I will be attending the Phase 2 module of the Certified Professional Trainers Course or CPT this weekend. I was invited by KC See, the master trainer of CPT to give a 1-hour presentation on How to Use the Internet to Promote Your Training Business. And I am still thinking if I should use these subject titles instead…
We had a networking session with participants of my SEO Workshop at SIM, Namely Ave, last evening. There were 14 of us and we have people from my April workshop to the recent October workshop.
Jolly organized this meeting and prepared a buffet dinner for us to eat, drink and talk. It was a great evening. We get to know one another better and found out the Internet business that we planned or already embarked on.
I think this is also a good way to get participants who are keen on starting an Internet business to find out what others are already doing and become motivated to start their own project.
TC Yeap was excited about his new found knowledge after attending the Big Seminar in the U.S. and also the recent World Internet Summit(WIS) in Singapore. He shared with us what he learned and compared the quality of participants he met in both events. Most of the people who attended Big Seminar had already started their Internet business and were there to network and exchange ideas among the big names in Internet marketing industry. However, in the WIS Singapore event most people were newbies looking to make money on the Internet. You can read more about TC’s experience at his Letter From Singapore blog and his post on Internet Business, Not Internet Marketing.
I hope we can organize such networking meeting more often - at least once every 3 months.
That is what Andy want to rank top in Google, Yahoo and MSN! He thinks Amelia is the coolest baby on the planet and he even got a domain for her daughter, AmeliaHun.com.
Here’s the screenshot of Andy’s masterpiece.
It is a simple web page. However, it was created on-stage in front of a live audience - I could imagine the sort of pressure he was experiencing. And if you look at the source HTML codes, you will see that the page is indeed optimized for the desire keywords: coolest, baby, planet. (The search engines usually ignore words such as on, the, it, a, and so on.)
I did a quick research on the Zippy.co.uk - a new SEO Meta Search Engine - to analyze the competition that Andy is up against. The number 1 in Google, Yahoo and Ask is actually about the coolest baby stuff and not the coolest baby on the planet. It is PR4 and Google reported more than 100 backlinks, Yahoo’s 700 backlinks and MSN’s more than 2,800. The website has more than 4,000 pages indexed by Google and more than 6,000 by Yahoo. So it will not be easy to top this website for the keywords coolest, baby and planet with the one page created by Andy at AmeliaHun.com.
So beside more aggressive on-page optimization and build more baby related pages, Andy has to get a lot of backlinks with the keyphrase “coolest baby on the planet”.
Unintended SEO Ranking Results
November 26, 2006
This blog is currently ranked 3rd for the keywords - coolest baby on the planet and number 1 for Singapore’s coolest baby in Google.
What a pleasant surprise! I was googling for “singapore seo specialist” last week and discovered that ShiHengCheong.com was ranked Number One. So I thought it was fluke and the ranking would drop after some time. However, it is still No. 1 on Google after 10 days. I think it will stay until some other SEO specialist optimized their web page to claim this position.
I have been using adlink for sometime now. Many people want to know if you can make more money with the original text ad or the newer adlink. I would say that you can make more money by using both ad types.
Where you place adlink is important. Usually, I put it on the left side of the screen near the top and just below the header. This placement let your visitors think that the links are part of your navigation menu and you should get good CTR.
Most publishers rejected the idea to use adlink because they reasoned that you need 2 clicks from your visitors to get paid. However, from my experience, those who clicked at the adlinks would eventually click at one of the paying link and in most cases two or more links. As a result, I get high CTR, higher than 30%.
The other question is whether you get paid more per click.
Well, it depends. So far, I have implemented adlink successfully on one site only. The CPC is double that of standard text ad on the homepage. I think it depends on the context of the page and also how much the CPC advertisers are paying. So if you find your standard text ads are not paying you good CPC, you may want to put up adlink to boost your earning.
It’s confirmed. The 2-day workshop will be conducted on 3rd and 4th March 2006. The venue will be at PSB Academy, Toa Payoh Campus. Jolly and I will be facilitating the workshop, you can find more information here - SEO Web Design Workshop - Singapore.
We will be promoting and marketing this workshop via email and possibly Adwords targeting Singapore audience. Jolly has already a list of 300 people who have shown interest in this sort of Internet marketing workshop.
