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The State of SEO and My Public Niche Site Project

samedi 8 juin 2013 à 17:44
Podcast 16: The State of SEO and My Public Niche Site ProjectA new podcast is here!

I felt like it was time that I sat behind the microphone and shared a few of my thoughts on the current state of SEO and my public niche site project.  In fact, as I look back at when I published my last podcast, its been over 4 months!  What I think you will find here are some motivational words to help you see how I view the world of Search Engine Optimization and more.

In addition, I cover a few topics in regards to my niche site project that I haven’t mentioned previously on my blog yet.  So, its definitely worth a listen.  Here’s is some of the information I cover in the podcast:

The State of SEO

Overall, I believe that the state of SEO is very good.  Meaning, I believe that now is just as good a time as any to build and rank niche websites in Google.

I share a couple of pieces of evidence to support this claim.  First, I think I’ve done a decent job showing that its very possible to build and rank a niche website with my survival knife site for my niche site project.  This is proof that you can type into Google and see for yourself, so you don’t really have to take my word for it.

However, I often find myself looking to other companies when I want some extra motivation.  One such company that I check in on from time to time is Demand Media, Inc.  The company is publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker symbol DMD.

If you are not familiar with Demand Media, they own the websites: eHow.com, LiveStrong.com, Cracked.com, and many others.  I often look to this company for inspiration because they are employing the exact same business strategy that I am for my business!  Yes, they own much larger websites and implement this strategy on a much larger scale, but at its core, the strategy is really the same.

Demand Media does lots of market and keyword research, and once they find a low competition keyword based on their own formula, they hire freelance writers to create an article on the topic.  Then the article gets posted on ehow.com where it gets free traffic from Google and makes money from Google Adsense or other contextual ads.

Sound familiar?

This is essentially what I do with my niche websites.

So, I get my inspiration when I look at their financials and see growth.  Below is a copy of their quarterly income statement:

demandmediaincome

You will see that they are clearly growing.  They had a net loss for the quarter ending Mar. 30th, 2012, but have since seen increasing net incomes for the next 3 quarters.  This is encouraging, because the 2011 and 2012 were shaky years for SEO with the Panda and Penguin Google updates.

So, clearly Demand Media has found a way to continue to grow after these updates.

And so have I.

My Public Niche Site Project

Despite some setbacks in 2011 and 2012 with all the Google changes (and my Google Adsense account mishap…and by the way I still have my new Adsense account open and all is well); I am seeing some real success in 2013.  In fact the last few sites that I’ve built have all reached page one of Google.

So, what does this mean?  To me it means that I’ve learned and improved my processes.  What I was doing in 2011 and even early 2012 does not work anymore.  This is exactly what Demand Media has done as well…we’ve shifted our tactics slightly.

If you are just starting out in the niche website business, I actually think you are lucky!  You can start doing things the right way and hopefully never experience some of the big penalties that have happened over the past couple of years.

On the podcast, I shared some of the traffic and earning numbers for the site.  The past few days I’ve been getting 500 unique visitors per day to my survival knife site!  This is huge.  Now obviously some of that is from my blog readers here, but how much is tough to quantify.

However, I AM selling lots of survival knifes, and I don’t think that’s coming from you :) .  As of yesterday, I’ve made about $120 in Amazon Associates revenue for the month of April.  I hope to hit at least $250 for this month, and then $500 for the month of May.

googleanalyticsapril15

Click to Enlarge

In order to increase the amount I’m making on the site I have 3 plans.  Rank higher.  Add more content.  Add an email list.

In fact, just yesterday I added an email opt-in form to the site to start collecting email addresses.  I currently have 4 emails that will go out in an auto-responder series that essentially drive people to different pages of my website.  So, once people are on my email list, I can drive them to individual knife reviews or my knife chart to get more clicks, and hopefully purchases.

However, I am also on the lookout for good survival related affiliate products.  I’m sure there are some good survival or emergency preparedness ebooks, but I haven’t found the right one yet.  Once I do, I will be able to add this to my email marketing plan to further monetize my site.

Here’s what my email opt-in form looks like (just a template provided by Aweber):

emailoptinform

In addition, I plan on adding a Twitter page to gain some more followers.  Thanks to a strategy that I was recently reminded of by Cliff Ravenscraft of PodcastAnswerMan.com, I should be able to gain a decent following without too much work. Cliff discussed this strategy at the Social Media Marketing World conference which I attended last week in San Diego, CA.

