Launching a New Website – Days 1 & 2

Day 1:

The first thing I did was to get a robot.txt file and get it uploaded to the main domain. This file tells Google and other bots to stay away from pages that you don’t want to show the world. It’s just a text file and you can learn how to make one.

Then I created a sitemap for the site. Now a sitemap is needed to tell the bots just where all the pages on your site are and for some reason they love this file, so I feed it to them. I go to a free site that will create it for me.

I just put the URL in a form and wait five minutes. Then I saved it as an html file and a .xml file because my site visitors really like to see what I have on my site and Google bots really like to gobble up .xml files. So I uploaded both of these files to my site.

I then started the launching procedure which just means you let Google know about your new site and you invite people to it. It’s very simple to do, but a mandatory step as far as I’m concerned. You need to go to Google and set up an account. You basically have to claim your site and tell Google where your sitemap information is. It’s
very easy to do. Just follow the directions there. So that being done, I have to wait until Google actually indexes the site to get any organic traffic (search traffic) from it.

Because it was late at night, I just barely had time to announce the site to my Facebook and Twitter Friends.

Cpanel stats for visits: Aug. 1 = 29 (probably mine)

Day 2:

Today I downloaded Roboform and realized what a fool I’ve been for so many years to have not used this tool before. I think I spend at least 30 minutes out of my day filling in usernames and passwords and this free
software takes all of that away. The reason I did this was so that I could more efficiently use Social Marker. I spent about an hour submitting a Disney Checks page to various sites using Social Marker.

This post will be updated tomorrow with new statistics and new advertising activities. I may have forgotten to mention that one of the stipulations of this project is to spend no advertising dollars on PPC.

Thanks for reading this and stay tuned for a progress update on launching a new web site in 30 days.

30 Day Plan To Launching a New Website

This is a thirty day report of statistics on launching a brand new website and building substantial traffic in thirty days. Since this is August 2, 2009, my plan is to report on thirty days worth of effort in attracting traffic to a new website.  This post will be updated on a daily basis and each day’s advertising efforts will be reported as well as the number of visitors for the previous day. Since this will be an ongoing project throughout the month of August, I suggest you book mark the URL and check back to see the statistics change.

I’m not guaranteeing any great results, but if Julia Child could inspire a year’s worth of  trying a new recipe every day, then certainly I can find 5 minutes a day to update this post with the advertising efforts of this new site launch.  I’m sure there are plenty of people that are much better at this than I am and I encourage you to steer me in the right direction if I’m getting off target.

Let me explain that the reason for this concentrated effort. Not that I want any sympathy…well…maybe I do…but when you are a business owner you don’t have access to great health insurance.  Without health insurance coverage, I had an accident that, shook me up literally. I generously offered to help my aging mother hang draperies in her home. It was a nice thing to do,  I thought.  However within 5 minutes of arriving at her house, I had slipped off a desk and took a spill. On the way down, (you would never guess that in my teens I was a Hawaiian State Diving Champion) I managed to hit my back on part of the chair that had supported my body momentarily. As my body hit the floor, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy for me to get up and my mind raced with, YIKES…I have no health insurance.

To make a long story short, $9,500 later, which was only 24 hours, I was laid up at home with 2 broken ribs and a lot of pain medication. Well, I’m totally healed now and totally frustrated with how difficult and expensive it is to get health insurance when you work for yourself. I decided that I would have to make at least an extra $10K a year to even afford to buy myself health insurance.  So this is part of my effort to change my circumstances, learn more about launching a site from scratch and just see how fast it can be done. Maybe you will learn something from this if nothing more than you are really glad you have health insurance.

The actual creation of this new website is a lot of work, don’t get me wrong, but I figure that the hard part begins after the actual launch so I’m not going into details of the creation of the site, nor the domain name selection or anything but advertising.

The new website, Checksmall.com was completed on August 1. So here is the report for August 2009.

Rewards from Top Affiliate Companies

Custom Direct Wins the Gold Award at the 24th Annual Maryland Performance Excellence Awards

If you are like me, an affiliate marketer, you may not know much about the companies that you are doing affiliate marekting for. I have been an affiliate mareketer for 4checks.com for the past several years and never realized that they actually market for a company called Custom Direct.

Half of the checks that are on www.coolchecks.net are printed by Custom Direct. This company has an outstanding reputation and owns at least 10 different check printing companies.

The CEO of the company, Dale A. Dabbs, has been in the check printing business a long time and he say:

Since 1993, we’ve committed ourselves to making positive strides to continually enhance our people, products and processes to provide satisfaction and value. We put our customers first, and we seek to exceed their expectations. Thatrsquo;s the Custom Direct Difference.

Custom Direct is committed to providing our customers with high-quality, dynamic products, outstanding service, and great support from our talented team. Irsquo;m extremely proud of the people who work for CD and their dedication to helping our Company remain a leader in the industry.quot; – Dale A. Dabbs, CEO

I was happy to hear that they have a good track record and have satisfied customers all over the country.

I think that success as an affiliate marketer comes as a result of associating yourselves with a high quality, reputable company. Custom Direct fits the bill for 4checks.com and therefore…for me at www.coolchecks.net.

