Track Wordpress Outbound Links With Google Analyticator Plugin

If you are a Google Analytics conspiracy theorist, this post will not be for you. For everyone else, I wanted to post a link on How To Track Outbound Links From Your WordPress Blog. It shows how to use the Google Analyticator WordPress Plugin along with Google Analytics to track your outbound links clicks. If you already have the Google Analytics code on site in the footer or header, you will need to remove it beforehand as the plugin will automatically add the code for you. Give it a try on a site.

Ready For Cyber Monday?

Well, after a great start to the holiday shopping season, Cyber Monday is just a few hours away. This day is notorious for being the busiest online shopping day. Make sure your sites are up an running properly and load fast. You may also want to check for any specials that you can promote from all of the affiliates you have a relationship with. You would be surprised of all the emails I have gotten from my affiliates that are having deals.

Promote, promote, promote. I plan on doing about 30 blog post on Monday myself across several niches. Best of luck to everyone and let's knock them dead.

Saturday Around The Web November 28th

Here are a few things for your reading pleasure. I am knee deep examining traffic this week or the list would be longer.

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes about How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years

A cool Twitter too called Who follows Whom!

Paul Cunningham tells What the Top 100 Blogs Teach Us About Domain Names.

Dan Zarrella gives 5 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter.

Mark Jackson covers the Natural Link Building Practices.

SEO Metrics From Analytics Video

Happy Black Friday everyone. I hope everyone's traffic is through the roof like mine is today. Christmas shopping time is definitely here.

Rand Fishkin released an excellent Whiteboard Friday video on what SEO Metrics you should be looking at in your web analytics. As always, Rand does a great job of explaining the "why" behind it. Theses metrics give you a great idea of where you need to improve in certain areas of your site. Below is the video.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Analytics for SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

I am off to my wife's cousins to eat my fill of fried turkey and pecan pie. I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving. I for one am very thankful for the ability to work online for a living surrounded by wife and dog. I truly am blessed. I will be taking MOST of today off, but will probably sneak in a few hours of work later this evening. I just can't help myself. Have a great day and thanks for reading!

Dave

I Feel The Need... The Need For Speed

Nope, no Top Gun movie clip here.

Matt Cutts recently did an interview at PubCon with Mike McDonald and talked about Google Caffeine and more importantly gave a hint about how site speed MAY matter in the future in regards to ranking. He noted a few tools you may want to bookmark.

http://code.google.com/speed

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

The second link is a Firefox plugin which is pretty dang cool. I highly suggest you give it a try. The video interview is below.

Need A Starting Point? - What Do You want For Christmas?

I get an email every now and again from those that are new to business and wondering where to start niche wise. It is always easiest to niche about things you know the most about. Being it is about Christmas time, why not start with what you want for Christmas. Put down a list of 10 things you would most want for a gift this holiday season. It is a great place to start and will hold your attention, because you already have a vested interest in it. Now this does not mean you set up a Blackberry site, but you can start to attack that niche from another angle. Start wide a whittle it down to an angle or sub niche with lesser competition.

I myself only want 1 thing for Christmas and that is a Booksamillion gift card so I can drink chocolate caramel lattes every Saturday until next Christmas. So I might try to attack coffee gift cards or book store gift cards.

Do not rush in choosing your niche. Research every facet from competition to keyword research. It is OK to start small, it will teach you how to rank and how to convert on a smaller scale. Be creative and think like a surfer. You can attack large niches in an indirect fashion. Force yourself to brainstorm!

Free Mind Map Application To Layout Site With

I have been playing with bubbl.us to brainstorm on site layouts and navigation. It is a simple and free web application that has a ton of uses. You can save what you create and it is a great tool to brainstorm with. There are several more things you can do with it that I have not even touched on. Create a free account and play around with it. Drop me a note of anything you can get it do or uses for it.

Another Clean Wordpress Template

I always am on the lookout for clean Wordpress templates with a ton of white space. They seem to perform well for me. I recently found this template from Midmo Designs. You might recognize it from the demo used in the CJ Niche Store plugin I have talked about recently. I like the cleanliness of it and thought I would pass it on to my readers.

Solution For Burnout, Make More Money

I got an email that made me chuckle last night. The reader wanted to know why I never seem to suffer from burnout and never miss a post. First of all, I love what I do, it is not work to me. It is fun. If this feels like work to you, and you dread it. You are in the wrong business. Also I love making money. When you are not making money, you are not getting results and you are more susceptible to burning out. I see distinct correlations with me working daily and making more money.

