Category Archives: Making Money Online

How To Submit RSS Feeds (And Find Your RSS Feed)

Submitting RSS Feeds

Hello and welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! This is Jonathan Kraft and I am here today to talk to you about RSS Feeds! Wooohooo! Sounds real boring, right? RSS Feeds, XML Feeds, sounds really technical and boring?

Well, here’s what’s really cool about RSS and XML feeds is it allows people to actually read the content of your website in whatever format they might want to read it in; which is really great for them and not so great for you in a lot of ways! However, what is really great is that it does give you access to an entirely new audience that you may have not been able to reach before. There are all kinds of things you can do with your RSS feeds.

Today we’re going to talk about how to find your RSS feed, what is your XML/RSS feed and what do you do with it? How do you use it to get more traffic to your website?

So, what you’re going to do to find your RSS feed; if you’re currently running a WordPress blog, what you’ll do to find your WordPress feed – actually there’s a bunch of different things you can do; but the default URL for a WordPress feed is yourwebsite.com/feed. You can usually find it there, if not, you can look at /feed/rss2. If you don’t find it there and you are using WordPress, you may need to get someone to help you to find that RSS feed.

I’m going to show you a couple of examples here. We have our Carrie and Jonathan site, if we go to www.CarrieandJonathan.com – this is the website currently. If we go to www.CarrieandJonathan.com/index.xml that will actually take us to the XML feed. I’m going to show you that here real quick; this website is actually built in a Content Management System (CMS) called Movable Type. Movable Type works a little bit differently than WordPress. But if we go to the index.xml page, we can actually see that yes, it does take us to an XML feed of our website and gives us options for how we want to subscribe to this; do we want to subscribe using Outlook, Bloglines or My Yahoo or Google or Live Bookmarks? So it gives you these different options to subscribe to our feed for Carrie and Jonathan.

However, our GreenJoyment store, we have a couple of different things going on at GreenJoyment, but our GreenJoyment store actually runs off of WordPress. So if we go to www.greenjoyment.com/feed/rss2, because this is running on WordPress, it should actually give us a feed for the GreenJoyment store. So I’m going to show you the GreenJoyment store here just what it looks like if you visit it. Here’s what it looks like if you just visit the main page of the GreenJoyment store.

But if we go to that greenjoyment.com/feed/rss2 you can see that the store also has its own feed here and this is done at greenjoyment.com/store/feed. And again, people can subscribe using Live Bookmarks, Microsoft Office Outlook, Bloglines, My Yahoo or Google.

Now, you may not be using feeds yet, you may not be using feed readers; but there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are using feed readers and they want access to be able to read your site using feeds.

What this means is two things: number one, you should have a big “Subscribe to our Feed” on your website where someone can find it very easily and that’s something I’ve done a really poor job of actually. If you look at different sites that we have, I’ve really not done a good job of putting RSS feed links onto our sites. But you can see here on our IdentityTheftSecrets site that I do have all kinds of options on the right-hand side here for where people can subscribe to our RSS feeds. So you need to put that button on your website, this XML or RSS feed which actually links directly to your feed to let people sign up for that.

If you visit some of the most popular websites online … let’s go to ProBlogger, you can see when you visit their website it’s one of the first things you see up here, “Subscribe to ProBlogger via RSS.” “What is RSS?” “Follow us on Twitter.” Those are the first three things that they really want you to see and do when you’re there. And their feed has an 118,000 plus readers! So that might be something good for you to have!

So what you want to do then is take your RSS feed, once you figure out what it is, take your RSS feed and go to the Resource link right below the video right here and submit your RSS feed to the Top 244 RSS Aggregators. Yes! This will take you some time. But it will be very beneficial for you to submit your RSS feed to all these different websites!

You can see here, this is the website that you’ll see when you click the Resource link; he talks about what RSS feeds are and how it works. As of right now, they have 245 RSS feed readers that you can submit your RSS feed to. It’s probably a really, really good idea for you to spend some time, probably take two to three hours one day to go through and actually submit to all of these different feeds. The way I would recommend doing it would be to open five or six of them in a new tab and have all of your information in a document somewhere that you can just copy and paste it over and then you can just put it into those forms.

Alternatively, the way I like to do it is using a service called RoboForm – I’ve talked about RoboForm before; it really, really saves a lot of time, effort and energy because you push one button and it fills in the form for you so you don’t have to spend all day either copying and pasting or typing.

I recommend three things: find out what your feed is and put a button on your site that links to your feed; very similar to what we saw on ProBlogger. Then take your RSS feed and submit it to all these different RSS feed readers and then third and finally, before you do that, make sure you go sign up for RoboForm.

There’s a link below here that will give you a discount on RoboForm; one of the best time-saving tools I use and recommend highly and you can get a discount, a $6 discount on it, by clicking the link.

That’s it! Those are your three steps out of this video!

Be sure to come back and visit often as we’ve got lots of great information coming for you on really how to make money on the internet.

Resource:

Discount on RoboForm

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Get Traffic Adding URLs to Avatars

Welcome back to another edition of Traffic Tuesday with ThreeMoneyMethods.com!

I wanted to show you today in this video something I learned from James Martell, he’s a friend and a very smart marketer.

One of the things he talked about was taking the images that you use for all of these different social networking sites you are a part of and actually putting a web address in them. And I thought that’s kind of an interesting idea, never tried it before, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I changed out mine on my personal Facebook page, I changed it out so that it included the URL CarrieandJonathan.com which is our site where we do all of our travel stuff.

It was fascinating! The day I changed it out I got four comments from people and our web traffic actually increased on CarrieandJonathan from people who had been friends in high school, people who were former students – I used to teach German and theater, you may not know that, but former students who said, “Hey, I’ve never seen your CarrieandJonathan site, that’s pretty cool!”

It worked here so I went and changed out my Twitter profile too; Twitter only allows you to have smaller images, but you can look at this close enough to see our domain name in the image there.

So what I wanted to do is show you real quick how we did this.

There’s a bunch of different free image creators online; I think you can just Google “free image creator” and you’d find a bunch. What I’m going to do is actually do it inside of Photoshop because I’m familiar with Photoshop.

But if you don’t have Photoshop, just Google “free image creator;” and you should be able to create a little avatar or a custom logo here for yourself in a few different sizes.

What we’re going to do is actually create it in five different sizes. I’m going to go “create a new image” here and we’re going to start off with it in 250 by 250 (pixels); most of these sites have square avatar images. Some of them have rectangles but the vast majority of them are in square image sizes, so we’re going to make the width and the height equal. We’ll go ahead and click “ok” here.

So I now have my image; unfortunately it’s not fitting up with the box here, but you kind of get the idea. What we’re going to do is – maybe I’ll make it really simple and I would just put some text in here. We’re going to make one today for Three Money Methods. So I’m going to go ahead and put some text in here. You can see it’s overflowing the image there, so I’m going to have to make it smaller; so I’m just getting my formatting here all squared away.

