Archive for November, 2009

What is Content Management?

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I have been thinking quite a bit this last week about syndicating content for strategic online marketing, drawing out all kinds of schematics of how this can be accomplished in a quicker more efficient way. Basically, this is keyword marketing through content syndication with the sole purpose to generate website traffic.

You see, I think the problem for most of us is that we do what everyone else in the online world is doing, or what we are told by the so-called experts is the best way to build traffic with the goal of gaining our own tribe of followers on the net. This boils down to the tried and true of what is known to work, but also known as following the crowd.

This usually means writing original content on popular topics, maybe re-purposing that content in the form of article marketing, writing press releases, placing classified ads, commenting on blogs and forums within your niche, and then bookmarking everything in site.

Oh, and I forget to mention writing endlessly on your own network of blogs, lenses, and micro-blogs daily, or at least weekly, not to mention learning how to produce and edit videos to become a vlogger, (video blogging).

Are you starting to see a pattern here? Everyone that knows the game is fully aware that all of these methods do work to a certain degree, but I see at least a few problems with these content distribution and link building schemes.

The first problem is the time involved to do all of these steps correctly, and unless you can hire and train an army of workers in a far off country to perform many of these duties, you will spend endless hours a day doing these tedious mechanical tasks yourself.

Another problem is creating an endless stream of unique content that is well suited and targeted for each and every niche that you are in, let alone having the time to manage the content distribution through a network of blogs, article directories, micro-blogs, bookmarking accounts, etc.

Moreover, the biggest problem I see, is that you will end up doing everything that everyone else is doing. You also are never sure when search engines will change the game, the way they index information, or how they will value and credit links.

I started thinking about this in a recent training module from Alex Jeffreys, when he mentioned that he has only written something like 20 blog posts in his lifetime…but has has over 200,000 visitors to his blog. He basically writes one post a month. Can you believe that?

Alex refers to this as strategic blogging. He takes the time to research and  identify what his readers are truly interested in knowing and reading about, and sets about writing an in depth post that will inform, motivate and inspire.

This certainly goes against the grain of many pro bloggers that tell us that you need to write (post) frequently, and then do all of the other things that surround the notion of promoting your content.

Heck, I did not even mention yet the other aspects of social media marketing, and all the other time sucking, going-through-the-motions kind of networking tasks involved with Web 2.0.

For me I have made a conscious decision to work smarter. That means no more short daily posts about anything and everything just to say I have met some sort of daily quota. I am going to become a strategic blogger, and a strategic marketer.

This is how you build value, and how you can become a thought leader in your niche. Along the way I still plan to be sharing some of the knowledge I have gained about SEO and online marketing so those that end up following me can place these things into good practice.

The web and the search engines are just a network of machines that tabulate information and keep score. My focus now is creating value by creating good content, and then building a system for content distribution that works on auto-pilot as much as is possible by design.

Believe it or not, the end goal here for me is still list building. Why? Because I know that once you have a list, you never again have to rely on search engine traffic, search engine ranking, and a laundry list of mindless activities along with all the other things mentioned in this post.

Still, in order to reach the goal of building a list you have to start with understanding what it will take to get people (your target traffic) interested in what you have to say in order to lead them to opting in to your list in the first place. This is still going to require a website (landing page), or at least one blog to drive traffic, and an autoresponder.
You also will have to know how to build and use these tools, or know enough about the process in order to train or hire someone else to build your systems for you.

I know that these steps are all prerequisites to building long term income online with a list. Just like I know that there are only three things you must understand are most important for getting organic search traffic. They are Keywords, Content, and Links. You can say that whoever has the most and the ‘best” of these three components will always rank the best in the SERPs. I have proven this to myself time and again through testing.

I already have 3 pages leading back to this site ranking on Google first page results for the exact keyword phrase “about Alex Jeffreys”.

But don’t despair, because you can learn how to do keyword research and become competent at that, and you can learn how to become a competent writer. In fact, you must learn and understand these are important steps and the driving force behind building initial traffic to your virtual real estate (VRE). Your websites are virtual real estate that can produce income.

Location is everything in the virtual world, just like it is with a real world brick and mortar business. If you can’t be found on the web then you have no traffic and you have no business. You have no chance of anyone getting to your message and getting on your list.

For me, the last area of link building is the simplest concept in many ways, but also the hardest to accomplish. I find it hard to tackle because of the time involved. I also have tried automated software in the past and also have had websites de-indexed because of it…so that no longer is an option for me.

Watch the video below to see how convoluted things can get when it come to the subject of traffic generation.

Guess what? I know that it can be a lot easier than what is presented in this video. I am not knocking anybody, and in fact I have used and still use many of these traffic techniques, but I am here to tell you it can be executed in a much simpler manner.