The reader also asked why I don't take vacations? LOL! I assure you that the Beau Rivage Resort & Casino has wireless internet. I learned years ago not to discuss TOO much of my personal life on the internet. I get my time away in, trust me.

I am very organized as far as things I need to get done and treat what I do like a business that needs me everyday. Sure, I get sick, have bad days and such, but always tend to get something done. Being detail orientated is important.

Lastly, I just do not have time to burnout. Sounds funny, but is so true.

Commission Ritual Review

I have been hit up by two of my readers as to my thoughts on Commission Ritual training product. I hadn't had a chance to get to it until today. I never had heard of Brian Johnson beforehand so that is both good and bad deepening on how you look at it. I laid down the money today regardless to see what it was all about.

The great thing about the program is it only cost you $4.95 to have a look. After 7 days if you like it, you are billed the rest. Very nice option as it shows he has faith in what is behind the door.

Inside you get a very detailed 121 page ebook that helps you follow along with 80 videos. That is not a mis-print! Over 80 videos and well done videos at that.

Now quite a bit of the videos are aimed at newbies who struggle with even setting up and installing Wordpress. So if you are new to Wordpress ingeneral, he has you covered in here. He also covers niche research, keyword research, site setup, content creation and the structure. His methods are not new, but a little mixture of everything out there along with common sense.

Why good thing is what he teaches is above level and not trying to game Google. He gives you a VERY detailed and well laid out plan to follow with a bit of a different twist. If you are in need of a structured course and plan, Brian has it in here.

Also thrown in are some 20 plus Wordpress templates and yes he even shows the newbies how to install these. I looked mostly at his meat and potatoes and believe you will profit from it. I intend to pattern the next site I build around his methods, but it likely will be in December some time. There are many ways to skin the cat in the business and his way is sensible and very learn-able.

In closing, for $4.95 you can see for yourself. I do not put my stamp of approval on many of these courses as many are just junk and trying to game Google without any pure methodology. You will see several things that I teach inside along with a few other things I never have touched on. Worth every dime in my opinion. Well thought out and laid out course.

From Black Friday Until Christmas

I am in the midst of an utterly fantastic month thus far in November. It is shaping up to be record month for me. Some of the success is attributed to some sites that were rebuilt that are starting to reap the changes. The other success I think is to the fact that the holidays are approaching and everyone is jumping into the holiday spirit a bit early. As the calender turned to November 1st, I had sharp spikes in traffic on many sites.

I am not one that checks stats every day as most of you know. I get to looking at stats and I can't put them down. It eats away productive time. I like to check stats once a week and archive twice a month. However, from Black Friday until Christmas, I will check traffic stats everyday and examine very very closely the keywords associated from the SERPS traffic. I look for anything I can attack and attack quickly. Usually I do it in a blog post and a single item. I had a ton of success doing this last year and expect this year to be no different. I also will watch Google trends to see if I can spot anything in my niches as well. You never know when something might get hot and that way I can attack it as soon as possible. Remember, Black Friday is only a week away now, get ready.

CJ Niche Store Wordpress Plugin Search Results Template Mod

While browsing the PHPBay forum, I came across an interesting mod you can make while using the CJ Niche Store Wordpress Plugin to your Search Results page (search.php) in your Wordpress template to show items from Commission Junction based on search terms a surfer uses. The code below will go in place of everything between the <div class="postarea"> and closing </div> tag. It will of course differ from template to template that are using with Wordpress, but the main code piece is below.



Here's <? echo $_GET["s"]?> for sale at YOUR STORE NAME HERE.
<p>
<?php
function cjnichesearch($term) {
$keywords = $term;
$text .= '[cjniche keywords="'.$keywords.'" listing="10"]';
echo do_shortcode($text);
}
cjnichesearch($_GET["s"]);
?></p>

Adsense & Chitka Ad Unit Placement Guide

You ever have one of those days when you are making so much progress you do not want to stop and even go to the bathroom? Today is that day for me. I am getting a ton done today, but wanted to stop and point everyone to a free ebook released called Adsense & Chitka Ad Unit Placement Guide. I have used Adsense forever and it has always been a huge earner for me. Even when most bailed on it, I never stopped and never understand or faced the problems others had. You have seen me post a bunch about Chitka as well. They have crawled into my top 10 as far as income producers now and using Adsense and Chitika hand in hand has been lucrative for me. Enjoy the reading.

