Savvy Affiliate

Day 46 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

As your blog grows you will likely find more and more demands on your time.  You may want to start a new blog.  You may want to spend more time working on monetizing your site and generating traffic, and less on generating content.   However it is content that makes the blogging world tick.  If you stop putting up quality posts to your site people will stop coming.

What’s the Solution?

One easy solution to continuing to put up quality content and saving yourself time is to get a guest blogger to help contribute articles to your site.   Guest bloggers will work for either money or traffic, so if you have either one that you are willing to share, you can get some quality articles for your site.

What are some tips on publishing Contributing Authors

1. Verify that it not duplicate content - For the first couple of posts that you publish from a specific person, run a check on a couple of key phrases to make sure it isn’t already published elsewhere on the internet.  You don’t want to screw yourself by putting up some duplicate content.
2. Give it a proof read - You may be surprised how little editing goes into blogs.  And anything that goes up on your blog reflects on you.   Many times I have seen guest posts no blogs and read the comments.  The commentators often have no idea that it was a guest posts, and just attribute it to the main site author.
3. Give Credit - You want to continue to get articles from your contributing articles.  So make sure that you give credit where credit is due.   Give them a prominent link so make sure they get some traffic to their blog.  This will make them more inclined to give you more content in the future.

So How Can you get guest bloggers?

Getting guest bloggers isn’t easy.  You have to be able to offer something to the people writing for your site.  However here are some tips to make it easier.

1. PR is important - People judge a site by its Page Rank.  If people are looking at contributing to your site they will most likely evaluate whether or not they will get any search engine rankings out of it.  If they won’t then they won’t contribute.  So if you are having trouble getting contributing authors, wait till the next PR update and you might fair better.
2. Guest Blogger - Guest blogger is a site where blogs can ask for guest bloggers, and people who are looking to contribute posts can find blogs to post on.   How well it works as a marketplace is still up in the air, so if you use it be sure to let me know
3. Ask For Guest Posts - If you want guest posts, make sure that you have a link on your site letting people know.  Direct them to a page where you ask for guest posts, and inform them how they contribute.  Be sure to let them know if you will take control of they content or whether or not they will retain ownership.    After all, your site may not seem that big to you, but a newbie may be looking to guest post anywhere to get some links.  Be sure to give them the option.

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Day 45 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

How Can She Drive Traffic To Your Site?

This girl can help you drive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site from Social networking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. It all stems from participating in those sites, and building up your friendships

The Best way to drive traffic with Stumbleupon is to actively participate.

You can not effectively game the social networking sites. If all you do is promote your own site your influence will quickly diminish. The top social networking sites have algorithms set up to catch exactly that. If you don’t actively participate, and promote other sites than your own, you will eventually have no influence over other Stumblers, and no influence in sending a page to the Digg frontpage.

To get traffic to your own site from Digg or Stumble, you have to have influence. You have to have friends

So if you have to dive in and participate, what should you use?

If you are going to take the time to actively participate in either Digg or Stumbleupon you probably won’t be able to do both. So which one should you use? I have recommended Stumbleupon in the past, it is much better than Digg. Recently Problogger has come to the same conclusion, Stumbleupon is better at driving traffic than Digg.

So once you start using Stumbleupon, what is your goal?

One of the main ways you gain influence in stumbleupon is by having people befriend you. If they befriend you, they will be sent the pages that you stumble. Blog-op recently posted a great article on how to build stumbleupon friends. And he was right on almost everything. You build friends over time. You need to recommend pages and interact with the community and build up a network.

But there is one more essential thing you can do to build friends. Be Hot.

Lets be honest. It is a simple fact that a lot of people will interact with a girl just because she has a hot profile picture. Many of the highest followed Stumblers on Stumbleupon are attractive girls. And that is no accident. All other things being equal, who would you be more likely to add as a friend

I don’t think it is much of a stretch to think that more people would add the picture on the left as their friend. I know I sure would.

So you aren’t a hot girl, don’t have too many hot female friends, what can you do? Well that is where Stock xchange comes into play. You can go there to download free images to use.

So is all this immoral?

