether your site is improving and being found by more and more people as well. The answer to all this comes courtesy of Google. They have a tool called Google Analytics that will tell you all you need to know about how well your new website is doing. And as with Google Adsense you only need the one account for all the websites you ever create. So lets get started by seeing how you can sign up for a Google Analytics account.

Getting access to your Google Analytics account

This really couldnt be easier to do. If you have already signed up successfully for your Google Adsense account you can use exactly the same email address and password to go into your Google Analytics account. You will find the home page at: http://www.google.com/analytics/ Over on the right hand side you will see a big blue button which says Access Analytics. When you click on that you will find yourself on the page where you can sign in with your existing Google account. So, just type in the email address and password you have for your Adsense account and click on the sign in button. This will take you through to the overview page for Google Analytics. This is where you will eventually see all the information for your various websites as and when you set them up. At first it will look a bit bare so lets see how you can add your first website to it right now.

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On the first page you arrive on when you sign into your Analytics account, you will see that there is an option over on the right hand side of the page that invites you to Access Analytics.

Now this takes you into another page that can look a bit confusing if you arent used to it. It almost looks as if you have signed out again, but your log in email address should still be at the top of the page. If you scroll down a bit you will see an invitation to sign up for Analytics at the bottom. Just click on the sign up button to go to the next page. You will see that the http:// bit is already filled in for you, so all you need to do is insert your website address in the next box. Make sure you include the www. part. When you tab down to the next box it will automatically be filled in with the same URL you have just typed in, but you can type over the top of this and call it whatever you like. So if your website is called www.gooddogtraining.com you could call it Dog Training website. Then simply select the country your website is based in (this should be the same as the country you live in for our purposes) and the time zone should automatically change to the correct one for wherever you happen to live. Click on the continue button to do just that. The page will then ask you to type in your last and first names and add your country once again. Hit the continue button once again.
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You then have to read through and accept the terms of service as laid out by Google and tick the box before clicking on the create new account button. This should take you to the tracking instructions page so you can set up Google Analytics for your new website. This is automatically set to the standard option to track a single domain and this is fine for what you need. You will see that you already have the code on the right hand side of the page to use for your website. All you have to do is to copy and paste this into the relevant part of your site and thats all there is to it. Once you have got the code copy and paste it into a notepad document for a moment and keep it open on your desktop. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on save and finish. You will then be able to see your new website listed on the following page. When you start adding new websites to your Google Analytics account you can view them as and when you wish by going up to the top of the site and looking for the My Analytics Accounts option. Click on the drop down box, select the site you want to see stats for and select it to have a look at how well it is doing.

Adding the Analytics code to your website

So now you have your Google Analytics account set up and you have got the relevant code you need to add to your website. The next step is to paste that tracking code into the right place on your site, and once again this is very easy to do. There are in fact a number of ways you can do this so I will mention them all here. First of all if you visit www.WordPress.org you will be able to find some plug ins that will help you add Google Analytics to your site quickly and easily. The second method is to go into the actual theme you have chosen because some of them will have a space you can paste your Analytics code into. You will find this under the theme options for your chosen theme under the appearance tab. The correct section will normally be labelled web analytics so just paste your code in the box given and then save your changes at the bottom of the page. The best method though is to add the code into the footer of your website. This involves going in and editing the theme itself, but it isnt quite as daunting as you might think.

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First of all go to the appearance tab and click on the editor option. This will take you into the style sheets for your theme. These do look rather confusing but all you need to do is to find the right sheet and the right place in that sheet, so lets do that now. You will find all the different style sheets for the various parts and pages of your theme listed on the right hand side of the page. Look for one that says footer and click on it. Dont worry too much about how complicated the html coding looks. You need to look for just one word an html tag - and it will appear as </body>. You will probably have to scroll down quite a bit through the html code to find it. When you do you will need to paste your Analytics code directly above the </body> tag. So you will have the piece of code that is directly above it, a space, the Google Analytics code and then the </body> tag. Here is a rough mock up of what the finished result should look like:

Dont worry if the section of code included in your theme is different from the code that appears in the example above. Every theme will have different coding because it will have a different appearance. All you need to do is to make sure there is a space above and below your Google Analytics code, and the </body> tag appears directly below it. Remember to save your changes and then youre done. Google Analytics will now start to track your websites activity and tell you how many visitors you are getting and how long they are spending on your site.

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Making the most of your Google Analytics account
Now you have started to track your website's hits and activity you can go into your Analytics account and find out more information about how your site is performing. This means you can make any changes that are necessary to get even better results and a higher income from your website. Click on the name of your website when you reach the overview page of your account. Then click on view report when the next page loads. This will take you to the dashboard for that specific site, and once Google starts to map and record the data collected from your site activity you will see a graph here that shows you how many visitors you are getting from day to day. Underneath this you can also find out how many page views your website is getting, how many new visitors your site has had and a lot of other information besides. Over on the left of the page you can find out more about your visitors by clicking on that option. This contains a lot of information and you might find that you won't use some of it. But new versus returning visitors is interesting because you can see how many people are visiting your site for the second or subsequent time. The other good area I often look at and get a lot from is the traffic sources section. This will show you where your visitors are coming from. For example not only will it show you what percentage of people you are getting from the search engines, it will also tell you which search engines are bringing you the visitors, i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing and so on. You will also see which other websites are bringing you visitors, and as you will see this is useful because you can see how well your linking efforts are working. We will dip into how to set up one way links in the next section. This page will also tell you how well your keyword efforts are working. You will see a list on the right hand side that shows you what your top performing keywords are. You might find that some of these are keywords you havent actually consciously targeted! In this case you can make a note of them and work them into future articles for your website. In both cases you can click on the link underneath the shortened list that says view full report. This will give you a complete list of keywords or traffic sources on a new page. Its well worth looking at so you can find out more about how to get the most from your site.
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Google Analytics has a lot more to offer as well, so have a browse round and once your site starts providing some more information and the visitors start to build, you can make the most of it and tweak your site to get the best possible results.

Google Webmaster Tools

Its worth mentioning here that Google has a special area specifically created for webmasters. It is called Google Webmaster Central and it contains a myriad of different webmaster tools. Once again you can sign into it with the Google account you have now created. The page you need to visit is: http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Just click on the big blue sign in button and sign in on the next page. You will need to add and verify your website but this is quite easy to do. Click on the add a site button, enter your website URL in the box that will open up and click on the continue button. The verification step is quite easy to complete; all you have to do is follow the instructions and copy and paste the small piece of code they give you into the home page of your website. This tells them that you are the owner of the site and that you have access to it. There is a link which shows you an example so you can follow that through. You can postpone verifying your site until later if you wish. One thing I want to point out to you is the Google 101 section on the left hand side of the Webmaster Tools page. This has a whole range of help, advice and information that you can benefit from, and it really is worth spending some time reading through it to find out what Google does and how you can improve your site and make sure it performs even better in the search engine results. Remember, all this information is given to you for free so make the most of it! If you understand more about how Google ranks your website and what it sees on it, you can make sure your site ranks more highly as a result.

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STEP 11
Adding a sitemap to your website
First of all, what is a sitemap? Basically speaking it is a plan of your website. The main purpose of having a sitemap is so that Google and the other search engines can send out their spiders to crawl your site and find all the pages that are there. If you dont have a map for your site there is a chance that the search engines will crawl it and not find everything there is to see. For example, lets say you have created a website that has six pages on it. The search engines might crawl it and find just three of those pages. That means that only 50% of your pages will be indexed on the search engines. But if you had added a sitemap to your site you could make sure that every single page was indexed. And that in turn improves your chances of being found more regularly and receiving more visitors as a result. The easiest way to create a sitemap for your WordPress site is to get a plug in to do it for you. The best one to opt for is the Google XML Sitemap, and you can easily add it to your WordPress site in one of two ways. If you want to keep a copy of the plug in, simply go to www.WordPress.org and search for the Google XML Sitemap. Download it and then go to the plug ins area of your website. Click on add new, select the upload option from the list at the top and browse your computer to find and install it. The easier way of doing it is to go to the plug ins part of your website, visit the add new section and search for the Google XML Sitemap in the search box. When the relevant plug in appears, you will see an install option on the right hand side of the page. Click on it to see a pop up screen asking you to confirm by pressing the button labelled install now. This will then be done, and as you may remember from one or two things we did earlier you then need to activate the plug in. Once you have done that click on the settings option for the plug in to build the first sitemap for your site. All you have to do is click the button and the plug in will do everything for you. So you now have a complete sitemap for your website, and this will help you get the best results from the search engines. It also saves a lot of time trying to do it manually which is half the point of making use of all the plug ins WordPress has to offer to begin with. This is really the final step in actually building your website. Now it is time to put into place certain other steps that will help promote your site, make it more visible and bring more visitors as a result.
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STEP 12

INTRODUCTION TO SEO AND LINK BUILDING BUILDING ONE WAY LINKS

At this stage you should have a working site that has its own domain name, its own hosting and is live and searchable on the internet. Congratulations you have come a long way so far! But there is more work to do yet if you want your site to get the best possible results and be able to make the most money for you. Lets move on now to see how we can do just that. This step is all about discovering what SEO means, and how you can benefit from having lots of one way links to your website. Weve mentioned SEO already much earlier on, and in case you cant remember what SEO stands for, it means search engine optimisation. The idea is that if your site is optimised to appeal to the search engines it will be ranked more highly and will also be more visible both to the search engines and to the visitors you want to be getting.

