Internet Gangsters

The open-source ecommerce solution, Magento has just released a new version in time for all those online Holiday stores(woot!!).  You can download the update within the Connect Manager in the admin portion of Magneto.  It includes:

• Google Base integration
• Scheduled DV logs cleaning options
• Google Website Optimizer Integration

and more, its pretty slick, i sound like an advertisement - but im not, its that great.  Here is a fancy little video showcasing the Google Website Optimizer options within 1.1.7.

Full 1.1.7 Patch Notes here.

Wordpress is an amazing tool if you want to start up a content driven website without having the knowledge to code something on your own. Actually, even if you do know how to code it’s a simple, quick and easy way to manage a website.

Wordpress can be used in two ways,

1. You can setup a free blog at Wordpress.com which will give you a web address of http://yourblog.wordpress.com, which you can have any domain forwarded to. This will allow you to have free hosting for your blog if you don’t want to spend the money right away.

2. You can download the Wordpress software from Wordpress.org and install it on your own hosting server. This will give you full control over all aspects of your new site. This is the method that I would recommend.

Once you have the Wordpress site setup and ready to go, before writing any content at all, figure out how you want to go about getting traffic to your site. At this point you should not be focused on making money, it will only discourage you when you don’t. You should already have some idea about what the site will focus on, since I’m assuming you either bought a domain or registered a free blog based on the topic you will be writing about. This article is obviously focused on bringing organic traffic to your new website using SEO and a few effective plugins for Wordpress.

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I just wanted to make a post about my best day so far, which was yesterday. Most of the money was made on one site, which was started at the end of December. I think I found a pretty good, unsaturated niche with a lot of potential for making money. It has only been averaging around 500-1000 hits a day, but I’m offering something that people will come back for daily, which is what you want to do. If you can gain loyal visitors that will continue to come back and use your site, then you’ll have that steady income for awhile. Now yesterday was in no way a ground breaking number, but being the best single day I’ve had so far.

For all of my sites I only spent about $8 on advertising through adwords and msn adcenter yesterday and profited ~$140. In one day for only about an hours worth of work updating all the sites in the morning isn’t bad. Hopefully this number will continue to grow and I can monetize this new site a little better to maybe pull a little more cash out of it, but I’ll keep everyone updated.

So, here we are. You have your site all set up and you are ready to take over the internet, but you cant do that without content. Content is king. How do you write engaging content you ask? Well, you could rip off from other sites, which is generally a bad idea and frowned upon by your fellow interneters, so instead maybe let those other sites serve as an inspiration for your writing. Ultimately this is the sort of stuff that will make or break your site, since once visitors come, you need to provide them with a reason to stay. Depending on what your website is about, there is usually some static information about that topic that you can use as reliable subject matter.

For the sake of this article lets assume, you have a site about Scuba diving. There are several different static content pages you could add to your site. Something like common scuba locations would be good, since all new scuba-ers are going to be looking for good places to dive. You could also have a page on how to get certified, because that sort of information does not change too frequently; also good for SEO due to the general keywords in a How-To article.  Also maybe something like general saftey procedures for scuba.  As you can see, this is all good general information related to the topic.  It is static and will provide you a good starting ground for your posts on whatever.  If at first you are not seeing the type of traffic you are looking for don’t give up.  Generating traffic is not an easy thing to do for a beginner, especially if you have a difficult niche.  Remember not to get discouraged because this is one of those areas where persistence pays off.

One of the keys to getting your website higher on the search engine results is to have a lot of other sites linking back to you, but how are you supposed to get links without paying a lot of money? Submit your site to free directories, that’s how. Directories are sites that basically just have a ton of categories full of links, just like the yellow pages in a phone book. Yahoo has one of the best directories, but it’s not free to get your site entered and they usually won’t accept sites that are straight up affiliate sites. If you have some cash, there are a bunch of good paying directory sites that you can find out there, but this post is about the FREE directories out there that will accept your site no matter what. Yes these directories probably will not get you too many hits from people actually clicking your link in them, but what they will do is give you one-way links that the search engines will see, and this is key.

Search engine ranking is determined by a lot of different factors; keywords, links in, popularity, etc. So once you’ve made sure your site is up to par with it’s keywords and all the SEO you can do on your own, it’s time to move on to building links that point to your site and the easiest way to do this is free directories. Link Rain has an incredible list of over 500 free directories that you can submit your site to. Link Rain itself is a directory that you must pay to get into and is for legitimate sites. So you can always go that route as well and pay them to get your site listed, or you can go down this list and start adding your site to a few directories everyday.

By doing this the search engines will see more and more links in to your site and it will help you move up higher on the results pages for whatever keywords you are trying to get higher with. Also, make sure when you submit to these directories, your titles and descriptions contain the keyword you are working towards. For example, if you have a site that sells purple dildos and you want to rank higher when someone searches for “purple dildos” or “adult fun toys” then you want to make sure that you put those words in your description that you submit to the directories. And if you can put it in the link and title as well. Anywhere you put those keywords is going to help. But don’t write a description that talks about “leather and lace” if you’re not trying to help your search results for those terms, it’s pretty common sense.

For you lazy people out there, there is another option. You can pay someone else to submit your site to hundreds of free directories for fairly cheap. Check out places like Digital Point to find someone who will do this for you. But the one thing is, don’t expect to see instant results. You won’t start seeing an influx of traffic until the search engines have had time to crawl all those directories, so expect to wait a few months before you start seeing more search engine traffic generated from these new inbound links. Remember, nobody got rich overnight (other than winning the lottery) so making money on the internet will take some time and effort, don’t expect instant riches. But just think, every link you build back to your page could bring 5 more people, so in the time it takes to build 10 links you could have brought 50 more people to your site over time.