Sometimes we get so caught-up in the complicated aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and business in general, that we forget to do the simple things, and many times they can be really powerful.

I have dedicated much time and effort on this site, and on my personal blog, to explaining SEO, and giving easy-to-implement tips. These tips have helped many of my readers attain amazing Google rankings, very quickly. As an example of their power, When I launched this blog, neither “Renegade Marketing Strategies” or “Yvette Hampton” were ranked terms on Google (At least not YvetteHampton.com, there is some swimmer or runner who shows up). Within two weeks of launching this site, searching “Yvette Hampton”, or “Renegade Marketing Strategies” yielded this site, as the first, unpaid result on Google. That is an amazing feat! While Google search rankings change almost daily, You will still find us at the top of the Google results (within the first page), although we move around a little bit every day.

Those are just the simplest search terms, but all of my sites perform equally well for more obscure search terms as well.

The Tip

You can spend all the time in the world on SEO, and forget to do the simple things, like SUBMIT YOUR OWN SITE to the search engines.

If you have a blog, you can submit your site to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping. This is Google’s Blog Search engine. Once you have submitted your site, you can search for it at http://blogsearch.google.com.

You can submit your site to Yahoo! at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.

You can submit your site to Altavista at http://www.altavista.com/addurl/default.

You can submit your site to Microsoft’s Live.com at http://webmaster.live.com/.

You can submit your site to MSN at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.

To add your site to Ask.com, you have to have a valid sitemap. Search this site for the term “Sitemap”, or Google the term “Sitemap” for instructions on creating a sitemap. Detailed instructions are outside the scope of this post, but once you have your sitemap created, you can “Ping” Ask.com with the address, and Ask will begin to spider your site. You can get instructions from Ask.com at http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22, or you can do it yourself by changing the following address to include your site, then entering it in your address bar and pressing enter.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

First, an important note: BACKUP YOUR SITE before you attempt this!

Here are the steps to take, to back up your Wordpress site:

1. Log in to your Wordpress Dashboard – enter “http://YOUR_BLOG’S_ADDRESS/wp-admin” in your address bar, and enter your username and password.
2. Click the “Manage” tab at the top of the page.
3. Click the “Export” option.
4. Make sure “All Authors” is selected in the “Options” section of the “Export” page.
5. Click the “Download Export File” button at the bottom of the page.
6. Name the exported file and save it to your computer.
7. Using an FTP (I recommend Cyberduck for Mac, or WS FTP for Windows) program, download ALL of the files from your web server, to your computer.
8. Make sure all everything you just downloaded is secure. Preferably, burn them to a DVD or CD and store them offsite. If this isn’t possible, an external hard drive works well too.
9. It might not be a bad idea to back up your MySQL database right now, but that is outside of the scope of this post, and I personally have never done that. If you follow the instructions here, you will have everything you need to restore your site in the event of a major meltdown.

For a great introductory lesson, try making a subtle change to your “functions.php” file. This will add some really great functionality to your blog, and it isn’t hard to do.

Edit some PHP

In my personal blog, www.GarrittHampton.com I talk about a change that I made to my “functions.php” file, to change the text that is displayed for “Protected” wordpress Posts. You can see the results here, http://hampton-family.com/Yvette/?p=161. This was a simple change, that has made a big difference for my site. It has made it much easier for readers to subscribe to my VIP Content, and that means MORE SUBSCRIBERS!

I encourage you to take the time to try this on your own site. I think you will be happy you did.
For Clear Instructions, CLICK HERE.

Don’t forget to visit the Wordpress Support Forums for more great ideas and expert help.

I was going for the longest title and subtitle in blogging history.

Since the first “dotcom boom”, a web page has been a necessity for any serious business. While this is especially true for online businesses, it is equally true for brick-and-mortar, and home-based businesses. It is not even acceptable for a business to not have a website, and in fact, I would propose that it is not even acceptable for a business to have a mediocre website. When our kids can put together a highly trafficked MySpace or Facebook page in their spare time, we just have no excuse as business owners not to devote a portion of our resources to putting together a GREAT website. Customers make immediate judgments about a business the second they land on it’s website. In many cases, these are subtle, subconscious judgments, but they impact the business/customer relationship powerfully.

Luckily, since the “dotcom boom” and “dotcom bust” things have gotten much easier. There are so many powerful tools available that enable every business owner to produce a really professional looking site, with only a moderate amount of work. These tools truly negate any excuse that these businesses might have, for not having a website. Additionally, with the advent of “Web 2.0″, the proliferation of social networking sites has spurred the creation and refinement of many of the most powerful of these tools.

