Archive for May, 2007
With the growing popularity of blogs and in particular a WordPress blog, it is getting easier for everyone to establish an online business presence.
Using a WordPress blog, a small business owner can target a small geographic region in the keywords chosen to write about. In fact I will be doing a similar blog in the coming weeks for my wife’s small medical transcription business. She is a one-person business and the target market is very small. So by using a title and keywords focused on a small geographic area she could easily dominate the search engines in a short period of time. I will try to keep a record of the progress of this new site as soon as it starts.
So what is stopping a small or any size business for that matter, from keeping its customers up to date and informed using a WordPress blog? I think most business types think of a blog as something like what I am posting right now; which is just a collection of my random thoughts, or something like Myspace for teenagers to brag about their latest antics. Or for political pundits to spin their latest tin-foil hat crackpot theories about whatever they disagree with. Some of those myths can be dispelled here:Entireweb Weekly Newsletter
While a blog can be all those things it can be much, much more.
A WordPress blog can be setup to look like professionally built website. The latest version of WordPress allows for a static home page. This can allow the business to show the same consistent information about its offerings while driving traffic to the site using the effectiveness of a blog platform. For a small business owner setup and cost is minimal, and once setup maintenance can be as easy as writing an email once a week or more.
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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog, online business
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Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com
Using a custom permalink structure for your WordPress blog not only enhance the look of your posts URL but will also help search engine rankings.
One of the first things to do after installing your WordPress blog should be to customize permalink structure.
Follow these steps for a more SEO friendly WordPress blog URL structure.
Login to the WordPress dashboard, go to Options, Permalinks.
The four options are:
Default
» http://www.esmartjob.com/blog/?p=123
Date and name based
» http://www.esmartjob.com/blog/2007/05/29/sample-post/
Numeric
» http://www.esmartjob.com/blog/archives/123
Custom, specify below
Custom structure /%category%/%postname%
If you noticed I use and recommend the custom structure /%category%/%postname% this will change the URL to http://www.esmartjob.com/category/titleOfPost
With a good SEO friendly category and post title your chances of ranking higher in the search engines will increase.
If the title of your post is too long you can shorten it in the write post screen using a shorter but relevent Post Slug found on the right side just under the Post Password box.
What if you have an existing WordPress blog and changing the URL structure will lose many of your incoming links? There is a WordPress plugin for this called Permalink Redirect.
The Search Engine Journal has a recent post describing how they implemented a custom permalinks structure to their existing blog. Check out the post here: SEO Friendly URL Structure for Wordpress Blogs
Don’t like or agree with my recommended permalinks structure? Check out more permalinks customization options at Wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com
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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog, search engine ranking, WordPress blog, WordPress plugin
Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com
There are numerous ways to make money online with a WordPress blog or any other blog for that matter. Goggle AdSense is probably the most common method that most bloggers consider first. However there are othe ways to use your WordPress blog to make money online.
Another Google-like advertising method is In-Text Advertising. One of these types of content links advertising can be found at http://kontera.com/ . As you can see I have recently implemented this on my site and will monitoring it for the next few days.
If you have a WordPress blog you can easily add the script from Kontera with a nice little WordPress plugin called Kontera DynamiContext Plugin. This WordPress plugin handles the Kontera script quite well without the need to edit any of your template files.
Another way to monitize your blog is joining one of the pay post sites. Get your blog approved on one of these sites and you can get paid by advertisers to write posts about their product or services. The Make Money Online blog has more about pay per post here: Making Money From Blogging.
Other ways to make money online with a WordPress blog are quite obvious and apparent right here on mine, with the inclusion of income opportunities for programs I belong to as well as ClickBank products.
Remember there are many different ways to make money online so make sure to capitalize on all available income opportunities.
About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com
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Do you want your own WordPress Blog like this one? I can help, find out more here: Blog Builder |
Technorati Tags: make money online, WordPress blog, Goggle, WordPress plugin, income opportunities, make money online
Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com
Placing Google AdSense in the right areas of your WordPress blog can make a big difference in your earnings. I have found a nice resource for free WordPress themes that utilize the proper placement for Google AdSense code.
