EzSEO Newsletter # 16
Andy Williams ez SEO
ezseonews.com
Happy New Year!
It has been over 2 weeks since the last newsletter. I went to the UK over Christmas to spend some time with my family and had a great time - I hope you have too. Anyway, I am back, and hoping to motivate you into getting better search engine positions than last year. If you are new to this newsletter, I would like to welcome you to our growing family - I try to send out a newsletter every Sunday.
In this issue:
1. SEO Website Builder Update & Free Prize Draw
2. Another Success Story
3. Highly rated free resources
4. Main article - Planning for success
1. SEO Website Builder Update & Free Prize Draw
As many of you know, I am about to release SEO Website Builder - a revolutionary tool to help beginners get great search engine rankings without knowing any search engine optimization or HTML! My test site has now been in Google for a few months now, and the current standings of this 18 page site are as follows:
Google Position - Number of pages
#1 - 7 pages
#3 - 3
#4 - 1
#5 - 2
#9 - 1 page
#11 - 1 page
#14 - 1 page
#24 - 1 page
Not in top 30 - 1 page
That is 14 pages in the top 10 with 7 of them at position 1 in Google.
A friend of mine has been testing the software and now has some of his pages indexed. His website is about spyware removal software, and he told me this morning:
"Not only am I #1 for my main phrase on Google, but also #1 on Yahoo and AOL!"
Great News!
This software will be released in the next week or so, but my subscribers do have a chance of getting a free copy. If you have not already done so, just send me a blank e-mail with the subject PRIZE DRAW and you will be entered. There will be a second and third prize too, and no, they won't be free eBooks that others are giving away. These prizes are only otherwise available by purchasing them.
If you don't win the free copy of SEO Website Builder, you will be able to buy a copy at a huge discount, so make sure you read next weeks newsletter to make sure you don't miss the opportunity.
2. Another Success Story
A friend and fellow marketer has been using the techniques I have been telling you about in this newsletter to completely redesign his site TheJungleMarketer.com. In his November newsletter, Guido told his readers:
========== START QUOTE =============
"I've spent most of my marketing time this month (which is
only a few hours per week) in redesigning my pages to look
better, be easier to navigate and hopefully get a better
SE ranking.
I checked my ranking this morning and noticed that Google
had spidered the new site. Well - TheJungleMarketer went
from total SE obscurity to #445 out of 450.000 competing
sites and 2.320 direct competitors, i.e. when you search
the term with quotes.
That doesn't seem very exiting but when you consider that
my PR is still 0 and no incoming links are reported, its
a pretty cool result."
========== END QUOTE ===============
Guido is referring to the placement of his site for an internet marketing term (which I will not divulge for privacy reasons).
Well, now all of the changes Guido made have been picked up and this morning his site has is sitting at number #2 in Google for his target keyword phrase, #1 if you include the phrase in quotes (that has moved up from #8 & #6 respectively from yesterday).
Great work Guido. More proof that the techniques you have been learning here do work. If you have missed any of my early newsletters, you can still get them for free (not for much longer) in the archive section of my site. I would also recommend you sign up for Guido's newsletter. He is one of only a few marketers whose motive is to help others rather than shove every new product that comes out down your throat.
3. Highly rated free resources
I thought I would mention some great resources which I find invaluable and wont cost you a cent. They are all top notch resources.
(a) Firstly a newsletter which is perhaps the best I receive and read. It is by Sean Burns (Rankings Revealed fame) and in it, he always offers great information & advice that you wont find anywhere else (at least not for free anyway). Go over to http://www.webmastersreference.com/ and sign up for that one - you wont be disappointed.
(b) ZipCentral. Being able to zip and unzip files is an important part of working on a computer. I have always used Winzip for this purpose but it is not free, so I thought I would find one that was. ZipCentral is a WinZip clone. It looks very similar and has all the functionality you need. This free software is now my zip software of choice. Find it at: http://zipcentral.iscool.net/
(c) www.nonags.com - a great website with top notch free software (this is where I found ZipCentral).