We’re going to make this just a little bigger. This really isn’t intended to be a Photoshop class; if you aren’t good at this, you can just hire somebody on Elance to create this kind of stuff for you. But it is a good skill to have and if you don’t have this kind of software, at least you’ll know what to do to have someone do this kind of work for you.

We’re just going to go ahead and make this image – so I’m going to spare you most of the details of me creating this image because you can learn to do this on your own; this is really about traffic.

But basically the idea is you get an image setup that actually includes your web address. You want to make it really, really, really clear when it’s this big size because you’re going to size it down to where it’s very small so that people will actually be able to come back to your website here

I paused the video – you can probably tell that – because it’s a different size here, a little bigger and also because we’re more zoomed in or more done with the image here. But basically we’ve created an avatar image, this one is 250×250 (pixels). So I’m going to go ahead and save this and I’m going to save it for me inside of Photoshop here and I’m going to save it as a 250×250 image/

I’m going to put it inside of my Three Money Methods folder here and we will call this “avatar-image-250-250.” I’m going to save this as a Photoshop file and then I’m going to save it again as a JPG because that’s the file type that most sites accept. Occasionally, you’ll run into somebody that accepts a GIF and not a JPG, a G-I-F file and not a J-P-G file, but for the most part, people just accept the JPG file more often. So we’re going to go ahead and save this as a JPG here – it doesn’t need to be ridiculously high quality, we’ll put it at 55 there and we’ll go ahead and save that.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to resize this image; so instead of it being 250×250, it’s going to be 200×200. I just want to check it out and make sure everything is still pretty visible here – yes, looks good! So I’m going to go ahead and save this; by the way, this is the Facebook size, 200×200. So we’re going to save this as “avatar-image-200-200” and we’ll save it as a JPG. Then we’re going to go “image-image size” and I’m going to save it as 120×120, so we’ll have one that is that size. Now this is getting a little harder to see, but you can see it, so I’m not going to worry about changing the size of things here just yet, although we will as it gets smaller here. But we’ll go ahead and save this as “avatar-image-120-120” and we’ll save it as a JPG.

The reason for all these different sizes is different websites will only accept different sizes of image avatars. For example, when I showed you Twitter over here, Twitter only accepts a relatively small file of 50×50; I think that’s the size that Twitter accepts. So in order to get yours down to that size and make it still visible, you have to make it 50×50 or 75×75 or 80×80; I’m not exactly sure what their avatar image size is.

But we’ll go ahead and go “image-resize” – you just want a bunch of different sizes so that it works on a bunch of different websites for you. I’m going to go ahead and put this at 80×80 and now, it’s really too hard to see. Unfortunately, it’s just become too difficult to read really anything on here. So I’m going to try and clean it up a little bit so I can actually see the domain name down here for just this text. Just by turning off the drop shadow, it becomes much easier to read what it actually is, so I’m going to go ahead and click “ok.” That’s really good enough for me at this point, just for purposes of this video, we’re going to go ahead and say that that’s good enough. I’ll go ahead and go “file-save as” the 80×80 JPG. Then there is an option for a 50×50; I just don’t know, unless your domain name is like just 10 characters long or something how you get it to be readable in that size of an image. But we’re going to try here just for purposes of the video. I do, on the domain name, “3” Money Methods with a number 3 instead of a t-h-r-e-e; so that becomes easier to separate this out here and gives me a little more space, although it’s still going to be hard to read. So I’m going to go ahead and size this down so that it’s 50×50 and then we’ll see how we can make it more visible in that size range.

So we’re going to go 50×50 and as you can see it becomes very difficult to see it at all; so we’re going to try to get it so we can see it, but I don’t really worry too much about it because with the 50×50 size there’s not much you can do to make it really legible. But you can see it just becomes really difficult to make it so it’s even legible at all at that size.

So what I might do here is get rid of the “.com” on the end and that gives me a little more room to stretch this out, just a little bit; and I think that’s as good as its going to get. So we’ll just leave it like that: “3MoneyMethods.” And I’ll go ahead and do a “file-save as” and this will be our 50×50 image.

The nice thing about doing this is that it’s just another way to bring traffic back to you because people actually see that image in your profile when they’re looking at your posts or your things that you’ve put on Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or wherever and you get another opportunity to “brand them” with your logo or your name in the actual image itself. We always have this saying, “A picture equals a thousand words;” well, here’s your picture!  And now we have all these different files sizes that we can use. This is our original and then we’ve got this one that we made which is much smaller. We can post these now onto different profiles and get traffic that way having put an image with a URL in it.

That’s just a quick little tip and again I got that from James Martell. There’s a link, if you’re on the Three Money Methods website, where you can go to actually learn more from James Martell. Just a great guy and a great affiliate marketer! You can definitely learn a lot from him.

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How To Get Traffic from Articles

Welcome back to another edition of Traffic Tuesday with Three Money Methods. This is Jonathan Kraft and today I want to talk about Article Traffic. This should be a relatively quick video to talk about getting traffic to your site using articles.

There are a whole bunch of different article websites out there; there is some article software that you can buy that will help you submit your content out to a lot of different sites.

So I’m not going to go into this topic really in-depth, but I want to show you just really quick some results I’ve been able to get from submitting articles at Ezine Articles and then offer you a tip about how to get traffic using articles on other people’s websites.

What I’m going to do here is go ahead and sign-in to Ezine Articles. I’m now logged into my account here and you can see all kinds of stuff in here, but I’ve got some articles that are currently under review, I have some “problem” articles and then I’ve got a whole bunch of articles in here, couple of draft articles and then a bunch that have been published. I have 120 articles that have been published inside of here and these have been published over the last, I think, 3 years inside of Ezine Articles.

If you look at the statistics on the left-hand side here, I’ve had 52,000 “article views;” meaning the articles I’ve posted in here have been read over 52,000 times! It’s pretty exciting; it’s a good start on getting a bunch of articles out there. Over 5,000 almost 6,000 people have viewed my profile. I have over 1,000 published articles inside of here and over 880 people have clicked on my URL links from the articles that I’ve posted.

Now that’s not a huge amount in here; but if you think about 880 clicks just by taking the content that I was already writing anyway, sort of re-purposing it a little bit, rewriting it a tiny bit and putting it into my Ezine Articles account. Now, I’ve also got a writer that works for our business, her name is Lisa Carey, and she’s written some articles as well, a lot of articles actually and put them into here; she has access to my Ezine Articles account as well.

But I want to show you, here is 880 clicks; I’m going to show you one of the sites that we’ve actually sent traffic to – it’s a site called IdentityTheftSecrets.com. This is the traffic from the last year inside of here; so July 9, 2008 through August 8, 2009. In that time, I have received from referring sites; I’ve received over 11,000 visits. Three hundred and eight of those have been from Ezine Articles. If we go into here, I can see that it’s been two different referral paths, it’s about 2-5 visitors every day and more so recently as we’ve got more articles in there. But it’s about 2-5 visits a day from people coming and checking out things after reading articles inside of Ezine Articles which is pretty neat! It’s pretty exciting that people actually come through to the site and all I’ve had to do is have someone actually go and post that content inside of my Ezine Articles account.

