Driving Traffic To Your Site With Facebook

by William in the category Traffic Tips

Facebook is the 5th most popular site in the world (according to Alexa) and you’d think it’d be a great way to drive traffic to your website right?

Well not exactly.

You have to remember that the people on your Facebook account are technically meant to be your ‘friends’ and most of the time most of them are your friends, people you know.

So if you start a niche site about shoe polish… do you think ALL your friends deserve to know about it? Is this your target audience that you are trying to push an affiliate product to?

I wager it’s not.

But if you’re starting a site that means something to you, such as a personal blog, a food blog or maybe an Internet marketing blog like this one, I’d say you could market to your group of friends.

It might be something they can relate to and hence come and visit your site.

So if you think your friends ARE your target audience, here’s a good way of getting some traffic and exposure.

1) Login to your facebook account.

2) Click on your name on the top right hand side of your facebook page.

3) Click ‘post link’

4) Paste the complete link to your article. NOT just your homepage. The reason is if you post your article link, Facebook will try and find an image from the article to use and add it to your link.

5) Click ‘Preview’ and let it load. If a little summary like what you see above doesn’t display, you have to remove the trailing ‘/’ from your URL and try again. (NB: Sometimes it doesn’t work even when you do that. In that case, I have no idea what to do… sorry.)

Choose a picture from the available options and if you’re fine with everything, click ‘post’.

6) If it posted correctly, you should see it show on your wall like this.

7) Facebook will then decide which of your friends would like to know this information and post it on their Facebook ‘newsfeed’ on their home page. And more often than not, the people that Facebook think would like to know what you are up to are your closer friends or who view alot of your pictures.

These people are likely to click your site, pay a visit and who knows, maybe even tell a friend?

8 ) I’ve been doing this for one of my other sites since the day it launched (about 5 months ago) and here is the proof of the traffic. It is easily in my top 5 sources of traffic.

Petalingstreet.org is a Malaysian blog aggregator that I use for that site because its targeted audience is Malaysia.

So why not give it a try? You may get 10, 20, 50 or even 100 visitors almost immediately to your site. But remember that these people are your friends, please don’t SPAM them with useless information ok?

Add me to Facebook! (or click on my picture in the sidebar)

-William Lee

How To Add A Gravatar Image To Your Comments/ Blog

by William in the category Wordpress

Adding your picture to your comments with the Gravatar service is a great was to feel more ‘connected’ with your readers, or as a reader yourself.

When you leave a comment, do you look like one of these icons? Do you wonder how come the other people have a little screen shot of their face, logo or some other cute picture next to their name? While you are a blank silhouette of a man or a spectacled smiley face?

Well that’s because they’ve set up a Gravatar account which is linked to their email address. Whenever you leave a comment (with a Gravatr linked e-mail address) then your selected picture will appear in the box next to the comments section.

To setup a Gravatar account follow these steps:

1) Go to http://gravatar.com
2) Sign up for an account

3)Login to your new account

4) Click ‘Add an Email Address’

5) Type in your e-mail address that you use to leave comments (or the admin e-mail address you use for your blog) and click ‘add’

6) Click ‘add a new image’

7) Upload a picture from your hard disk, a website or straight from your webcam.

Choose an image for your email address

9) Select the image that you just uploaded

10) Click ‘confirm’ when it asks you to

It’s as simple as that! Leave a comment with your new Gravatar picture below to test it out.

But what if you don’t have the little box next to your comments on your blog? How do you install it?

This only works if you have a WordPress blog.

1) You need to have access to the files on your server. For that, I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how to get them. I use Dreamweaver to get to my files.

2) Find http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/comments.php (where yourdomain.com represents where you installed your blog and yourtheme is the theme you are using for your WordPress blog)

3) Open comments.php in Dreamweaver or notepad if you don’t have it.

4) Find this line:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

Anything under this line is for the comments section of your blog.

5) If you want to put your Gravatar icon above your name in the comment box (like my comment box below) then search for this line.