Perhaps. This may not be the most ethical way of driving traffic. I won’t argue that. I think it can be an effective way though. As an experiment, why don’t you open a new Stumbleupon account and try your usual methods of getting some friends. If you have a hot picture up right now, put up an ugly picture. If you have an ugly picture, put up a hot one. Spend 5 days working each account, and see how many new friends you acquire.

I would be interested in hearing the results.

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Day 44 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

One problem I have continually had with my site is poor design.  Although I’m good at writing content, getting links, and driving traffic, site design is a huge weakness for me.  However good site design is essential.   With poor site design people will look at your site and leave immediately.  Your bounce rates will be huge.

Where can you get good themes?

While having a good theme is essential for your site, actually designing a theme can be very challenging.    There is a lot to learn before you can design a good theme.   You have to learn PHP, HTML, CSS etc.    And many people started blogging to get away from having to run those aspects of your website.    So if you don’t want to make your own theme, where can you get one?

1) Wordpress Theme Viewer - This is the default wordpress theme database.  There are thousands of themes in here and many of them have been well designed and validated.   This is a good first resource.  Check it out and you could very well find something that is almost exactly what you are looking for.

2) Wordpress Theme Generator - Want to create your own theme?  You can use this tool to configure different themes.  Quickly and easily vary the colors to see what looks good.  Change the spacings, where the sidebar is located to suit your needs.

3) Free Wordpress Themes - One of the myriad of sites you can get if you Google “Wordpress Themes”, this has a nice repository of different themes that you can check out.

But they don’t exactly fit my needs

Chances are, any theme you download isn’t going to be perfect.  There is going to be something in it that you want to change.   You may not like the colors, you may not like the spacing, or you may just want to put in a couple of different pictures.   However starting from a free base theme and modifying it to suit your needs will be an order of magnitude easier than trying to create one yourself.   The easiest thing to do is pick one that suits your needs format wise, and not worry about color.  Changing the color of your site is much less difficult than changing the format.   Get the format right first, then worry about the color.

I want my Page to Look Like That Site

Stealing someone else’s theme is as bad as stealing their content.  But if you are just looking at a single aspect, like how did they get their picture to go to the right of the menu bar, you can dig into their code to see what they did.

The easiest way to dig into their code is to just download their page and examine it in a text editor or webpage creation tool.   Internet explorer and Firefox allow you to easily download a webpage to your desktop.   Presumably the other major browser do as well, but I don’t use them so I don’t know.

To download a page to your computer using IE 7  (IE 6 is very similar) Go to page, save as, and saves as a “Webpage Complete”   This will allow you to view the CSS and HTML separately, as they will be in your site.

To save a page in Firefox go to File - Save Page As

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Day 43 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

In my previous posts on Google webmaster tools I have covered How to diagnose problems with your site, and how to find out who is linking to you.   This post will cover several other tools available to you in Google’s Toolbox.

Check Your Page Rank

Although there are many tools available to let you look at the page rank of a specific page, I think that the one available on Google is very good at letting you take a macro look at your entire page.   It gives a break down of how many of your pages are ranking high, medium, low, and how many haven’t been ranked at all.

Currently all the pages on Savvy Affiliate are ranking low.   Given that this is a new site it isn’t entirely surprising.   It is nice to see that most of the pages have been indexed and assigned a page rank though.   Additionally it is handy to see the page with the highest page rank.  I’m surprised it isn’t my main site, but that will sure to correct itself with time.

Site maps

You can access your sitemaps in Google webmaster tools.   If you have a sitemap for your page, use the webmaster tools to point Google at it.  This will ensure that Google indexes all of your pages, and does so fairly quickly after they are first posted.   Google checks the sitemap on a daily basis, which is more frequently than many new sites would be checked on their own.

 Search Queries

Finally you can use Google webmaster tools to see how most searchers are finding your site, and where you rank for that query. 

Unfortunately Savvy Affiliate isn’t currently ranking well for any really desirable keywords.  Most of the search traffic I am receiving is from my long tail search terms.   However this give me some direction of keywords I might want to target in the future.   Am I getting some hits for “Monetize Your Persona?”  and I rank number 4 for the topic?   Perhaps I should do a post on the subject and try to move up to number 1.

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Day 42 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Google webmaster tools are an amazing tool for anyone who is building a website.   In Part 1 of Google Webmaster Tools I wrote about how you can use the tools to find bugs in your site.  This post will be about how you can use the tools to find out who is linking to you, what pages they are linking to, and what anchor text they are using in their links.