Now before I had Lisa working with our business, I actually was going in and posting all this content myself and you may have to do the same thing. But it’s very interesting; the average time on the site is a minute and 33 seconds. I’ve got relatively low bounce-rate actually which means that people are actually viewing more than one page of the site when they come in and they’re staying on the site longer when they actually come having read an article from somewhere else.

I also know the average visitor value to this site – I’m not going to go through all that – but the average visitor value to this site more than makes up for the time and the money that I spend on someone actually going and posting these articles inside of Ezine Articles. Again, you’ll probably have to do this yourself when you first get started, but sign up at Ezine Articles and just start posting some articles in there.

There’s all sorts of helpful articles about what kind of content you should be putting inside of here; how you should write your articles to get people to come back to your website – you can go Google and find out all that stuff. But definitely sign up for Ezine Articles. I wanted to show you that just to show you that it does work and you do get results from it.

The other thing I wanted to talk about is finding websites and blogs you can guest write for. Now you want to go identify – if you’ve already downloaded our marketing, if you’re in the marketing arena, if you’ve already downloaded the RSS feed for all of the different blogs in the marketing arena or in the green arena or the travel arena, you already know about all these blogs that are already publishing content in your arena.

You should have a list and you should be following people in your arena, regardless of what it is; if it’s childcare or if it’s being a good parent or if its cell phones, whatever it is, you should have a list of blogs that you follow and comment on regularly. With some of those people, you should have started to build a relationship with and you know which ones bring the best traffic back to your website from your traffic logs inside of Google.

So what you can do is actually send a letter and I’m going to give you the content of this letter, you just have to grab it from Three Money Methods and it basically says:

“Dear Website/Blog Owner/Jim Smith,

Do you need content written for JimSmithWebsite.com? Well, I’m a real person with real writing skills and would like to write an article or two for your website for free.

Again, this is free content for you; all I ask for in return is that you let me have a bio box at the bottom of the article to link to my site.”

And it kind of goes through the rest of it here, “this is unique content that I won’t be posting elsewhere online;” you are writing an article specifically for this person for their audience. “I can write an article on the topic of your choosing.”

Yes, this is going to take you some time and yes it’s going to take some effort to actually write an article that fits their audience. However, it can result in significant volumes of traffic over time coming back to your website. So I’m going to give you this text right below the video here on the Three Money Methods website, if you’re doing this on YouTube or somewhere else, just come to ThreeMoneyMethods.com and put your name and email in on the website and in exchange, you’ll be getting all kinds of great stuff, but this is one of the things you’ll get and that’s basically it.

If you’re not submitting articles out and getting traffic back into your website that way, you should be taking and sending your content out so that people will come back to your website. It’s a great way to get people to come back and view you. We haven’t even gone through submitting articles to magazines or all the different article websites; there’s thousands of article websites. There’s also “article randomizers” so that you write an article and then it takes your content and turns it into like 14 different articles that you can submit out so that you’ve got different content showing up in different places. There’s all kinds of different things you can do once you get started doing this. But the key is to get started! So I’ve shown you two simple ways today to get started getting website traffic using simple article content.

I hope that’s helpful for you and we look forward to seeing you back here for another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays.

Article traffic is a great way to get traffic to your website!

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Blog Commenting: Video 2

Hello and welcome back to Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesday! This is Jonathan Kraft and today we’re going to be doing a follow-up on last week’s conversation about blog commenting.

I got some feedback from the video and I love that feedback – it’s so great to get some feedback from people as far as things I can do better and ways I can help you better. So definitely keep the feedback coming in!

I wanted to make this follow-up video for the things that people have wanted and requested. So here’s what we’re going to do; one of the things somebody said is, “I don’t really understand what you did with that whole Google Reader thing. How does that work exactly?”

Ok! Well here is my gmail account. Let’s say you had logged in and this is our ThreeMoneyMethods [AT} gmail. By the way, don’t send us email here – I will not get the email if you send it here. By chance I might pick it up, but chances are not good! So don’t send us email here; if you want to send us an email, use the email that came to you with this content.

If you want to log in, so what we’re going to do here is we’re actually just going to log out of this gmail account – well, I’m logged in. I’ll take it that you can figure out how to go to www.gmail.com or go to www.Google.com/mail. Once you’re logged in there, you’ll see that there’s a place you can click on up top that has a little thing that says, “Reader.” Alright?

Inside of Reader here, you can go into Google Reader; this is all of my items from last week in Google Reader. If I click on Settings in here, this is where you are going to upload the OPML feed that I gave you last week with all of these blogs; it’s about 260 marketing-related blogs that you can just upload right in this import/export tab. What you’ll do is you’ll click “upload” and you’ll find the OPML file, it’s an XML file that you downloaded from me. You’ll upload it right into here –you’ll click “browse, you’ll find it on your computer and then you will upload it clicking this button.

Once you do that, you’ll go back to your Google Reader and you’ll see inside of Google Reader that you now have all of the exact same blogs that I have that I’m posting comments on. These are some of the top marketing blogs on the internet.

You can also add your own Google Reader items by adding a subscription. You’ll just type in www.”whatever”.com – whatever the web address is and Google Reader is going to go out and try and find a feed at that website.

You don’t have to know all that stuff; feeds and how does RSS work – you don’t have to know all of that. Just take the OPML feed, upload it and start commenting on other people’s sites.

I love the feedback from people going, “Hey, I’ve been commenting on other people’s websites and I’ve been getting some traffic to my site – it’s cool! I love it! Thanks so much!” Love that feedback! It’s really cool that people are actually taking action on the information.

The other comment I got from people is, “Hey, you know Jonathan, this sounds great, but I don’t have 30 minutes a day to go and post to these websites. Isn’t there someway that I can have someone else do that work for me?” Well, two things to be aware of: yes, is the answer to that question; the other thing is what you’re doing when you go out to these other websites is you’re building relationships. If you’re comfortable with someone else building relationships on behalf of your business, then yes, absolutely you can have somebody else go and post comments. You could pay them or here’s what I figured out, you can actually just hire an intern. There are a lot of people looking for internships in the internet marketing space. So what I’ve done is created a job description for someone who wants to go and post on blogs. What I want to do is find someone who is a Marketing Blog Commenter and I will give you this text too actually – just because I’m a nice guy.

This is actually the text that I wrote to go find somebody and you’ll have to pay to find somebody; yes, you’ll have to post an ad on Craig’s List which at least in my big city here in Denver, is $25. But if you find somebody good, isn’t that worth it — all the time you could save? So Marketing Blog Commenter … here’s what the ad says:

“First 30 days unpaid intern needed. If you enjoy reading and learning about marketing, especially internet-related marketing, this may be the internship for you. I need someone to go and read marketing and business material at a variety of blogs and news sources online ….”

