Have you heard/read about Pay-Per-View, Pay-Per-Click or Cost-Per-View? All of these terms define the technique of attracting traffic to our sites by paying for that traffic. The most common method is through Google AdWords, where we can create ads containing text based on carefully researched keywords.

Although our ads can come out in the first search results page solely because of a sound keyword research, everytime a viewer clicks on our ads we would be paying money. Hence we have to make the best use of those clicks we get on our ads. And we wouldn’t be doing so if we are sending them straight to our blogs…

Instead, we’d be better off by sending them to a squeeze page. The reason is simple: a squeeze page is a single-goal page where the probability of conversion is much higher than that of our blogs. In our blogs there will be a lot to see and read and visitors could forget or get distracted from what they came in for in the first place.

Even in the case that we’re using blog hopping, forum posting, or the above mentioned paid methods of advertising, we should direct traffic to our squeeze pages… and capture the leads!

Buying traffic is risking money, so if we get into it we have to be prepared to carefully track what keywords make us money and which ones don’t. That way we would be able to fine tune our efforts. As with everything else, the tracking can be done more effectively using the right tools. One that is most often recommended is StatsJunky.

Keyword research and tracking are two skills we would need to develop that we might have not been keenly aware of when we started blogging. There is more than just setting up a blog on WordPress or Blogger and wait for the visitors to come… and then just go.

I had been wondering for some time how to make a favicon. Favicons are the  little illustrations that appear to the left of site addresses or URL name in the the address bar:

The default is a blank white page and that is what I had on my blog. But I thought it would be cool to have a custom-made one.
After a quick search for  “how to make a favicon” and looking at the results, I liked the following icon generator: http://www.favicon.co.uk , which gives you a good summary of what favicons are and tells you how to make one, based on a pre-existing image you make or get somewhere. It is a neat tool. Not withstanding my lack of creativity, I was able to come up with this icon, which I am now using as part of my blog header illustration.

I also tried this other generator: http://www.favicon.cc. I found it real cool because of the animation. I think animation is a good resource to favicons because it can counterbalance the limitations imposed to them due to their small size. These two I made to try and improve the relation to the title of my blog (they look nicer when in their place, believe me):

Once you have generated the little icon you have to take it to the root directory of your blog (public html/yourblog.com) and then go into your themes files and look for the header.php file. In there you need to fiddle with the code editor, but it’s only a matter of locating the following line:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />

and substituting ‘favicon.ico’ for the name you used for your own icon. Since the generators usually name the icon files just like that, you might not even have to change the code at all.

Can free favicons be good? With tools like these they sure can, it is all up to one’s aptitudes, as with everything else.

I recently read a post in Mike Helton’s blog on a common, yet dreadful, subject: Why most internet marketers fail.

In his likable style, Mike gets to the point where he presents us with that infamous equation:

No list = No list marketing = No money

For a moment I thought the only thing I could get out of this obvious truth was that it was the logical explanation for my lack of online income, since “I don’t have a list”. But then something snapped and made me give the equation another twist: neglecting your list just because it is “too small” also equals to No money.

One should not shy away from email marketing efforts just because the members of one’s list can be counted with the fingers in one hand!

I myself have been guilty of that, I realized.  Why wait until my list reaches 100 or 1000, to build a relationship with the persons (or just one person, maybe) in it? That is what I have to learn… then just learn with that!

Moving on with the construction of my sales funnel, I decided to use a blog-based website, to take advantage of the ease to add and update content that  WordPress blogs have.

Since I would be promoting a unique product, brand development seems to me as very desirable. And having a custom header becomes essential to that development.

I looked around through many sites that offer free custom headers for you to grab but, good as some of them are, I decided that an original one will really set my site apart.

An obvious choice was for me to hire somebody to make the header, which is the way everybody recommends. And it is the way to go if you’ve got the means, no doubt. But, well, that’s not my case…

Despite my experience with Paint.NET telling me there’s no artist over here, I insisted on looking for free tools, considering a header is much like a flat illustration for a cover, only not as tall. That’s how I found XHeader, a tool that let me combine the same pictures I used for the ebook cover illustration to make a custom header, both items hence being in graphical tune:

My designs are kind of bland… OK, it might not be the coolest but it it is consistent with the ebook cover, my interpretation (as far as my current knowledge lets me go) of branding.