I am currently working with some incredible folks on some amazing content and link syndication techniques that will be disclosed in future posts. You don’t need any sales funnels. magnetic marketing guides, secret blueprints, or any other online courses with catchy phrases.

As I write this post over the last two days (this site is only 10-12 days old) I just checked my traffic logs and this site is indexed on Google with an average of 37 unique visitors a day, and over 340 page views a day. That translates to 1,100 visitors and over 10,000 page views in the first month (it could be more because it keeps getting better).

Just follow this site and opt in to the Alex Jeffreys course offered for free in the top right corner, or leave a comment below so I can contact you when I am ready to release this information. Better yet, tell me what you want to learn now, and I will research and write about.

Traffic Generation Around the Web

Secret Tips For Generating Traffic to Your Website

By having a testimonial on a website that is visited by thousands of people, you are getting free publicity and free advertising and traffic for your website. Use the secret tips outlined above to easily generate high volumes of traffic [...]

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If you want your blog or site to succeed,you NEED traffic. The best part is, you really don’t have to spend a lot of money to generate a good amount of visitors. I will show you some of the top ways to build long-term website traffic tips [...]

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Look For Keywords Which You Can Dominate. If the idea of passing a few hours a day on research does not excite you too much, you should listen to this. One of the things, which you simply cannot avoid, is research for keywords and this [...]

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Look for keywords which would be only yours. Even if you do not believe in doing a few hours of research a day please hear me out when I say this. Keyword research should be on your top priority no matter what.

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I am always searching for new online tools to make things happen faster. I came across this while going through some Stumbles. YouTube XL is an online search and viewer application for YouTube, and it is formatted for television viewing. From the Website: “YouTube XL is a version of YouTube optimized for watching YouTube videos on any large screen.” Look what happens when you do a search on “Alex Jeffreys”. I think this one is a keeper. Please leave a comment and give this a retweet! Thanks.

YouTube Search-Alex Jeffreys

Blog Comments About YouTube XL YouTube Rolling Out 1080p Video Streams … 1080p video streams as well as going back and re-encoding videos in its library uploaded in the aforementioned resolution for display while talking about new YouTube products such as YouTube XL (YouTube formatted for televisions). YouTube Going 1080p, Already? Check the video after the break for more tidbits about what’s next for the site, including YouTube XL. More: YouTube going 1080p, already? YouTube Announces 1080p Video On The Way Walk said YouTube has several set top box and television partners and of course, it’s also experimented with YouTube XL, an optimized version of YouTube for the big screen. It’s well aware that around 10 million people have attempted to [...]

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EvanBeckOnline.com uses the Do Follow attribute for the comments section.  Comments are configured for the Do Follow attribute, and this site is also powered by the CommentLuv WordPress Plugin.

Please be respectful, and know that comments are moderated for spam.

Spammers will not be tolerated, so do not “spam” comments with material that does not add to the conversation, is off-topic, or inappropriate.

Comments that are not relevant, or do not fit the topic in question will be deleted.

Visitors are welcome to add relevant comments and relevant comments and links will be gladly accepted.

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WordPress plugins are a very important part of getting ranked and getting traffic. However, there are a few inherent problems with these wonderful tools. People either don’t use the right ones…or they go overboard and use too many.

I feel this is one of the most important, All-In-One-SEO Pack, and you need to get it get set up properly before you turn your blog privacy setting back to “off”, and prior to publishing posts and pages. This then allows the search engines to see and spider your site with all of your content structured for proper indexing.

Since Alex Jeffreys discusses the importance of getting traffic as being so central to your online success, you will see why I think this plugin is so important.

First, you want to hop on over to the left of the dashboad, go to settings, and then to “permalinks”. You want to change your permalink settings before you make any posts, and before the search engines start indexing your site.

You want to use the “Custom” setting (at the bottom) and enter either:/%postname%.html, /%postname%.htm, or /%postname%.php. You can see that if you use the WordPress default, it will assign an arbitrary page number at the end with something like http://sitename.com/?p=123. I think you can see that this is pretty strange looking and bogus for SEO.

Permalink Setting-EvanBeckOnline.com

With the custom setting your permalinks will always be the title of your post.  The permalink for this post is /understanding-all-in-one-seo.php, and that is pretty search engine friendly. Neat, huh?

Next go back to settings and find All In One SEO. The SEO Pack gives you lots of other custom settings that will help you with SEO. The main things are to have a keyword rich title, keywords in the home description, and then load your keyword list up in keywords.