How do people find websites?

The best way to find the answer to this question is to think about how you use the search engines to find information. As we have seen before, when you want to find something you will go to Google (or any other preferred search engine) and type in one or two words that describe what you want to find. You might type in a question such as how do I train my dog? But whatever you type in it will contain keywords that will prompt Google to go off and find the sites that are most relevant to your query. You may have heard the term SERPS during your travels online. This basically stands for search engine results pages. When you type your query into Google it will return a results page for that query. This will give you the most relevant sites according to what you are searching for. In theory the top ten sites should be the most relevant ones, so you may not need to go beyond page one to find what you are looking for. Now if you turn the tables and look at this situation from the position of being a website owner which of course you now are you can see how important it is to get on page one for your search terms and keywords whenever you can. The higher you are in the rankings, the more likely it is that you will get more visitors.

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So lets say you have built a site about dog training. Someone goes to Google and types in the search term dog training. Your website will therefore be one of the ones that Google considers to show in the results that it returns to the searcher. But as we know it is no good being on the 50th page of results because the searcher will never get that far. You need to show Google that your website has relevance to that search term and that it has some authority as well. The stronger the case you can put forward, the more chance you have of showing up high enough in the search results to be found. And one of the ways your site can gain authority is by creating back links. Lets see how this works right now.

What are back links?

Back links are also known as one way links. A link like this basically occurs when another website links to your own. In essence they are very simple to understand, but they can take a little time to actually set up. But before we go into how to do that, lets find out why we need them. If you have two websites that are very similar to each other but one has back links pointing to it from other websites and the other one doesnt, the one that has back links will rank more highly in Google. This is because search engines view back links as votes for your website. Think of each back link as someone giving your site the thumbs up. They like it enough to actually link their own site to it.

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The more votes or back links you have, the more Google will look at it and view it as a relevant site for that search term. And they will rank it higher as a result. So basically speaking, the more one way links you can have pointing to your site, the better it will do in the search engine rankings. Sites that have a lot of links pointing to them are generally regarded as authoritative sites. This should be your ultimate goal over time. If you can get your site to be regarded as an authoritative site, it will rank well for any search term that is related to it. So in essence then, once you achieve that status you get a little boost in lots of other ways and for lots of other keywords - as well.

Linking from the right sites

This is an important point to bear in mind as some people think that all back links are the same. Theyre not. If you can get a back link from a site that is regarded as being authoritative, it will be worth a lot more in Googles eyes than a link from a site that is not regarded as having any authority at all. So you always need to be careful of where you are linking from some sites will be more worthwhile than others. Another point to think about is how many other links are pointing out from the site that has your link on it. If you have a link to your site on two other sites and one has two links while the other has a hundred plus, the site which has just two links will provide a more valuable link than the other one. Pages or websites that have hundreds of links on them look more like a link farm than anything else at least to Google and the other search engines. A link which appears on this kind of site will be worth less to you as you get less linking power from it. The thing to remember with one way links is that you should view this task as an ongoing one. You wont be able to generate lots of worthwhile links in the first few days that your site is live. And the longer your site is around for the more links you should be able to generate. As things go on you should find it gets easier and easier to generate them and build your site into a real go to place for its topic. In addition to this, as time goes by you will sometimes find that other website owners will naturally link to your website without even asking. This can provide you with additional one way links without any additional work on your part at all.

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STEP 12
An introduction to anchor text
This is another aspect of one way links that you should be aware of. Anchor text basically refers to the words you use to create a hyperlink that leads to the home page or another page of your website. So lets say you decide to write an article about dog training to link back to the home page of your website. Were going to cover article marketing later on in this course, so stay tuned for that as it provides a great way to get both traffic AND back links to your website. At the bottom of your article you are going to have a link to your website. But you shouldnt be tempted to put something like to find out more about dog training, click here with the words click here appearing as the anchor text. What you would need to do instead is to remember what the target keyword is for the page you are linking to, and use that keyword as your anchor text. So if your website home page is ranking for the keyword dog training you would put something along the lines of visit my website to find out more about dog training. And dog training would be your anchor text to turn into a clickable link. The reason for this is that Google analyses the text in our links to find out what our site is all about. So if we use the words click here it doesnt tell Google anything about our site. But if we use dog training or whatever keyword is relevant to the page we are linking to, Google has something to work with and will use that information when ranking our website. Remember too that when you are linking back to your website in any way at all, you dont always need to link back to the home page. Try and create a plan of action that enables you to link back to every single page on your site equally. This will give each page a better ranking and improve your chances of getting more traffic as a result. So our goal is to build enough incoming links over time for Google to rank us at or near the top of its free organic search results for the term we have targeted. There are lots of ways you can build these links. Some are good, some are bad, and some are illegal in Googles eyes.

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For example you cannot create a thousand websites and then have a link from each of them pointing back to your own website. Google can tell what you are doing and it will penalise you as a result. It will probably disregard the links too, so all that hard work will have been for nothing. You should avoid link farms too as these are basically just huge websites that provide links to other sites. They have no real value in themselves and Google doesnt like them. Writing content for other blogs and websites and submitting articles to article directories are all good ways to get quality back links to your website. As you might expect, all the best ways do require a little bit of work. Basically we need to build one way links back to our websites so that they look as natural as possible. And as I said before, building a quality site that automatically makes other people want to link to it from their own will help you no end as well.

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STEP 13

SUBMIT SITE TO DIRECTORIES

If you had a business with proper premises like a shop, you would want as many people to know about that shop as possible. As such you would make sure that your business is listed in as many local directories as possible, so people would know it existed. The same process applies to your website. If you create it and host it online and then just sit back and wait for people to visit, the chances are you will only get the odd visitor who just happens to stumble over you from time to time. This is where web directories come in. They are a bit like a telephone directory but for websites. Getting listed in some of these directories can give us a good start when we have just created a new website. They provide another way for us to get some exposure for our new site and of course once a site is listed it should remain listed for the foreseeable future. This means that not only will we gain the immediate benefit of a link back to our site (remember what we learned in the previous step in this course) we also get ongoing opportunities to get fresh traffic as well. You will find that each directory is split into a number of different categories. This means you need to make sure that your website is listed in the correct category, so if someone is looking through that directory to find websites on your chosen topic, they will come across your website as a potential site to look at. Each directory also provides us with a back link to our website. It isnt a good quality back link but it is still worth doing in this case because most real businesses naturally want to get listed in web directories. So you see that Google and the other search engines dont actually regard the web directories as a bad thing. Another thing to be aware of regarding web directories is that they vary in what websites they will accept into their listings. Some of them are very general and have categories for everything under the sun. Others are focused on particular niches, and that means your own website may or may not be relevant to list there. Always make sure you list your site in the appropriate niche directories and avoid those that arent relevant.

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You can also find directories which only list websites that reside in a certain country. Once again these can be useful if your website is targeted towards people who live in a particular country. Since they will be looking for information and websites that will lead them to services close to where they live, you might get some worthwhile traffic from these directories in particular.

How to get your website listed in web directories

There are two ways that you can do this you can either personally submit your site to each directory or you can pay a small fee to get someone else to do it for you. It all depends on what kind of budget you have available and whether or not you are happy to do the legwork yourself. You need to be a little careful when submitting your website to these directories though because it is very easy to overdo it. There is no real penalty involved in submitting your site to thousands of web directories, but you will lose out in time and also potentially in money if you pay for them. You will come across some people who will tell you they can submit your site to five thousand directories for example. But these are mostly very low quality and in lots of cases the directories are not even seen by the search engines. And if your links arent seen there is no benefit to you at all. Personally I just stick to the top directories. Some of these are free to submit to and other ones are paid, but I tend to use all of them whenever I launch a new site now. Its up to you whether you use one or the other or both, we have provided a list of both free and paid directories in the back of this manual. Submitting to Web Directories: When you submit your site to a directory, you usually just need to enter your site name, a short description and your URL. Where possible you should try and use the keywords you are trying to rank for in the title, because that will usually become the anchor text when the listing goes live. It's not always possible, some directories insist that you use your site name, in which case you should just use your site name which will usually include at least some of your keywords anyway.