Without a doubt, my favorite tool for web design is Wordpress. Wordpress, has definitely benefited from the improvements in technology, brought about by the social networking craze. On the surface, Wordpress is just blogging software, but at the core, Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS).

What the heck is a CMS, and why should you care? The purpose of a Content Management System is to collect data, organize it, and present it over the internet. It allows massive amounts of data to be presented in an orderly, and easily searched and navigated manner. It combines a server-level database, like MySQL, with a browser-displayed front end (a web page). In short, it makes designing a data heavy website a breeze. By data, I mean words, links, numbers, pictures, video, audio, customer accounts, passwords, code, or any combination of these: basically, the meat of a website. For a good example of data, managed by a CMS, take a good look at this site. It is filled with words, pictures, video, links, and on the back end, administrator, editor, author, and subscriber account information. It is also, very typical. If you can imagine having a site like this, or already do, you need to know about CMS.

While Wordpress isn’t the only CMS tool out there – in fact, there are countless others – It is my favorite, and if you have read this blog for any length of time, you know I recommend it all the time. I first used Wordpress in 2005 when I had to do a ground-up redesign of a real estate website, for one of my consulting clients. I had been designing web pages for about 9 years, and up until then, mostly edited HTML by hand, in TextEdit, or Notepad. I used to design every page of a site, verify it in multiple browsers, fix any problems, then upload all of the files to the host, using Fetch, Cyberduck, WS FTP, or another FTP program. I had used a couple of WYSIWYG HTML editors, but found them to be more of a hindrance or crutch, than a real benefit. Keep in mind, I designed HUNDREDS of pages this way. I had built several, highly complex sites like this: everything from a personal sites, band sites, record company recording studio sites, to the site for our high-end stationery store. It was a very tedious process, but it yielded great results for the time.

When I started the site redesign, I felt like my designs were starting to look a little dated, and I knew I needed to find a faster way to work. I had heard about Wordpress on Leo Laporte’s radio show, and thought I would give it a try. I installed version 1.5 (I think) and never looked back. I was able to create a great looking site with tons of content (50+ pages, MLS search, home value tools, mapping, lead capture forms, and more), in a very short time. It was a “Eureka!” moment.

Since then, Wordpress has only improved. I am currently running version 2.6.3, and it is excellent. It is highly customizable, and gives very professional results without a lot of work. Plus, if you are willing and able to dig in and do some real under-the-hood work, Wordpress can yield amazing personalized results. Because of the excellent Wordpress support forums, with a little searching, you can usually find great ideas for making your blog work exactly like you want it to, and usually there are clear examples of code that you can use or adapt, to make the needed changes.

I don’t expect you to know how to administer a MySQL database, or even install Wordpress. The good news is, you don’t have to, and if you do, all the better! Most web hosting services offer guided installation of CMS systems, in fact, Go Daddy has a one-click Wordpress Setup that I have used many times. It makes setting up a Wordpress blog take just minutes.

Take the time to dive in to the world of CMS. You will find that managing your website becomes much easier, and your site will look and perform much better as a result.

Wordpress Resources:

You can download Wordpress for free at Wordpress.org

You can cut your teeth on Wordpress, with a free blog, at Wordpress.com

My personal blog at www.GarrittHampton.com has tons of Wordpress tips: everything from Installation, to Themes, to Plugins, to the truly geeky stuff like editing CSS and php.

Check out the Wordpress Support Forums for expert help.

Check out http://wordpress.org/extend/ for great Wordpress Themes, Plugins and ideas.

Here are some of the other Wordpress posts on this site: http://RenegadeMarketingStrategies.com/?s=wordpress. Notice that some of these posts are for subscribers only. To access all of the VIP content on this site, subscribe to our newsletter.

In this subscribers-only “Expert Tips” post, I will give an overview of the plugins I am currently using in my own blogs, explain how they work, and tell you how to install them on your own blog to give it power and flexibility you won’t believe. Keep in mind that although this post is specific to wordpress, most blogging software offers the use of some plugins, and while you may be using another blogging tool, you can take the suggestions in this post, and use them as a jumping-off point to search for similar plugins for your blog. Also, don’t feel constrained to using the plugins I have suggested. There are usually some great competing plugins for each of the ones I am using. For example, visit the plugin page at wordpress.org, wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and search for plugins to allow you to add a Digg link to your posts. Just enter “Digg” in the search box. You will be amazed at how many plugins allow you to do this one thing. The same is true for almost all of my plugins.

