Video: How to edit WordPress themes using CSS

Video: How to have links on your WordPress site open in a new window.

When blogs first came out, they were typically used by people for updating their family and friends about various aspects of the blogger’s lives. While some people still use blogs for that purpose, a lot of people have found a way to make good money through blogs. They have found a way to make the search engines work for them and cash in from their visitors. However, it is next to impossible to make money with a blog unless you have a good blogging guide to help you along the way.

Okay, so what does it mean when I say bloggers “make search engines work for them”? That’s a fair question; allow me to explain. Search engines are in the business of making money. And the way they make the most money is by providing results that relevant to to the people using them. After all, if they didn’t return useful results, then people would simply go to a competing search engine to conduct their searches. The other thing they thrive on is fresh content because that’s what people are generally interested in. Blogs provide the best of both worlds: they are focused on a single topic, so there is built-in relevancy; they are updated frequently, so freshness is there as well.

A good blogging guide will show you how to make the most of both of these factors, plus another which we will get to shortly. When you are able to provide fresh and relevant content, your blog will start climbing higher in the search results. This is a good thing as most people will try searching with different words instead of digging too deep into the search results. If you can get on the first three pages of results, you have a chance to generate some decent organic traffic. The first page of results is even better, and the first one or two positions on page one are ideal.

So, now you know how important traffic is, and the general concept of how to get it. Now on to the other thing a good blogging guide will show you…how to make money with your blog. In other words, how to turn the traffic you get into a source of income. There are a few different ways you can make money with a blog, but it all comes back to treating blogging like a business.

One of the most important things you can do is buy your own domain name and hosting. While you can use free platforms like Blogger and WordPress, you still need to host them on your own site and pay for a domain name (such as www.nameoyourblog.com). Not only will it look more professional and give you more credibility, it will also give you more control over your content. See, if you use a free service, and host your blog with them using the free domain, they can delete your blog without warning. I don’t say that to scare you, but rather to stress the importance of hosting it yourself.

Many people will tell you that to get your web site noticed you need to ‘optimize’ your site for the search engines. You are then led up a path where you have to keep changing your web site as the search engines change their ways of listing things. As fast as you ‘optimize’ your site, Google and the others have moved the goalposts, meaning you have to keep optimizing over and over again.

Now consider some facts. Most people in the world are not users of the Internet. Let’s repeat that. The vast majority of people who you want to reach don’t use the Internet. It doesn’t matter how well you optimize your web site, they simply will never find it.

Here’s another fact. Some of the best Internet marketers make most of their sales ‘offline’. They sell their books, CD-ROMs and so on at seminars, workshops and conferences. Indeed, for many ‘Internet marketers’ these ‘offline’ sales represent the bulk of their income.

So what do these facts tell us? They show us that ‘offline’ promotion is more important than online promotion. You may be able to optimize your web site to get high rankings in a search engine. But that doesn’t mean you’ll reach the vast majority of people who could buy your product or use your information.

This was confirmed recently by one study that showed most people go to an Internet address (URL) after having read it in a newspaper or magazine, been given it by a friend or colleague, or having heard it being mentioned by someone speaking at a meeting or on TV. In other words, it seems that significant numbers of people who get to your web site will do so having heard the URL somewhere outside the Internet.

You can get many people visiting your web site, even if you are not ranked highly by the search engines. You can do this in two main ways:

1. Write articles for use in regular publications – newspapers, magazines and so on. Always include your URL in the article and you’ll get millions of people to notice your web site address.

2. Speak at every opportunity. Make presentations to business clubs, chambers of commerce, local societies – you name it, you should speak at it. Every time you speak, announce or your web site address.

Although these are the two principal ways of gaining offline publicity for your web site, don’t neglect your business stationery, posters, car stickers and so on. The more your web site address is visible outside the web, the more visitors you will get regardless of how kind the search engines are to you.

Video: Using guest posting on other blogs to drive traffic to your WordPress blog

Best things in life are free, as many would say. This especially holds true with efforts in advertising one’s products or services. With free Internet marketing services, one can save a lot. Instead of shelling out for the marketing aspect of your product or services, that chunk of money could be put to other important elements of your business since many information websites now offer knowledge regarding Internet marketing services that comes with no price tag at all.

This is not to tell you that better focus on plain Internet marketing. It still will do your business a lot good if you mix traditional advertisement efforts such as traditional and new marketing media.

Here are few of the free methods that you could employ to make your products and services be in their most visible, thus saleable, form.