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners eCourse

If you have read my blog for a while or ever visited the BANS forum, you will recognize a poster by the name of Bunny. Her real name is Laura and she has been a student of the business for quite a while. Laura is a prime example of how to stick with something and learn every facet of this business. She knows how tough it is for newbies in the business.

Laura has just released her Affiliate Marketing for Beginners eCourse. I was asked to preview this a few weeks back and all I could say is WOW!!! If you are new to this business or have been struggling with getting your feet planted firmly, you NEED this course. It is thorough and I mean thorough. This is no thin eBook eCourse either. Be prepared to set aside some reading time as this is no pamphlet or one night read.

There are 270 pages in this eCourse and it is jam-packed with step-by-step instructions, tips, and techniques to start affiliate marketing. All of this is divided into 55 short, manageable lessons.

If you are new to this business and web site building, I highly endorse this course. You will get your money's worth and be on the fast track.

Use this link and code soggy1116 for $10 off until November 30

The Berries Often Taste Better Than The Coconuts

It is a mistake we all make, especially those new to the business of affiliate marketing. Most look at the coconuts way high up in the tree and overlook the berries growing at the base of the tree. How does this relate to affiliate marketing? When most do their keyword or niche research, regardless of the tool you may use, the focus is often put on the results with high numbers. The higher numbers are often one or two keyword phrases, but are not limited to that length as I have seen many three and four keyword phrases that even I know not to attempt to capture.

MOST properly built niche sites these days will have 30 or pages to them. These 30 pages each can be focused on 2-3 sets of keyword phrases. Even if each page was focused around say 2 each per page, that is 60 in total. Now imagine if the exact phrase count for search was 100 each and each of those were very attainable to rank for. That would total out to 6000 exact phrase counts for that site. Now, will it be that perfect? Absolutely not, but you give yourself a much better shot at garnering "buying traffic" by using those longer tailed, less searched for phrases. Mix in the fact that your content by nature SHOULD include LSI type terms that you will garner organic traffic for and you will find that your site is better off as a whole.

So what do you do if you have a multitude of sites you aimed to high with? You can either re-focus those pages around lower volume keyword phrases or you can add more pages to the site that better attack these phrases. Depends really on the direction you want to go. In my case, I usually re-focus the pages, wait for the engines to come back and index them again and build a few backlinks in the mean time. Using this process, I have taken sites that were only earning a few peanuts a month to sites that earn $200.00 or more a month and the volume of traffic has increased. Not only the volume, but the quality. Meaning more repeat visits as well.

Does this mean you can not shoot for the coconuts on some pages? Absolutely not, but when you start picking the berries, you will be amazed how sweet they are and they are easier to get than climbing the coconut tree.

The 6 Month Measuring Stick

I get a frustrated email every now and again from reader who is wondering why after 2 months they are not on page one of Google. Well, besides there being so many factors that go into ranking to begin with, it is almost an impossible question to answer with being given only a link to a site. Also, 2 months is a mighty short time to be judging a site by. Many people will do the minimum right out of the gate and sit and wait and start complaining at month number 2 if not sooner.

Is it impossible to rank page one at the end of 2 months? Absolutely not. It depends on the keyword phrase and the competition for starters. Several new sites can hit page one right out of the shoot with fantastic SEO and a great launch with light competition. Will it stay there? That depends on a number of things as well.

I use a 6 month measuring stick and a consistent backlink building process over the first 6 months to truly judge my sites. After that time and based on what I have done work wise, I have a pretty good idea if I met my goal and what I need to change to further advance. This does not mean you launch, do a few things and wait 6 months though. I suggest a slow and methodical backlink building process over 6 months time. Also, if the site is built correctly, you should be seeing a steady climb in organic traffic right from the launch date.

You need to remember that solid ranking is not a race, slow and steady will give you better chances at staying locked into page one once you get there.

Google Affiliate Program Continues To Grow

It seems every other day I get an email from the Google Affiliate Network of more and more advertisers coming on board. I use quite a few and have been impressed with the results. I have heard of and seen a few Wordpress plugins that are coming along to take this feeds from advertisers that use them and makes adding products quite easy. None are up to snuff just yet that I have come across, but i is only a matter of time. Google finds their way into everything and usually does it quite well. If you have yet to sign up for the program, you really ought to, you would be amazed at the companies they already represent. I suspect by the end of 2010 that the Google affiliate program will be in top 3 earning programs, it is that good.