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STEP 14

SUBMIT SITE FEEDS TO RSS DIRECTORIES

So you have now listed your new website at several online web directories. This should help you to build up some traffic over time. But there are some other directories it would pay you to get your website listed at as well, and these are known as RSS directories.

What are RSS directories?

First of all we should look at what RSS means. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. Syndication refers to a method for distributing the content of your website. The good news is that your WordPress site has an RSS feed automatically built into it, so this part of the process will already have been solved for you. All you have to do is to get the word out about your site by using the RSS feed to help you.

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An RSS feed is immensely useful because it helps people to stay updated with what is going on with your site. For example, lets say someone signs up to receive your RSS feed updates. They will do this via a reader which updates all the RSS feeds they happen to be subscribed to. If you publish a new article on your site, the RSS feed will update their reader for them to let them know that new content is available. They might then visit your website again to have another look at it, so RSS feeds provide a way of keeping in touch with people who are interested in your site without involving any more work on your part. The good news is that people who are interested in your site dont have to remember to revisit it constantly. They can simply access their RSS reader and get all their updates from there. Incidentally you can monetize your RSS feeds as well simply go into your Google Adsense account and read more about it there. On your home page when you have signed in you will see Adsense for Feeds appearing as an option. Click on that and go through the steps to add some Adsense ads to your feed. This provides another way for your website to make money. So even if someone reads your new content and doesnt visit your site, they may still click on an ad within your feed, making you a few cents in the process.

Submitting your site to RSS directories

The process for submitting your sites RSS feed to the RSS directories is much the same as it was for submitting your site to the basic web directories. We want to submit our site feed to as many RSS directories as we possibly can, because again each one counts as a back link to our site. And again it gets the search engines to pay attention to our site as it has links leading back to it from lots of good websites. The feed address for your website should be quite simply http:// www.dogtrainingtips.com/feed/. You could also choose to sign up with Feedburner at www.feedburner.google.com to manage your feed and get a proper feed address from there. Once again you can use your Google account sign in details and burn a feed from the initial page you will see. This is a quick and simple process and your Feedburner account has plenty of ways in which you can enhance your RSS feed and make it work even better for you.

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The other advantage of using Feedburner is that the one account will work for all the subsequent sites you choose to set up as well. This makes life easier for you, and since you can use the same Google account for Adsense, Analytics and now Feedburner as well, you only have the one set of log in details to remember. Once you have your feed address identified, you simply have to submit it to as many directories as you can. We have created a list of RSS directories that you can submit too and posted it in the back of this manual. I always submit my new sites to these so I can vouch for all of them. You can either do them all in one sitting or break them up into manageable chunks if you find it is a boring job. Make sure you do submit your site though, because this is just one more way of finding new streams of traffic for your site.

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STEP 15

SUBMIT TO SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES

The Internet is a huge place you dont need me to tell you that. But it means there is a place for people to share the best sites they come across on their journeys so that other people can benefit from them as well. And just as you would bookmark a page in a book so you could refer to it again later, you can do exactly the same thing in the online world as well. Its called social bookmarking and it provides another way for you to make sure people can find and visit your website. When you become a member of one (or more) of these social bookmarking sites you can arrange your favourite sites in categories depending on what subject they are based on. You can also share them with other people online if you wish, and this is where you can gain new traffic for your own sites. Most sites have rules about whether or not you can submit your own sites for consideration. But most of them will allow it so long as you dont abuse the facility. For example if you were to have a collection of twenty bookmarks shared publicly and they were all relating to your own sites, you probably wouldnt be looked on too favourably. In contrast if you bookmarked a handful of other sites for every one of your own you bookmark, you would have a much more balanced account. There are also distinct advantages to this because more people will be interested in the sites you are recommending. One good tip to remember is to bookmark a few websites that are similar in nature to your own. If people are looking for sites on a specific subject they will look through all the sites you have bookmarked. And since yours will be among them it can bring you some more followers too. Many online marketers use social bookmarking sites to get their own websites seen by a wider audience. The idea is to get as many other people to bookmark your site as possible too, so you can reach more people and get more traffic as a result. Lets take a look at two of the most popular social bookmarking sites now, so you can get an idea of how they work. I will then add a list of the top social bookmarking sites at the end of this section, so you can join as many as you want and bookmark your new site with each one.

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STEP 15
Digg
The idea is simple if you like a link that someone else has provided, you Digg it. The more Diggs any one item gets, the more likely it is that the item will appear on the home page of the site. And as you might imagine that can get you a lot of traffic, even though it is likely to be a short lived stream. You can still benefit from it. The join up invitation is at the top of the home page, and it doesnt take long to sign up with a new account. Its a good idea to use the same username with all the social bookmarking sites you use, even if you change the password each time. This will enable you to be more visible on each site. If someone spots you on one site they will recognise your name when they visit another social bookmarking site and see you there too. Make sure you fill in your profile once you have joined, because this will enable people to see who you are and what you are doing. Its a good idea to keep your profile picture the same on each site you join as well, for the same reasons mentioned above. So how do you Digg your own website? At the top of your profile page you will see an invite to submit new. Click on that and the next page will show you how to do it. All you need to do is enter the URL of your site and then select the news article option before clicking on continue. Digg will then go off and check out your site before reporting back. It may come up with some potential duplicates but unless someone else has already helpfully submitted your site for you, just confirm that it isnt a duplicate and wait for the next page to appear. Your submission should have a title and a basic description filled in, but you can alter these if you wish and add more information to them. Remember those keywords they can help you attract more visitors. Once you have filled out the rest of the page your story will appear on Digg. And if you can promote that fact elsewhere you might get more people to Digg your submission as well. One final thing whenever you create a new website in future, dont forget to Digg it!

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StumbleUpon
You can add a site just as easily to StumbleUpon as well. This site works in much the same way as Digg, in that the aim is to get as many people to view your site and give it the thumbs up as possible. Look for the add a site button when you first join and arrive on your own page. A window will open up at the top of the page and all you have to do is add your URL and a description for your site. Once again dont neglect to enter some of the best keywords you have for your site. If you are linking to your home page include the main keyword for that page. It will ensure that your site shows up in any searches performed on StumbleUpon by anyone wanting information on that subject.

Moving on to other social bookmarking sites

As you can see the basic idea with every social bookmarking site is the same. The submission process may be slightly different but the same idea is there with all of them. So make sure you bookmark your site with as many as you can. And of course every time you do you will also get another valuable back link to your website. And you know by now how important those back links are. We have links to more bookmarking sites in the back of this manual.

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STEP 16

SUBMIT A PRESS RELEASE TO ANNOUNCE THE SITE

A press release is a great way to announce the launch of your new site. But there is more than one benefit to creating a solid press release when your site has just launched. For starters you can expect to get more of that back link power when you send out a press release. Every press release should have a link back to your website, so if it is published in ten different places online you can get ten back links in one fell swoop as a result. Press releases also have the power to get you into Google News and this can give your site a handy boost at the beginning too. If you take a look at the top of Googles home page you will see that one of the options you have available is the news option. Press releases often get picked up and displayed here, so if someone is searching for information about the topic of your site and they search in the news section, your press release could appear. I usually just write and send one press release for every new site I launch. I prefer to submit them through a paid service, so I only have to submit it to them and the rest is taken care of for me. But you can submit your press releases through the many free sites that are online as well if you wish. Once again this is something you can do for free when you are on a tight budget. Once your website starts to make some money you can invest some of that cash into a paid press release service for future sites that you create.

How to write a press release

There is a very specific method for writing press releases that you should follow. If you create it in much the same way as you would write an article you wont get anywhere. It should include certain items of information and it should also not include the word you. This might sound a bit odd but there is a very good reason for it. You are not telling an individual about your website. Instead you are announcing the fact that your site has launched. So for example, you might be tempted to say something like this: You can visit my new website by going to www.dogtrainingtips.com.

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But this sentence contains the word you. So we would need to change it to something like this instead: Interested parties can visit the website at www.dogtrainingtips.com. You can see here that I have removed the you and my aspects of the previous sentence. This is how you need to write to produce a good press release, and it will come more easily the more you practice it. Remember too that you can just check through to see if you have used these words once the press release is written. If you have you can just rewrite it to change the meaning.

The top of the release should have your name and contact details on the left hand side. Make sure you add an email address where people can get hold of you if need be. To the right of this you should add the words FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE in capital letters as I have indicated here. This basically just means that anyone who wants to use the information in the release and publish it elsewhere can do so straightaway.