1. Promote your business through free search engine submission and optimization.

Submit your website to various search engines monthly. This will make many more people know that your website actually exists. Aiming for the top search engines will help a lot in this endeavor.

2. Improve your articles.

Remember that information on articles with good content as traffic-bringer of websites? This time it’s about making these articles serve your website better by using keyword suggestion tools that are offered for free. Update your web site’s content by regularly checking the standing of your keywords with the current market.

3. Acquire free content.

If you have no time to increase the SEO or search engine optimization-friendliness of your articles, you can look for free content from article directories. All you need to do is retain the resource box of those write-ups.

4. Avail of free comprehensive web traffic analyzers.

These are tools that you can make use of without costing you a cent. Your website’s hits statistics will be produced by this kind of Internet marketing tool for your own analysis.

5. Learn to manipulate web design templates.

You don’t have to be too techie-geeky to be able to design your web site. Oftentimes, web design templates or custom-made layouts are available for the Internet marketer to use.

6. Monitor your website’s visibility.

Tools such as search engine position trackers may be used to see your website’s standing.

These processes are very convenient to use as long as you keep in mind that you use and try to master their use for your own benefit. Just don’t get obsessed with your achievements when you finally learn how to use them and incorporate them in your Internet marketing feat.

Writing a free ebook is a great way to sell more affiliate products. The ebook can work for you in two different ways and I encourage you to use both methods in each free ebook you write.

The first way is to promote affiliate links directly in your ebook where appropriate. You can casually mention a product in the body of a particular chapter, review a product as part of your ebook, or add an Additional Resources section to the end of the book.

The second way is to link to your content site from your ebook. You can offer additional information on the site or link to a review page. By sending your readers to your website you get the chance to expose them to additional affiliate products and have the opportunity to get them on your newsletter list.

Lets take a look at how you can get started on your first ebook.

Find a topic that you are fairly knowledgeable about and come up with an overall theme for the book. What are people looking for on the particular topic? For example, parents of infants will be interested in tips and strategies to get their baby to sleep through the night. A mom looking for a work at home job may be interested in how to spot a work at home scam and where to look for legitimate jobs.

Come up with an outline, or group some related articles you have written on a particular topic. Now all you have to do is flesh it out a little bit and of course incorporate your affiliate links.

An ebook typically consists of at least 25 pages. That may sound like a lot, but you should keep your font size fairly large to make it easier to read on a computer screen.

Lets talk about format for a moment. You can purchase software to create an ebook, or you can make it a PDF document. PDF documents will work on just about any computer and people are comfortable downloading them.

I usually write my ebooks in Microsoft Word, format it in there, add any pictures or graphics and then turn it into a PFD. You can either do this with Microsoft Acrobat, or use one of the free PDF creation services on the web.

Your next step will be to get the ebook circulating. After all you are not going to make any affiliate sales if no one reads your book. You can offer it as a free download on your site or give it away as a bonus for subscribing to your newsletter. I also like to add a note in the footer of each page that the reader is welcome to pass the book along to others who might be interested in the topic.

Offer the ebook as a free giveaway to other website owners and post it on the free ebook directories. Then sit back and watch the book do the work for you. After a few weeks you should see the affiliate sales come in. Time to move on to another book.

One of the best ways to advertise these days is through pay per click advertising. Done the right way, it can literally boost your site hits and even your revenue by millions. For those who understand how applications like Google Adsense works, pay per click advertising can be cost effective and just plain old effective in an overall sense.

However, if mismanaged, pay per click advertising could be extremely costly and just as ineffective. Many people who use pay per click advertising spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year for clicks that dont go through . Whats the difference between those who use pay per click advertising effectively and those who do not?

One of the major things you can do to up your success rate (and lower your costs) when it comes to pay per click advertising is to go for low competition keywords. For example, a very high competition keyword might be car. This is the most common word that comes to mind when people think of motorized vehicles, so the cost of buying this keyword for pay per click purchases is very high. Any time somebody clicks on that ad thats targeting the word car, the cost to the company putting out the ad is quite high.

For bigger businesses, this might be fine. However, if youre a smaller car dealership, you might have better luck going for auto, which is a synonym for car yet a keyword with a lower competition level. These words will still show up when potential customers are doing searches (most people who are searching for car will likely search for automobile), and even if the event that the customer doesnt search for auto, the keyword is related to car. Google and other search engines understand the magic of synonyms, and you could get included in a search for car even if you didnt buy the keyword!