All-In-One-SEO-Screenshot1

Changing the title tags is the most important thing, and this section should look like what is illustrated below. Be careful when you do this, because if you  make a mistake then your titles will be messed up, or they may even not get indexed in the search engines at all.

There are some other settings you can check by preference. I like to keep “noindex” checked for categories and archives, otherwise it will result in duplicate content being indexed over and over in the search engines.

All-In-One-SEO-Screenshot2

Now, let me remind you why we are spending so much time on setting up plugins, and why you should take the time to do this properly. The answer is because this will help you get ranked in the search engines…and that means TRAFFIC. After all, that is what SEO is, Search Engine Optimization.

The video below does a good job of describing all the features of All In One SEO Pack. Leave your comments and questions, please.



Comments About All-InOne SEO from around the WEB

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Wordpress out of the box permits fundamental management of the main SEO meta information. To extend the functionality we add our own super-charged version of the All-In-One-SEO Pack. The SEO pack makes it simple to change the page title [...]

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Why Alex Jeffreys Does Not Know Much About Plugins

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Funny thing, but I was listening to Alex Jeffreys the other day and he admitted he does not know what plugins he has installed on his blog. Not a good idea for most of us, but the lesson here is that if you have your business set up right you can pay other people to handle such things.

Starting out, you just might want to learn what this is all about. I have listed the most common WordPress plugins I have been using when building sites. Your choice of plugins depends on what you are trying to do. I mostly am concerned with SEO and traffic.

Below is my most commonly used list followed by a how-to video on using the auto-installation inside WordPress. Keep in mind that some plugins are not free, and not all are available in the search function from the WordPress interface. Many times you may have to upload a plugin using an FTP client like Filezilla (see last post-Installing Google Analytics the Easy Way).

All In One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.

CommentLuv – Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.

Do Follow – Removes the nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.

FollowMe – WP FollowMe is a WordPress plugin that allow you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO, and Bing.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin.

RSS Footer – Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles.

ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Top Commentators Widget - Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

WP tags to Technorati – Simple plugin to convert Wordpress tags to Technorati (‘http://technorati.com’) links.

In the next post we will come back to “All-In-One -SEO”, since it needs some special attention. The settings for this plugin are a little more involved, but well worth the effort.

If you need help, or have something to add, please hit the comments below.

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I am still chugging away on prepping this site for online SEO. If you have forgotten, you want to do these things to make your new site user friendly for the search engine bots. My first few post are all about online SEO.

These are one time action steps (for the most part) that generally involve activating plugins, thanks to the WordPress platform. As Alex Jeffreys explains in his mentoring membership and course, you want to install Google Analytics early on so you can track your traffic sources.

Google Analytics Instructions

First you need to do a search on “Google Analytics”, follow the link, and then the instructions for setting up an account.

This is fairly straightforward. What is not so user friendly is getting the necessary tracking code inserted properly into your site. Once again, we can look to a plugin resource to make the task more manageable.

Google Analytics-Setting Up Account

I just finished doing this by following the video instruction below. I find you can almost always find a YouTube videos that explain how to do things in great detail. Please leave your comments or questions, and let me know if you need any help.



About Google Analytics

“Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.”

From the Blogosphere

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Google Analytics in retrospect and as real benefits, for free Google has earned its giant position in search engine marketplace through real innovative.

How to Install Google Analytics on Your Blog

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How To Get A Google Analytics Account

How to get a Google Analytics account for your website. Instructions to aid with the setup procedures involved with signing up for a Google Analytics account.

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Alex Jeffreys says don’t do this do that, blah, blah, blah…so here goes.

In this post I am going to explain how to activate the Wordress Akismet plugin and add a plugin named Tweetmeme. These are simple plugins that you need to activate early in the configuration of your blog or website for functionality and content syndication.

First, a little about Akismet. Akismet comes already installed with the Wordpress platform and all you have to do is sign up for a Wordpress API Key and activate the plugin. Just follow the instructions in the plugins section to get your API Key. Save this in a notepad file for future reference. You will only have one API Key that you use for any new websites you may happen to launch in the future. What’s it do?

“Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.”

Instructions can be found under the Plugins section of your dashboard, right under the “Appearance” setting: Dashboard > Plugins

Copy and paste your API Key in the box, check the below that and click the “update options” and you are done.



Then you will next want to install the Tweememe plugin. I learned about this plugin from fellow Alex Jeffreys student Joe Fier at JoeFier.com. This is a “retweet button” for Twitter, and we will be discussing Twitter marketing in later posts (see it in this post at the top right-hand side. There is a video on the Tweetmeme plugin below. This plugin will help send you traffic from Twitter.