While all of these plugins are available for free download at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, wherever possible, in this post, I will link to the homepage for the plugin or designer. To install them, download them from either the Wordpress.org plugins page, or the designer’s page, then unzip them and copy them into your wp-content/plugins file using an FTP program, or your webhost’s control panel, file management software. Once you have placed the plugin in your wp-content/plugins folder, log in to your Wordpress dashboard, and click the plugins button at the top right of the page. From there, follow the instructions on the page to activate and set up the plugin.

Akismet

Akismet is, without a doubt, my favorite Wordpress plugin. like most great tools, It does one thing and does it very well. Akismet is a comment spam filter.

If you have ever had to deal with comment spam, you know that it can quickly eat up your time, frustrate you, and cause you to lose faith in humanity. Before I found Akismet, I used to have to moderate approximately 200 spam comments a week. After a few times, spending 10 minutes deleting spam comments, and finding that I couldn’t even weed the spam comments out of my blog, without losing the good ones as well, I turned off the comments on my blog. I hated to lose the power of allowing comments on my blog, but I couldn’t stand the trouble that they brought.

Akismet has fixed this problem, for good. Now, I allow comments on all of my blogs, and never have to deal with comment spam. Akismet is such a great plugin, it is now included with every installation of Wordpress. I encourage you to activate it immediately when you install wordress.

Google XML Sitemaps

One of the most powerful SEO tools I have found, is Google Sitemaps. Sitemaps are XML or HTML documents that tell search engines what, and how many pages are on a website. They also tell search engines when these pages were created, and how often they are edited, and how to find them. The idea behind Sitemaps is, “why wait for search engine spiders to find pages on your site, when you can just tell them where they are”. I have found Sitemaps to be a very quick way to get ranked on Google, and like I have said before, If you can get found on Google, you can get found anywhere.

You can visit Google’s Sitemaps page here. While you are there, take a look at the rest of Google’s Webmaster tools. They are very powerful.

With small sites, it is possible to build XML and HTML sitemaps by hand. But if you have more than a few pages, or if you update your site often, it gets VERY time consuming to keep your sitemap up to date. If you regularly post to your blog, say weekly, it is nearly impossible!

This is where Google XML Sitemaps comes in. This plugin will automatically update your XML sitemap every time you update your site, then it will automatically notify Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com about the changes. Very Handy!

I Love Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking sites allow users to submit links to sites, pages, videos, blog posts, or other content that they like, and then, allow other users to vote on the the submitted links. Links with more votes move further up the list. While this is a somewhat obscure concept, it is simple to understand the effect of these sites. Digg is the most popular social bookmarking site, right now. If you have a blog post that gets voted to the top of Digg, you will get literally thousands, and maybe tens of thousands of hits to your site. It is not uncommon for sites to be knocked offline, due to high traffic, when they hit the front page of Digg.

In order to benefit from the HUGE amount of traffic that these sites provide, you have to actually get people to link to you (Digg you). If you have a really great site or post, they might do this manually, but it is much easier to get people to Digg you, if give them an easy way to do it, then encourage them. This is what the
“I Love Social Bookmarking” plugin does. It places a link at the bottom of every blog post that allows people to Digg that post, or submit it to any of several other social bookmarking sites, in a few easy steps. To see it in action, Purple heart and “Social Bookmarking (Digg This)” link at the bottom of this post, then DIGG THIS POST. I’d do it for you!

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images automatically sets the proper ALT and TITLE attributes for images you put on your blog, and if you haven’t added these tags, it adds them according to criteria you set. SEO Friendly Images also validates the xHTML in the post, to W3C standards. That’s a lot of technical gibberish to say that this plugin cleans up your posts and tags images, so they are easily indexed by search engines.

Tell-a-Friend

Tell-a-Friend adds a button to the end of every blog post, that allows readers to email the post to a friend, or group of friends. To see this plugin in action, click the “SHARE THIS POST” button at the bottom of this post. In marketing, “calls to action” are very important. While you might expect that your readers, clients, or customers should know exactly what you want them to do, you can be reasonably assured that you will have a much better response, if you just ask them to do something specific. That’s what this plugin does. It asks your readers to spread the word about your great content.