Using low competition keywords is a great way to get a lot of attention for much less money. When you sign up for pay per click advertising, be sure to do some research first and come up with commonly searched for terms that are lower competition. Dont just go for the most obvious words while it might seem that this would get you more advertising bang for your buck, remember that youll be paying out considerably more bucks for what might not even be a worthwhile bang.

In following articles, we talk about the best routes of finding these low competition keywords that will help you keep costs down while boosting site viewership. It might sound too good to be true, but effective pay per click advertising is a great way to get the attention of niche markets – and it doesnt have to be expensive!

The world of offline consulting is massive. There are so many opportunities and such a wide variety of ways to help an offline business find success online.

In this section of the guide, you will find a list of services that many offline consultants are performing today in their own consulting companies. It is impossible to list every possible service opportunity but let this list serve as a starting point and you can create your own unique ideas from there.

Web Design – Creating websites, company blogs, mobile sites or specialized sites to meet a businesses particular industry needs.

Website/Blog Maintenance – Once a site goes live, it needs to stay current. Many companies do not have the time or expertise to do this themselves so it presents a fantastic consulting opportunity.

Search Engine Optimization – Once a company has a website live on the internet, they need to make sure the site is found by potential buyers. SEO services can be an easy sell if the client sees the potential payoff of being ranked high on search engines. Google Places is a must learn for local SEO.

Media Buy Campaigns – Most companies have advertising budgets and they understand that their audience is surfing websites like Facebook. Helping companies run effective Pay Per Click campaigns on these kind of networks can be very profitable for both the consultant and the offline company.

Lead Management – Generating and managing leads found through online methods can also be a profitable service. If you can help a company capture warm/hot leads online and turn them into buyers, you will have repeat business for a long time.

Domain Registration and Hosting – While these are both very inexpensive things to setup, most offline companies dont even know where to begin. This is a very easy way to help a company and make a nice profit as a consultant.

Social Media Management – Ask any local business if they think Twitter and Facebook are important and they will agree. They will also be willing to pay credible consultants a management fee if they can take care of the companys social media profiles.

Mobile Marketing – Mobile media is exploding and offline companies are noticing that most of their customers are carrying around hand held devices. Turning those devices into marketing messages for a local business is something that many of these companies would be very interested in learning about.

Video Marketing – Once a business has a website and/or company blog running, they are going to attract an online audience. A great way to extend more value to that online audience is showing them videos of the company in action. A restaurant owner can show behind the scenes footage of the kitchen, a dry cleaner can show the detailed process they follow to make their clients clothes come out clean and perfect every time.

There are many other opportunities available to a consultant when it comes to working with offline companies. In the end it all boils down to your interests, your skill set and what the customer sees as the highest value in terms of return on investment.

Savvy online business owners can take advantage of all the free marketing opportunities the Internet has to offer. In order to maximize the results by using free marketing, youll need to put in a little bit of elbow grease and quite a few hours of time, but once you get the hang of it, youll be astonished by how well you can get the word of your business out there and start seeing real conversions.

The best way to go about marketing your site without spending a dime is definitely the social media route. There has been a literal explosion of interest in sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Yelp in recent years, and any online business owner whos interested in getting the word out about their products and services would be foolish to not take advantage of these congregation spots.

The trick for making social media marketing effective is the method in which you go about it. Many business owners simply sign up their businesses for accounts and then send off hundreds if not thousands of friend requests and expect interest to come flooding back in.

The reality of the situation is that its not that easy a smaller approach is definitely much more economical insofar as generating real interest in your business is concerned. Start by friending smaller groups no larger than twenty people. If somebody sees that youre trying to friend over two hundred people, chances are theyll think youre a spammer and not reply to your query. Smaller groups make you look more genuine and interesting. Also remember only to friend groups and individuals who have a stated interest in the product or services that you sell; to do otherwise is considered spam.

When sending out news feeds on these sites, the number one rule to consider is keeping your send-offs interesting. Before you send anything out, be it a tweet or a status update or an email announcement, take a minute and think about whether or not what youre sending out is relevant or interesting. People will enjoy hearing about your product offers occasionally, but not three times a day. Again, you dont want to come off as a spammer, because then people will stop friending you and the whole process will be for naught.

Also, be sure to take the time to look at the profiles of your friends and occasionally comment on what they have to say. This helps build your credibility as a friend and show that you take an active interest in the people who are following you on the social networking sites. Once again, more personable and less spam-like makes your social media marketing strategy much more effective.