You get the idea. Here’s the deal, in here I’ve posted “you must be wicked smart, detail-oriented, a great communicator, trustworthy, hardworking, adaptable, insightful, native English speaker.” Look, I want to weed people out. I don’t want to have someone coming through my business saying, “hey, ya know, ummm, yeah, this was a great blog comment …”

No! I want somebody who rocks! I want somebody who will go and actually post really creative, really unique comments. I’ve posted up at the top, “first 30 days unpaid, I need an intern – somebody who’s going to work for 30 days for free.” Then, if that person’s good:

“the first 30-45 days this work will be an unpaid internship at which time, if there’s a mutual fit and the work you’ve done has been done in a quality fashion, we will negotiate an hourly rate not to exceed $9 an hour.”

There are so many people in the world who would love to be paid $9 an hour just to go and read and post comments. There are so many people who would love to do that. And where do you find those people? Well, one great place is Craig’s List! You just go log-in to Craig’s List, create an account at Craig’s List, post a new ad; you’ll see it’s very easy. I’m posting a new ad in Denver because that’s close by to where I live, but you can post an ad anywhere. I’m “Offering a Job” …. “Denver” …. and I’m looking for an internet internship … let’s go “Marketing/Advertising/PR” … there’s my current total, it’s going to cost me $25. Then I’m just going to post the ad right inside … post it or paste it. Compensation: I could just copy and paste from here.. “First 30 days unpaid; $9 an hour after that … up to $9 an hour. Contact From – I don’t know Contact From is … I’ve never seen that before, that’s new to me. Telecommuting is fine; part time is good; it’s contract-type work; it’s an internship and that’s fine.

I will go ahead and click Continue here and there’s my post: “If you enjoy reading about marketing, blah, blah, blah. Wicked smart, detailed-oriented, funny is a plus, if you’re not familiar with RSS/Google Reader,” all my apostrophes turned into funny characters which stinks because then I need to go back and edit it, but otherwise this is my job posting and this is where we’ll find somebody, on Craig’s List. Craig’s List will then send me emails when people respond to this ad. I’ll get emails from people who are interested in the ad.

So that’s really all you have to do to find somebody to do this kind of work for you. And you will get responses from posting this job posting if you post it in a busy market where people are actually looking for this kind of work.

You’re going, “well I don’t want to spend that kind of money.” You have to spend some money to get someone’s time or you have to use your own time to get the money! Those are your two options.

At any rate, here’s what I’m giving you: this whole job description is yours at ThreeMoneyMethods.com. If you’re not reading this on the blog, then you are not seeing this text; but you can come to ThreeMoneyMethods.com and put your name and email in and I’ll be happy to give you this text in exchange for you having come to the website, and putting your name in here. You can also learn a little more about me and my background and what we’ve been able to do because of our internet businesses. But what you’ll do is just come to the website and put your name and email in here. Then you’ll get that OPML feed for free that I mentioned and you’ll also get the text for this job posting via Three Money Methods.

So I hope that makes sense, but seriously, by doing this blog commenting, you can drive so much traffic! I had a day in the last week where I had 50-plus visits just from going and commenting on other people’s blogs. It’s just not that hard and it just doesn’t take that much time.

By the way, yes I am interested – if you’re a person who wants to be paid $9 an hour and is willing to work for the first 30 days for free to go and post comments on behalf of Three Money Methods and they’re good comments, I would love to talk with you further to see if this would be a mutual fit for us.

Thank you for watching the video and be sure to come back – next week, we’re going to have another great video from Three Money Methods about how to really drive traffic to your website and how to start generating revenue from the traffic that you’re bringing in.

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Blog Commenting: Video 1

Alright, so here is a quick video about how and why you want to do blog commenting. So basically, here’s the idea. Lots and lots of people have blogs, in whatever industry or arena you are working inside of. In this case, I’m going to show marketing blogs, but you could do whatever you wanted to do as far as whatever your industry is in going and commenting on other people’s blogs.

So what I did was I actually hired somebody to go and to find blogs dealing with marketing. They went out and found all these different websites; they came back with a list of the Top 200 websites in terms of traffic and ranking for me and I loaded them into a Google Reader account.

So I’m going to go in and log into my gmail account. If you don’t have a gmail account, you could set this up on your own, get a gmail account which is free.

But basically all I did was … I went in and set up an account for our Three Money Methods site.

If I click on “Reader” once I’m logged in here, by the way, don’t send email to ThreeMoneyMethods at gmail.com because I won’t get it – I just don’t check this account for anything. But if you click on Reader inside of here, I’ve loaded all of the blogs in here. I actually had somebody go in and add subscriptions to all of these blogs. So they just went through one by one and added subscriptions to the blogs.

So I can click on “All Items” inside of here and I can read the most recent posts, today’s a Saturday, so there won’t be many that are too recent, but I can read the most recent posts about whatever people are talking about within the marketing arena.

So, “Which CMS do you use?” Which Content Management System do you use? I’ll go ahead and open the link in a new tab and scroll down here; I’ve got a new tab opening at the moment; “Giving Affiliate Marketing another Go,” this is a guy who’s trying to do Affiliate Marketing, I’m opening that in a new tab, “AffMeter List of Supported Affiliate Networks Grows” … “Photos from my 27th Birthday” … ok, maybe we’ll post something in there … “Learning Specificity in Marketing.” Ok, I’ve got four tabs open now; you can see these here, “Which CMS?” “Giving Affiliate Marketing another Go.”

So, I’m going to go ahead and go to the first one here, “Which CMS do you use?” Inside of here, “Which CMS do you use,” people use WordPress, blah, blah, blah. I’ve already commented on this site, so you can see that my information is already in here. “Hey, I use Movable Type and WordPress. I like Movable Type because it allows multiple websites from one installation, but I like WordPress because there are so many great tools for it that people have created.”

Maybe you don’t know anything about Content Management Systems; so read the post and learn about it from whatever they’re saying here and then comment something that’s relevant to the discussion that’s going on. I just happen to know already the answer to the question, “What CMS do you use,” so I’m going to go ahead and post this comment. “Thanks for talking about your WordPress experience though. Good to know why other people choose the CMS that they do. Warmest, Jonathan.”

Sometimes, if I’ve commented on a website before, I will put my web address actually in the comments if I know that it’s going to show up on the website. If I don’t know that it’s going to show up on the website, I won’t put my web address in here because I’ve already had the opportunity to put it in up here. I’m just going to shorten this down, MoneyMethods online and that’s it. “I use Movable Type and WordPress, blah, blah, blah.” I’m going to go ahead and “Submit Comment.”

I’m going to do the same thing on this post, on this post, on this post and on as many other posts as I can, or want to, inside of here. Now again, you want to actually make comments that are relevant to what people are talking about. Number one, you’re building relationships with all the top people in your arena and number two; you are posting links to bring people back to your website. But first and foremost, you’re building relationships! So you want actually to post something that’s relevant to what they’re saying inside of their post.