Buy A .Net Get A .Com For $1.00

Name.com is running another great deal until midnight where you buy a .net domain and get a .com for $1.00 more. You would be crazy not to take advantage of buying at least a few of these. After this post, I will be purchasing about 5 or so for later use. Also do not be scared of the .net extension. I have never had problems getting them to rank as I would a .com. I will race you there!!!

5 Solid Things A Day

I have been doing quite a bit of work as of late on older sites. It has been going on for quite a while. Sometimes it can get monotonous without much proof of work being done from a first glance aspect. I implemented myself a "5 solid things rule" into my daily routine so that productivity on task that can be done on other sites other than redesign work and SEO revamping will make my days more productive from a traffic building standpoint.

Re-design and SEO is productive mind you, but not as productive as adding content and building backlinks. My "5 solid things rule" requires me to add a total of 5 pieces of new content or 5 backlinks pointing to ANY of my sites on everyday. This can include social bookmarks, article directories, link directories, blog comments, you name it. A total of 5 in all of any combination. I usually gravitate to getting these knocked out in the first part of the day to free up the time for the boring work plus other things on my list of things to do. It makes sure I am staying productive from a traffic building aspect of my sites as well.

On The Money Title Tags

I recently finished some testing on a site that has high page rank and ranks very well for several main keywords and phrases. I wanted to test changing the title tag of a few pages to see how it would effect the ranking. Now this was not rocket science and I knew what the outcome would likely be, but I wanted to see it happen first hand. I singled out 6 pages and changed the title tags of the pages and nothing else. It took a few weeks for Google to capture all 6 pages, but as expected, all pages dropped way down from the number 1 spot that they had.

Your title tag should be reflecting what you are trying to rank for, it should be clear and specific as well. Often times simply reworking a sites title tags to better chase lower volume keyword phrases can help a sites profitability almost instantly. I am finding this on a few of my earlier sites that I was shooting for the moon with as far as high competition phrases. Simply changing the title tags of some of these pages to better attack longer keyword phrases with less competition has helped these sites out tremendously.

Have you looked at your title tags lately?

Matt Cutts Video On Titles & Snippets

Today is one of the better videos by Matt Cutts from Google in which he thoroughly explains how Google comes up with the snippets and titles for web pages. Listen closely and you can see how your content can be reflective how snippets used as well as meta description tags. Good video.

CJ Niche Store Wordpress Plugin Upgrade & New Amazon Plugin

It has not been long since I first posted about the CJ Niche Store Wordpress plugin that allows you to display Commission Junction items easily in Wordpress post and pages. I just received a notice that the plugin has been upgraded and includes a few suggestions I made as well. The plugin now lets you add nofollow to the affiliate links, add a description and use it solely as an Overstock Wordpress plugin as well. In addition to that great news, a new free Amazon Wordpress plugin has been released as well. I have included the videos below that shows about the CJ and Amazon Plugin features.

I Never Met A Backlink I Didn't Like

While it is true you can not always control who links to you, what anchor text they use and whether or not it is nofollow or not, it all looks good in the big picture. So many people obsess over page rank, exact anchor text and and nofollow that they lose sight of what looks natural. Sure, I build a ton of my own backlinks and often times try to mix them up on what and where I get them. I also use a slow and steady pace and make sure to mix in a few nofollow blog comments and imperfect anchor text as well. Looking too perfect is bad and several folks do not realize this. If you are using a blog commenting service or someone who bookmarks your pages on social bookmarking sites, make sure they give you the ability to rotate through different sets of anchor text and are mixing in a few nofollow links as well. If you do this methodically and slowly, you too will see that ALL backlinks actually have a role and your rankings will rise slowly and most of all will stick in the rankings instead of fluctuating.