<cite class=”comment-author”><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite>

and ABOVE it paste this line:

<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 48 ); ?>

where the number represents how big you want the Gravatar image to be. Default is 32 (i.e. 32×32 pixels big) but I put mine a little bit bigger.

6) Save your file and upload it back to your server.

7) Refresh your page and the box for Gravatar images should be there.

Please remember that not all themes are the same and this method may or may not work for you. But it should work for the default and more popular themes out there.

Share this article if you liked it!

Thanks,

-William Lee

I’ve Changed My Autoresponder From Getresponse.com To Aweber.com

by William in the category Autoresponders

getresponse

I’ve recently changed my getresponse.com autoresponder to a similar service offered by Aweber.com. Why did I do it? Well Aweber.com is being used by some of the biggest Internet marketers around and the added credibility of that can’t be all false right?

Also, Aweber.com’s pricing is pretty low, at only $19 a month for 0 – 500 subscribers, with an increasing pricing structure as the amount of subscribers increases.

aweber

Once I opened up Aweber and gave it a go I did not regret getting it at all. It is SO easy to navigate and use. In fact, it has a step by step ‘list building wizard’ that opens up at the bottom of your web browser each time you start a new list. It shows you the % completed to get your list up and running, from your welcome message all the way to putting the subscriber box on your website.

I’ll go in more depth when I’ve fully explored the system and its capabilities.

For now, those of you who subscribed to my old list, you’ve received an email from me (via @aweber.com) asking you to resubscribe to my newsleter. Just click on the link in your email and it will continue sending you my newsletters as before.

Thanks!

-William Lee

Drive Traffic To Your Site With Unique Article Wizard

by William in the category Traffic Tips

Unique Article Wizard is an online tool that has been going around the Internet marketing circle for quite a while now. Apparently alot of the big Internet marketers use it to bring in traffic to niche websites, or even their own branded sites.

How it works is you supply an article to the Unique Article Wizard program and it will ask you to rewrite the article one more time. It then takes both of these articles, combines them in many different ways and creates hundreds of slightly different articles.

They claim that this is enough to prevent Google from punishing the article content for ‘duplicate content’.

The Unique Article Wizard network comprises of more than 1000 article directories and blogs which your unique article will be sent out to. Each of these unique articles will have at the bottom, just like a normal article a resource box.

You can put your link there linking your article back to your website. The ‘blogs’ in their network will do a pingback to your site, another way of getting back links to you.

Unique Article Wizard slowly sends out these articles on a time delay basis so as to not make it look like your site is getting too many back links at once. However, some people have said that after only 2 days they are already getting listed on Google for some good keywords.

I’m still thinking whether or not to get myself a copy as at USD$67/month, it’s not the cheapest tool out there. Along with my recent purchase of an Aweber.com account, that would bring my monthly Internet marketing expenditure to USD$86/month, or approximately RM300/month.

That’s NOT small change.

But think about it this way… if I manage to make one sale every 2 days, at an average affiliate comission of $25 using a combination of these two tools, that adds up to USD$375/month or RM1300.

That’s ALSO not small change.

I would have easily paid for my monthly subscription to Unique Article Wizard and Aweber with a nice profit in hand.

All I’d have to do then is repeat the process for other niche sites and affiliate products.

I’ll let you know how it goes,

Unique Article Wizarding,

-William Lee

How To Make Money On The Internet? Try Google Adsense.

by William in the category Adsense

google-adsense-1

Google Adsense is possibly the simplest and easiest monetization strategy to implement on your website or blog. (Although not necessarily the easiest way to make money online)

Google Adsense is simple enough to understand. Google charges advertisers to advertise on their search and content networks via Google Adwords. The publisher (that’s you and me, the owner’s of the website/blog) put a small piece of java script on the pages we want our adverts to show.

Each time the page is loaded, the java script pulls ads from the Adsense network which it thinks are targeted to the content of the page. This is done by going through the keywords used on the page and comparing them to the keywords used by the advert.

google-adsense-2

If a visitor to your site clicks on one of these adverts, you get paid money. That’s all there is to it.