The reason I want to show you this here is if I go into my Google Analytics account, I can show you the difference between posting blog comments and not posting blog comments.

So I’m going to go log-in to Google Analytics here and we’re looking at Three Money Methods inside of Google Analytics and this is just referring sites that referred people just to the front page of ThreeMoneyMethods.com. Inside of here, you can see, I’ve got pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic (laughs), pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic; all this no traffic, no traffic, no traffic. Hey, then one day it jumps to five and three and three, and look at this! Thirteen visits and the vast majority of this is coming from blog commenting! All I did was go post some comments on other people’s well-trafficked websites, to actually add some conversation to the discussion and become part of what’s going on in the community.

I posted this day, I posted this day, posted blog comments. I don’t even think I posted any on this day and I didn’t post any on this day. But hey, look! I posted a bunch this day and I brought in 20 visitors basically to my website that day. I didn’t post any Thursday and I didn’t post any on Friday, but I’m still picking up residual traffic from the work I did on Wednesday!

All you have to do to bring people to your website is go and post comments on other people’s websites that are already getting traffic! Become part of the conversation of what’s going on in your industry and your arena and you can actually bring traffic back to your website to get them to do whatever you want them to do on your website!

Now the only thing you can do on Three Money Methods, when people come to this page, the only thing they can do is actually put their name and email in; they either go away or they put their name and email in; now I’ve done that on purpose. But whatever goal it is that you have for your website, you can use blog commenting just to bring people to the website.

So here’s the deal; I have three different lists that I have put together – the top 200 blogs. I’ve got the top 200 blogs in “green,” I’ve got the top 200 blogs in “travel” and I’ve got the top 200 blogs in “marketing.” If you will come to ThreeMoneyMethods.com and put your name and email in, I will give you what’s called an OPML feed to just upload automatically into your Google Reader; so you don’t have to go through the process of hiring somebody to find the top 200-250 blogs and then put them into your Google Reader, all you have to do is download one file from Three Money Methods website after you put your name and email in, just download this file and then upload it into your Google Reader and you’ll have all of those blogs already sitting in your Google Reader for free, from me just in exchange for putting your name and email in here at ThreeMoneyMethods.com.

Go ahead and come to the website – I hope this tip has been very helpful for you. Posting comments on other people’s blogs is a great way to find out what’s going on in your industry and your arena and it’s also a great way to get people back to your website to do whatever you want them to do once they’ve actually come to you to find out more information about what it is that you do.

So, I hope this has been very helpful — definitely come visit us at Three Money Methods for more great tips about how to do online marketing!

Thank you very much for taking the time to watch this video.

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Title Tags, Keyword Tags, and Meta Description Tags

Welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! I am your host Jonathan Kraft and here to talk with you today about Title Tags, Keyword Tags and Meta-Description Tags. So initially, back in 1996 and 1998, they started creating ways to organize websites. To actually be able to access the websites and know what they were about, they created these things called Title Tags, Keyword Tags and Meta-Description Tags.

Let’s just do a search on Google for … “make money online.” It’s a very common, popular term and gets a lot of searches. So here we see a few different things on Google. I’ve sized down my screen so this is really big. You see on one side we have the sponsored links and also up top here we have the sponsored links. “Make money online;” “make money online fast;” “make money online.” These in the orange are sponsored links and these on the right-hand side are also sponsored links. That means that someone has paid for those links. But then, if we scroll down here, we have “makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com;” we have “entrepreneurs.about.com;” we have “moneymakers.blogspot.com;” we have “team-schuman;” “forbes;” “financial planning;” “Carlo Cab.”  I have been on Carlo Cab’s website before and I know he’s got some really cool stuff on here so I’m sure that he’s done a good job with his description tag, his title tag and his keywords tags.

So what we’re going to do is go ahead and open this in a new tab and I’ve sized it up so you can see it. If you look at this website, we have Carlo Cab, and what we’re going to do is go to View-Page Source. Inside of the page source here you can see a few different things. We have title tag, “make money at home with a 13-year old;” “make money online;” keywords tag, down at the bottom here we have a description and a keywords tag; description: “discover how a 13-year-old made money online. Make money online topics include Blogging, Internet Marketing, AdSense and a lot more.”

And you then see underneath there he’s got a meta tag and the content is “make money online;” “make money from home;” “make money at home;” “blogging;” “make money blogging;” “internet marketing.” He has very good keyworded description, title and keywords tags.

So those three tags look like this: if you were looking at a webpage from scratch, here’s what you would see: html and /html (end html). You don’t really need to know all of this stuff either, because if you’re using WordPress or Movable Type or some other Content Management System (CMS), they handle a lot of this stuff for you. But you can use what you’re learning here to make sure that it’s actually being handled correctly. You do have to learn a little bit in order to have the kind of success that you want to have online, but you can use the tools; you just need to double-check to make sure that its doing what you want it to do for you.

So this is what a basic structure of what a website would look like: you have turn on HTML, turn off HTML. You have a header which carries all kinds of description stuff, information about a website, you have a /header and start the body, which is what you actually see on the webpage, and then /body.

Inside of the header tag, you have title and /title. You also have meta, content=”whatever” and / that.

With meta tag in the header you don’t have to go /meta.

It just knows automatically that this carat (>) ends the meta description. Then you also have a meta and content=”whatever.”

So if you were going to build a page about “make money online” it would probably be a really good idea to make the title of your page “Make Money Online.” Probably a really good idea in the description is to say something about “making money online is relatively simple.” Keep it short here. “Learn to make money online.” The keywords=”make money online; money online revenue;” whatever your page is about.

So here’s what I want to go back to Google and show you; you go back over here and we’re going to leave Carl Ocab’s website here. Go back to our Google search for “make money online.” See how this says right here in the title tag: “Make money online. Make money at home with a 13-year-old.” Well, what does that look like? It IS the exact same thing as Carl’s title tag. “Make money online” <break> ‘Make money at home with a 13-year-old.” That is what actually shows up in the search results, the title tag to try and bring people back to your website.

Now if we go “discover how a 13-year-old made money online.” “Make money online topics include Blogging, Internet Marketing, AdSense and a lot more.” What does that look like? Well, if we go in here, we can see in the description “Discover how a 13-year-old made money online.” ”Make money online topics include Blogging, Internet Marketing, AdSense and a lot more.” It’s the exact same thing! The thing that shows up in the search engine optimized results to bring people to your website is the meta description and the title tag. So you want to make sure your title tag and your description tag really help people to want to come to your website.

You’ve got to do a really good job of writing description tags and title tags that make people want to come to your website. Sometimes I’ll use a word like “What — I can make money online?” You might be more interested in coming to a website if it actually has some appeal to you. If you’re reading along through the search results and you’re like, “Make Money Online;” “Making Money Online;” “What — I can make Money online?” If that showed up in the Top 10 search results here, wouldn’t that stand out a little bit more? Possibly; it might make you want to click and come to that website.