The templates have been designed around the Google heat map. So you can be almost guaranteed a higher click through rate than other templates. Also, they are based on 5 very popular themes; Business, Diet, Travel, Loans and Real Estate.
A unique WordPress theme can mean the difference between ranking well in the search engines and not ranking anywhere at all. So why use the same theme that literally thousands of other people are using. This is your one opportunity to make your blogs unique to everyone else’s. Not only that, they are optimized highly to earn money from Google Adsense, so you simply cannot lose.
Get Free Blog Templates Now… Click here!
About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com
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Technorati Tags: Google, WordPress blog, WordPress theme
Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com
So you want to know where to start with an online business? To get the full potential out of any online business you will definitely need a website. When I say website I don’t mean a page that some programs give you with your affiliate ID attached to the end of it, but your own domain name and a good provider to host it on. But before we get into domain names and hosting accounts let’s start at the beginning with the online business idea itself.
You first need to decide what your new website will be focused on, or your niche market. While there are thousands of work at home websites on the Internet, and the competition is well established, you can still find your own little niche within this bigger category that has been overlooked and is less competitive.
Keyword research is crucial to determining your sites theme and the success of your online business. Keywords or keyword phrases are something that you will hear a lot about as you progress and start to develop your website.
Even if your website is a pre-designed Plug-In Profits site It should eventually be optimized toward a more narrow, less competitive niche.
Search engine optimization, or SEO is the process of finding these keyword phrases and designing or changing your website around your keywords. This should be done on every page that you add to, or have on your site. Every page on your site should have a specific topic and be optimized according to the content on that page.
Before you choose your domain name you should determine your sites theme or niche and keywords and then choose a domain name that closely matches. That is why you should do this research before you register a domain name. The two most popular tools for keyword research are subscription based Wordtracker, and the free Overture tool. Another site I recommend for SEO related research with a whole suite of tools is SEOBook.com. I recommend trying out the free ones first then get a one-day or one-week subscription to Wordtracker as it is considered the most accurate.
Choosing A Domain Name
After you have decided on your main sites themes or niche its time to determine your domain name. You could chose anydomain name and try to build a brand around it like Google has done, or you may want to choose a keyword domain name that relates to your sites niche.
Whether you choose a brandable domain or a keyword domain is a choice you must make, and a choice you should make in accordance with your business plan. If you have a large offline advertising budget and the budget necessary to brand your organization, I’d recommend a brandable domain. If, on the other hand, you’re working on a tight budget, choose a keyword domain and let the search engines bring the customers to you.
Try to keep your domain name as short and to the point as possible. If you think you may eventually market your site offline then try to get a .com extension. If you are sticking strictly with online marketing then the other extensions such as .net, .us and the newer .ws will have more names and options available.
There are numerous tools available to search domain name availability such as Godaddy.com or Nameboy.com; both have tools for suggesting different names based on your first choice if its not available. Godaddy or 123cheapdomains.com are probably the cheapest place to register your domain once you decide on a name. If you are joining a program that sets up your website you should check if domain name registration is part of the package or something you can benefit from or get a discount if purchased from it.
About The Author
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Jeff Houdyschell Provides proven income opportunities, Ideas and information helping others start a work at home job. For more online business tips, visit the eSmartJob.com information center at: http://www.esmartjob.com/articles/articles.html
Related Resources
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Technorati Tags: online business, domain name, work at home, domain name, Google
Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com
When you start a home business and no one knows who you are, one of the greatest challenges you will face is how to drum up new business. There are many different ways to promote your home based business on a budget.
Here is a great article I have posted on my mian site for business advertising on a budget.