We are off to an excellent start of optimizing our website with online SEO (Search Engine Optimization). One thing I need to mention is that I use the terms website and blog interchangeably. For our purposes they are the same thing. We are just using the popular and powerful Wordpress platform for content management of our websites.

Please leave any comments or questions you may have. I do read comments and will help you with any problems. As we move along, others will chime in with tips as well.  If you have a Twitter account, please retweet this post.

Comments About Akimet and Tweetmeme for Blogs

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Tweet Meme – This is a very effective and simple plugin that allows you to add a “Retweet” button alongside your post. It also shows the number of Tweets that a particular post has received with Integration with TweetMeme Analytics.

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Digg Digg is a social bookmarking plugin for your wordpress blog which helps to display the social bookmarking buttons on your blog easily.This plugin will Integrate “Digg”,”Reddit”,”dZone”,”Yahoo Buzz”, ”TweetMeme (twitter)” [..]

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First off, my mentor Alex Jeffreys always says to provide extra value in the form of good content…so here we go.

Thanks for visiting my new website/weblog. Since this is a new launch, there are a few things I am doing over the next couple of days to prepare my new site for public consumption. After that I will be writing more about myself and tell you what my plans are for this website, and about my mentor Alex Jeffreys.

This is a first step to doing some important online SEO that will help to get EvanBeckOnline.com (or your new site) indexed in the search engines rather quickly.

The first thing I did was to change the “privacy” setting to prevent the site from being crawled by the search bots until I have added some content in the form of original posts. We will turn this back on after we have some content in place. Here is how to get there:

Dashboard > Settings > Privacy

Privacy Settings-Online SEO

The first three posts I have made relate to information about this site, and are viewed by Google to be important pieces of information.

I have found these pages essential to help with organic search rankings, plus they will increase trust with the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and with the visitors to your website.

At a minimum, you have to have a Contact Page, an About Page, a Privacy Policy Page, and a Site Map Page. The site map page is created with a free plugin, Google XML Sitepmaps.

I tie these all together for easy navigation in a “catergory” that I title “Website Information”. Although these are titled as “pages”, I publish these as “posts” for a very specific reason. I want to use my “pages” for promotional information in the future, and the “posts” will always be used for publishing content and articles (the journal function and aspect of a blog).

You will note that the free theme I am using (Flexibity2) also creates a tab for each page at the top of the header for easy reference. I have included a video about Flexibility2 at the bottom of this post.

Unless you are doing something unethical or spammy, then there is no reason for not including these pages and this information. Another thing I like to do is include links to these items at the bottom of the static home page for internal linking and easy navigation.

I hope this will give you a head start on indexing a new Wordpress powered website. My first few posts will continue this online SEO process. Please leave any questions in the comments, and I will try to answer them.



Other Web-Based Notes Regarding Online SEO

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EvanBeckOnline.com is dedicated to be a journal of my experiences as a student of Alex Jeffreys, and also as a way to hold myself accountable to my personal and online goals.

This site is updated with reviews, informative content, and tips as I research or am taught this information.  The website updates in a blog format to be current and timely. This means that you can check back often and see updates to the information found here.

You may navigate the site using the side bar menus. Remember to follow links you see in bold throughout individual posts to learn more about the products and services being mentioned.

I hope to meet and see you online,

Evan Beck

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If you have any questions regarding the content of EvanBeckOnline.com, about the products mentioned, or questions in general about list building and developing your online business, do not hesitate to contact me via email or Twitter.

Your feedback about EvanBeckOnline.com is helpful, appreciated, and also welcome. This is how we learn together and from each other.

I particularly would like to field questions about how I can help newcomers to online marketing. If I do not know how to answer your question, I will do my best to find you the answer.

Please contact me at:
evanbeck@EvanBeckOnline.com
twitter.com/evan_beck

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Our Commitment To Your Privacy
To better protect your privacy we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use and visit this website, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties.

Log Files

As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files.The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider), the browser you used to visit our site, and the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.

Cookies and Web Beacons

We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site.This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to use features, such as a forum. We also use third party advertisements in support of this website. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit the website, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing local ads to someone in a particular geographic area) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (based the content of the types of websites frequented). You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with this website, as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.

Our Commitment To Data Security
To prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.

Our Commitment To Children’s Privacy

Protecting the privacy of the very young is especially important. For that reason, we never collect or maintain information at our website from those we actually know are under 18, and no part of our website is structured to attract anyone under 18. Under our Terms of Service, children under 18 are no allowed to access our service.

Collection of Personal Information
This information is purely used to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. Importantly, IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information.

Links to Third Party websites

We have included links on this site for your reference. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on these websites.

lterations to this Privacy Statement

The content of this statement may be altered at any time.

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