What is being linked to?

One of the nicest features about Google Webmaster tools is its ability to to list all of the pages in your site which have external links pointed about them   This list is much more robust than the list you would get if you used Link:www.yoursite.com.   Google filters the results if you use Link:    By using webmaster tools you get the full result list, and it is much more impressive

The next step, if I want to see who is linking to a particular page, is to drill down on that page and see all the incoming link

My page on “Value of a Blog Post” got 18 incoming links.   It seems like those 18 links are from about 4-5 different sites.   Which isn’t too bad for one of my posts.  Clearly I should try to do more like that.

Finally you can look in Statistics, Page Analysis, to see what the most common anchor text linking to you is. 

Not surprisingly, my most common anchor text is “Scott”, my name, “Savvy Affiliate”, the site title, and “Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use”, which was a post I wrote for a Problogger group writing project.     Since I’m not currently targeting any keywords I can’t say whether or not any of my keywords are on here, but you can use these tools to check how well your key word targets are progressing.

Tomorrow I will show some of the statistics that are available through Google webmaster tools.

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Day 41 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Google has a ton of tools available to help webmasters improve their site.  They have tools to diagnose problems, find out who is linking to you, analyze you robots.txt file, and much more.  The best part is, all the tools are completely free.

To access Google webmaster tools, go here.  You can login with your Google account, and add your sites to be analyzed.   If you have more than one site, you can add as many as you want.  If you want separate tracking for different subdomains, that is not a problem.

Site Diagnostics

One of the best parts of Google webmaster tools are the site diagnostics.  Running a blog, I miss some of the error checking features that you might get from a good piece of web development software like Dreamweaver.  Luckily, Google has them all in one place.    

If you login to webmaster tools and access your site, go to Diagnostics, you will find this

Quickly glancing at my page I can see there are some problems with it.  I have several http errors, some broken links, and some pages which Google can not access because of my robots.txt file.  I can drill down to those errors to learn more about them.

My Links Not found errors:

The links not found is one of the best features available.  Occasionally I will forget the http:// in front of a link I am adding in my blog.  When you do that it becomes a relative link instead of an absolute link.   These are all links that are broken in my blog.  Now that Google identified them, it is relatively easy to go in and correct them.

I can also look at my http: errors

These errors are a little more troublesome.   I have 64 pages which Google apparently can not access. They are all “403 Forbidden”  meaning that they aren’t being indexed by Google, and they aren’t driving any traffic to my site.   Although I don’t know the cause of the error, now that I know an error exists I will be able to track it down and root it out.   Do any of you know why I might get a 403 Forbidden error on my site?   I presume there may be a bug in my .htaccess file, but it needs more investigation.

 Finally, is there a problem with my Robots.txt file?  Google thinks there might be

Googlebot can’t access 62 pages on my site because of the robots.txt file.   Looking at the pages I can see that it is not a problem.   All of the blocked pages end in /trackback/ or /feed/ or something similar.  They are all auxiliary pages on my site, and they were intentionally blocked from Google by the robots.txt file in order to avoid duplicate content.

The bottom line is that Google webmaster tools can be a great boon to you.   You should use them.  Tomorrow I’ll go into something more fun, tracking who is linking to you.  And trust me, this tools makes much more data available to you than a simple Link:www.yoursite.com would.

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Day 40 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

One easy way you can improve the quality and number of posts you write is to create an idea list.   Although I’m sure there are a wide variety of tools available to help you manage a list of post ideas, my personal favorite is Google Docs and SpreadSheets.   Google docs, or any other tool like it, allows you to keep track of your great ideas and manage them easily.

Why have an idea list?

You never know when you are going to get a good idea.  Most of the time when I get a great idea for a post, I don’t have time to work on it then.  However if I don’t do something about it right away, chances are I’ll forget my idea.   The best compromise is to simply write down my idea, and come back to it when I have time.

Keeping your list online instead of on your local machine is a good idea as well.    By keeping your list online you can access it anywhere at anytime.  If you are at your office or on a trip there is a good chance you will have access to the web.  So store the data there and make life easy for yourself.

What to do with it?