Ultimate Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very powerful website statistics service provided by Google. The Ultimate Google Analytics plugin adds JavaScript to each post, page, and link on your blog, that allows Google Analytics to generate statistics on what your visitors are doing while they are on your site. Additionally, Google Analytics can tell you how visitors arrived at your site (did they enter a search term in a search engine, or click on an inbound link on another site), and how they left your site (did they click on an outbound link, or did they close the window or browser).

I have found Google Analytics to be an irreplaceable tool, in that it allows me to very effectively, guage the effectiveness of certain aspects of my sites. It allows me to work to increase the “stickiness” of my site, by adding more of the features that my readers like, and it allows me to track the effectiveness of different advertising campaigns, because I can see which landing pages people are entering through, then what they are doing once they are on my site.

For anyone who is serious about conducting business on the web, I highly recommend a good statistics program, and Google Analytics is by far the best that I have used.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does just what it’s name implies. It automatically upgrades your wordpress installation to the newest version. This is a great time saver for me, because I have multiple Wordpress blogs that I manage, and manually upgrading all of them would be a real hassle.

yaCAPTCHA

yaCAPTCHA adds a CAPTCHA field to the end of forms. CAPTCHA is the technology that creates distorted text images, to ensure that the person filling out a form is an actual person. In concert with Akismet, yaCAPTCHA insures that the only comments I get on my blog, are from real people. I also use CAPTCHA technology on my subscription form. To see this plugin in action, comment on any post on this blog.

Normally, “Expert Tip” posts on www.RenegadeMarketingStrategies.com are password protected, and available only to our Subscribers. For VIP access to all of our great content, including the “Expert Tips” section, Free gifts, and other limited time promotions, Subscribe to our Newsletter.

Expert Tip

One of the most important things you can do for your business, is make sure that people find your website. This seems like a simple concept, but you wouldn’t believe how many businesses I have encountered that have a website that just doesn’t show up in search engines. Whenever I start a new consulting job, this is one of the first places I focus my attention. The web is so important for businesses, and not just eCommerce sites, or “web-centric” businesses, yet so many times this simple thing is overlooked.

If you have followed my blogs for any length of time, you have probably noticed that I post articles on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) pretty regularly. While SEO is a pretty broad term, it basically means doing things to your site to improve your Google ranking. Why do I only say Google? Because Google OWNS search. Their strategy of a simple page that delivers highly relevant results has made them the reigning king of search (Their “Don’t Be Evil” motto has helped too). And, if you are highly ranked on Google, I guarantee, your ranking on Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN, Live.com, Altavista, Dogpile, and every other search engine will be high too. When I do SEO, I just focus on Google, and let all the other search engines fall into place. I have been doing this a LONG time, I have had a lot of success with SEO, and this strategy has never failed me.

While I post basic SEO articles on the Renegade Marketing Strategies site, I usually reserve the extra-geeky ones for my personal blog, www.GarrittHampton.com, But this one was so important I had to add it here too. Please read the whole post at www.GarrittHampton.com/?p=177. I have only included a snippet here, but there are many more details, and pictures on my blog.

O.K., so here’s the tip. Use the “Publish Immediately” feature to put your blog on autopilot.

Search Engines love blogs. They love lot’s of regularly updated content, but most of us have lives, or short periods of writer’s block, that prevent us from always updating our blogs on a daily or weekly basis. Here’s where this tip comes in. When you have some free time, or a huge stroke of creativity, or if you have a long or multi-part blog post to write, sit down and write. Then, publish the first post, or the first part in a series, and set the rest of the posts or parts to be published in subsequent days. To do this, just click Edit, next to the “Publish Immediatly” area on your Wordpress “Write Post” page. This is a great way to look like you sit down religiously and write posts every day.

You don’t have to use Wordpress to use this tip. Try this with Blogger, TypePad, Moveable Type, Drupal, Expression Engine, Nucleus, Pivot, b2Evolution, bBlog, Serendipity, TextPattern, or whatever blogging tools you use. Dig around a little bit, and I am sure you will find this capability. Happy Blogging!

Don’t forget to READ THE FULL POST, and see the pictures here. I go into much clearer detail on how to implement this strategy on your blog, and explain how I am using it for my own blogs. Then, to see how to take this technique to the next level, and really apply it like an expert, check out the great tip at www.webdemar.com.

BONUS CONTENT

Normally, “Expert Tip” posts on www.RenegadeMarketingStrategies.com are password protected, and available only to our Subscribers. For VIP access to all of our great content, including the “Expert Tips” section, Free gifts, and other limited time promotions, Subscribe to our Newsletter.