This is the first time we are extending the progran to 2 days. We used to have a 1-day hands-on session with selected group of people who had attended Money Mastery and Internet Money Machine programs. Now, we are promoting to a wider audience and targeting those who want to do something from home during their free time using the Internet. Honestly, we cannot guarantee you can make money after a 2-day workshop. However, you will definitely learn how not to waste money on website and web marketing!
It’s on. Jolly and I will be holding a 2-day Internet Marketing seminar for newbies. We will focus on how to use the Internet to turn your hobby into a money making website. of course, blogging is the quickest way for most people to start publishing on the Internet. So we will show people how to use Blogger to start a blogsite on a hobby or a topic that is close to your heart. The seminar will cover the basics of SEO so that each of your posts will be search engine friendly. Then we will introduce the various methods to increase your blog’s visibility and to attract targeted traffic. With loads of good quality targeted traffic, you can monetize this web traffic with Adsense and affiliate programs e.g. Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare and etc. The objective is to be able to generate a monthly check from Google within 6 months.
The seminar will be conducted sometime in Feb/Mar 2006 over Saturday and Sunday at SIM.
Here’s an example of a hobby blogsite:
http://singapore-trekking-newbie.blogspot.com
If you are interested in trekking or love the outdoors, you find heaps of interesting posts.
After about 1 year of publishing content website, I can tell you the top problem I have is getting enough articles - good article to be exact.
I started with writing content articles by myself. It was quite time consuming and honestly I am not a writer. So I started hiring writers at Rentacoder and Elance. It costs somewhere around $5 to $20 per article depending on the length.
Now, I have 2 writers based in Singapore doing articles for me on demand. And I can tell you, this is burning a big hole in my pocket.
Here’s why. I will have to spend hundreds of dollars every month to get enough articles to keep my existing websites “fresh” and also for publising new websites. I can only expect a return on the investment I put in for the articles to come 3 to 6 months later.
However, there may be a cheap and quick fix to my problem. Buying “shared” articles - i.e. you subscribe to those services that give you rebrand rights articles. You will get a number of articles every month. These are not “unique” articles as they are shared by a number of subscribers to the service. However, you can modify the article, you can rewrite them to make them “unique”.
I am going to use such a service to publish content on to blogs. Reason being blog posts get picked up by search engine robots quickly than conventional website. So now I am going to buy some cheap bullets and starting posting 10 articles daily to my blogs!
I first used PPC e.g. Google Adsense more than two years. The two factors to the success of a pay-per-click campaign is the keyword selection and text ad copy i.e. the title and description of the advertisement.
For keyword selection, I used a combination of Wordtracker, Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool, Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool and etc. It is tedious process and could take several days to generate a list of good keywords.
However, the bigger challenge is writing the ad copy. Here’s where creativity is absolutely required to achieve high CTR. I have read some article by Perry Marshall and other PPC gurus but writing creative text ad is not something that can be learned from reading. I believe it has to do with doing - constant practice.
But I do not know where and how to start.
So I turn to the search engines. Just type in your hand-picked keyword and the search engine will come up with some ads together with the search results. By studying these ads, I can have idea for my own ad. This was how I started to see vast imporvement in my CTR!
This is probably my final post for the month of July 2005. For the rest of the week, I will be busy preparing for the Internet marketing and SEO Workshop that I am doing at Singapore Institute of Management.
I have set up an e-group for those who are attending the SEO Workshop this Saturday. As we have only about 6 hours, I decided to get them prepared for the hand-on workshop prior coming to attend.
I intend to help each and every participant to launch One blog and One mini-site. So I will need them to have their content ready and on the day itself, we just use the HTML editor to add in the text, adjust the layout and upload using FTP.
This is what I will be doing for the one-day workshop:
Part 1 - Blogging
1. Use Blogger to blog
2. Submit to blogs directories and search engines to index your blog
3. Search Engine Optimization - Write blog that search engine loves and your friends will read
4. Be so proud of your blog that your friends will ask you to teach them how to blog
5. Use My Yahoo to subcribe to RSS feeds
6. Monitor the traffic to your blog using free software online
7. Put Adsense on your blog to convert traffic to revenue
8. Link your blog to your website to increase traffic
Part 2 - Mini-site
9. Build a mini-site from scratch with free hosting
10. The 8 HTML codes that you must know and use
11. Upload your website using WSFTP
12. Optimize your mini-site for search engines