I just got done reviewing Charles Kirkland WordPress Codebreaker, a new product that just hit the market so I thought while the thoughts are fresh and my notes are not shuffled to the bottom of my to do list, I would post my initial reactions here.

I apologize that this is not going to be a full “formal” review but I think I have a couple important thoughts that I wanted to capture.

First, I’ll point out that this product is all video based and perfect for the beginner wanna be blogger- I mean really perfect, and the price? For under $40.00 someone will be given the step by step blueprint to how to set up a blog, one video at a time… you can’t pay a virtual assistant that cheap to do it for you.

Like I said, I’ll go into more depth later on but here are what I consider a couple of my biggest take aways after watching all the videos:

• This really is soup to nuts on how to set up a blog start to finish
• The videos are all screen captures so you don’t miss anything
• The common steps that are taken for granted like how to ftp, how to set up feedburner, how to do SEO on your blog, even how to find content and actually make your blog posts!
• How to upgrade your WordPress from one version to another in a series of about 8 videos. Very helpful especially since I “heard” that the WP automatic upgrade plugin will not work on future versions of WordPress….(I have not investigated the truth of that)
• ADSENSE! These videos go into the best Adsense tips to get the most out of your blog if you are using that as your $$ strategy.
• How to make more money with your blogroll- brilliant strategy that I will try out myself!

Who would I recommend this product for? Anyone that is new to blogging and wants to learn how to do everything from start to finish from changing themes to installing MyBlogLog. You can check out my thoughts on MyBlogLog in my earlier post here.

This would also be great for anyone that isn’t a techy geek but is interested in adding an additional revenue stream or just making money flipping blogs, this is a very small investment that would pay for itself.  Blog flipping is a simple business model and you could easily make $100.00 or more in 24 hours with all free tools and not having any additional skills then what is shown in these videos.
So there you have it, my totally off the cuff, first thoughts after watching all the videos in the WordPress Codebreaker. Even after I have set up many, many blogs myself I still learned some golden nuggets in these videos. I highly suggest you check it out!

Still not sure? Get your FREE WordPress videos now… Click here!

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Charles Kirkland WordPress Codebreaker Review

Many small business owners focus on search engine optimization and paid advertising for their website traffic tactics. However, they forget that even Press Releases can bring a surge of new visitors, media opportunities and back links to their websites.

Today I created a Press Release following the Patrick Pretty PDF Press Release strategy. Check out the MBC Work At Home Tips Press Release and tell me what you think!

If you struggle with your Press Releases, I highly recommend the following resources:

Patrick Pretty
http://moms-business-coach.com/recommends/patrickpretty

Publicity Hound
http://moms-business-coach.com/recommends/publicityhound

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

How Many Website Traffic Tactics Are You Using?

The must have tool of your weekend, the “Website Grader”. Quick, do it now, before you run out the door to start your weekend go visit the useful HubSpot site. This is a site that was recommended to me during last weekends Tweet Up in Boston, and now I’m spreading the word to you.

It’s super easy and fast and will do all your analyzing for you!

When you get to the front page at the top of the screen you will see the Website Grader button. All you need to do is click that, enter your URL AND any of your competitors URLs and you will get back some incredible data.

As they state on their site about the grade your website gets, “A website grade of 99/100 for www.hubspot.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 99% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

The software is constantly being upgraded and the algorithm enhanced. The number of potential recommendations provided by the tool is also increasing frequently. Please check back often.”

The report you get on your URL will include,

• Meta Tag
• Heading Summary
• Image Summary
• Interior Page Analysis
• Readability

Even better you will see more details about your Blog, off page SEO, Social Web 2.0 sites and Competition.

When you are done, they will email you a report of your data. Download their free Internet Marketing kit and you will get ideas and tips for any area that you may be weak in.

It’s all free so please take advantage of this great resource. Oh, I did I mention they have a Press Release Grader too? Check them out- HubSpot.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

What Did You Get for a Grade?

People often overlook the classic use of images for search engine optimization strategies. How are your images labeled? Do you see that the spider bots are hitting your images in your website stats?

I know it’s important to label your images, but did you know that Google has a spot that you can go and feel like you are playing a game while you help them provide the most accurate labels for the images in their index?

Check out the Google Image Label page and you will be given a page, paired up with another user and given one image at a time while the clock ticks away.

