General Archives

A New Design for Affiliate Blog Online

Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 10:15 pm

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As you can probably tell (if you are a regular visitor), we have just updated the design on this blog. We are still using the Flexsqueeze theme but we downloaded one of the skins in the Flexsqueeze member area to try out something new.

The skin we chose was the Plain Jane skin which is based around the Thesis theme. It’s a very plain skin but with Flexsqueeze you can change just about anything so we added a header and changed some of the main theme colors and fonts.

We are still in the process of making changes so you may see some anomalies over the next couple of days or so.

We have been using the same design for some time now so it was definitely time for an update.

What Was the Main Factor in Our Success

Friday, February 25th, 2011 at 9:32 pm

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Yesterday we received an email from a reader asking what we considered to be the main factor for the success we now have today. I initially had trouble answering this question because there was no one main factor…there were actually quite a number of them and each factor helped move us to the next level.

I often think back to the early days and wonder how much quicker we would have made it if we had done things differently, but you can’t dwell on the past…you can only learn from it. And believe me everything we have done has been a learning experience…you might even call it an apprenticeship of sorts, although we were probably the longest serving apprentices in existence. It took us around 5 years to start seeing some real success. But just what does the word ‘success’ actually mean in this business? Well, mostly it relates to money which is understandable but it’s all relative really as one person may see success as making $100 a day and another won’t feel successful until they are making $1000 or more a day.

Either way, I’d like to think we have been successful at this…we worked hard to get here, probably harder than we needed to in retrospect but as I said, you can’t dwell on the past. We know that even our mistakes have helped us get to where we are today so it has all been worthwhile. And though we have had our fair share of ups and downs, at no point do I ever remember either of us saying that it was time to give up. We might have focused on other things for a while like our online wholesale jewellery business (which we have now closed) or our main 9 to 5 jobs but we always came back to this business because we knew that we wanted the lifestyle that it could give us.

And man, is this one fantastic lifestyle. Just imagine going to sleep and waking up to find you have made a few hundred dollars overnight. Or doing a meditation and when you get back to your computer you see that you have made an affiliate sale…or going to see your child perform in a play at school and checking your phone to see that a couple of sales have come through while you have been sitting watching.

Please don’t look at this post as if I am gloating here…I still have to pinch myself on occasion to make sure this is real. What I am trying to do is impress upon you that everything you are doing to move upward in your business is soooo worth the effort although you may not think so now particularly if you are still struggling to get there. If you want the freedom that this business can give you then you have to do the work.

Okay, I can see I am getting sidetracked yet again, so I will get back to the original question which was ‘what was the main factor in our success?’

As I said there wasn’t just one so I have put together the main ones below. Without each one of these I doubt we would be where we are today.

Never giving up – I mentioned this briefly above but I think it was obviously a critical one because if at any point we had decided to give up, it would have meant that we would both be still back at our regular jobs. Not that there was anything wrong with those jobs. As 9 to 5 jobs go, they were a pretty good organization to work for, the people were great and we both had highly paid jobs, but both of us just wanted more freedom. We didn’t want to continue having to get up at 6am everyday and trudge off to work for someone else, or to have to work around work schedules and other peoples time tables before we could take days off to travel. We knew there was something better and keeping that uppermost in our minds made us determined to succeed.
Changing to Amazon links – I am pretty certain that if we had continued linking to other merchants and not changed to Amazon that we wouldn’t be making a quarter of what we make now. Linking to Amazon products was a real turning point for us.
Writing better quality reviews – We’ve mentioned this numerous times on our blog but when we moved over to writing better quality reviews our conversion rates soared. We have written hundreds if not thousands of reviews over time and most are short 300 word articles. One day we decided to change one of those reviews to a lengthy well written review of over 1000 words and the results were phenomenal. We are still reworking the older poor quality reviews to this day.
Focusing on one site instead of many – This one was absolutely critical. When we were working on all of our sites at once we had no time in the day and nothing really worked. We were spreading ourselves too thin, and we weren’t enjoying what we were doing. When we finally started focusing on only one website things started to happen. It was actually quite hard to leave the other websites alone (Wanda still tends to tinker with them if I don’t keep an eye on her) but we did our best to just focus on the one and it made a massive difference.
Guest articles – Another critical factor was our method of backlinking. We were originally told about this method by James Martell and it is to this day our main method of backlinking. Why?…because the backlinks that you get using this method are super strong and much better than any other type of backlinking method we have tried and believe me we have tried a lot of them. It basically involves submitting articles (containing links back to your website) to other websites and we don’t mean article directories.
Reading and listening to self improvement information – This one may not be for everyone but I do believe that this made a major difference to our success. We spend at least an hour a day of our working time listening to people like Harv Eker, Bob Proctor, Paul Scheele, Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins and so on. What they do is give us a bit of motivational boost for the beginning of the day. They have also changed our mindsets for the better so that we are focusing on more positive aspects of our lives and our business.