N/B: You can also get paid per 1000 impressions, but that’s another beast altogether.

Google handles all the tracking, payments and selection of adverts, so that the most targeted (and hence most likely to be clicked) adverts are put on your website.

The first reason that Google Adsense is essential to sites that provide alot of informative content is that through the past few years of development and improvement, the system is now more customizable than ever.

google-adsense-3

You can place adverts in content, in your site search and even in your RSS feed (new).

google-adsense-4

The ability to customize the colours of your adverts to match your site is very important as unlike what some people think, an advert is more likely to be clicked if it looks a part of the site. This can potentially increase the amount of money you make with the Adsense program.

google-adsense-5

Secondly, Google Adsense allows you to track exactly which site is making you money (through channels) so that if you are testing changes to the positioning of adverts, or even just a change in colour, you can see if it’s brining in more clicks (and hence more money) or if your changes are not working.

You can therefore quickly assess changes you are making, for better or for worse and modify as needed.

Lastly, advertisers are now understanding just how powerful advertising on targeted websites is and hence there is more chance that a product/service being advertised on your site is highly targeted to your audience. This gives another chance that someone will click on the link and make you more money.

The key to Google Adsense is to make your content as targeted as possible. Take for instance this article, it’s about how to make money on the internet as well as Google Adsense.

Depending on which country you are reading this from, there is a very high chance that the advert you see (either on the bottom of this post or at the top right of the post) is related to either making money online or Google Adsense.

Some bloggers are guilty of rambling on their blog. If your ramblings are interesting enough and people read your content because of your opinions, then keep rambling. But if you are trying to draw people to make money, then choose your words more carefully, it will help in your Adsense income as well as your SEO in the long term.

Adsense makes sense,

-William Lee

My Google Position For ‘Internet Marketing Blog Malaysia’

by William in the category Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I just did a quick check on some keywords that my blog is listing for and I’m proud to say that on Google (well google.com.my anyway…) I am listed at position #6 for ‘Internet Marketing Blog Malaysia’.

I still have some ways to go for the more general terms like ‘make money online’ or ‘Internet marketing Malaysia’.

But I’ve got an idea what I need to do to get those – just research keywords, write articles based on the long tail keywords with medium-high search traffic and publish.

Unfortunately not many people are looking for ‘Internet marketing blog Malaysia’, either that or my position is not high up enough on the search rankings just yet.

I’ll make a short tutorial on how I optimized my page to get this search ranking in a later post. For now I’ll just take the small victory that my search engine optimization strategies are working to an extent.

Thanks for listening,

-William Lee

Why Akismet Spam Catcher Is So Important

by William in the category Plugins

The Akismet plugin is invaluable to bloggers who get alot of comments on their blogs. It works by blocking comments that it detects as ‘spam’ comments and holds them in moderation until you review them, or you can set it to automatically delete everything after a certain amount of time.

akismet1

If you’re not sold on the idea yet, just have a look at some of the automated messages that spammers send as comments. It actually makes sense and seems like a good comment that a reader has left on your blog, but clicking back on the link of the commentor and you’ll find that it’s probably a website selling domain names or something similar like that.

Also, I encourage people to always set comment moderation to ‘on’ even with Akismet installed as some messages do get through their filters. On one of my other blogs, I get an average of 20 – 30 spam messages a day caught by Akismet.

spam

Imagine getting 30 messages like this for every post that you write? And imagine having to go through your ‘comments awaiting moderation’ every day deleting these one by one. Install Akismet, it’s a must, and it’s FREE.

N/B: Check through your spam folder every once in a while as Akismet also does catch messages that isn’t actually SPAM. But this happens very rarely, but better to be safe than sorry right?

Happy spam catching,

-William Lee

20 Best Free WordPress Themes

by William in the category Wordpress

Following in from installing WordPress on your blog as well as the important WordPress Plugins, the next thing you’ll need to download is a good theme for your site.

Below I’ve compiled a list of the best free WordPress themes I’ve seen on the Internet. Of course there are a lot more out there but this is just to get you started.

bpro