The Smart Passive Income Blog » website design

Are You Optimizing Your 404 Page? Yes, Your 404 Page.

Pat — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:25:15 +0000

When you visit a non-existent URL on a website, you’ll often come face to face with an error similar to the following:

“Oops! We couldn’t find what you were looking for.”

or…

“Page not found.”

What you’re actually seeing when you come across this error is the “404 Page”, which is a page that your browser goes to when the page you were looking for was – well – not found.

Common reasons for landing on a 404 page include:

A misplaced letter or misspelled word in the URL when typing manually into the browser’s address bar.
A misplaced letter or misspelled word in an existing link.
The link or URL is typed correctly, but the page just no longer exists (aka. broken link)
A redirection error.

Whatever the path may be, when people land on your 404 Page they will most likely exit your site.

It’s sad, but true. People are spoiled, especially when it comes to searching and surfing online, so when they don’t immediately find what they’re looking for – it’s on to the next thing like there’s no tomorrow.

However, there are things we can do as website owners, bloggers and internet entrepreneurs to decrease the chances of people leaving our sites when they do reach a 404 Page, which I’ll outline for you below.

How to Optimize Your 404 Page

Before anything, you should take all the necessary precautions to make sure your links are all typed in correctly and that you don’t have any broken links on your site. You can use a tool like Google Webmaster Tools to do help. Even after that, people can still land on your 404 page by mistyping a URL or clicking on a misspelled link from a site other than your own.

On your 404 Page Template itself, there are a number of things you can do:

Include friendly text that clearly mentions that the page they were looking for cannot be found, but that you’re also willing to help them find what they were looking for. Something other than “Page not Found” will really make a difference and get people to engage with you on your page, even though it wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. Then, you can keep them on your site reading content using the stuff below.
Include a search function for the content on your site. It’s always nice to give people an option to search, especially if they were looking for something specific and don’t know where else to go.
Insert your most popular posts. These posts are the most popular for a reason, so they’ll give you the best chance of keeping people on your site.
Insert your most recent posts.
Include the categories or tags of your blog.
Include an opt-in form for a newsletter.
Include an Advertisement or Promotional item – I wouldn’t recommend this, but it is an option. This might work because if the visitor was planning on leaving anyways (because they couldn’t find what they were looking for), you can try to get them to click on an ad or go somewhere else that may help you earn a little bit of cash. I want to keep readers on my site, so this technique is not for me, but I just wanted to throw it out there for you.

Also, it’s important to make sure you design your 404 page to have a similar style and structure as the rest of your website, so visitors won’t feel like they’ve been kicked off of your site.

Lastly, if you’re slick, you can include a form on your 404 page to report broken links to you.

How Do You Design an Optimized 404 Page?

The easiest and most hassle-free way to optimize your 404 Page would be to outsource it to your web designer, or find someone on Elance or Odesk to do it for you. Simply tell them what you want on the page, and boom – done in less than an hour, if they know what they’re doing.

But, since I know a lot of your are curious or just don’t want to deal with outsourcing, I’m happy to share with you exactly what the code on my own 404 Page template looks like.

If you’re running a WordPress blog, every theme (I believe) has a 404 Template that you can edit, which can be viewed in the Appearance > Editor area, and then looking under Templates on the right hand side:

Typically, it will have code that looks something like this:

This is your plain jane 404 code and it definitely needs an update.

Instead of pasting my own, I’ve attached it here in a text file (in rich text format) so you can download it and use it as you wish. Note that it may or may not work perfectly with yours, because you may have different plugins installed or a different version of WordPress which may affect the code somehow, but whatever you do, if you plan to make changes yourself, please save what you had in a separate text file just in case.

If you want to see my 404 Page live, just add some random text to the end of this post’s url in your browser and press enter.

I won’t mention any specific sites, but I went ahead and tried adding random text onto the ends of other popular sites’ urls, and was surprised to see that not all of the top bloggers and top websites that I visit actually implement this strategy. Many are still using the plain ol’ 404 Page template.

I hope you found this “not-so-common” tip useful! As always, thank you for your support.

If this is your first time visiting this blog, please subscribe to my RSS Feed. Cheers!

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Are You Optimizing Your 404 Page? Yes, Your 404 Page.

How to Not Be a Newbie Blogger When You’re a Newbie Blogger

Pat — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:05:34 +0000

Blogging = survival of the fittest.

It’s seriously a jungle out there, and for newly hatched blogs, it’s even harder to survive.

But, there are a number of things you can do right away as a “hatchling” to immediately gain ground “in the wild” and transform yourself from a newbie, to what may seem like a seasoned pro.

Below is a list of things (big and small) that you can do as a newbie, so you don’t stand out as a newbie.

1. A Professional Looking Domain Name

If you haven’t built your blog yet, I recommend grabbing a domain name and hosting package from a web hosting provider such as Bluehost. You can easily build your blog with their one-click WordPress install (in less than 4 minutes), and you’ll have the benefit of having a professional looking domain name.

So, instead of having something like:

yoursite.wordpress.com or yoursite.blogspot.com

…you’ll simply have:

www.yoursite.com

The free blogs you can setup on wordpress.com and blogspot.com aren’t bad. In fact, there are many successful ones out there – but if you’re planning to be a successful long-term blogger, then you might as well start on a self-hosted site.

2. Update the Favicon For Your Website

A favicon is the little 16×16 icon that appears next to your web address at the top of most browsers, and it sometimes shows up next to the tabs or in the bookmarks section too.

A new blog usually has what looks like a blank sheet of paper, or sometimes it’s your hosting provider’s logo. Either way, it screams “Newbie” to a lot of new visitors. Spend 5 minutes to update your favicon, and it can be a small detail that makes a big impact.