The best part about keeping an idea list online is the ability to flesh out your ideas as you go.  If you have a really great idea, but you don’t have time to work on it, you can jot down a little outline.  Later on you might have some things to add or take away.   By the time you really do have a chance to site down and work on your killer idea it is already half written.  You could have most of what you are going to say already in your computer for free.  You will just need to flesh it out, which is much easier than coming up with the idea at the time.

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Day 39 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Blogging means you are constantly searching the internet for new ideas, things you may have seen and forgotten, or just random stuff.   There are a ton of Google search operators which can make your life easier, how many do you use?

• OR or | - use capital OR or the symbol | to put a boolean or in your search.  Maybe you are looking for something that is in Seattle OR Portland.
• - Use the minus sign “-” to exclude certain text from your search
• FileType: looking for a pdf file or a powerpoint you remember seeing?   Use FileType:PDF or FileType:PPT or many others to keep from bringing up just plain html pages
• ..   Use a Number..Number to search for pages which contain any number in that range.  For example if you want to look up Midway Island relating to WWII you could try - Midway Island 1940..1945
• Allintitle: The words must appear in the title of the page
• AllinText: The words must appear in the text of the page
• AllinURL: The words must appear in the Web address
• AllinAnchor: The words must appear in the anchor text of links to the page
• Site: Only return from a particular page.  i.e. - Adsense Tips Site:www.savvyaffiliate.com - This is a great alternative to the poor search functions many sites employ
• -Site: Use the minus sign in front of site to keep from pulling up a specific page
• Related: Look for pages similar to a specific site.   See if anyone out there is using your ideas.
• Link: see who links to a specific site.   Example Link:www.savvvyaffiliate.com to see who links to my page.   Note, Google’s version of links is different than MSN or Yahoo.  Where you might see a couple hundred on Yahoo, or a thousand on MSN, you will see only a few on Google.
• *** -view  use this with a Site: command to see which of your pages appear as supplemental results.  Example “Site:www.SavvyAffiliate.com *** -view”   Ideally you don’t want any as supplemental results, you want them all appearing on the main search page.

Did I miss any?  Let me know and I’ll add them to the list and give you a backlink.

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Day 38 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Sure, everyone would like to slowly build up their site with content and climb the search engine rankings.  That may be good in the long term, but occasionally you just want some quick and easy links.   They may not have the best anchor text, they may not be as valuable as a review from an A list blogger, but a link is a link

Here are some places you can satisfy your urging for quick and dirty links

Comments

With the Advent of the Dofollow plugin, more and more blogs are shifting from using rel=nofollow tags to handing out the link love.  You can find a list of all the blogs employing Dofollow here.    If you are going to comment for the links, aim for the older pages.  Go back a couple of months to before the last Page Rank update.   Find the pages which have some page rank and focus your time on them.   After all, that is the point, so use your time well.

Note : Do not Spam!  There is a difference between commenting on some one’s blog, and getting a link out of it, and spamming their site.    A good comment might be “I enjoyed the article article, but I think you overlooked this…… It might be valuable to your readers if they try using this Firefox extension instead of that one, which is a little outdated”   A bad comment would be “Nice post”   In fact, so many people just try to use the “Nice Post” gambit that some bloggers I know have added “Nice” to their list of banned words

Forums

Forums are always good for a couple links.  Tossing them in your signature and writing posts or replies can drive traffic and may add links.  (Many forums use no follow)  When doing this I aim for “Sticky” posts at the top of the forum, as these are the posts that people will most likely see.   Once again I stress the difference between a good forum post and spam.

But say you are just about the backlinks, and don’t want to waste your time on a forum with rel=nofollow.  How can you tell if they give out Google SEO juice or not?

Chris at Blog-Op has recently pointed out a great firefox extension that lets you do exactly that.  Search Status will highlight all the links in on a page that have the rel=nofollow extension.   So turn that on and browse your forums.   See a page with a bunch of pink?  Keep looking

Blog Carnival

Good old reliable Blog Carnival.  They are quite great for getting some one way links.  Since many blogs that host blog carnivals are high quality the backlinks that you get can have some value.   To save yourself some time, use the carnival’s Multi Submit page.   You can quickly scroll through the list and find all the carnivals which interest you.

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