(d) TopStyle Lite - a fabulous cascading style sheets (CSS) editor. If you use CSS then this is a great tool to have. The free version is a cut down version of the Pro version but perfect for most people's needs. Get this tool at: http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2003/08/topstyle_lite_3.html
The Pro version offers far more features for advanced users including integration into popular editors like Dreamweaver MX.
4. Main article - Planning for success
I have been reading a lot of newsletters in the last couple of weeks about motivation and planning for 2004. I do think that it is an important part of online success and so wanted to share a few thoughts with you that may help get you in your online business.
How often have you heard this:
"SET SMALL BUT ACHIEVABLE GOALS"
Many people do set their goals but don't define any way they might go about achieving them. To say "I want to achieve an online income of $5000 a month by June 2004" is a good goal, but how are you going to achieve that goal? Without some idea of how you can succeed, you will fail. What you should be doing is writing down ideas about how to achieve that goal.
So this is perhaps the type of plan you should create:
"I want to achieve an online income of $5000 a month by June 2004"
To achieve that goal, I will:
(a) Create a new site every month using the techniques set out for me in the ezSEO Newsletters.
(b) Write my own information product.
(c) Start a newsletter
OK, three solid ideas which can make you some online income. However, even this is not enough. You need to break down your three ideas into action plans. For example, just stating that you will create a site a month will not get it done. You should lay out a plan to achieve that individual goal. If you are working part-time at this, maybe you need to divide up your time and ley it out as a work timetable. If you have 5 or 6 hours a week to accomplish this goal, then why not plan like this:
Week 1.
Monday - 1 hour researching topics for my new site.
Tuesday - 1 hour using Nichefinder to collect profitable keyword phrases
Wednesday - 1 hour sorting through my keyword phrase to find only the best.
Thursday - 1 hour to find relevant affiliate programs with high commission.
Friday - 1 hour to choose a domain name & register it
Saturday - 1 hour creating or finding a template to use for my site
Week 2
Monday - 1 hour to organise my keywords into primary & secondary. Each primary keyword will be used to write one web page.
Tuesday - 1 hour - Create one web page
Wednesday - 1 hour - Create one web page
Thursday - 1 hour - Create one web page
Friday - 1 hour - Create one web page
Saturday - 1 hour - Create one web page
and so on...
Following a schedule like this will help you achieve your goal of one site a month.
What about a plan for writing your own information product? Well, you could buy Jim Edwards great eBook on the subject and use his plan. "How to Write and publish Your Own eBook in as Little as 7 Days".
Jim has it all outlined for you and at only $29, you could save a lot of time and effort, after all, Jim really does know what he is talking about.
And the final goal - Starting a newsletter. Well, how will you collect subscribers? How will you send your newsletter to those on your list? How often? What topic? Make sure you lay down a plan that is workable and one you can stick to.
In a recent newsletter, Neil Shearing wrote a great plan for making an online income by breaking things down into numbers. I don't have his e-mail in front of me, but it went something like this:
If you want to earn $5000 a month, then you need to be making 5000 / 30 = $167 per day.
If you sell a product with $20 commission, then you need to sell 167 / 20 = 8 or 9 products a day.
The average conversion rate for a site is about 1% meaning only one visitor in 100 will buy anything.
That means you need 800 or 900 visitors a day to your site.
So 800 or 900 visitors a day to your site could mean $5000 a month.
Question: How are you going to get 800 or 900 visitors a day to your site?
Answer: Easy, use the skills you have learnt in ezSEO Newsletter.
Fun Question. how many visitors would you need to make $1000,000 per year?
Makes you think, doesn't it?
Whatever you decide to do in 2004, make your plan realistic and give yourself the best chance of achieving your goal by outlining the steps involved, and then most importantly stick to it.
NEXT WEEK I hope to have an exciting announcement regarding new product releases.
I have not decided on a topic for the main article next week, but I may start to look at how server side includes (SSI) can help your rankings and increase your profits. Other candidates include dynamic linking (links that are invisible to the search engines), CSS, and making a living with affiliate programs.
If there is any topic you would like to see covered, please let me know.
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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at [REMOVED - USE CONTACT US LINK]. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That's extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.
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