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You then need a title and sub-title for your press release. I generally use something like the following example for mine, and tweak it every time to make it relevant to that particular site: BRAND NEW SITE LAUNCHED GIVING DOG TRAINING TIPS TO DOG OWNERS Training Dogs Becomes Easier And More Enjoyable With The Right Tips Once again the main title should be in capitals and the sub-heading should just have the first letter of each word capitalised as shown here. Then you will have the body of your press release. Make sure you add your location first of all, such as New York, USA or London, England for example. The first paragraph should always answer these five famous questions who, what, why, where and when. So in this case the answers to those questions might be as follows: WHO dog owners WHAT dog training website WHY to help dog owners train their dogs to behave properly WHERE online WHEN now You will find it a lot easier to write your press release if you jot down those questions and make sure you have the answers to all of them before you begin. A good starting paragraph for this example might go something like this: Atlanta, Georgia, USA - A new website aimed at dog owners has just been launched with the aim of helping them to learn how to train their dogs to behave properly. You would then go on to give more information about your website, perhaps including some examples of the kind of information people can find there. Make sure you add some keywords so you can appeal to the search engines and to people who are looking for this kind of information. Another good tip to remember is to add a few quotes to the press release. People like quotes because they can quote them themselves when they want news for other outlets. All you have to do is think about why you started the site in the first place. We know that the main reason is to make money, but of course you won't be sharing that! Instead put something like this:

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I created this website to help dog owners get the best behaviour out of their dogs, said [your name]. Some people are literally unable to control their dogs at all, but if you know how to do it you can get really good results from even the most unruly of dogs. You get the idea. Sprinkle in a couple of quotations like this and give people a taster of what to expect from your website. It is also perfectly okay to include the URL of your website in the actual press release itself, although dont overdo it. Pop it in somewhere near the beginning and then use it again at the end. You should always have the final paragraph as a basic information paragraph that tells people about your site and where to find it. After this you then have another paragraph which will give information to those people who want to get in touch or visit your website. Something along the lines of the following paragraph will do just fine: To find more information on DogTrainingTips.com and discover how to train your dog successfully, you can visit www.dogtrainingtips.com or email [your name] at [your name]@dogtrainingtips.com. And that is all there is to it. It sounds easy and in reality it doesnt have to be that difficult. Once you get the hang of it you should be able to write a perfectly competent press release without it taking you ages. You only need the body of the release to be about 500 words long, so bear that in mind as you are writing. Of course if you dont like writing or you dont feel you are good enough, you can outsource the press release to a professional writer and ask them to write it for you. We spoke about Elance.com earlier on in this course, and you can use that same site to ask for a press release writer to take this job on for you. Simply apply the same advice about posting your job to Elance as I provided for you in that section.

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As I said previously I use a paid service to submit my press releases to all the best sites. But you can do it manually on your own if you wish, without paying a penny to do so. We have put together a list of the top free and paid sites where you can submit your press release in the back of this manual.

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STEP 17

WRITE AND SUBMIT ARTICLES TO ARTICLE DIRECTORIES

We have already spoken about writing articles and content to put on your website. But there are other reasons you should be writing articles as well, and that is what we are going to cover in this section of my 21 step plan. Here we are going to talk about article marketing. You may already have heard of this, but if you havent it is quite an easy concept to understand. Basically you will be writing articles to distribute for free around the web, each one of which will provide a link back to your website. Article marketing is therefore a great tool for building back links. It is also a good way to introduce people to your topic and to establish yourself as an authority on that topic. And since there is no limit to the number of articles you can write, you can get as many back links as you are able to as a result of putting some effort into article marketing. These types of articles are submitted to the various article directories that exist on the internet. The good thing about article directories is that they are considered to be authoritative sites in the eyes of the search engines. The best example is arguably the most authoritative article site of all Ezine Articles. You will find this at: http://ezinearticles.com You can submit your articles to the article directories for free and receive a quality back link each time. Well see how these articles should be constructed in a moment, so you will know what to do when you do it yourself. Some people only aim for very basic articles that will enable them to get that allimportant back link. But there is a lot more to benefit from here if you go about writing them in the right way. For example the back links are only the first part of the story. Yes you will benefit from the links because they will help your site to rank more highly whenever someone searches for an appropriate term in the search engines. But you also want to try and drive traffic through those links, because this means you will get extra footfall to your website. This in turn leads to the potential for more click throughs and purchases, and of course that brings in more money for you. And that is the whole point of creating your website in the first place.

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So once again the word quality comes to mind. The better your articles are, the more likely it is that people will want to find out what else you know and click through to your website as a result. And there is another good advantage of keeping the quality as high as possible as well. When you add an article to an article directory, you are putting it in front of lots of people. Some will simply be looking for information to read on that topic. So for example you might attract the attention of someone who wants to find out about training their dog. But you might also attract the attention of someone else who owns a website or blog about dog training. If they see your article, think it is of good quality and want to put it on their website or blog, they can do. They simply download it and they can use it for free provided they keep the link which leads back to your own website; which will give you more ranking juice to work towards your number one rankings.

So you can see that while each individual article provides a single link back to your site, it can get better than that. If two people spot it and like it enough to use it on their own websites, this means you get another two back links from that same article. And since most articles will stay on the directories for a very long time, you can see that there is a lot of benefit to be had from each piece you write.

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Just remember that the better the quality, the more likely it is that you will reap more rewards from it. The best articles can end up getting republished all over the internet, and that can be excellent news for the future of your site as more and more people link to it and find it. So there are two key benefits to writing articles and submitting them to the article directories. Firstly you can get direct traffic from the articles themselves and wherever they end up, and secondly they will give you a search engine boost. Its not surprising that so many website owners and marketers use article marketing to help them get the best possible results from their efforts.

How to create a good article

So lets see how you can create a good quality article to submit to the top article directories online today. All articles consist of four main things:

A good title A summary The body of the article A resource box

Lets look at each bit in turn to see how you can make the most of each part.

A good title
The title is the first bit people will see, so it must have the power to encourage them to click on it to read more. If you have a boring title you wont get anywhere near as many readers. It helps to know which page on your website you are going to use as your back link too, because you should always use a keyword or phrase in your title. If you use the one that is present on the page you are linking to you will get better results. It is also a good idea to use that keyword as close to the beginning of the title as you can. So for example if your keyword is dog training you might do something like this: Dog Training 6 Hot Tips For Getting The Better Of An Unruly Dog

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This puts the keyword right at the start of the title, and it follows up with a promise of what the article contains. You dont have to follow the six tips idea, but this is a good way to write a solid article that covers several points. People like articles that are broken down into four, five, six or more stages, so bear it in mind. Its also a nice easy format to start with. Most article directories will have a limit on how long a title should be, so watch out for that. The main focus here is to pique peoples curiosity and encourage them to read the whole article. Your title should therefore tell people what they can expect to learn if they carry on reading.

A summary
The summary is exactly what it sounds like it is a summary of the contents of the article. You need to give away just enough to convince people that they will learn something worthwhile from the article, without rendering it pointless to read it. The thing you need to remember here is that you arent trying to pique peoples curiosity. So an example of a poor summary might be something like this: Do you want to learn about dog training? Then read on to find out six great tips for training your dog. This isnt really telling the reader any more than they learned from the title. Instead you need to build on what you promised in the title by telling them a bit more of what they can expect to get out of it. Try this approach instead: This article on dog training focuses on the six methods that will ensure your dog behaves and does exactly what you want it to. Youll find out how to get fast results that will give you confidence in controlling your dogs behaviour. Do you see how you have developed the information you shared in the title, and made the reader want to read on to find out more? This is what you should be aiming for. You will normally find that a summary needs to be about two to five sentences in length as well, so you have more room than a title gives you to expand on what they can expect to learn in the body of the article itself. Remember too that your keyword should appear in the summary box once again ideally right near the beginning, as I have shown you here. Only include it once though this is all that is required.

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Next comes the main body of the article itself. This is where you must deliver on the promises you have made in the title and in the summary of the article. So in this case you would need to pass along six tips for training your dog. To get the best results from your articles it often helps to ensure you make some notes to begin with. You can then use this plan to help you build up the actual article. You need a strong start that draws people in, perhaps pointing out a problem that they may be experiencing. So in this case a good start would be something like this: Have you ever avoided dog training and been embarrassed by your dogs behaviour when you have been out in public with them? Is your dog uncontrollable whenever someone arrives at your house? Are you afraid to take them off their lead in case they disappear? This is a good strong start and anyone who can identify with this which should be most of the people reading it because they will have been hooked by your title and summary will want to keep on reading. It also features your keyword early on in the first sentence. This is something you should always stick with. The keyword you are focusing on should ideally appear in the first sentence, once again part way through the article and finally near the bottom of the article ideally in the last sentence. Next you will promise them that there are some good solutions for their problems. So you might continue like this: If this sounds horribly familiar, dont worry. There are plenty of dog owners who used to be in this same situation. But since they discovered how to train their dogs effectively they dont get these problems any more. You can see that this sentence promises a solution to the problem they have. You then simply need to tell them you have some solutions they can put into action, and then list the six tips you promised them in the title. Whenever you use this kind of format list each tip with a description of the tip itself, and then add more information and explanation afterwards.