In a nutshell, I am going to use Tweet Adder to automatically follow people on Twitter that are interested in the survival niche.  Tweet Adder is a tool that I have used in the past, and to be honest, works pretty well.  When you follow people, many of those people will follow you back.  So, if you follow enough people, you can build up a decent following.

This is how I gained an initial following on my Twitter page for NichePursuits.com, I used Tweet Adder.

I have nothing to lose by doing this with my survival knife site since I have NO Twitter following right now.  I’ll provide updates on this once I get started.

Your Thoughts

Overall, the state of SEO is very good.  I’m doing well with my niche websites, and other companies including Demand Media are achieving record profits.

I’ve shared what’s working for my niche site and what my plans are for the future.  The podcast below has even a few more details that I couldn’t cover in the text here.

I would love to hear any comments or questions that you have below!

You can listen to the podcast on iTunes right here.

Click Play to Listen to the Podcast!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download


38 Free WordPress Themes for Niche Websites

samedi 8 juin 2013 à 17:40

 

 

38 Free WordPress Themes for Niche WebsitesWhat’s the best WordPress Theme to use for niche Adsense sites?  Is there one theme that should be used all the time?  Or should a new theme be used for each site? These are some of the questions that you should consider when building sites.  If you are only building one or two larger sites, then this is really not an issue.  You just find a great looking theme for your site and go for it!

However, if you are going to be building dozens of small niche sites, in my opinion you will want to use different looking themes for nearly all your sites.  The reason?  Manual reviews.  If for any reason Google decides to manually review your sites, you don’t want to get caught with having every single one of your sites looking exactly the same.  If nothing looks unique or original on your sites, then this will raise a big red flag to a manual reviewer.  Of course, we never know exactly what the Google algorithm or manual reviewers are going to do when they visit our sites, so I believe its best to keep each site looking as unique as possible.

I personally started out building lots of small niche sites about 2 years ago (I built several other larger sites before that were complete flops).  When I was building those sites, I used the exact same theme on all of them.  All of my sites looked exactly the same with the same theme, same ad layouts, colors, and everything.  Since that time, I’m pretty sure these sites were manually reviewed (can you ever know for sure?), penalized, and I had other tough learning experiences.  I went on from those experiences to build more unique sites and produced better content, and as a result my Google Adsense earnings have surpassed what they were before these “tough” experiences.

So, I have some background when I state that you want to try to make each site as unique as possible.  Yes, its a little more work, but I believe its worth it.  Now when I build my sites, I do my best to use a different theme on each site.  I certainly have some repeats of themes that I really like; however, I do my best to switch it up.  Here are a list of both free and paid themes that I have used in the past for my niche websites.

38 Free Themes for Niche Websites

1. Bluesense – This and Prosense are the 2 themes that I used on all of my sites initially.  Bluesense produces the best Click Through Rate I have ever seen.  However, lots of these sites got penalized.  I don’t think it was Bluesense per se that caused it, but the fact that I used the same theme (could have been any theme?) on all my sites. I don’t use these themes on new sites now.

2. Prosense Grey – Another free theme by DoshDosh, like Bluesense.  (Please note that DoshDosh.com no longer appears to be a working site [which is really sad because it was an excellent blog] so these themes will not be up to date).

3. Green Park 2 by Cordobo.com

4. DarkZen by DailyBlogTips

5. iFeature theme

6. iStudio theme

7. Platform theme

8. zBench theme

9. EvoLve Theme

10. Arjuna X theme

11. Light and Modern Theme

12. zeeDisplay Theme by ThemeZee.com

13. Baza Noclegowa Theme

14. Light Clean Blue Theme

15. Minimal Georgia Theme

16. Mflat theme

17. Magazine Basic Theme

18 – 30. Fthemes.com – I have probably used over a dozen free themes from this site.  The only downside is they require links in the footer to their sites, the theme will be disabled if you mess with the links.  Or you can pay $19 to buy the theme without the links.

31. Application Theme

32. Jenny Theme by SpeckyGeek.com

33. iBlog Theme

34. Whitehouse Theme

35. Intrepidity Theme

36. Magnolia Theme

37. SilverRay by BlogPerfume.com

38. Original Premium News by WooThemes

Premium Themes (Not free)

39. Arthemia by Color Labs

40. Polished theme by Elegant Themes

41. Coldstone theme by Elegant Themes

42. ThemeForest.com – I have purchased a few premium themes from Theme Forest (including the one for the NichePursuits blog!); so there are lots of good options here for those sites you want a real eye catching design for.