Advertising Your Home Business on a Budget
About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com
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Do you want your own WordPress Blog like this one? I can help, find out more here: Blog Builder |
Technorati Tags: start a home business, home based business, advertising
Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com
The default WordPress theme is probably one of the most used WordPress themes. This is most likely because it is so easy to customize.
Unlike most other themes it is very easy to change the color of the WordPress default themes header right from within the WordPress blog dashboard. After you login to the WordPress dashboard, click Presentation, in the dark blue sub panel directly below the main menu panel, click Header Image and Color.
The WordPress blog default theme’s header will appear with several option buttons shown below it. The theme has a gradient color scheme and you can choose two different colors that will blend together in the middle if you wish.
Clicking on the Upper Color or Lower Color buttons will show a color chart to choose from. If you don’t like the color options available in here you can click the Advanced button and place a hex color code in the box. What’s a hex color code? It is an alpha numeric code that tells a computer how to render a color on the screen.
To find a different color to use you can find more hex color codes here: http://html-color-codes.com/ or Google hex color codes. Just find the colors you want to use and place the 6-digit codes in the Upper Color (Hex) and Lower Color (Hex) boxes shown when you click the Advanced button and make sure the # sign is in front of the hex color code.
After making your changes click Save and view your new header color. There are ways to change the entire header image but that is for another day.
| Discover The Magic Formula To Create “Set-it-and-Forget-it” Websites Using Wordpress & Make Your First Adsense Dollar in The Next 7 Days.
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About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com
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Do you want your own WordPress Blog like this one? I can help, find out more here: Blog Builder
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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog
Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com
Should you install WordPress blog on your site in a subfolder or in a sub-domain ?
www.yourdomain/blog/ This is in a subfolder or subdirectory
The above example is a typical WorPress blog setup and for SEO purposes you are adding content pages to your website with every post. The search engines love to see new content added to a website. Then If you utilize the correct inter-linking structure, linking your main website and other pages from within your site from your blog posts you will also gain page rank. Each page will pass Google Page rank to any links on that page. In Goggle’s page rank hierarchy, each sub directory will have a value passing PR to any pages in which you link. You should link using keyword-anchored links to both the sub-directory and the main index page in the footer and even in the body of your blog posts.
Here is an example:
[html] Major Keyword
proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com
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Technorati Tags: install WordPress, WorPress blog
I got this technique in an ad from Brad Callen of SEO Elite. His marketing approach is a perfect example of helping others first providing useful information, building trust, and then offer them a quality product.
Anyway the techinque is pretty simple to use you blog to get your website indexed quickly. This form of website promotion is very easy to do and even though the example shows a Blogger blog it can be used for a WordPress blog or any web page for that matter.
I hope you can see how you could use this on other popular sites like Google and MSN. Check it out here Blog And Ping at the end he will pitch his product to you. And just so you know I am not an affiliate of his so I am not sending you there to make any money! Heck I am doing that right here (see below)! I just think it is another great way to use your WordPress blog.
| Discover The Magic Formula To Create “Set-it-and-Forget-it” Websites Using Wordpress & Make Your First Adsense Dollar in The Next 7 Days.
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Do you want your own WordPress Blog like this one? I can help, find out more here: Blog Builder
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Technorati Tags: website promotion, WordPress blog, WordPress blog
Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com
With the growing popularity of blogs and the ease to obtain links through comments on blogs, it didn’t take long for programmers to come up with automated tools to blast link packed spam comments to unsuspecting blogs.
Some just turn comments off for their blog but to me that eliminates one of the great features of making your blog interactive for your visitors. Comments can open discussion between the reader and the blogger. Your blog’s visitors can even subscribe to a post’s comments, getting notified of any new comments, keeping your readers coming back.
The WordPress plugin, Akismet checks comments posted on your blog posts against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
To activate Akismet from your WordPress blog dashboard, click Plugins, scroll down and click Activate next to the WordPress Akismet plugin. After you do that you will see a box near the top of the dashboard that looks like this:
Click the link in the message, and then the Akismet Configuration panel will open. You should then see this in the middle of the screen:
Please enter an API key. (Get your key.)