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Here is an example of how to do it: 1. Practise a new habit every day. If you dont practise teaching your dog a new habit regularly, they wont pick it up as easily. Regular efforts will be rewarded as they will learn the new habit much faster and more easily. You would then go on to list the other tips you have promised them. Once that part of the article is done you basically just need to round it off with a nice ending. This can be a summary of what you have told them: So there you have it six tips for dog training that, when used regularly, will transform your dog from an unruly unmanageable hound to a well behaved pooch. The ending should remind readers what they can achieve if they put these tips into action. Not all articles will use the tips format of course. You can share information in many different ways. But the tips format is a good one to use for starters because it gives you a framework to work with. You will notice that I haven't mentioned the idea of promoting your website at any point so far in your article. This is because there is only one place that you can promote your website, and that is in the resource box. There is one exception to this though, and that is the use of a clickable hyperlink to a page of your site. You can add this into an article near the bottom to create another back link and another chance of encouraging your readers to click through to your website. The best bet when using this technique is to hyperlink the last instance that you use your keyword. This should be in your last sentence. So in the example given above it will look like this: So there you have it six tips for dog training that, when used regularly, will transform your dog from an unruly unmanageable hound to a well behaved pooch. This is how the hyperlink will look when your article is published, but you will need to insert the relevant html yourself to make it work. This is very easy though; the relevant code is given below, and I will then show you the above sentence again with the code added in. Here is the html to give you your clickable hyperlink: <a href=http://www.dogtrainingtips.com/>dog training</a>
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Hang onto this example because you can use it for every link you ever need to create. Simply replace the red text with the URL of the page or website you want to link to, and replace the blue text with the keyword you are targeting. When you do this correctly the final sentence in our example would look like this when submitted to the article directory: So there you have it six tips for <a href=http://www.dogtrainingtips.com/>dog training</a> that, when used regularly, will transform your dog from an unruly unmanageable hound to a well behaved pooch. Obviously you wouldnt have the coloured text; I have simply kept it in so you can see how it works. But when the article is published you will end up with the clickable link shown previously. Most article directories also allow you to preview your article before submitting it for publication, so you can make sure the clickable link shows up correctly.

A resource box
This is the important bit because it is the one place where you can tell people about your site and promote it a bit. The key thing to remember is that this gives you a chance to sell your site, so make the most of it. Read these two sample resource boxes and see which one you like the best: Joe Bloggs writes regularly about the subject of dog training, and has a website which you can visit at http://www.dogtrainingtips.com. OR Are you desperate to control your dog? Dont struggle on alone make the most of the free advice and information on Joe Bloggs website, http:// www.dogtrainingtips.com. Hopefully you will agree that the second resource box is much punchier and makes the website sound more dynamic and exciting. It also includes that wonderful word free, which is always a good way to ensure more people are tempted to visit your site.

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The second resource box works better in another way as well. When you read it you realise that it could almost be a continuation of the article itself. This makes it more likely that more people will read it and click on the link you have provided. Compare that to the first resource box. It starts with the name of the author and most people are going to stop reading there and then. They arent interested in reading about you; they want to know how to control their dog. Thats why although your resource box is the best place to promote your business, you still want to appeal to the reader and promote it in a way that will benefit them and not you.

Outsourcing your article writing

Once again if you dont feel comfortable with writing these articles yourself you can always get them outsourced to another writer. Go back to Elance.com to do this, and simply get a small batch of articles done at a time. In my opinion this is always money well spent. Its not just a question of the quality of the articles you can get from a good ghostwriter. It also has to do with getting things done in a faster amount of time. A professional writer may be able to write articles much faster than you ever could. And in addition to this while they are writing the articles you could be setting up some one-way links to your site, or doing something else that you wouldnt normally outsource to someone else. How about researching the keywords for your next website, for example?

My view on article marketing

Personally speaking I think that article marketing is one of the best ways to promote your websites. I have personally submitted thousands of articles to directories linking back to various websites, and it is one of my main back link building techniques. The fact that you can start with little to no budget and write the articles and submit them yourself for no cost at all is definitely an advantage. It enables you to spend your budget elsewhere if you wish.

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How many articles should you write?
You can write as many as you like for each site you create. If you want to write hundreds then you can do the more you do, the more back links and potential traffic you will get as a result. But the best way to proceed to begin with is to submit one article to the top ten article directories for each page of content you have on your website. So for example if you have a ten page site you should write and submit ten articles at least, each one linking back to a different page. If you have a five page site write five articles, and so on. But always remember to use the specific keyword you chose for the page you are linking to when you come to do your anchor text the hyperlink we covered earlier on.

Which article directories should you be submitting your articles to?

There are hundreds of different article directories online today, but some are undoubtedly better than others. I have put together a list of article directories in the back of this manual. You should try and submit your articles to as many sites as possible because each link you get from different sites counts towards getting your own site ranked higher in the search engines.

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STEP 18

BLOG COMMENTS AND FORUM LINKS

We have covered a lot of different ways to create back links to your website so far, and in this step of my 21 step plan we are going to explore two more methods for doing the same thing. It stands to reason that the more places you can link back to your website from, the more chance you have of finding more potential visitors and generating more traffic. This is exactly what blog comments and forum links supply you with, so lets take a look at each of them in turn.

What are blog comments?

Some blogs you will find online invite readers to leave comments on the blog posts. You can invite other people to do this on your own website, as it encourages a bit of interactivity. But you will find that many other blogs also allow comments from their visitors, and this is what we are concerned with here. Not all blogging platforms allow comments but a significant number of them do, and while some blog owners turn them off a lot of people do allow them. Before we go into more depth on how to use blog comments to create more back links to your own website, I just want to mention that it is very important that you do this in the right way. The one thing you dont want to do is to spam other blogs. Some people go around spamming all kinds of blogs with irrelevant comments, just so they can get back links to their own sites. There are plugins for the WordPress blog platform that enable you to block many of these spam comments so you can stop them from getting onto your website. So how do the blog comments work? Well the idea is that you can build links to your website by using your author name as a clickable link. So for every blog comment you create, you will get another link back to your website. And of course there is always the chance that someone will read your comment and click on your name to visit your website as a result.

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Now when I say your name, you wont actually want to use your own name as your link. This is for the same reasons that we have already seen when it comes to anchor text. Google will see two things the website you are linking to and the text you are linking there with. This means that if you were to use your name say Joe Bloggs for the sake of our example and you were linking to http://www.dogtrainingtips.com, there would not be any relationship between those two pieces of information. But if you were to use your name for the blog comment as DogTraining, there would be a solid relationship between those two pieces of information. Your blog name should always be the same as the keyword for the page you are linking to. Remember too that you dont always have to link to the home page of your website. It pays to link to every other page of your website as well, so bear this in mind when you are starting to use blog comments. Make a point of linking to your home page from some comments, and then work through all the pages on your site to make sure they all get the benefit from this type of back linking.

Creating good quality blog comments

The good thing about blog comments is that they dont have to be very long. Compared to an article, which should be in the region of 400 to 500 words, a blog comment could be around 100 to 150 words long. You will find it easier to come up with ideas for comments as well, since you will be adding to content that is already on the site you have found. So what you need to do is to find good blogs that are related to the topic of your website. You can do this simply by performing a search in Google to find suitable sites. Make a list of them and then go through them one by one to find some good sites that you can use. The most important thing (apart from making sure the blogs are of good quality) is to ensure that they allow blog comments. If they dont then you cant do anything with them. Once you have found a good blog which allows comments, have a look through it to find a blog post that you feel you could comment on. The important thing to remember when commenting on any post is to make sure you have something worthwhile to add. You do want to link to your site but you also need to make sure you are adding quality to the conversation. Make relevant comments and add something worthwhile to the blog. If you can show you have read the blog post then people will respond to that and they may reply to your blog comment as well.
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In this way we can perfectly happily include a link to our website and it doesnt count as spam. The only time you would be spamming is if you go to a blog that isnt connected to the subject of your own website and you leave an irrelevant comment. And as we want to create good quality links we wont be doing that. As long as you find a blog on the same subject and you add a good quality comment you can easily link to your own website without having to worry about spamming that site. Whenever you add a blog comment you will find it is quite easy to do. The blog will invite you to add a comment and when you click on that option you normally have to add your name (which will be your keyword in this case), your email address (you can use the admin email address for your website) and then your actual website URL. You then simply type in your blog comment in the box provided. When the comment is published your URL for your website will automatically be tied into the name (keyword) you have provided. The best approach to get the most out of this method is to contribute worthwhile blog comments on a regular basis. When you first create and launch your website you can go and find some relevant blogs and add some comments to them with a link back to your website. But make sure you then do a few each week to get more and more back links to your site over time. You will find you can rank more highly in the search engines the more you do this, because the search engines will see all the links being created and reward you with a higher position accordingly.