Create an online business using affiliate programs

Creating an online business using affiliate programs is possible and there are thousands of affiliates making up to $10,000 each month from affiliate programs. There are also a few affiliates who generate up to million dollars per year only from affiliate programs . Some will tell you that affiliate programs do not work, it’s their way to say I don’t want to work in the affiliate marketing business, or I cannot do so, either way it’s you who will determine if affiliate marketing can work for you or not.

Here are some affiliate marketing tips that could help you understand the process better and effectively make money with affiliate marketing.

1. Having your own content pages on the web.  It can be your own website which is the better choice, or you can build content pages on other websites like social networks (squidoo, hubpages and stumbleupon) but it’s very important to write your own content as reviews and information about the affiliate products.

2. Writing and distributing articles.  This way you establish your own identity on the internet, and people can find out how skilled you are. With article marketing you can generate traffic to your website or web pages and you can increase your webpage popularity. In either case, using your links in the articles and in the resource box of the articles is easy and you can invite your reader to click on your links to learn more useful information from you.

3. Choose the best affiliate programs in your niche market. If you are willing to put forth effort promoting affiliate products, it will be easier and more profitable for you to promote the best affiliate products. Read the Best Affiliate marketing Programs report to have an idea of how to choose the best affiliate programs to work with.

4. Use pay per click marketing to generate traffic to your review site. With some products you can directly send traffic to your affiliate links from PPC search engines but it’s also recommended to send the traffic first to your review pages to help your customers make up their mind about your products.

5. In most cases people love to compare products and compare its features before purchasing, you can do so for them in your page and buy giving them more products and information about those products and compare a few products and point out the best product.

6. One huge mistake affiliates make is trying to hide. they don’t want their visitors to know that they are affiliates and they earn commission from the products. People do not care if you are earning a commission or not. They know that they will pay the same price for the product no matter how they got there, even if they went directly to owners website.  But people care if you are trying to help them or help yourself. So think about helping your customers and the money will come.

7. Learn affiliate marketing. Knowledge seperates us in the affiliate marketing business and any other online business. To be successful you need to learn. The best example is the Arabian-affiliate. When he decided to join the affiliate and network marketing business, he started learning the English language first, then he learned everything about internet marketing. I know him personally and I know he spent thousands of dollars in the process, and he told me once investing in education is investing in myself, and it’s the best investment you can make. And he is now one of the most successful affiliates on the net, and he now has his own team working for him.

So invest in your knowledge, learn everything about your business and be updated of every new technology on the internet. Signing up for newsletters can help you get some of the information. Read this affiliate marketing Report and all the other report on the Arabian-affiliate website.

8. Build a relationship with some successful affiliates. Get to know them and contact them. most of them hate being contacted by phone, but you can use the e-mail to contact them. You will be amazed of how they can help you, however they will invite you to join their programs but they can be very helpful. At first when I started working with the Arabian affiliate I thought to myself he is an idiot and I am a lot better than him and I know better, but with the time I learned that he knows how to lead, how to think small and get down to the lowest level of knowledge just to grab your hand and take you up step at a time to help you go up and reach a point of success where you can be left alone and be creative.

9. Another tip I learned from him is: to be a salesman you can duplicate. You can learn exactly what other affiliates are doing like him and thousands of other affiliate; but to be a supper affiliate you need to think different. You need to seperate yourself from others by being creative, and develop your own ideas and strategies.

10. Use  pen and  paper. Write everything down, i.e. your thoughts, ideas and strategies; no matter how small, irrelevant or impossible it can appear to you at first. Sometimes when you go to sleep you will think of something. Write it down before you lose it. And save all of your writing and check it frequently. An idea that you thought of 3 months ago can now make you thousands of dollars, because then it seemed impossible to convert into action but now it’s more than possible and can be easily done.

People have no idea what kind of treasure is hidden in their mind and they have no access to that treasure.

Affiliate marketing is one of the few businesses that could not be affected with the bad economy. It’s true that every business and any individual will be affected from a bad economy, but with the time affiliate marketing business has proven to be successful. People will keep buying and keep trading no matter what happens. They can decrease and limit these actions and buying through the internet had proved to be easier and cheaper.

To be successful in business you need to think as a businessman and treat your business with the respect it requires.

Find out how you can make more money on affiliating other products with the help of free traffic.

Blogging experts reveal their blogging tips

Learning To Blog Class Sessions

One of the fun things about going to BlogWorld Expo 2008 was listening to expert bloggers reveal their personal blogging tips and tell us how they make money with blogging.  Jim Kukral lead a question answer session with four very successful bloggers, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson , Darren Rowse  and for a brief time Jeremy Shoemaker.

Each guest was asked questions about what made their blog successful and what they recommended to others who are starting out a new blog.  They discussed issues such as which programs were making them the most money, whether Google Adsense was really Webmaster Welfare, and what topics are the best to blog about. They talked about how long it takes to establish a good blog and what to expect from your blog at the beginning.  All of them agreed that you need to have a passion for the topic you are going to be blogging about to avoid the dreaded “abandoned blog.”
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