The Best Plugin for SEO? – Our SEOPressor Plugin Review

Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 12:45 am

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A Review of the SEOPressor WordPress Plugin

We’ve said in the past that we don’t worry too much about getting the SEO just right on our sites. We used to spend hours on SEO in the past trying to get everything just perfect. We would make sure the main keywords were in the first paragraph twice and then at least once in every other paragraph and we would try and get as many other related keywords in the article as possible. Then we would spend even longer working on title tags, meta descriptions and so on to get them just perfect. But to be honest, when we gave up on all of that, we did so much better.

Now I know that a number of people will disagree with our philosopy on SEO but that’s okay. Everyone has their own opinion and if something works for you then by all means continue with it. We’re not here to convert people – we’re here to tell others what works for us and relaxing with on page optimization has worked for us.

But that’s not to say that SEO should be ignored completely. We still ensure our main keywords are on the page somewhere and in the title tag but we just don’t stress about it. We’d rather spend time focusing on getting the review written in a way that is helpful to our readers rather than spend too much time on optimizing the page to rank in Google. That’s why when we found the SEOPressor WordPress plugin we wondered at first whether we would really use it that much.

However, there were a few reasons why we decided to give this a go. First of all, this was pretty much a no-brainer for SEO - in other words even if you only know the very basics about SEO you will be able to use this plugin and for those of us who do know something about SEO it means that we don’t have to spend too much time thinking about it. We can spend a few minutes optimizing the page based on the suggestions the plugin provides and then move on. Secondly, this isn’t a plugin that just automatically optimizes your pages for you unless you ask it to - so you have full control on what changes you want to make. I didn’t want a plugin automatically making decisions for me and this plugin has worked out perfectly. And finally, you don’t need to use this plugin on every page or post on your site…you have the option to use it on one blog post or on every blog post…the choice is yours.

So in a nutshell we can optimize our pages without any real effort , leaving us more time to focus on what we think is the important stuff like writing quality reviews and getting backlinks.

One of the first sites we uploaded the SEOPressor plugin to was this blog. However, we haven’t really used it that much – maybe once or twice. This is because we aren’t promoting products on this blog in a big way plus our traffic on this blog is more viral and we don’t have to rely on a good Google ranking. So we integrated the plugin on our product blogs and that’s where it works really well. We can improve our on-page optimization without taking too much time out of our day and with complete control over how it’s done.

What Does the SEOPressor Plugin Do?

What this plugin does is analyze the content on your page and provide suggestions about what you need to do to improve it. So once installed you simply create a new post on your WordPress blog.

Directly underneath the post box is a section to add the main keyword you want to rank for. Once you’ve entered the keyword you can start typing in your blog post. When you’ve added a bit of content you just click SAVE DRAFT and then on the right hand sidebar of the page the SEOPressor plugin will kick in and display it’s ratings and suggestions.

Our Test of the SEOPressor Plugin

So to show you how this really works using a real life example I have used it on this blog post. I typed in the main keyword that I want to rank for which is ’seopressor’. I then typed about half of my blog post and clicked Save Draft and this is what SEOPressor tells me at this point (see image).

The SEOPressor plugin provides an overall rating which in the case of this blog post is 48.89%. That’s not very good at this point. I need to improve on that but the only way I can improve on it is by making the suggestions listed below that. In this case it suggests improving my keyword density by including more of the keyword on the page, adding H1, H2 and H3 tags, adding an image so that I can add an ALT tag and it also recommends that I add the keyword ’seopressor’ to the first sentence.

Now normally I’d probably choose not to do all of those things but that’s what I like about this…I can choose to optimize only what I want to optimize. But for the sake of this review I am going to implement all of the suggestions in the list to get the score close to 100% and the keyword density to an optimal level.

You can also edit the settings so that this plugin automatically italizes, bolds and underlines the main keyword throughout your post as well as throughout your blog. And you can also automate it so that it automatically adds the main keyword to your title tag. We’ve chosen to keep those options turned off.

So after making the changes this is what the SEOPressor plugin now tells me:

You can see that I have done a lot better with just a few simple changes. Basically I added a title at the start of the blog post using a H1 tag and I also added a H2 and H3 title in the post. My keyword density has also increased although for some that wouldn’t be enough – I might go back and see if I can add the keyword a couple more times without making it sound spammy but if not I am not going to worry about it. I also added a couple of images and the plugin has automatically added alt tags as I have designated the plugin do that in the settings.

I did notice some anomalies with this plugin. Notice how in the first image it tells me that I don’t have an internal link to other pages? Well I didn’t actually add an internal link and yet that option has disappeared in the second image. Perhaps it is because I made enough changes to get me to an optimal score so it isn’t required.

Will We Continue to Use this Plugin?

Yes, I think so. It’s simple and provides us with a quick and easy way to gauge the on page SEO on our pages and if we don’t want to use it on every page then we don’t have to. And it’s so great that the SEOPressor plugin is designed to work on PAGES as well as POSTS because we often use PAGES to create our product reviews.

Want More Info?

You can click the link below to get more info on this plugin. We particularly recommend taking a look at the video on that page because it quickly runs through the features better than we could ever explain them.

Click for more info on the SEOPressor Plugin here.