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Launching a new website – Days 6-10

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This reports covers a span of days, mostly because there isn’t much new to report. There was a problem with having Google index the site as http://mynewsite.com and not http://www.mynewsite.com. That problem was solved with a 301 redirect file put in the .htaccess file. Now Google is showing all pages indexed for http://www.mynewchecks.com.

When studying the Cpanel stats, there were 32 external links pointing back to Website B and that is very good. There were 45 different keyword phrases that are bringing in traffic.

74 different page urls were bringing in traffic and there were 224 unique visitors for the month.

The daily statistics

1-Aug 29
2-Aug 26
3-Aug 36
4-Aug 43
5-Aug 67
6-Aug 35
7-Aug 50
8-Aug 11
9-Aug 11

After watching the movie, Julie and Julia, I realized that I’m not as diligent at writing everyday and my topic here is possibly boring to many people, so my apologies. I am hoping that it will get more exciting as time goes on.

Frugal Tips For Saving Money

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Saving money isn’t that hard when you take a frugal approach to it. I know that the words “saving” and “frugal” don’t bring the happiest thoughts to your mind. And that is the number one reason you aren’t able to save any money. You have the wrong attitude. It is surprising how easy it is to change your attitude. When you succeed at saving money, you are helping yourself. Keep you goals at the top of your priorities. When you have a budget and live frugally, you don’t have less, you have more. It is all about having more money. Not less.

I know that personally, my biggest challenge is wanting more. It is something that is hard to fight. We are saturated by advertising. We see new and more expensive things all around us. Many of us struggle with issues surrounding shopping and acquiring. I have the fear of being without something I need, so I buy everything I might use someday. I have to constantly remind myself that if I don’t buy it now, I will have the money to buy it later. It is in the attitude. You can change it.

One of the easiest ways to start saving is to cut down how much you have to buy. You can stretch things out a bit. Use less cleaning supplies and soaps by diluting them with water. Save scraps and reuse old clothing as rags. Look at the uses of things that might be considered trash. If you can avoid a shopping trip by reusing something once, you are saving.

I have found that being frugal has a great side effect. You can lose weight. Start by only drinking water and milk. Cut out the sodas. Save juice for breakfast. Don’t make the sugary drinks. None of it is good for you anyway. Drink water. Cut the calories and feel healthier.

You can also cut out a lot of money, and calories, by only buying healthy foods. These are often cheaper than the prepackaged convenience foods. Instead of frozen pizza treats, have a salad or turkey sandwich. Eat fresh veggies and fruits instead of chips. Shop on sale. Don’t eat as much each meal so that it goes further for your family.

If you have the money to stockpile on sales items that you will use, then by all means, shop up. Buy enough to last you until the next sale. But don’t get carried away. Only buy items that you will absolutely use. Canned and frozen veggies, flour, sugar, tomato sauce — look for the items that are staples of your diet. In fact, if you can only buy sale items when you shop, you’ll be doing pretty good.

When you stock up your pantry and have plenty to eat, it is easy to focus on other matters. You don’t have to worry about finding the money for food. The food is already there. When you can make something yourself, make it. You can often save money by simply putting a little time into it. And it is often quite satisfying.

And my number one way to save money — pay off those debts. Take every penny you are saving and put it towards getting rid of that debt and building an emergency fund. Don’t buy things you can’t afford and don’t need. Ask yourself what is more important to you — having some item or living a stress-free financial life? Having the money you need when you need it is more important than having some gadget sitting around collecting dust.

Article Source: by Martin Lukack

Launching a new web site – Days 4 & 5

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Day 4

Video Marketing Efforts: I created a video using www.stupeflix.com. I have to say it was really fun to make and I guess it won’t hurt to show you the video here.

It was really fun to make and very easy too. The best part about it is that it ranks number 3 for the keyword phrase “order checks” when you do a Google video search. I think that video marketing is one way to advertise your business. I have yet to learn a few skills in being able to control the text as it displays throughout the video, but it wasn’t bad for a first try.

I also used SocialMarker.com to get the word out for my page that displays discount coupon codes for checks. That took about 30 minutes and it’s getting easier to get through the bookmarking procedure.

Cpanel stats: 43 visitors

Day 5

Today was a great day because I discovered that Google had indexed my site and I could see that 32 pages showed up in the Google search results. If you don’t know how to see if your site is showing up in the search results, just type in site:http://www.nameofyoursite.com into the Google search box to see if your site appears.

After discovering that, I took the keywords in my title tags and popped them into Google search and was quite happy with the results. There were 30 keyword phrases that had page one search results. Out of those, seven were number one listings. There were 39 keyword phrases that were in the first three pages of search results. It is too soon to tell which keyword phrase will be the most profitable, but at this point, I start to speculate and it becomes fun to watch the statistics complete the story.

I used SeoElite to see how many sites had links pointing to my site and it reported this:

1 – from a page rank 8
6 – from a page rank 6
5 – from a page rank 1

Cpanel shows 25 pages showing links to Website B.

Cpanel – 47 visitors.

I was informed that Amit completed his social bookmarking. He does a great job and offers his services to others as well. You can contact him through his site at WickedFire.com

Best tips for launching a new site: Based upon some of the Social Bookmarking experiences I’ve had, it seems best to submit good articles that have content relevant to the place you submit them to or they are considered spam by the site owners. Google search engine results should start bringing in more traffic within a few days.

Launching a new web site – Day 3

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This is a series of articles relating to advertising activities behind launching a new web site. This article represents day 3 of  a 30 Day Plan to build traffic to a new web site and report the number of daily visitors as reported in AWStats in the CPanel.

The following is a list of marketing activities performed for the day.

1. Spent time reading Webproworld.com for marketing tips.  Advice from the web site, Webproworld.com was that “some of the best ways to build links are forum posting, blog commenting, directory submission, article submission, and social bookmarking and you can use all of these strategies at the same time.”

2. Published an ezine article on coolchecks.net/blog with a link to the new site.

3. Checked Google to see if the site had been included in their index. There were  7 page results from social bookmarking, but the main site has not been indexed yet.

4. Asked for help from a Facebook friend, Amit Nyamtabad to do more Social Bookmarks.

5. Posted links  on Twitter and Facebook about  Christian Bank Checks.

6. Made forum comments on three forums.

7. Spent time at Alexa.com finding out my who was linking to my competitors.

8. Submitted to two directories, prolinkdirectory.com and directoryvault.com.

9. Published an article at www.coolchecks.net about business checks which linked back to the new site.

10. Checked Cpanel Statistics on visitors.

Aug. 1 = 29

Aug. 2 = 26

Aug. 3 = 21 (This may change by tomorrow.)

Conclusions: It takes a while for Google to index sites so while you are waiting for that to happen, it’s good to spend time doing other promoting activities.

Launching a New Website – Days 1 & 2

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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 Website B 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.