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Using Google Blog Search to find suitable blogs
The best way to find relevant blogs for your needs is to use Google Blog Search. This is basically a search engine for blogs rather than traditional websites, so it makes it easier to find the blogs you need. The search page you need is http://blogsearch.google.com/. You will see a search box at the top of the page, so type in the topic you are looking for and then click on the search blogs button. Make sure you click on this button instead of the search web button, so you only get blogs in the results. You will then see a list of relevant blogs appear on the search results page. Open up each one in a new tab and then look at them to see if they allow blog comments. If they do you can either bookmark them or make a separate note of them. One word of advice here if you bookmark them make sure you tag them with an appropriate keyword. Once you get several websites up and running with lots of blogs to comment on for each one, you will want to get quick and easy access to them all whenever you need them. This is by far the quickest and easiest way to find the blogs you want on any subject you can think of. You may already know about one or two relevant blogs but this will turn up plenty more you can submit comments to.

What are forum links?

Lets move on to forum links now to see how you can use these to build up more back links to your website. Forum links work in much the same way as blog comments. There are lots of different forums online and they enable people with common interests to come together and share ideas and information on one specific subject. So the first thing you need to do is to find forums that are related to your subject. Once you have done this you need to sign up for a free account for each one. Make sure you always read the terms and conditions to see whether you can add your website address anywhere. Some forums are very strict and dont allow you to do it. But most of them dont mind you linking to your website in the signature link underneath each forum post you make. Once again the key thing to remember here is to make sure you contribute to the conversation. If you join a forum and start telling everyone about your website, you wont be viewed favourably at all. This is the forum equivalent of spamming.

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What you need to do instead is to focus on adding worthwhile content to the conversation. There are two ways you can do this. The best way to get started is to read some of the conversations that are already going on and contribute to them. Make sure you dont say something that has already been written by someone else. Try and contribute something fresh if you can as more people will be impressed by it. The second method for getting involved in forum posting is to pose a question to kick off a new topic. For example you might say something like this: What do you think is the best way to train your dog to behave whenever you let it off its lead? This poses a good question that will hopefully invite good replies from other members of the forum. Remember though that if you start a new topic like this you should keep an eye on it so that you can respond to any replies or questions that someone else adds. If you just ask a question and then disappear people wont view you as a good member of the forum community. Most forums will send you an email whenever there is a new post added to your forum thread, so you can easily keep track of what is going on. The good thing is that every time you post a new forum comment you will get another back link to your website. So if you are an active member you are getting a nice reward in that you will have an ever increasing amount of back links to your site. And of course you will also have people visiting your website through the link in your forum signature, and that could happen at any time. So you see there are lots of benefits to making a regular effort to contribute to various blogs and forums that are concerned with your particular topic. Remember that you will get the best out of them if you use them all the time. It also helps you to become known as an expert on that topic, and the more you can create a good name for yourself the more traffic and income you are likely to get for and from your website.

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STEP 19

WEB 2.0 LINK WHEELS

Youve probably heard of Web 2.0 by now, but you may not be 100% sure about what it means. The meaning is actually very simple. A web 2.0 website is a site that allows its users to share information. For example a web 2.0 bookmarking site doesnt just allow you to bookmark websites for your own use later on; it also allows you to share those bookmarks online so others can see them too. Web 2.0 sites come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Some of them allow you to bookmark websites as we have already seen. Others are social networking sites that give each user the chance to create a unique profile and interact with other members. But there are also other websites you should be aware of, because they give you the opportunity to develop web pages of your own that can point back to your website. These types of sites are typically authoritative because they are made up of lots of people all building pages about the subjects that interest them the most, and all within a much bigger site. The two main examples that come to mind are Squidoo and Hubpages. Lets take a look at each of them in turn so you can see what they are about and how they work and more importantly how you can make use of them.

Squidoo
Squidoo has been around for a few years now and is well established; in fact it is one of the best examples of the kind of site I want to introduce you to. It consists of hundreds of thousands of different web pages, all created by its members on lots of different subjects. Its free to join and once you have done so you can start building as many web pages or lenses as they are known - as you like. There is no limit to the number you can build and this is a great advantage because every single one can be linked back to your website. You dont just have to build one page for every site you have; you can find different parts of the topic to write about and create a separate page for each one.

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STEP 19
Squidoo also gives you an opportunity to earn money directly from the site itself. Every single lens is ranked according to how much traffic it gets, how many people are linking to it, how highly rated it is and so on. There is a monthly payout which is split into several tiers, and the higher up each of your lenses is placed the more money you will earn from it. You can also earn from adding Amazon products and many other items to your lenses, and this can add another ongoing revenue stream to your internet income.

How to use Squidoo to promote your website

Lets see what you could do with your dog training site. Its a good idea to work with the keywords you have already researched as you know they will bring good results. A general dog training web page (or lens) is a good idea to start with and you can then create another lens for each keyword you have in mind, just as you did with your website initially. Dont copy the information you have on your website though; write a unique article that you can use to draw people in with. You can then link to your website from the lens itself. Using the same keywords is good because they receive a number of searches each month but they dont have a huge amount of competition. So just as your website will rank more easily so will your Squidoo lenses as well. This means that if someone reaches the first page of Google and they dont click on your website link, they might end up clicking on one of your Squidoo lenses if it gets ranked that highly instead. And from there they can make their way to your website anyway. The idea is to construct a lens in sections, because this makes it easy to read. You will find that each section is referred to as a module. Its up to you how many of these you pick for each lens but its a good idea to make sure you have at least half a dozen. Otherwise it will look a bit empty and people wont be drawn to it. A text module is a basic module that you can use to put sections of your written content in. This could be as little as a paragraph or a whole article if you want to put more content into one single lens. Its a good idea to break up the writing with various other modules though, and this is where you can create the opportunity to make some more money. For example lets say you are building a lens on dog training equipment. What you could do is to start with a general introduction to the subject and then write about three or four different items of dog training equipment in turn. You could then use the Amazon or eBay modules to look for relevant items that you can feature on your lens. If anyone buys one or more items you would get a slice from the proceeds.

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STEP 19
There are plenty of other websites you can link to via a Squidoo module to stand a chance of earning the same money as well. So not only are you creating a web page where you can link through to your website a couple of times, you are also creating a chance to earn more money even if people dont visit your website. This is one of the reasons why Squidoo is so popular. Another thing to bear in mind if you end up building several lenses around the topic of your website is to link all those lenses together each time. This means that if someone comes across one of your lenses on dog training they can easily find all your other lenses on the same topic as well. And the longer you can keep them reading your lenses and your content, the more chance there is that they will eventually move across to explore your website as well. So once your website is published and you have gone through the other steps in this course, make sure you start putting some Squidoo lenses together so you can build some good links back to your website. And as you can see you will be able to benefit in more than one way as well.

Hubpages
Hubpages is very similar to Squidoo in some ways but hubs (their name for a web page on their site) tend to be smaller in nature. A Squidoo lens can be a huge monster split into several sections, whereas a hub is often equivalent to a short article something around 400 to 500 words long. The good thing about this is that it shouldnt take you long to build several hubs that link back to your lens. As with Squidoo there is also the opportunity to make money directly from Hubpages. The best way to do this is via Google Adsense. Instead of receiving a share of what the site earns, all you have to do is insert your Google Adsense ID in the relevant place on your Hubpages account. You will then earn revenue every time someone clicks on an ad on one of your hubs. To do this, go into your Hubpages account page and look for the link that says affiliate settings. This will be in the middle of the page. You should see a space for your Google Adsense affiliate code. This is the bit that starts with ca- and then has a lot of numbers following on from it. Find this code, paste it in and save it. From then on you will have the potential to earn money if any Google ads on your hubs make money. And since some people on Hubpages are making $100 and more each month from this method you can see that there is the chance to add some more revenue onto your monthly earnings.