All Of Us Leave Money On The Table

I am still in the process of going back through several sites of mine that are long overdue some attention. Many sites I am refocusing monetization efforts on and trying to find the money that I am leaving on the table for these sites. Most of these sites are by no means high traffic, but they do get some targeted organic traffic nonetheless. You may find that adding advertising in addition to the normal Ebay and Google Adsense very lucrative. Have a look around at the main competition in the niche. How are the top ranked sites monetizing? Could their be a Clickbank match? Perhaps a book from Amazon or even a product from Amazon? Over the last week of work on my sites I created another $87.78 in income that I can attribute exactly to attacking money being left on the table by myself. Is $87.78 a huge amount? No, not really, but times that by 4 weeks and it is nearly $400.00. Now it likely will not be that every week, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but you get the picture. Not a bad little raise I gave myself, by going back through and searching for money that is always left on the table? How much is laying around for you to collect?

How SEOs Know SEO By Rand Fishkin

The great Rand Fishkin has another gem with today's White Board Friday video. This should hit home with a few of you. My wife is down with the flu this week, so I have not been too active on the boards and such. So excuse this short post. Watch the video below!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - How SEOs Know SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

USB 2.0 Universal Hard Drive Adapter

Here is something for your Christmas list. I did not even wait and ordered it today. I have several older hard drives laying around that I have been "meaning to" extract some important data off of. It is a pain in the ass to take time out to connect these hard drives to my current main computer to merely pull off a few files. This neat new device looks like just what the doctor ordered as it connects from the hard drive to a USB connection and turns the hard drive basically into an external hard drive to extract or store info on. Regardless of how it works, I need it and you may need at as well. I thought I would bring it to everyone's attention.

Every Asked To Guest Post?

You would be surprised how many blogs out there would be more than happy to let you guest post on their blog. If you have a site that specializes in music memorabilia for example, you can easily find a celeb rumor blog or something similar in character that will let you guest post for a backlink in the bio of the post. These "in content" backlinks go a long way when received from trusted domains. Remember that you are not so much in it for direct traffic as you are the link juice itself. Also, bloggers would gladly take a day off for someone else to write a blog post for them. All you have to do is ask. This week alone I asked 6 different blogs if I could guest post and 3 already said yes. Imagine picking up 2-3 quality backlinks a week.

How do you find and get to these blog owners quickly? You can start with Twitter. Many bloggers know the usefulness of Twitter and use it as both a network tool and a medium to circulate their blog post. Also, many bloggers have contact forms right on their sites. Be direct and to the point when asking them. Ask them if they have a topic in mind and if you can guest post for a backlink at the bottom of the post. It really works. All they can do is say no or not answer you at all.

If they do allow you to guest post. Hammer out a quality post. Pretend this post is going on your own site and is both grammatically correct and factually if relevant. 300 words is a great target for length, but you should ask what the blogger expects as far as a word count.

Chris Cemper Advanced Link Building Videos

Let me start of by saying that I am a huge fan of Chris Cemper. I watch and read everything that he puts out in regards to link building. I recently stumbled across a set of 3 videos on advanced link building that he did at the 2009 Budapest Affiliate Conference. They total about 30 minutes time and are well worth watching.

Below are all three videos.

Studio Press Fix For Using ReviewAzon

I recently was implementing the ReviewAzon Wordpress plugin into the Lifestyle Wordpress theme by Studiopress and noticed it shoves the Amazon listing all the way on the right of that theme. This is easily fixed by opening the index.php and page.php pages of the template and adding:

<div style="clear:both;">

before:

</div>
<?php the_content(__('Read more'));?><div style="clear:both;"></div>

on both template files.

This should bring everything into alignment. This fix will likely be needed on a few of the other Studiopress themes, but I haven't gotten to any of them yet to check.

Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Still Fail

I have been bombarded with messages today about the Auction 2 Post plugin. First of all, I have not purchased the plugin as of yet. I will at some point I suppose as it does look interesting, but I have no reason right now to rush out and do it. Anytime something gets good buzz, I see people rush out and purchase like it is the magic bean, the secret to success. The problem most have, is that they already have a large stable of tools or plugins that can make them money, but they can't even use them properly. Now if you have an indeed specific purpose for a new plugin like this or see the benefits, then buy it. The problem is that several just buy it not knowing the benefits and how to use them. They are just monkey see, monkey do. Sure the plugin looks interesting, but not interesting enough for someone who can't make money with the tools they already own to rush out and buy it. If you have been at this a while and struggling to make money, what makes you think buying this will change things for you? You should be concentrating on the process first. Like the N1Way guide teaches. Until you understand HOW to make money, merely buying new tools will cost you money. Now if you understand the money making process and see the benefits of the new plugin, then BUY it if it fits your needs as a tool, not a magic bean.