Why? They have you and the partner “compete” against eachother to come up with as many names and labels as you can for the image you they are showing you. If you both choose the same image, you win points! A virtual video game that does Google’s work for them!

While it sounds easy, I have to say, it really is not but it did have an addictive feature to it and I was ashamed that I hit “PASS” more then once. However, it’s a good page to check out and I bet you won’t upload or use another image the same way after you play for 2 minutes!

Now, go check out your site, check your image names and alternate text and titles, be practical please and don’t keyword stuff- be accurate and complete and don’t have images that say image1 that doesn’t say anything.

Do a Google search in Google Images and see if your image even shows up… hmmm is that a watermark with your URL I see on that image?????? Why, isn’t that a clever way to send someone directly to your URL when they are shown a picture of something they were looking for…..

Especially if you go to the Google home page and see the number of images that show up in the actual search results.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Do You Use Google Images?

Image by confusedvision via Flickr

Tip of The Day

Anchor Text Code can be used in your blog posts, web pages, forum posts, social networking sites, basically anywhere that a little basic html code is allowed. If you don’t have this code in your notepad on your desktop yet, quick, copy and paste it there now so you have it ready the next time you need it.

<a href=”http://www.yoururl.com” target=”_blank”><b>your keyword</b></a>

Don’t forget about the deep links and make sure you link to other key pages in your website and not only your home page.

For example: I could use

<a href=”http://www.tubbybundle.com/catalog.htm?item=3&ret=catalog.htm” target=”_blank”><b>Sports Baby Towels</b></a>

When I copy and paste the above into html tab of my WordPress blog it looks like this:

Sports Baby Towels make excellent new dad baby gifts that help dad bond with baby during one on one bath time while giving mom a break.

I added some text around the keyword since you don’t want to it to look like a pure keyword stuff but have some meaning.

Why use Anchor Text Code?

If you look at the example above, the Anchor Text actually stands out from the rest of the text showing that it is hyperlinked, or that if you click on it you will go to another page. Anchor text has great SEO (search engine optimization) properties by telling the search spiders exactly what the content is of the page your linking to what tells more to a person and/or search spider “Click Here” or “Sports Baby Towel” I’m telling you where you are going and what the content of that page is with “Sports Baby Towel”. It’s like I’m holding your hand and I’m going to show you a page with sports baby towels…

So, copy and paste the code, do your keyword research and establish a core list of keywords with their appropriate webpages to link to and then use those in your forum postings, web 2.0 proporties and so forth.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Anchor Text Code

“..part of SEO is to attract the spiders.  I know that making changes on your site attracts them to come back and check out the changes.  To what extent do changes need to be made?  In other words, does that mean that full paragraphs of text need to be changed frequently on each page of your site, or is it more behind the scenes, like with titles, keywords, etc?  Common sense is telling me it is the visible text that ‘customers’ may see, but I can’t understand how to continually change all the text on my site.
To sum up…my question is really how much needs to be continually changed in order to attract the google-bots and other spiders?”

Answer:

As with any SEO question you can get as technical as you want, but I like to keep it short and practical, so in a nutshell;  It’s more then just changing text it’s adding content.

Go back to your keyword list and pull out your long tail keywords and add a page of information, like an article, for each of your keywords. Just think of how your site will grow if you add one article a week to your site focused on your keyword or topic. That’s an extra 52 pages that you can have “floating” around the internet and showing up in search engines that people can use as a front door to find you.

Of course, I’m not saying never change your base content, you should always keep testing and tracking and tweaking the content on your base pages for conversion purposes.

However, writing an article that is 400-600 words long should only take you 1/2 hour of work and less then that once you get used to the format.

Add linking to your other pages within the article to help the spiders effectively move around all your pages. An easy swipe line for doing is adding a line such as “As I stated in my earlier article, 5 Tips for SEO, print out your list of keywords and use those for your content base”

Let’s pause for a moment and look at this tactic:

1. I referenced you to an earlier article I wrote- keeping you on my site longer
2. I created an anchor text link that spiders will be attracted to with my keyword in it
3. I created a gateway for spiders to move from one page to another since they will follow the url
4. I added more value to you as a reader by giving you more information you were looking for, understanding SEO.