On the top of that page click the Sign Up tab, fill in your information and if you have a self-hosted blog choose the Just a username, please option.
Be sure to use a good email address in here to get your login information and WordPress API key, click the box to agree to legal junk and click next.
Check your email and click the confirmation link from WordPress to activate your account. You should then see a page that reads, “Your account is now active!” Click the login link within the text of that page and login.
You should now be at the WordPress.com site, if so click the dropdown box on the very top right of the page and choose “Edit Profile”, now you are in the Global Dashboard.
Within the WordPress Global Dashboard, click Profile, you can now see your WordPress API key on the right side of the page. Oh, and by now you should have also got the API key in an email from WordPress also! But you should still edit your profile while you are in the Global Dashboard.
Now its time to place the API key in the Akismet WordPress plugin; go back into your WordPress blog dashboard, click the link on the Akismet WordPress plugin warning box near the top of the dashboard. Paste the WordPress API key in the box and click update options.
If the warning box is not visible check to see if Akismet is activated, click Plugins and look for the status of the plugin on the right. You will notice that all activated plugins are highlighted green. When Akismet is activated you can configure it by clicking Plugins, and look for the Akismet subpanel (white text in the dark blue bar) directly below and to the right of then main panel menu.
Keeping comment spam out while allowing your blog visitors to comment, will not only keep your blog clean but more interactive and help generate more traffic.
About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com
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Do you want your own WordPress Blog like this one? I can help, find out more here: Blog Builder |
Technorati Tags: WordPress plugin, WordPress plugin
If you have been involved with blogging then you probably have seen something about the term Social Bookmarking.
What is Social Bookmarking and what is so special about Social Bookmarking?
Social Bookmarking websites categorize and store ‘bookmark links’. Millions of people are searching for information on these Social Bookmarking sites. So to get traffic to your website you should post links back to your web page on these Social Bookmarking websites.
You will need to specify some tags (better known as keywords) that will categorize the bookmark to your site. Other people can search, and vote for your bookmarked site. Social Bookmarking is very viral and can quickly help generate traffic by sharing links.
Some benefits of Social Bookmarking are:
Highly Targeted Traffic
Since your bookmarks are categorized according to your tags, your traffic will be from those searching for those particular tags (or keywords). They will click on your bookmark link and visit your site.
Fast Search Engine Indexing
Most of these Social Bookmarking sites have high page rank. The search engine spiders visit these sites very often so your links will be crawled almost immediately!
High Search Engine Ranking
Social bookmarking is a great way to generate quality one-way incoming links, one of the main factors to higher search engine ranking. With Social Bookmarking, you can get unlimited ‘keyword’ links to your site. Having more keyword links that are relevant to your site will result in higher ranking
Better Page Rank
With incoming links from high-ranking Social Bookmarking sites will improve your site’s page rank. With a higher page rank, you can link to your sites and improve their ranking too!
Onlywire.com has semi-automated tool that will bookmark a few sites at once but you still may want to bookmark many, many more. You can also visit some of the more popular sites by clicking on the green “share this” icon and the other icons shown below this post.
If you really want to take it to the next level, and automatically signup for the most popular social bookmarking sites, and bookmark your blog posts and web pages automatically then check out Bookmarking Demon.
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Technorati Tags: Social Bookmarking, Search Engine Ranking
Is your website or blog ready for the next generation Google search engine? Google has recently launched Universal Search. The next generation will blend content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into web search results.
What does this mean to you? Your website and blog’s search engine rankings could be left in the dust if you haven’t integrated the above mentioned features into your site. If you have then you may now show up for more searches.
Here is the bottom line from a post on the Official Google Blog.
“While today’s releases are big steps in making the world’s information more easily accessible, these are just the beginning steps toward the universal search vision. Stay tuned!”
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has a great article posted here: Google 2.0: Google Universal Search
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Technorati Tags: Google, search engine ranking