Execute PHP in WordPress post, page and Widget Sidebar

samedi 8 juin 2013 à 17:38

If you are still struggling on how to insert PHP Codes inside particular blog post, page or a widget sidebar for execution; the following tutorial is for you.

 

 

 

Executing PHP codes in WordPress Page/Post

 

Installation

 

  1. Download phpexec.txt
  2. Rename phpexec.txt to phpexec.php
  3. Upload to /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  4. Activate the plug-in from WordPress administration menu

 

Usage

 

Anywhere in your post/pages where you want to execute a PHP Codes, insert <phpcode> before your php codes and </phpcode> your php codes.

 

view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
  1. <phpcode>
  2.     <?php
  3.         echo “Current date and time: “;
  4.         echo date(“l dS of F Y h:i:s A”);
  5.     ?>
  6. </phpcode>

 

Security

 

If you are running a blog with multiple users, you need to determine who can run this plug-in. Alter the settings in your Administration Menu. Options -> PHPExec

 

Executing PHP codes in WordPress widget sidebar

 

Installation

 

  1. Download the plugin.
  2. Rename execphp.txt to execphp.php
  3. Upload to /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  4. Activate the plug-in from WordPress administration menu

 

Usage

 

This plug-in work like a normal text widget except that it allows execution of PHP Codes. You can create up to 9 instances of this widget.


Posting Source Code

samedi 8 juin 2013 à 17:35

While WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to use potentially dangerous code on your blog, there is a way to post source code for viewing. We have created a shortcode you can wrap around source code that preserves its formatting and even provides syntax highlighting for certain languages, like so:

 

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#button {
    font-weight: bold;
    border: 2px solid #fff;
}

 

To accomplish the above, just wrap your code in these tags:

 

 your code here

 

The language (or lang) parameter controls how the code is syntax highlighted. The following languages are supported:

 

 

If the language parameter is not set, it will default to “text” (no syntax highlighting).

 

Code in between the source code tags will automatically be encoded for display, you don’t need to worry about HTML entities or anything.

 

Configuration Parameters

 

The shortcodes also accept a variety of configuration parameters that you may use to customize the output. All are completely optional.

 

 

Here’s some examples of the above parameters in action:

 

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This line is not highlighted.
This line is highlighted.
This line is highlighted.
This line is not highlighted.

 

 

 

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<strong>This</strong> is a short snippit of <code>code</code> with padlinenumbers set to 4.

 

And here’s a larger code block to see it all in action. It is set to the PHP language with “htmlscript” enabled and line number 12 highlighted.

 

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    <title>WordPress.com Code Example</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>WordPress.com Code Example</h1>
    <p><?php echo 'Hello World!'; ?></p>
    <p>This line is highlighted.</p>
    <p>This line is very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very long.</p>
    <div class="foobar">
        This    is  an
        example of  smart
        tabs.
    </div>
    <p><a href="http://wordpress.com/">WordPress.com</a></p>
</body>
</html>

 

 

 


Enables superusers to copy existing sub blogs to new sub blogs.

samedi 8 juin 2013 à 17:32

A simple and effective approach to copying blogs within a multisite network.

This plugin was derived from Ron Renneck’s awesome WP Replicator (http://wpebooks.com/replicator/) plugin, although it’s been 90% rewritten. Changes from the original include the following:

Sadly the WordPress file management code is not idea for handling the copying of a large folder with subdirectories so we opted to stick with exec(‘cp’). On the flip side, we set up a filter (copy_blog_files_command) so that you can override it with your own custom copy code.

This plugin is actively supported and we will do our best to help you. In return we simply as 3 things:

  1. Help Out. If you see a question on the forum you can help with or have a great idea and want to code it up and submit a patch, that would be just plain awesome and we will shower your with praise. Might even be a good way to get to know us and lead to some paid work if you freelance. Also, we are happy to post translations if you provide them.
  2. Donate – if this is generating enough revenue to support our time it makes all the difference in the world https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=TWM2GF6BQZGSN
  3. Support us by buying our Premium plugins. In particular, check out our Events Calendar Pro http://tri.be/wordpress-events-calendar-pro/