(I also used XHeader to make the icon for the OmiSubmitter software I’m giving out, take a look at the sidebar, to the right of this post).

When you’re preparing the squeeze page you will use to offer your product, one thing you first envision is having a (hopefully) appealing image in there. You know it’s time for ebook cover design.

My idea was to come up with a flat illustration first and then generate the cover.

For the illustration I decided to start from scratch. To do so, I used a chart excerpted from the ebook itself and combined it with two free pictures and some basic word  processor drawing effects.  After some difficult sparring with my PC I had to settle for this:

For the cover, I tried doing some searching. First I gave a try at a tutorial using Paint.NET, which is a free tool comparable to PhotoShop (or so the authors claim). Paint.NET really is a great software but I found that it requires a knack for design non existing inside me, even when digging real deep…

I then moved on to free ebook cover generators, finally setting for the one from MyEcoverMaker.com . Although it offers just four free cover designs, I liked the fact they’re really good looking images: no watermark-type of background or anything, they honestly  give out the cover. My choice was the stacked paperback picture, considering my product  is a short report.

With many thanks to MEM, this is what turned out to be my first ebook cover:

There are fancier covers everywhere but now it’s on to the next task.

Now that my e-book has been completed (I still have to make it into a PDF and add the cover, though), the following task to complete is creating a squeeze page.

But hey!, there is a little big step before choosing whether to start from scratch or use a template… and that is choosing a domain name.

As usual, I thought of looking up for advise on the subject in the  web and, also as usual, I found plenty. It appears to me that there are two schools of thought about how to choose the right name: one is in favor of brandable domain names, which recommends using short, witty-or-sticky words for the name in the hope your intended public will remember them, and the other is for keyword-based titles, generally resulting in longer names aimed at being liked by the search engines or guessed by people when surfing the net is search of information.

Again as usual I found the arguments of both sides convincing enough to leave myself undecided as to what name use for my own site-to-be…

I did some more reading on a less compromising source that dealt with the some of the “purely” technical aspects of domain names: use of hyphens, the best dot-what and even the use of domain name selection tools.

In the end I decided to go for a name that, depending on how you look at it, is both brandable and keyword-based, does not have hyphens (my blog URL does have some and I know they are cumbersome to deal with) and sticked to good ol’ dot-com. In English it would be a short one, maybe already taken, something like “ThinkLotto”. Fortunately in Spanish there are plenty of  names still available.

I think I have “sort of sorted” this other one. Ahead with the squeeze page!

This post resulted of my recently finishing of a short e-book. It’s been the first one (hopefully I will be writing more in the future), it’s not about IM, and it took me a long, long while to complete. It seemed as if I would never figure out how to complete an e-book!

I have always been a slow writer, therefore putting that much time in a rather short opus is not unsual. But looking back now, the main factor I see for this happening is that I was pretending to write too much of a book. Being the reason for my e-book the promotion of an affiliate product, I lost sight of the fact that I should be writing a short report and instead let the vendor be the one with the long words.

One’s first aim should always be to start something that can be finished (Hadn’t I read Luke 14, 30 before?). I should had not been afraid or weary of changing the initial scope, even the idea, as long as the change keept the product useful and informative!

I had (have) a plan with this e-book. But a plan is a tool to be used to reach an objective and one should be alert that it, the plan, does not sabotage the mission by becoming the objective itself. I mean, if one gets to the point where one cannot get to conclude a task (the e-book),  then there  is something wrong with the plan and it should be revised. Which in the long end, I did.

Still ahead is a squeeze page, a thank you/download page, an autoresponder series and whatever. Along with the e-book, all of them are equally important parts of a successful IM effort and I shall just keep going!

This past Wednesday, when trying to get to the dashboard to work on my blog, I was surprised to see the WordPress 5-minute installation page instead. I then tried getting to the blog from my spots in the Commentators lists of fellow Alex Jeffreys students, but to no avail: For the fifth time, I had lost my blog!