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STEP 19
Creating hubs on Hubpages
One thing you will immediately notice with Hubpages is that there are a lot less modules to use for each hub. But since they dont tend to be long anyway this really isnt a problem. You can use Amazon and eBay to help you earn money as well, so bear this in mind if you have joined those affiliate programs. EBay tends to be the harder one to get approved for, but you can earn enough from Amazon and Google Adsense not to worry too much about this if you do get knocked back. Many of the rules that apply to creating good website content and a good lens on Squidoo apply to Hubpages too. For example make sure you focus on one strong keyword per hub and use it in the title as well as at strategic points throughout the hub. Never overload a hub with keywords as it wont get you anywhere you need to make sure you write good quality content that will attract the attention of the search engines for all the right reasons. If you follow the tips I gave you on creating good content earlier on you should be fine. Incidentally if you have written some good articles to distribute to the search engines you can try rewriting them to use on Hubpages as well. Since a hub is really just an article this is a good way to get fresh content up on the site quickly. Just make sure you dont use the articles as they are rewrite them so they are 100% unique. As with anything else you will grow and learn as you start adding new hubs to Hubpages. Watch out for those hubs that are getting the most traffic and try and figure out why that is. Then you can mirror those results by making sure you apply the same principles to future hubs as well.

Other Web 2.0 sites you can submit content to

Squidoo and Hubpages are probably two of the best known and most popular websites of this kind around. But there are others you can use as well, and we have a full list of sites you can use in the back of this manual. The best bet is to try and aim to use them all in time, but if you want to start by focusing on just one or two thats fine.

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STEP 20

BUILD PROFILE LINKS

Here we are with another way to build some worthwhile links to your website. Profile links are exactly what they sound like links from a profile you have created online that lead back to your site. There are plenty of websites that allow you to join up as a free member, and you can take advantage of these by doing just that and then creating a profile about yourself. Its important not to rush into doing this though it isnt enough to just join and add your website link in. Make sure you do it properly and fill in the user profile completely. Lots of sites have member areas and you can join each and every one that doesnt impose a fee for doing so. For example there are plenty of social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, forums, blogs and so on that encourage people to join for free. Make a list of them as you find them and join a few at a time.

Filling in your user profile

You may already have a photo prepared that you have used on other sites I have mentioned. Use this as your profile picture and make sure you fill in some details about yourself as well. You can tell people what your interests are and throw in a few keywords about the topic of your site as well. For example you could say that you love dogs and have an interest in dog training to get the most out of your dogs. Every site which offers a members area will have a space of some kind that allows you to enter your website URL, so make sure you add yours. These links work well because they are usually coming from authoritative sites. And as we saw in the previous step this is very good news because it means you can boost your own site in the search engine rankings. So always be on the lookout for new sites like this and create a new profile whenever you find a new one. Some are better known than others for example most people have heard of MySpace and you can join and create an extensive profile on the site. You also buy lists of sites that allow you to build profile links on. There are a few people around who do this, but the original, and still the best in my opinion is Angela Edwards. You can find her site here.

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STEP 20
But there will also be forums and blogs you can become a member of that are related to your topic. For example I did a quick search for the keyword dog forums to see if there were any that would be useful for our dog training example. And the very first one that popped up was a forum called Pet Forums. This would be ideal for this example, and you can bet that whatever subject your website is on, you can find and create profile links on sites which have a similar interest. We have put together a list of sites you can use to build profile links on in the members forum. Also be sure to watch the video example of how to setup these links properly.

More advanced link building techniques

Link building is the most important part of this site model. Without link building you will have no traffic and without traffic you wont make any money from your website. So it is very important to understand the power of link building and how it works. You should be aware of the fact that once your website is built, you will be spending a great deal of time building links to your website. The more you have the more traffic you will get and the more cash you can make. Its as simple as that. I have covered some of the main link building techniques in this guide, but there are many more than these as well. You will find that some methods are free while others involve some kind of investment from you. Similarly some methods work better than others but all of them are valid and can bring worthwhile links to your website. We will from time to time be adding more link building ideas and techniques to the system, so make sure you join to keep up to date.

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STEP 21

RINSE AND REPEAT

Congratulations! You have now completed the first twenty steps to building, creating and promoting your own website to make money with. You will be glad to know that the twenty first step is simply to repeat the other twenty, in order to create your next website. This is really the key to making the kind of income I do from this method. If you follow all of the steps I have shown you so far with your first site, you should be able to start making a few dollars a day from your website. It doesnt sound like much does it? But remember that it is recurring money which means it keeps on coming in day after day after day. It is also passive income. This means it will keep on coming in long after you have stopped working on the site. You may remember earlier on in this course I told you I had some websites that I no longer do anything with. They simply sit out there on the internet and continue bringing in a few dollars every single day. I may have spent a few hours creating them in the first place, but once that initial work is done the website will still continue to bring in the cash. This is what we call passive income, and it is a huge advantage of making money online in this way.

So how do you make more money and build up a four figure income each month?
You probably know the answer already. You simply rinse and repeat the above steps and create more websites over time. Of course you should go back and carry on adding more content to your original site too, building more links and getting it to rank more highly in the search engines as a result. This will all help you to bring in more Adsense revenue on a daily basis. This is very important to understand. For example, lets say you follow all twenty steps I have shown you and your site starts bringing in $2 a day, every day. That isnt too bad, but if you were to go back and add more content, build more links and develop the site further over time, that $2 will multiply into a much larger figure. And when you consider that your daily figure will multiply, that means you will earn much more over the course of a month, a year and even longer as well.

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STEP 21
This is the key thing to remember. It would be very tempting to follow the twenty steps and then get straight on to building site number two. But make sure you have truly made the most of site number one first. The idea is to build your first site, then go back over it and add more content and link to it in more ways. Get as much traffic to it as you can. When you feel you have exhausted all the possibilities and you have built out the site as much as you can, only then should you move on to site number two. By going back over the first site you can increase your income from it and that will continue to roll in while you are building the second site. If you then follow the same process for that the money will be coming in from two sites while you build number three, and so on.

Isnt all this a lot of hard work?

If you were expecting something that didnt involve any work on your part at all, Im sorry to disappoint you by telling you that no such job or work exists like this online or anywhere else for that matter. What I have revealed to you through this 21 step guide is a way that will bring in a regular and ongoing income for you in return for some initial hard work. If you still arent convinced let me explain this in another way. If you are currently working as an employee, you will be getting a flat rate for every hour you work. Lets say you get paid $15 an hour. If you stop working you stop getting paid. This means you wont get paid for any time off you have when you go home from work, unless its a paid holiday or something similar. And if you stop working in that job you stop getting paid altogether. Now lets compare this to your website. Lets suppose that to begin with your website brings in eight or nine cents an hour. That equates to around $2 a day. It doesnt sound like much at all does it? But lets develop this a bit further. Eventually you manage to develop the site enough to bring in $5 a day with it. It still doesnt sound like much, but after working on it for a few weeks you stop adding any new content to it. But even when you stop working on it, it will still bring in $5 a day. Provided you still own the domain name and you keep up the hosting, you will still be bringing in $5 a day with that site maybe even more months and years after you stopped working on it.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

FINAL THOUGHTS
So here we are at the end of the course. I hope you have enjoyed reading through the steps and you have already started putting the initial steps into action. Remember that the only way you will make good money from this method is to put it into action and use it to create a new future for yourself! In case you have decided to read through everything before you start, let me just recap the basic idea we have to make money from creating your own websites.

A summary of your new money making plan

First off you need to choose a topic, buy a domain name and set up the hosting for it. Once that is done you need to do your keyword research so you know you will only be targeting the best possible keywords. Based on those keywords you write or order your content to populate your website with. Once you have WordPress installed and set up as I have shown you, you can start adding your content to your site. The next step is to monetize your site using Google Adsense. You can also find products to promote that are sold by other people. Google Analytics will show you how well your website is doing, and a site map will ensure that all the pages on your site are properly ranked and searchable via the search engines. You then begin the task of making your website easy to find by linking back to it from as many places as possible, just as I have shown you. These include writing and submitting articles and getting your website listed in various RSS and general web directories. The final step is in working to make your site as good and as visible as possible before starting the whole process again with a brand new site. As you can see, this really isnt very hard to get to grips with. You need the determination to actually make yourself sit down and get started. But just imagine where you could be in six months from now if you just get started today. You will probably find the first site will be the hardest one of all although I use the word hardest in its loosest sense as it really isnt that difficult at all. And the first site is only difficult in that it is new to you. Once you have gone through the whole process once you will have gained valuable knowledge and experience that you can put to good use for the next time.

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FINAL THOUGHTS
With every subsequent site you produce you will find the whole thing gets easier to do. And because you are bringing in some money by this point you may choose to outsource some of the things I have mentioned as well. For example instead of writing your own content you can get someone else to do it instead. And you can also put some of those linking techniques that require a one off or monthly payment to good use as well. But all of this comes later on. Your only job right now is to get started. And its up to you when you do that but the sooner you get going the sooner you can start tapping into this amazing income.

