Quick tip to cutting down on spam
A while back I mentioned the advantages of publishing newsletters with RSS (Really Simple Syndication). I don't know if you followed my advice to get yourself a newsreader or already knew all about it to begin with, but I just picked up a good report that goes more in depth about the advantages of getting your news through feeds instead of subscribing to ezines, whenever you have the chance.
The report is in PDF format, you'll need the free Adobe Acrobat software to read it, which is installed on most computers already, if you don't have it go over to adobe.com to pick it the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. To get the report, just right click for the "Zero Spam Report" and save it to your desktop or somewhere else where you can find it.
Just as a hint, I talked earlier today about getting noticed by the search engines quickly, since I put RSS feeds on my sites, my traffic has gone up about 50% in just a couple weeks (and my traffic wasn't too shabby to begin with). Just a coincidence? I don't think so.
RSS feeds and blogs are the hottest item on the Internet right now. If you have a web site, you need to learn about them, and take advantage of them, now, before your competition beats you to all that extra traffic out there.
Talk to you later.
Getting some speed out of the search engines
In my last post I mentioned that I had put up a bunch of new pages on one of my sites, and was expecting to wait a couple months for them to get spidered, ranked, and start bring in traffic.
I was wrong. I started seeing traffic and revenue yesterday. Unbelievable as it seems, with something over 5 billion web pages to keep track of, Google was able to put a bunch of my new pages in their indexes, and some of them were coming up on the first search results page (even the first position!) for the search term the page was written for.
At this point in time, I have 2 major areas I want to further my education in. One is search engine optimization, the other is Google AdWords. In both areas I've already done a lot of studying, bought and read some excellent eBooks, and consider myself conversationally proficient.
However, in the Internet marketing world, you're competing with a lot of other people. If you do a Google search for a common phrase you might get millions of competing pages. For example I just did a search for "make money" in quotes it returned the first 10 pages out of over 10 million. The page that's in 100th place (out of 10 million) will rarely get seen. If you're not in the top 30, you have a major problem if that's what your page is about.
So what you have to do is two things. One, you have to focus your page on a more narrow topic, like "make money selling sunglasses" (which has no competition, but maybe not many people typing that phrase either). You want to find a happy medium, and there are tools that enable you to find out how many searches are being done for a particular phrase, as well as the number of competing pages. I highly recommend you invest in the "tools of the trade", if you want to master the trade. Later on tonight, or maybe over the weekend, I intend to post some of the better resources that I can recommend that have helped me to the point that I'm at in my progress towards my goals.
Second, once you find the topic you want to rank highly for, you want to be kind to the search engines. You want to make sure your page is set up so that you will rank well. That's a learnable skill, and one that can make you independently wealthy in a very short period of time. With that skill you can sell your SEO skills to other companies, or you can set up sites of your own and make a killing.
In life, receiving positive feedback is a tremendously motivating influence. Whether you're a child that was told "nice job" for a good report card, or a web site owner seeing your page at the top of the 1st page of Google search engine results 2 days after writing the page, it's an exhilarating experience.
Over the next several weeks, I'm going to attempt to learn everything I can about search engine optimization, Google AdWords, RSS feeds and blogs. I'll let you know what I find out.
I'm typing this post on the day before Thanksgiving, I hope you have a wonderful holiday.