Fortunately for me, this time I had a recent blog database backup, thanks to having installed the WP-DB-Backup plugin when I first (well, fourth) started blogging. I had chosen to receive the backup file weekly in my mailbox, so I had it handy for the job ahead. Now I just had to find out how to use it…

After doing some research in Google for ‘how to restore a WordPress database’, I concluded that the simplest set of instructions appeared to be in the WordPress Codex itself. Following the steps in the Using phpMyAdmin section of the document, I logged in phpMyAdmin through the Cpanel of my domain. Next, the codex instructs to “…select the database that you will be importing your data into.”

It took me a while to figure out how to identify which database to use since phpMyAdmin listed three different ones under my domain login username. Finally I realized that the backup file name that the plugin generates contains the database name. In my case, the file name was brighter_wrdp2_wp_20091229_243.sql, so I picked ‘wrdp2′ as the database to restore:

And that was the trickiest part of the process! The remaining six steps required three simple clicks of the mouse and in a few seconds I had my blog back.

What a difference from the four previous mishaps… Having that backup file was the key to an easy recovery of my blog, so many thanks to Austin Matzko for a most effective plugin!

For the past few weeks, I have been working on the suggestions in the Website Grader report to improve search engine ranking. In the Off-Page SEO section of the report, besides the all-important inbound links number, there are two seemingly relevant items: being listed in dmoz and in the Yahoo! Directory.

I started with dmoz, as it was referred to as “the largest and most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web”, which sounded impressive to me. For some reason I found it hard to define the category for my blog; finally, I chose Business: Marketing and Advertising: Internet Marketing: Marketing Services as the best fit. Unfortunately, dmoz does not acknowledge a submission and they do not offer any alternate method to follow-up on it, hence the only thing to do is wait. But as of today, waiting has not worked and my blog has not been listed. I guess I could try again, as suggested in this interesting article on the subject.

As for the Yahoo! Directory, I shunned from it after I found out there is a substantial fee for their service ($299 is substantial to me). Instead, I opted for submitting my blog URL for free to Yahoo! Search.

Other actions I have taken after the suggestions in the report: I have added the Alexa traffic rank button to my blog (there is nothing to brag about my rank just yet) and submitted one article to Digg; I bookmarked on del.icio.us myself, maybe something I should not have done…  I also added the Twitter Follow Me button to the side. The little blue bird looks good there, I think.

A rather puzzling statement from Website Grader is the one about “Too many images found”. There is not much to do except for ignoring it: the pictures I have are the gravatars of the top commentators and the image for the e-book cover in the opt-in form. They stay!

One thing that has botehred me a bit is that I could not get the Website Grader badge to show my updated grade after all the above actions (it got up to 82). Since I could not establish the root cause, I decided to remove it. Something similar happened with the Alexa rank button, but this one updates automatically now. I might give the badge a second chance…

There is always more that can be done but I think I have addressed the Website Grader report sufficiently. I should now go back to focus on getting links and continue commenting on other blogs.

Gosh! It took me too long to post again…

I have found that the All in One SEO Pack plugin and the report I got from Website Grader can complement each other nicely to help me improve the search engine ranking of my blog.

To set up the plugin, the three main fields, Title, Description and Keywords, also known as metadata, can be appropriately filled in based on the suggestions in the report. In the case of my description, I had to make it shorter, since it was way longer than the recommended 150 characters. But most important, I came up with a completely different title for my blog. I changed to “Notes on blogging and list building”, which includes two keywords with which the search engines can have a better idea of what my blog is about. This title can still be improved but I think it is better than the old “The blog of Jose Perez” , considering that my name is a very common Hispanic name…

After these few changes I requested a new report for my blog. Website Grader gave me a 73/100 grade this time, a modest 4 points better than my initial rating.

According to the report, my grade could benefit from listing my blog in DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory, as well as bookmarking it with del.icio.us and submitting articles to Digg.com. But also according to the report, the main course of action for me is to work on increasing the number of inbound links to my blog, that is, getting more sites to link to it. The Superb business blogs & sites list I already have can help me a lot, I just have to post more often in those places and identify additional ones to list. I should also continue to post on forums, since Google Analytics tells me I’ve been getting links from the two places where I’ve been participating.

And one more step I’ve just taken that can bring me more links (by bringing in more visitors) is setting up the KeywordLuv plugin. Again with the help of my friend Vance Sova from Learn List Building, I will learn how to make the most of this tool that rewards commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their website, giving them improved anchor text.

Well, I’ll keep scratching the surface of SEO. It’s worth the effort!