Maintaining your sites

While you dont have to keep adding content to your websites and building new links, you will make more money if you do. Typically speaking a site that has twenty articles and a hundred links pointing to it will make more money than a site that has just ten articles and twenty links. And similarly a site that has forty articles and two hundred links will do much better than both of the above examples. But it doesnt have to be a lot of work. Lets say you spend thirty minutes a month outsourcing some links and adding on a few new posts to a site. Thats really all it will take to keep it fresh and maintained to a good degree.

Feeling a bit daunted?

Dont worry. That is a perfectly natural feeling. When you are at the beginning of this journey putting these steps into practice and making them real can be very daunting. I understand how you feel. At the end of the day Im telling you to do all these things to create a site that might earn $3 or $5 a day. It doesnt sound like much. But you need to think long term here that is the secret to earning the really big money. If you can build one site that can average just $5 a day, then you can build ten sites that average $5 a day. And suddenly you are up to $50 a day in earnings and $1,000 a month EVERY MONTH coming in for no extra work. And the best part of all this is that the money should continue to come in month after month, year after year, with very little extra work from you.

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FINAL THOUGHTS
Im talking about a real residual income here, and there is no limit to the number of websites you can build either. If you want to stop at ten, fine. But if you want to go on and build a hundred or more, just imagine the amount of residual income you could build up as a result. Believe me when I say it really is possible and it really is worthwhile to put the initial work in to reap the eventual rewards. So if you are thinking that $5 a day isnt worth your time, think again. Multiply those figures and see how good they can get when you start talking about having several websites instead of just one or two. This should make you realise that you are on the verge of starting a worthwhile and rewarding business that will keep on repaying you for a long time to come. Good luck and enjoy the experience. And whatever you do, start today! The sooner you get going the sooner you will start seeing the money coming in. Now does that sound like a good deal? Believe me it is. I make $1,000 to $2,000 and more every single week, simply by following these steps and building and creating new websites on all kinds of different topics. It does take time and effort to create worthwhile sites that will do well with Google and with your visitors, but in my opinion those efforts are well worth it. And make no mistake the efforts are well rewarded as well.

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RESOURCES
Pinglist For Wordpress
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 http://blogshares.com/rpc.php http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.twingly.com/ http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

10. http://blogdigger.com/RPC2 11. http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc 12. http://bloglines.com/ping 13. http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ 14. http://blogsnow.com/ping 15. http://feed24.com/?c=add 16. http://feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?XmlPing 17. http://ping.feedburner.com/ 18. http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ 19. http://rpc.newsgator.com/ 20. http://octora.com/add_rss.php 21. http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php 22. http://wasalive.com/ping/ 23. http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php 24. http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ 25. http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/ 26. http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/ 27. http://pingqueue.com/rpc/ 28. http://rpc.shareapost.com/ 29. http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2 30. http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2 31. http://blogsearch.google.co.ca/ping/RPC2 32. http://blogsearch.google.co.au/ping/RPC2 33. http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

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RESOURCES
Top 50 Article Directories
1. ezinearticles.com 2. articlesbase.com (No-Follow) 3. suite101.com 4. buzzle.com 5. articlesnatch.com (No-Follow) 6. helium.com 7. goarticles.com 8. articlealley.com (No-Follow) 9. articledashboard.com 10. ideamarketers.com 11. selfgrowth.com/articles.html 12. amazines.com 13. bukisa.com (No-Follow) 14. articlecity.com 15. articlerich.com 16. searchwarp.com (No-Follow) 17. isnare.com 18. sooperarticles.com 19. articleclick.com 20. articlecube.com 21. a1articles.com (No-Follow) 22. infobarrel.com 23. submityourarticle.com/articles/ 24. web-source.net 25. articlecompilation.com 26. articlestars.com 27. 365articles.com 28. EvanCarmichael.com 29. abcarticledirectory.com 30. site-reference.com 31. articlepool.com 32. articleslash.net 33. articlesfactory.com 34. articlenexus.com 35. articlewarehouse.com 36. upublish.info 37. acmearticles.com 38. article-buzz.com 39. e-articles.info 40. carolinaarticles.com 41. thewhir.com/find/articlecentral 42. articlecell.com 43. articlebliss.com 44. affsphere.com 45. thecontentcorner.com 46. fourpxarticles.com 47. articlemonkeys.com (No-Follow) 48. articles.everyquery.com 49. dime-co.com 50. ultimatearticledirectory.com

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RESOURCES
Top Free Web Directories
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. http://www.dmoz.org http://www.jayde.com http://www.superpages.ca http://www.patient.co.uk http://www.gimpsy.com http://www.bestcatalog.net http://www.exactseek.com http://www.bizweb.com http://www.haabaa.com 26. http://www.greenstalk.com 27. http://www.smallerbizz.com 28. http://www.emfind.com 29. http://hoppa.com 30. http://www.allthebizz.com 31. http://www.click4choice.com 32. http://www.websavvy.cc 33. http://www.imarvel.com 34. http://www.cyberwebsearch.com 35. http://www.dc2net.com 36. http://www.cantufind.com 37. http://www.josh.nu 38. http://www.webs-best-directory.com 39. http://www.myallfish.com 40. http://www.yeandi.com 41. http://www.bontonic.com 42. http://www.allfreethings.com 43. http://www.fitnesspros.net 44. http://www.smartlinks.org

10. http://www.canadopedia.com 11. http://www.earthstation9.com 12. http://www.re-quest.net 13. http://www.mavicanet.com 14. http://www.webworldindex.com 15. http://www.illumirate.com 16. http://www.americasbest.com 17. http://www.web-beacon.com 18. http://www.clearleadinc.com 19. http://www.booksmusicvideo.com 20. http://www.chiff.com 21. http://www.somuch.com 22. http://www.re-quest.net 23. http://www.psychnet-uk.com 24. http://www.clickey.com 25. http://www.proudlycanadian.net

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RESOURCES
Top Social Bookmarking Sites
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. http://linkagogo.com http://delicious.com http://www.folkd.com http://multiply.com http://memori.ru http://moemesto.ru http://spotback.com http://planyp.us http://www.linksilo.de

10. http://www.gafanhoto.com.br 11. http://wink.com 12. http://www.stumbleupon.com 13. http://www.oneview.de 14. http://www.evernote.com 15. http://faves.com 16. http://bookmarks.excite.co.uk 17. http://segnalo.virgilio.it 18. http://www.bonitrust.de 19. http://www.listsofbests.com 20. http://www.jamespot.com 21. http://www.adifni.com 22. http://url.org 23. http://linkarena.com 24. https://iterasi.net 25. http://www.startaid.com 26. http://oyax.com/virg17xa 27. http://secondbrain.com 28. http://plum.com 29. http://bookmarks.ph 30. http://www.deligio.com 31. http://mobiseer.com

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RESOURCES
Top Press Release Submission Sites
Paid Sites: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. http://www.prnewswire.com/ http://www.businesswire.com/ http://www.prweb.com/ http://www.prleap.com/ http://www.webwire.com/

Free Sites: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. http://www.free-press-release.com/ http://www.prlog.org/ http://www.pr.com/ http://www.openpr.com/ http://www.1888pressrelease.com/ http://www.newswiretoday.com/ http://www.pr-inside.com/ http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/ http://www.ecommwire.com/

10. http://www.theopenpress.com/ 11. http://www.pressmethod.com/ 12. http://www.free-press-release-center.info/ 13. http://www.i-newswire.com/

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RESOURCES
Top RSS Directory Sites
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. http://www.2rss.com/index.php http://www.5z5.com/Suggest-A-Feed/ http://9rules.com/about/feeds/ http://blogdigger.com/add.jsp http://www.blo.gs/ http://www.feedagg.com/ http://www.feedage.com/submit.php http://www.feedbase.net/Add.php http://www.feedboy.com/addfeed.html?catid=

10. http://www.rssfeeddirectory.org/ 11. http://www.feeds4all.nl/ 12. http://www.rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php 13. http://www.syndic8.com/suggest_start.php 14. http://rssmountain.com/rss_directory.php

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RESOURCES
Top Web 2.0 Sites
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. www.wetpaint.com www.Zimbio.com www.wordpress.com www.wikispaces.com www.livejournal.com www.vox.com www.blog.com www.bravejournal.com www.edublogs.com

10. www.typepad.com 11. www.Zoho.com 12. www.gather.com 13. www.onsugar.com 14. www.blogetery.com 15. www.easyjournal.com 16. [email protected] 17. www.21publish.com 18. www.zoomshare.com 19. www.insanejournal.com 20. www.SOSblog.com

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