Now there’s a whole art to getting to the top of the search results; but one of the things that it includes is writing really good title and description tags. The keyword tag is not used so much anymore; but I still put it on the page just because I think it’s good to have on there. But what started happening is that people figured out that they could get ranked for things like “Brittany Spears Naked” and stuff like that that people are looking for a lot! Even though their page was about mortgages, they decided to put “Brittany Spears” and “Paris Hilton.” Back in early 2000, 2001 and 2002, if you think about really popular search terms around that timeframe, people were actually putting those in the keywords tag and they were getting traffic for that even though their website had nothing to do with that.

Well, Google now ranks websites on about 200 factors. So you can’t just keywords stuff into your keywords tag here and hope that you’re going to get results. They don’t use this keywords tag so much anymore; but I still think it’s a good thing to have.

Now I want to show you both inside Movable Type and WordPress, they have it setup so that you can automatically put this stuff in there. There’s a plug-in for WordPress called the All in One SEO Pack plug-in that you can download and put into your WordPress installation and I’ll show you what that looks like on our GreenJoyment site.

So if I’m logged into my GreenJoyment store here and I create a new post using WordPress and I scroll down the page here, I have a space for an excerpt which could also become my description; but I also have the All in one SEP pack down here at the bottom. And you can see I can write a title tag, a description tag and a keywords tag for this post. Those tags actually show up on the different posts that I’m writing.

I want to make sure that the title tag I write matches the actual content of whatever I’ve written in WordPress to actually help to try and get that ranking for whatever it is I’m talking about. Writing a really good and very interesting title tag will actually help to bring people to the website and also will let Google know that yes, in fact I am talking about GreenJoyment; we might be talking about inverters or something or how to make your own solar panel. And so if I’m talking in the content about how to build your own solar panels, I’m going to be talking in the title tag about “how to build your own solar panels.” Then the description would be “build your own solar panels … Three Simple Steps.” You want to make sure that what it’s actually about comes first in your description and your title tag.

I’ll show you the same thing inside of our Movable Type installation. These are just different Content Management Systems (CMS). I think we’ve talked already about Content Management and why you should be using some sort of Content Management System.

This is for my Strive4Impact site and I have an excerpt, keywords and a tags title done in here. Well the excerpt becomes the description inside of Movable Type and the keywords become the keywords tag.  But you want to make sure you’re writing a keywords tag, a description tag and a title tag that actually match the content of your post and bring people back to your website for what it is that you’re actually talking about. That will help you get placed well in Google and other search engines for the things that people are looking for.

We’re going to talk later in another video about how to find out what people are looking for so that you can actually talk about those things! But it’s really important to know when you’re writing posts and when you’re building web pages, you really need to pay attention to the description tag, the title tag and than also, to a lesser degree, the keywords tag.

Hopefully that makes sense. If you just go and look at your webpage, just look and see, do you have a title tag, a description tag and a keywords tag? If you don’t, either hire a programmer or learn how to do it yourself, but make sure those things are showing up in your posts so that you can actually start getting search ranked for the things that people are looking for and for the things that you’re talking about.

Like I said, we’re going to do another video about how to find out what people are actually looking for so you can talk about it. But your homework out of this video is to go and find out, do you have these things on your web pages; and if not, get them on there as quickly as possible because this will help you to get traffic from search engines automatically and at no cost to you!

Thank you for watching the Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesday! Stay tuned, we’ve got more great videos coming and more great training to learn how to make money online and build a business that let’s you live the life of your dreams!

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How To Use Yahoo Answers To Get Website Traffic

Hello and welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! I’m your host Jonathan Kraft and today we are going to be talking about one great place for you to do two things with: one, to get traffic to come into your website via things you post externally and another way to get traffic to come to your site via things that you’re learning from this website about what people are looking for.

So the website is Yahoo Answers and you can get there by just typing in Google “Yahoo Answers” or you can go to answers.yahoo.com. The whole idea behind the Yahoo Answers is people can ask questions and other people can come and answer them. So, for example, here’s a guy who asks the question, “what should I eat for making 1700 calories per day for gaining?” Question for guys, “are belly rings hot?”

Let’s say you had a blog about technology stuff. Here’s somebody who has a question about “wanna race or battle on Mario Kart Wii?” You could create a post called “how to find friends to race on Mario Kart Wii.” If you had a tech blog, you could also talk about what phone you think is suitable for this person or play two sounds at the same time on Movie Maker.

So lots of tech questions in here, but as you’re reading through here you’ll also see there are other ones about travel. For example, “how much for a taxi from Benidorm to Jalon near to Calpe?” I guess this is a question in Spain, but if you have a travel blog, this might be a great question for you to answer on your blog.  If you’re looking for content to write about, this is a great place to learn. “I’m a young, African American woman moving from Chicago to Houston.” Good thing for someone with a Houston blog or for someone who is looking to have a travel blog. You could talk about Chicago and Houston – the kind of issues that people might encounter in Chicago and Houston.

Here’s a geocaching puzzle that finds coordinates to a location #4 – so this is Games and Recreation but it’s also a travel question. So this gives you a great place to just find topics that people are already asking questions about.

The other thing you can do is search; so I’m going to search in here for “green buildings.” I know we just posted on GreenJoyment about this so I’m doing this on purpose, but we might want to do an Advanced Search because we’re pulling up all kinds of old answers. But if you do an Advanced Search here, you can find questions that are still open to be answered. Now you have to setup a Yahoo Profile in order to do this, you can, it’s very simple. So we want the question status to be “open question,” date submitted can be anytime.

So, “what is the going rate when buying a green horse?” “How does a small company get involved in going green?” See I was looking for green buildings but what I was really looking for was how companies can work to go green in their own environments. I know I have a lot of the answers over here in this post on GreenJoyment. So I can just basically copy and paste to answer this question.

“I’m a marketing manager for a small multi-media company with 20 people. We’re looking to get involved in environmentally going green. How can we get involved in a local community with little budget? Also, we are self-serving in the fact that we would like to get some recognition out of this.” So you could answer whatever you wanted. Now this has already had a “Best Answer” chosen by voters.

“When did the “going green” phenomenon begin exactly and for what reasons?” This is a great question … “when did it change from a hippie, tree-hugging thing to a mainstream thing? I’m doing a cultural analysis on this and am looking for some origin info. Any help is much appreciated. Website resources are great too.” This is a question I can answer very easily using tools that we’ve already talked about.

“It seems to have become mainstream sometime around the same time that Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” came out and won so many awards. I think the book “Fast Food Nation” also helped. Here are a couple resource sites you can use: Google Trends (remember we’ve talked about Google Trends in other videos from Three Money Methods); Google Trends shows “going green” trending up about the same time as these books.”

