Check in time. How are things going? What questions do you have and what have you had trouble with? By now you should have joined a couple of affiliate links and are ready to start adding those links to your website.

We don’t want to just start throwing ads and links all over but we do need to get them in there. A lot of the decision as to where to put your affiliate links will depend on the layout of your blog. For example, on my blog I have some great space down the side that I will put three 125×125 square banners.  Each of these banners leads to an affiliate product that goes very well with my topic. But how do you get those to show up on your blog? Once again, we are using WordPress as the example and the easiest thing to do is to go back into the “Appearance” tab and click on Editor. Once in the Editor, this time you will look for the “sidebar” option in the list of files. If you are placing your ads in another location you will need to locate that file, but for this example I used the sidebar.  You may have to play with it a little but grab the code that the affiliate program gave you and copy and paste it into the sidebar file. Make sure you put it in a place that will make it appear where you want it to. You can even choose to use some of the “Styles” defined in the page already by taking some of the code from another section in the sidebar. Click the “Update” button to save your changes and check it on your live website. If something looks wrong, go modify the placement and try again.

If you are using a longer banner, you may want to include that in your header file and save the side space for a Google Adsense snippet (which we will cover tomorrow).

If you have a large selection of actual products and if you have tried them yourself you might also try posting a review of the affiliate product. This works well because your post is about the product specifically and should be filled with keywords that may help people find that product making it more likely to be found in search engines. Reviews also let you get in as many affiliate products as you can keep up with and of course keeps a running archive so it’s always available.

So go ahead and get some ads up on your website and start making money!

Due to a major project at work and not having enough time to put on deodorant this morning I have to prolong today’s post until tomorrow. Ok, I’m kidding about the deodorant but seriously, tomorrow we are back on!

Today is an easy day for you. We get to surf the web for information. One of the easiest ways to start generating revenue through your blog is to set up advertisements, product reviews and links that lead to a link specifically made for you that lets you earn money off of every sale made through that link. This is called an affiliate link. You may not have any affiliate programs in your arsenal yet or you may have a ton. It doesn’t matter. Our goal today is to research affiliate programs that would go well with the topic of your website. Don’t worry about plugging them into your website quite yet, I will go over those instructions tomorrow. All we are interested in today is finding the programs, signing up for them and learning how they work.

So what would be a good program to join? There is no straight answer but Amazon is a favorite of mine because they carry practically everything, but there are also some specific products sold by 3rd party companies that might benefit your site. For example, with UltimateWebsiteTrafficSecrets.com I plan on offering the TrafficSeeker program as an affiliate product. It only makes sense since it is a piece of software designed to get traffic to your website, relatively affordable and has a great commission structure. The key is the product needs to be related to your subject matter, preferably something you have used or tried so you can truthfully recommend it and it should have the best possibly affiliate payout you can find.

Get out there and research what programs will work for you and sign up today because some take a few days for an approval process. Tomorrow we will work on getting them worked into our website.

Happy Monday to everyone! We’re you plugging away all weekend on your article and meta tags? Ya sure you were, it was Super Bowl weekend! But it’s ok, life is all about fun so let’s just get back on track today and make this blog work for us.

Today I’m going to be submitting my own website to the major search engines. There are several ways of getting your website submitted to search engines including using a 3rd party piece of software or manually submitting your URL to the search engines directly.  As for me, I don’t have a ton of time in my busy days so I am going to choose the first method and grab my search engine submission software TrafficSeeker to get my submissions done for me in just a couple of clicks. You don’t have to use TrafficSeeker, any software will work, but I’ve used TrafficSeeker for a number of years and I’m comfortable in how to use it so there ya go.

The first thing we do is start up the software and create a new project. You can call yours whatever you want, I usually just stick to the domain names for my project names. Once you’re in the software, the first thing you want to do is enter your full URL in the “site url” box. Once that is done click the “extract settings” button and the software will automatically fill in all the other stuff for you based on your website meta tags. You are also going to need to enter in your “email” and “junk email” values as well. I have 2 emails setup for each of these. The regular email is one I check to click on links for confirmations and other important things. The junk email is an account I made up that just sucks in all the junk email that these submissions can generate. I highly recommend not using an email account you use often in the junk email field.

There are lots of things you can go in this software including some really fantastic page ranking reports, link popularity and other information you might find useful, but for now just select “features” at the top of the software and click on “submit” in the list. You can then select the “Wizard” button and just follow the prompts to get your website submitted. The first time around, I would select to submit to everything in the list, if for no other reason that to build some backlinks. Once you are finished and click the “Finish” button just sit back and watch it submit to all those other places on the internet. My window currently shows that it is submitted to over 1 MILLION places on the internet. Not bad for such a cheap submission software.

That’s all there is to search engine submission! Easy day huh? Don’t get too relaxed though because this whole week is going to be all about modifying our website so that it starts making us money. Just what we want! This week will be some work, but I find it rather fun so hopefully you will too.