Maybe you have seen or heard of a little known ad campaign called “got milk?” which originated in 1993 by the California Milk Processor Board.  This group of milk processors agreed to allocate 3-cents of each gallon sold to fund efforts to promote the consumption of milk through marketing, advertising, promotion and public relations.1

Whoever came up with that catch phrase for the CMPB was clearly a marketing genius.  However, our country has gorged itself so much on the overuse of “got (fill in the blank)” that it has become a running joke in our household for the past several years.  I continue to be amazed at how many businesses use this marketing technique thinking themselves clever.  got bugs? got teeth? got carpet?  got windows? You get the point.  It has become nothing more than marketing noise in the ear of the customer.

Ann Sieg states it well in her book The Renegade Network Marketer, “Nothing Else In A Business Matters If Good Sales And Marketing Aren’t Being Used”.

The World Wide Web has become so central to today’s household that there are a huge variety of options you can use to effectively market your business.  Some are free, others cost a little, and of course, others cost a lot.  Where you fit in depends on your business, your marketing budget and your know-how (and if you don’t know how to do it, you can learn, or pay someone who does).

Stay tuned, because in the next few articles we will provide you with ways to effectively and creatively market your business.  In the mean time, may I suggest that you visit the Renegade University at www.renegadeuniversity.com.  Once there, type in your information to gain free access to the university and begin learning how to get your customers to come to you before having to plead for for their business.

I remember as a child my parents teaching me to have a good work ethic.  My mom always told me that even if I was having the worst day of my life, never let the customer, or my boss know it.  Have integrity and always put my best foot forward.

I continue to be amazed at the poor work ethic and lack of professionalism many businesses display.  If you want to succeed in business, you have to give your customer the respect and value they deserve.  After you gain their trust enough for them to provide you with their contact information (as addressed in part 1), be responsible with it.  Don’t use it to send out spam or other junk that will annoy them or waste their time, and certainly don’t sell their information or give it away.  Continue to provide them with valuable resources, products and information on how they can better their business or their lives.

Essentially, your customers will shop your business because they are in search of a solution to a particular problem.  Maybe your customer’s problem is that they need to find an all-natural approach to weight loss.  If you have a good quality, affordable resource for them, you can direct them to your website, through effective marketing, educate them on how to eat right, take proper supplements, and direct them in an effective exercise routine to help them lose weight.  Problem solved equals a happy customer, and a happy customer equals a return customer.

On the flip side, if your customer comes to you with the need to lose weight and you provide them with nothing but a little white pill, chances of them shopping with you again in the future are slim (no pun intended).  You have to gain their trust, keep their trust, and continue building the relationship.

Well, personally I don’t believe in karma, however, I do believe that most of the time in business, we will reap what we sow.  With all the competition for your business, most customers will come to you with a bit of skepticism and uncertainty until you prove to them that you really are worth their time, money, and energy.

Your customers will never trust you right off the bat.  You need to win their trust and you can do that in several different ways.  You can start by offering them something of value, for free.  For instance, you can offer them a free newsletter with good and helpful information on a topic that interests them.  You can offer them a free e-book written by you or someone else (with the author’s permission, of course) such as “The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing” by Ann Sieg (yes, it really is free.  Just click on the link).  You can also offer video or audio tutorials to help walk them through a new or difficult process.  Use you imagination and think of ways you are drawn in to other businesses.  What do other successful businesses do in order to gain the trust, respect and loyalty of their customers?

Once you have figured out a valuable, free product to entice your customers with, continue to build your relationship with them.  The way you do this is by first getting their contact information, then sending the free, valuable product.   If you have succeeded in gaining their trust, or even just piqued their interest in your business, you can continue to build a relationship and sell them on your business or product.  It’s business karma at its best!

While this is not a topic that I suspect I will be expanding on in the future, I wanted to include it here mainly to encourage creativity in web design, and to show some of the techniques I have used in the past (not saying anything about how effective they were). I originally had three posts on this topic, but the first was so site-specific, I decided not to include it here.

One Last Babelfish Post
May 12, 2006
O.k. this is my last Babelfish post, but this is a good one. Most of us have heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), yet it is a mystery to all but the most seasoned web pro. Companies charge thousands of dollars per year to keep other companies’ web pages at the top of the search lists. Web designers and marketing people pull their hair out trying to get their websites found on Google. We hear stories of Google removing whole sites from their database. What are we supposed to do?

There is an easy way to vastly improve your search engine standings and help your site to be found. Build a great website. I know it sounds silly, but it works. If you have a great website, it will translate to better search engine ratings.