So here’s what I’m going to do is I’m going to go www.google.com/trends. In Google Trends I’m going to type in “Inconvenient Truth” … now this just happens to be a question I know the answer to because I offer it inside the green arena. You’ll know the answers to a lot of the questions people are asking in your arena and that’s the point of this. “Going Green” and let’s type in “Fast Food Nation” as well and “Super Size Me.” So if we look at this here, this is actually a pretty helpful graph for the person who is looking for when this became such a big issue. But really look, “going green” doesn’t really get really big until the middle of 2008.

What I’m going to do though is I’m going to copy the full web address here, so if I copy this, I’m going to actually get rid of Fast Food Nation because it doesn’t really help with the case that I’m trying to make so I’m going to rid of that. Super Size Me is sort of on that chart, so we’ll leave that there for now.

What I’m going to do is then copy this web address and go back over to my Yahoo Answers here and my source to paste that there and then another source is www.GreenJoyment.com. So I’ll just tell her something about Google Trends; “hope that Google Trends helps you out.” I usually put my name in here when I’m answering a question or something because it creates a relationship with people.

But now I’ve got two different web addresses in here, one is my GreenJoyment site and the other one is this Google Trends search. Go ahead and click preview and my answer is down here and hey, look at that; I’ve got two links … one of them comes right back to my website from Yahoo Answers. So I’m going to go ahead and submit.

I’ve helped both to answer her question – here’s someone who’s interested in the market that I’m already involved with. I’ve got a couple of links now coming back to my website from this particular term. If someone actually votes this to be the “Best Answer” then I’ll actually get more points in Yahoo Answers but I’ll also have links coming back to my website from a question that got answered at Yahoo Answers.

It’s a great way to bring traffic back into your website. It’s also a great way to find topics to post about. If I go from her open question here, it has a category called “green living.” I can go into the green living category and find open questions in there to answer. I can also just look at past questions that people have asked that have gotten a lot of attention and I can answer those questions.

Check it out! Start using it!

Yahoo answers is a great way to bring traffic back to your website and also to know what to talk about when you are looking for topics for your website.

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The Best Keyword Research Tools: Market Research Going Green Example

Welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays!

This is Jonathan Kraft and today I want to talk about finding out what people are looking for so that you can target your content to the actual words that they’re looking for.

One of my favorite, favorite, favorite tools for doing this is Google Trends.

If you’re not familiar with Google Trends, you really, really have to go check it out. It’s basically tracking what people are looking for on the internet right now.

So for today for example, some of the most interesting things people are looking for… “Today’s Hot Trends in the United States” are Jennifer Tisdale – whoever that is; Watkins Glen Weather; Patrick Kane Arrested; David Morgan Whips; Ohio Unemployment; Hall of Fame Game 2009; DC United versus Real Madrid, which is soccer; and What Happened to Forrest Griffin?

So these are very popular topics for today — things that people are looking for.

Well, we have a website in the “green” arena and today I’m just going to do a look for “going green.”

That’s a common term; a popular term that people are looking for right now and I think that if I wanted to build a website around “going green” I might want to talk about the term “going green.”

Well I did a search, you can see up here for the term “going green.” I’m going to move down the page just a little bit here so you can actually see this. This is the Search Volume Index; it’s clearly a rising market and people are definitely becoming much more interested in going green over time.

Starting off in 2005 when Google Trends started, there really wasn’t much interest in going green; but it really peaks here … starts to peak and it gives you some news information about what might have caused that peak; it just shows news related to that.

Let’s say I wanted to build a website about going green or have a website about going green which we do; we have a website called GreenJoyment.com that talks to people about going green. If I want to know is it better to talk to people about “going green” or is it better to use the term “go green?” does this actually make a difference? Well, it actually kind of does! Which is maybe surprising, but if you looking “going green” versus “go green” –  “go green” in this instance is getting more than double the traffic as opposed to “going green.”

If you’re looking to build a website in this arena, it’s probably better for you to try and link back to your site using the term “go green” as opposed to “going green.” Because people are actually looking much more for “go green” instead of “going green.”

Let’s use another example, “mobile phone;” we’ll search the trends here. “Mobile phone” actually appears to be sort of a declining market here a little bit. It just gives you an idea to see what people are looking for – which is great!

Let’s say “mobile phone” versus “cell phone.” If you wanted to market a “mobile phone” or a “cell phone,” which would be better for you to use as a term? Well, “cell phone” is better for you to use. This gives you a concrete way to actually see what is going to be the better term for you to use; a “mobile phone” or a “cell phone.”

Now let’s compare this to something in the same arena, “SMS” for example. “SMS” is like four times the amount of search volume!

Does that mean you’ll be able to market more? Maybe, maybe not. But if you have a website about calling cards, cell phones, mobile phones and SMS text messaging, you might want to talk about “SMS” instead of “cell phones” and “mobile phones” on a more regular basis.

Let’s add one more term in here, let’s try “text messaging” and click “Search Trends.” “Text messaging” is in green; “text messaging” doesn’t even really show up on the chart! It’s a very, very minimal market. So your better bet, if you want to capture a market, instead of “text messaging” would be to talk about “SMS.”  Maybe you didn’t know that before.

Use terms from your market. Is it better to talk about “poodles” or “labradors?” If you’re in the dog market, which one is searched more? Well, it turns out that “poodles” are searched more, at least in 2005-2006, than “labradors.” But look, they actually get closer in 2008-2009; “labradors” are getting more popular, “poodles” getting less popular. Dogs overall are becoming a less popular overall search term.  So you can get an idea here of different markets; it’s just a great way to actually look for what people are looking for.

Two other tools I’m going to show you today: one is the Google Adwords Free Search for what people are looking for.  There are links to these tools right below the video here.

But you can see this is Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you can type in descriptive words or phrases and it will give you terms that are relevant to those terms that you’re looking for.  So sticking with our labrador example, let’s type in “labrador” and use synonyms.

You can also filter your results; you can have them not show ideas for new keywords; you can have them include adult content, by default it’s excluded. So we’ll just go ahead and click “Get Keyword Ideas” and Google is going to go out and look through its Search Index to find out what are the most popular terms.

Well, turned out “labrador retriever” is not as popular as “labrador;” but “labrador retriever” is more popular than “labrador puppies.” You can tell by the search volume here.

This is the search volume for June and then there are approximated search volumes. So if you’re going to have a website about “labradors,” you want to use the term “labrador retriever” more often than “labrador puppies.” You want to use the term “labrador retriever” more often than “labrador dogs” because this is what people are looking for more often.

You can also use this to buy Adwords and ads.

But I’m really just talking about creating content using the terms that people are looking for. There’s a link to this right below the video here; if you’re on Three Money Methods, you can actually just link right to this tool.

But it’s just a great way to actually know what people are looking for if you want to talk about “labradors.” So you want to talk much more about “labrador retrievers” than “yellow labradors.”

You also want to talk about “yellow labradors” but you want to talk about “labrador retrievers” more often.

The other tool that I want to show you today is the Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool so we’ll go ahead and go to that.

