Sherry Tingley

Launching a New Website – Days 1 & 2

August 2, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

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.

30 Day Plan To Launching a New Website

August 2, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

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 was completed on August 1. So here is the report for August 2009.

Business Checks

July 31, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Business checks are generally beneficial to people issuing more than 1000 checks a year. A business check is designed specifically for the needs of businesses. Normally when a business account is opened with a bank, a business checkbook with 100 checks is issued to the customer. An automated ordering system ensures that new check books are sent to the customer well before the old ones run out. Business check is basically a tool to counter check fraud. Check frauds are growing challenges facing business and financial institutions today, something the banks are increasingly getting aware about. Bank checks allow business owners and financial controllers to carefully reduce the potential for check fraud.

A business check actually enables a customer to spend more time managing the business with the convenience of a check book for his or her daily banking requirements. The main features include arranging for the direct credit of regular payments to a customer’s account. Also regular debits such as loan repayments can be made automatically by such a check. Business checks have therefore a critical importance to every modern business. They come with all security features also.

Business checks are very always good in quality and are recognized by all banks. Such checks ideally meet the American Banking Association standards for security. Business checks are available in many popular styles and designs. We have three-on-a-page manual checks and executive desktop checks or laser checks as good examples of business checks. Free 50-leaf “butt style” check books and duplicate deposit books are also considered examples of business checks.

Checks provides detailed information on Bad Checks, Bank Checks, Business Checks, Check Cashing and more. Checks is affiliated with Check Cashing Business.

By Marcus Peterson

Rewards from Top Affiliate Companies

July 19, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

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.

Blogging Tips From The Experts

July 3, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

While listening to Tim Ferriss on WordPress.tv I toke some notes that might help people with their blogging projects. Here are some of Tim’s best tips to make your blog better. Of course watching the video is ultimately the best thing to do, however reading this short digest may give you that extra “push” you needed to take your blog to the next level.

1. If you use the Category widget on your blog, change the name of the header to “Topics.” This dramatically changed the click through rate. It’s easy to do in WordPress 2.8. When adding that widget, just put the name you want in the form. Tim reports better responses with the title – Topics.

2. Sometimes an older post doesn’t have as much appeal as newer ones do. To fix this problem, you can display the dates on the bottom of your posts. To get this done, you need to change some coding on a file in your theme. You will have to look at the index.php file in the theme you have and find:

[php]<span class="time"><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?></span>[/php]

You’ll need to comment that out by replacing that with:

[php]<!–<span class="time"><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?></span>–>[/php]

Then you need to find this:

[php]<div class="date">
<div class="dateleft">
<p><span class="time"><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?></span>
</div>
</div></blockquote>[/php]

and cut that (that means copy it and delete it) and paste it after:

[php]<?php the_content(__(‘Read more’));?><div style="clear:both;"></div>[/php]

Save that file and upload it to see the changes. If doing that scares you, ask someone to do it for you. 🙂

3. List the total read time for your reader. 250 words = about one minute. This helps prepare your reader for what you have written.

4. Write about what makes you angry without being negative about anyone in particular.

5. Write your post and then do SEO research after. Then make your keyword insertions or changes.

6. StumbleUpon is one of the cheapest sources of traffic there is. One post that ranks well can bring 40,000 to 50,000 page views.

7. Flickr has a section of photographs that you can blog about by going to the advanced search and then choosing Creative Commons, then most interesting. You can actually blog about a photo right from Flickr.

These are just some suggestions to make your blog better. Tim Ferriss has some great blogging tips!