See you tomorrow!

I decided to post up an additional step today because it’s Friday and what better time do you have to do some research on this next step than the weekend! So after you get finished posting your first article today, take a stab at this next step. If you have any questions or need help, feel free to post a comment to this post and I’ll try to check it as much as I can over the weekend and get back to you.

Ok, let’s get started. You have finally posted your first article on your website so now what? In this next step we are going to concentrate on getting it ready for submission to the search engines. This is also a great time for me to reveal the subject of my niche content website to you because I have written an article on this very subject. Because of the experience I have in search engine optimization and web design I decided to create the Ultimate Website Traffic Secrets website.  I’m going to ask each of you to head over to my new niche content website and read the article “Optimize Your Website Meta Tags”. This article is exactly what today is about. You are going to be creating “meta” tags to put into the header page of your website.

What exactly are Meta tags? Meta tags are snippets of code filled with keywords and phrases that are found between the < HEAD> and < /HEAD> tags of your website and will help you get your search engine ranking up. Once you finish reading the article you should have a good understanding on how to create the Meta tags. Create your Meta tags in notepad so that you can tweak them based on keywords. Once you are satisfied with them then we can go ahead and move onto adding them to the website.

Just how do you get that code into your website anyway? The first thing you need to do is login to the admin center of your blog. I am using WordPress for all my examples so if you aren’t using WordPress, you will need to find other instructions. Once you are logged in, click on the tab “Appearance” tab and then select “Editor” from the submenu. Now comes the confusing part right? Well, not really. It’s actually pretty easy. On the right hand side you will see a bunch of files names. We are looking for one called “header”. If you click on that, the main page area will be filled with all of the code that makes up the header portion of your website.

The code that you wrote that make up your Meta tags needs to be placed inside of the <head> and </head> tags. I typically find it’s easiest to just look for the </head> line and put my Meta tag code directly on the line above it. Just make an empty line above and then copy and paste in all of your Meta tag code inside of it. Once it’s in there press the “Update File” button and your Meta tags are in place. Check your main website home page and be sure no funny code or characters are showing up to be sure you formatted them correctly.

That’s all there is to it. In my next post we are going to talk about how to actually submit your website to all of the major search engines, so get ready for it!

Now that we have our WordPress blog installed it’s time to start filling that baby up with some keyword rich content! If you have never written anything before, don’t be scared. Writing is fun when it’s something you enjoy talking about and know quite a bit about.

On the first day of this challenge we talked about a program called Market Samurai and how I use it to determine topics for my content niche blogs. This program shows me related keywords to the content subject so that I have a handy list I can refer back to at anytime when I am writing so that I can be sure that the articles I write are filled with my keywords so the search engines like them. In the end the goal is to create information rich content that our readers find interesting and that the search engines like enough to put us near the top of search results.

The articles you use on your content niche website can be written by you as an original piece, written by you as a sourced article, given by a guest blogger or one of several other ways of obtaining information for your website. However, to get started we are going to focus on writing the content ourselves. This way we know it’s unique, it’s written with keywords in mind and we have total control over it.

If you have Market Samurai you can use the “Find Content” module within it to find sourced content that you can use as an information base for your own unique articles. A quick note, I would like to mention regarding writing from sourced content: Do not ever copy and paste any article in whole or in part and claim it as your own and if you do use copy from a source, ensure to give credit to the author. This is just common sense guys and good practice. What I am talking about here is reading articles or websites written by other people and retaining the information to help you write your own articles. For example, if you need to write an article about “How to take care of a cactus plant” you may not know every detail on the matter, so you might go look up tips and ideas from other people. You don’t want to copy them word for word, but there is nothing wrong with rewording ideas from memory to include in your own article.

On the flip side, you may have a head full of information on the subject you are writing about and don’t need to research anything. If that is the case, write away like mad and just follow a few simple writing tips.

• Your first paragraph should be clear, concise and explain exactly what the rest of the article is about.
• Keep paragraphs short. It’s easier to retain smaller amounts of information and with more white space your eyes (and your readers’ eyes) will thank you.
• Ensure that your title, subject line or heading contains 1 or 2 of your keywords and also attracts the reader to actually want to find out more information about what you wrote.
• When you are outlining points, be sure to use bullets to separate out your ideas.
• Keep your topic focused on one specific topic. If you have more related ideas, write another article.
• Give lots of examples and tell stories if you have one that supports what you are writing. This will help backup your points but also may relate to your readers on a higher level.
• Give your readers lots of resources including books, website links and any other information that they can get themselves to support what you wrote.

End the day today by posting your very first keyword rich article on your blog. Be sure to define a category for every article you post so that they can be easily found at a later date if someone searches your website for something specific. Don’t forget to include an image with your blog posts if you can find one to go with it.