Again, if you’re watching this on the Three Money Methods site there is a link to this right below the video.

This is a website called Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a great product that you can buy and have on a monthly basis and get all kinds of great stuff just actually about keywords and understanding what people are actually looking for.

However, if you aren’t ready to pay for it yet, they also have a free sample of how their service works.

We’ll stick with labradors; let’s go in here and go “labrador.” You can have it remove offensive; you can have it show adult only or you can just turn off the filter. I just always turn off the filter just because I’m trying to get an idea of what it is that people are looking for in the market. This confirms what Google had shown us just a minute ago, “labrador retriever” is really what people are looking for; “labrador puppies” less popular. But you can get an idea also here for some other keywords, things you might want to talk about: “black labrador,” chocolate labrador,” yellow labrador,” “labrador puppy.”

This gives you an idea to talk about these things more often. This is the order in which you want to talk about these items on your website if you want to achieve the maximum level of traffic.

So we learned from our other search that “going green” was not as popular as “go green.” So let’s type in “go green” here and we’ll click “Hit Me” and see what keywords we get here. “Go Green” is definitely, by far, the most popular here.

Then we have “ways to go green;” “why go green;” “go green in your home;” “go green and save money;” “how to go green.” Those are the top five things, six things that I’m going to be talking about, really five things.

I’m going to use “ways to go green” in a lot of posts; I’m going to use “why to go green” in a lot of content that I create; “go green in your home.” I want to use those keyword terms most often because that’s what people are looking for.

You can get an idea also, let’s type in “going green” and see what other kinds of things we get.

There are less searches for “going green;” that’s just confirming what we learned already. But then we’ve got examples of “how going green saves you money;” “companies going green;” “definition of going green;” “going green at home;” “tips for going green;” tips seem to be a common thing that people want; “what does going green mean;” and “going green industry seminars.”

Anyway, here’s the thing, you’re going to get a really good idea of what you should be talking about on your website from this kind of a search.

If you’re looking at this on the Three Money Methods website, we’ve linked to these tools right below the video.

If you’re not, you can do a Google search or if you want an easy way to access these tools, just come to Three Money Methods and join us at ThreeMoneyMethods.com – yes, you will need to put in your name and email address in order to join our community but we’ll give you all kinds of great tools, tips and tricks about how to actually run a business, a successful business online. You’ll have to put your name in there.

We’ll look forward to seeing you then in the next Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays. We’ve got some great stuff coming up next week !

Hope you’re doing well and please leave your comments below the video if you have any thoughts or any additional things that we should have included in this video.

Google Trends
Wordtracker Free Keywords Tool
Google Adwords Free Keywords Tool

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Traffic And Controlling The Flow of Website Traffic: Video 2

Hello and welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays.

This is Jonathan Kraft and today we’re talking in response to last week’s video where I was talking about traffic. We were talking about all the different traffic methods, if you remember from last week.

If you didn’t see the video from last week, I’ve got a link to it right here.

This week’s video:


All these different methods you know, MySpace, YouTube, Scribd, radio; remember I had all those different things on this side – all the different ways of getting traffic and then we had the webpage in the middle and over here we had the three ways of making money online … selling your stuff.

Someone sent an email and said, “hey Jonathan, I don’t want to have my own website. I don’t want to put up all this content and have people coming to it.  I just want to sell other people’s stuff!”

That is fantastic!

But you still need hosting and you need a domain!

And here’s why, for the exact same reasons we talked about last week;
– if one of these methods goes away for you,
– if the ad space company that is paying you for the traffic you’re driving shuts down
– if you’re selling someone else’s product and they change the payment terms on it
– you’re selling your stuff but you suddenly want to sell something different than what you’re selling

The easiest way to switch what you’re doing is to have it all run through something that you control really effectively.

In order to do that, you need to have your own hosting account and your own domain.

Now here’s the thing, you don’t have to put up any real content there, you can just take the traffic and drive it through a redirect page.

A “redirect page” – I’ll show you an example of a redirect here – but all a redirect page is a page you control where the traffic is going and then it just redirects it right along.

So for example, last week in the video, I showed my redirect link for domain names. That redirect link was http://www.threemoneymethods.com/ideas/domain.

if you remember, that was in the video from last week.  Watch what happens when I press “enter” on this or when I click the “go” arrow over here, I want you to watch what happens.

I press “go” and it takes me directly to GoDaddy!

That is where you will be redirected to if you want to buy a domain.

But what just happened in that process is I sent you through a redirect which “cookied” your computer for GoDaddy for me as having referred you to GoDaddy.

So if all you were doing was sending people through a redirect, that would still be better than not sending through a redirect — if you’re just sending them right here.

Let’s say for whatever reason, GoDaddy decides to shut me off as an affiliate; I don’t know why in the world they would do that, but that happens sometimes.

Or GoDaddy decides to turn off their affiliate program.

Commission Junction decided to do this, I was sending lots of people to signup for their affiliate program and they decided to stop paying me for sending people to their affiliate program.

Now I still recommend you go signup for Commission Junction as an affiliate, but I don’t get paid for that anymore; that link that’s still there — I still drive it to Commission Junction.

But let’s say there’s somebody I liked better that I told you that you should go signup for these guys; instead of changing out every link I’ve ever created to this whatever – selling ad space, selling someone else’s stuff or selling your stuff, all I do is change out the redirect!

That’s one simple example of why you need to have your own hosting and your own domain.

There are a lot of other reasons; one of the primary ones being that you should be building a list of people who are interested in the kinds of things that you have to offer, because it gives you a way to keep offering them more stuff.

It’s ten times more effective to re-convert someone who’s bought from you in the past, or someone who knows you from the past, than to try and convert someone new.

So you should be collecting names and emails here.

There are a hundred other reasons why you should have your own hosting and your own domain; those are just two of the reasons.

I think I didn’t explain that well enough last week in the video and so I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope I’ve really driven this point home.

You have to have your own hosting; you have to have your own domain.

If you want to buy it through my links, great!

If you don’t, great! I’d rather you buy it through my links, but if you don’t that’s ok too.

Just make sure you get your own hosting, get your own domain and get it done … get it done today!

You will have to learn and it will probably be frustrating in the process.

But if you get your domain and your hosting through GoDaddy, they have really helpful customer support, and if you buy them through my links, great.

Really, they will help you to get this stuff set up.

Yes, it will be frustrating; yes, you will have to learn and yes the process is part of the journey and that’s a whole other topic we can get into.

Get your own hosting; get your own domain!

We’ll see you back next week for another week of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesday!

I promise next week we’re going to talk about this stuff over here. But this point is so important that I devoted two weeks to it. You’ve got to get this stuff done! You’ve got to have your own hosting and domain.

You’ve got to be driving traffic through there!

So, thank you very much! I’m your host Jonathan Kraft. Come back next week for Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays.

We’ll look forward to seeing you back here next week.

Talk with you soon!

Resources:
– your own hosting account through Powweb
your own domain through GoDaddy

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