Blogging As A Free Marketing Tool

Installing a WordPress blog (remember that’s free too) on your host account, attracts spiders to your site because it’s always giving fresh content. Spiders don’t see free WordPress.com or Blogger blogs as adding to YOUR site, but to WORDPRESS.com. Even if you have a link to the free blog site from your website, they live on different IP addresses so the most it will do is follow the URL. For more information on free blogs vs self-hosted blogs you can check out, 5 Reasons You Should Host Your Blog.

The extra benefit of using a self-hosted blog, is the fact you can schedule your post. This cuts your time by allowing you to spend a few hours with your keyword list, create your articles and load them and have them scheduled to go out on certain days automatically. You can do it once a month and not think about it again.

Back to the nutshell, there is your 2 choices, add an article page to your site every week or install the free WordPress.org on your host and post every week and use this tool for passive income in addition to fresh content made easy.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Quick Question Tuesday- SEO, Spiders, Content

For most themes, when you blog you will end up with anywhere from 3 to 10 blog posts on one page. This allows new readers to easily scan your posts and find topics of interest to them.

You can easily make these post summaries by adding the <!–more–> tag where you want the text to break and readers will see the “click here to continue” or “read more”. WordPress makes it one step easier by including the more code under the HTML tab so you can insert it with one click.

However, some WordPress Themes do not permalink the blog post titles to the actual single page post and the only way to get to the single post is by clicking on that more link.  I personally find this frustrating.

My current theme does not allow for the title link so I decided to hunt down and change this by once again hacking up the theme files.  I was happy to find that it took one piece of cutting and pasting code that I found at this very helpful website,Lorelle on WordPress.  I know the same information is in the WordPress codex but for some reason, I found it easier to understand on the above site.

I then went to my dashboard – design- theme editor and opened my index file.

I copied the following piece of code from the above website

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title('<h2>', '</h2>'); ?></a>

I found the small snippet of title code in my index theme and pasted the above code over it. Of course- before making any changes to your theme code, I always recommend you back it up or simply copy the code and paste it into notepad so that if something goes horribly wrong you can paste the original code back.

However, with that simple little five minute fix (that took me an hour to find) my post titles are now linked to their respective single post page. Voila!  It looks like I know PHP… but really I’m only copying and pasting.. even you can do it!

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

How To Make Your Post Title Link To Single Post

The last option is my personal preference and I created a list of 5 of my top reason why.

The Big 5

* If you have a blog hosted on your domain, you have control over everything about your blog. You can have your own layout and design for your blog, which means you can have a blog that matches your website logo. You can make your blog as unique as you want. This gives you an edge against other competing blogs in the same niche which may have similar layouts. You also have complete freedom to do anything you want with your blog. By hosting your blog on your domain, you can control your blog in many ways you want and you can add any features you want.

* By hosting your blog on your domain name, you make it easier for people to remember your blog.

* Hosting your blog on your domain means that you can develop and promote your own brand using your blog. You can make your blog headings similar to your website. In terms of search engine optimization (SEO) and advertising, this is very important because you will be advertising and optimizing your own domain and your own brand. SEO is also effective to do with your own domain name that includes your keywords. This will increase your blog’s visibility on search engines.

* By hosting your blog on your website, you have added security. This means that you don’t have to worry about losing your information or getting locked out of your account.

* You present a professional image by having your online business logo on your blog. This gives you ad edge against other competing website or blogs.

Based on the advantages outlined above, if you are serious about your online business, you must consider hosting your blog on your own domain.
Don’t Make Excuses

I know you are yelling at the computer right now that you don’t php from css to ftp so you can’t possibly create your own blog. Yes, it is easier to head over to Blogger and enter your email and your name and be blogging away within 10 minutes. But think of all the opportunities you are missing… and risking….

If you order a hosting package from some of the bigger hosting companies you can easily re-coup the small hosting fee you are paying with all the different ways you can monetize a blog with good traffic.

Good traffic that you can build using all the super cool tricks and plugins that only a self hosted blog will produce.

If you are still afraid of not being technical enough to load a blog you can pay someone a small fee to install and optimize your blog for you (like Moms Business Coach), a small investment in your automatic monthly income or follow a very short, step by step process that most hosting companies make so easy!

I recommend my host provider, I had my blog installed in under 10 minutes!

http://moms-business-coach.com/recommends/bluehost

Go Ahead, take a leap and if you have questions just let me know- we’ll help you out!

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

5 Reasons You Should Host Your Own Blog