So what makes a great website? First, you have to have a lot of relevant content. If you are building a dog grooming website, have pages for contact information, techniques for handling different breeds, tools of the trade, shampoo and flea dip recomendations, a secure online store, staff bios, pictures of past clients, tips for grooming at home and anything else that is pertinent. The more relevant content you have the better. Just make sure the content is relevant. Having a page dedicated to safecracking on your dog grooming site really won’t help anything.

This is where Babelfish comes in. Once you have your site set up and looking good, start translating it. Babelfish allows you to translate whole pages of your site into 12 different languages. That means that your relevant English content becomes relevant Spanish, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Portugese, Dutch, Russian, German, Chinese and Italian content. Take the time to capture the code and post the translated pages to your web server. This will multiply your content many times, and you don’t have to spend hours and dollars creating new content.

Enjoy, Garritt

_________________________________________________

Babelfish
May 11, 2006

I recently began the monumental project of translating the Realty Response and Realty Response Connections websites into spanish. This task is complicated to begin with, but the fact that I do not speak Spanish only makes things worse. Luckily, we have a wonderfully dedicated agent on staff who speaks Spanish. Consuelo set out on the tedious process of translating the website, page by page. She was doing a great job, but it was very slow going. Then we discovered Babelfish.

Babelfish is an excellent web translation tool provided by the good people at Altavista. You can check out the very basic front end to Babelfish at http://babelfish.altavista.com. At first glance it is not very impressive, but as you use the tool, you find that it makes very tedious translations possible, whole pages at a time.

The basic user interface allows you to translate blocks of text from English into 12 other languages including Dutch, Greek, Portugese, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish, . It also allows you to translate text in most of those languages back into english and to enter specialized characters for multiple languages via an onscreen keyboard. Just these capabilities make this free tool an incredible value, but there is more. By linking your website to Babelfish through a relatively simple html tag, you can allow visitors to view your site in any of those languages.

There are a few limitations to this amazing tool, but they can be pretty easily overcome. The first is that Babelfish can not translate button images. So if you use buttons on your site, they will remain unchanged. This is remedied by creating an all-text, or mostly-text page for translation. The second limitation lies with dynamic pages. Babelfish doesn’t like PHP or non UTF-8 encoding. That severly limits it’s usefulness for blogs. I have found that WordPress pages do not translate to languages that do not use the basic western character set. It will do Spanish and French on a WordPress blog, but if you want to translate your blog to Russian or Greek, good luck. Even with these limitations, Babelfish is a tool that every webdesigner should keep in his belt.

For businesses, Babelfish offers a relatively simple and inexpensive way to reach a wider audience, and even conduct web business overseas.

Earn Money On The Internet!
April 12, 2006

I am actually earning money with my personal website! How, you ask, am I doing that? With Google Adsense. If you notice, there are Google and Firefox links on every page of this site. Click them and I get paid. Pretty simple huh? If you would like to earn money on the web then click the Generate revenue on your site with Google Adsense link. Sign up for an Adsense account, then get paid. It couldn’t be simpler.

Tips:
Promote your site - You won’t earn a penny unless people find you.
Feature your ads prominently – People won’t click what they can’t see. Place multiple ads on every page. Not only does this make your ads more visible, but it might help your Google ranking. Google will find it’s own ads on your site. The more places you have ads, the more pages google will want to index. You scratch their back…

Create multiple Links - Give people options. Promote Firefox and Adsense and host links to other businesses.

Have a ton of great content! - This one is most important. Google Adsense creates ad content based on the content of your site. Google indexes your site based on content. People find you , read your page and return because of your content. If you don’t have good content you won’t have good conversion.

Create multiple sites - Search engine optimization 101 here. One of the factors that contributes heavily to your Google ranking is outside links. Many times, depending on the type of site you have, getting outside links is difficult. This is where multiple sites comes in. If you own three websites that all link to eachother it looks like each site has multiple outside links.

Create a free page - This goes along with the last tip. You don’t have to spend a bunch of money to have multiple websites. Check out Spaces.MSN.com, Yahoo 360 and myspace. These all will be found by Google, as readily as a hosted website with a unique domain name.

Remember that only Google matters - If you notice, the only search engine I mention in this posting is Google. Google OWNS search. If you are not being found on Google, chances are, you are not being found. Work to maximize your Google exposure. Read articles on seach engine optimiziation (SEO). Follow the directions. You will see a difference.

If you can follow these simple tips you can earn money with your website too.