To update your favicon, you’ll need to place a 16×16 pixel icon (named favicon.ico) into your website’s root folder. For WordPress users, that’s directly into your public_html folder. You can create a picture file in Photoshop and simply rename it to favicon.ico, or you can create one easily for yourself on a website such as Favicon.cc.

3. Update Your Permalink Structure

The permalink is the URL that your blog creates when you publish new blog posts. By default, they usually come out looking ugly, like this:

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/?p=123 (where p=123 simply means post #123)

Not cool, and it definitely doesn’t do any good for search engine optimization.

Before you write your first blog post, you should change the permalink settings to simply be the name of the post that you create. For WordPress users, it simply means doing exactly what the picture below shows:

Under Settings > Permalinks, click on Custom Structure, and insert the code below into the Custom Structure field:

/%postname%/

Your ugly URL problem solved, and now you look like you know what you’re doing.

4. Skip the Unnecessary Plugins and Widgets

What’s nice about WordPress is that there are tons of plugins and widgets to choose from that can do a wide variety of things for your blog, which makes customization really simple. The problem with this feature is that a lot of people tend to go overboard.

Not all plugins and widgets are useful. Be conscious about what plugins and widgets you’re placing on your site, and remember that sometimes less is more.

What good does a calendar on a blog do anyways?

5. Do Not Add an RSS Counter

New blogs should never include an RSS counter, because a counter with only 9 subscribers is basically a huge sign that says: “Hi! I’m new at this!”

Leave it out until you have over 100 subscribers (at least), and then you can incorporate it into your blog if you really want it on there. In the meantime, work on your content and making other parts of your blog awesome.

6. Add a Video To Your Blog

A quick and easy way to establish yourself as someone who knows what their doing as a blogger is by adding a video onto your blog, preferably somewhere in your sidebar.

A nicely recorded welcome message, or even a quick tip to share with new visitors can definitely make you stand out from even the more experienced blogs in your niche.

7. Format Your Blog Posts

Newbie bloggers almost always write excellent material. It’s probably because they’re super excited about starting a new blog and the possibilities of what’s ahead.

However, the format of many newbie posts always end up looking the same: a long, undivided post that resembles an essay.

In other words, the posts are lacking headings, subheadings, bold keywords, italics, lists, white space, pictures, charts, diagrams, and even links!

Take a look at some of your favorite blogs, and you can see that most are made up of several different parts, which makes it far easier to read and consume.

It might take a little practice, but if you can start off by writing blog posts with an eye-pleasing format, you’ll be far ahead in the game.

Darren from Problogger.net wrote a fantastic post about how to polish your blog posts, which I definitely recommend you read before you even begin to write your first post.

Tips From SPI Readers

I know I’ve only begun to scratch the surface about how to not blog like a total newbie, so I’m going to pass the baton to many of the SPI readers out there who do have experience with blogging, to hopefully add their own tips too. So please, feel free to leave a comment below with 1 tip that you’d give anyone who wants to start blogging tomorrow.

Cheers!

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How to Not Be a Newbie Blogger When You’re a Newbie Blogger

Content Without Design is Dumb

Pat — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:05:40 +0000

Content is King.

You’ve probably heard this statement before. If not, Wikipedia (yes, Wikipedia) illustrates the idea of “Content is King” as:

“…without original and desirable content…any media venture is likely to fail through lack of appealing content, regardless of other design factors.”

You can have the best-designed, coolest, most functional website around, but without good content, your website (or eBook, course, podcast, video production, etc.) is pretty much useless.

However, please don’t misunderstand the idea here. Design, or presentation is still absolutely necessary.

Design without content is useless, but content without design is dumb.

In other words: design matters.

Design Matters

Perry Belcher is an internet marketing guru. He even has an online button named after himself – The Belcher Button, which I’ve talked about before here on the blog. I’ve watched him, listened to his courses and have implemented a lot of his novel ideas into my own businesses.

There is one thing, however, that he always says in the beginning of many of his audio courses that I always disagree with. He always apologizes for the low quality recordings, and that it really doesn’t matter because it’s the content that counts.

Maybe the poor sound quality doesn’t matter to the people who have already paid for his courses to listen to his content, but in our world (you and me), the quality of our presentation is HUGE. The quality and design of how we present our content can mean the difference between:

A new visitor staying or bouncing.
A regular visitor reader getting excited or bored.
A potential customer buying from you, or instead buying from your competitor.
An existing customer being satisfied, or asking for their money back.

You can have the best content in the world, but without good design or an interesting presentation, your content will generally make little to no impact.

First Impressions

Design and presentation is vital for first impressions. Online, first impressions mean a lot more than you think.

The average person spends about 7 seconds on a single website, which means you have about 7 seconds to make a good first impression on your new visitors, or else they’re going to leave. If you’re got loads of great content, people won’t find it unless you give them a reason to stay.

For Your Website…

This means having a strong visual impact right from the pageload, especially when it comes to what your website is about and exactly what it can do for your visitors. Can you tell exactly what your site is about just from looking at the home page?

This means including something that makes you stand out from the other 200+ websites they visited that day. Why do things the same, when there are an unlimited number of things you can do to be different?

This means not including anything that would turn your new visitors off. What turns you off from websites? Do you do that on your own site?

For eBooks…

This means an awesome, non-generic looking cover.

This means a layout that’s inviting and unlike something like an essay or a report which would turn people off.

For Audio and Visual Media…

This means a strong intro (song or spoken introduction).

This means getting people excited about the show or broadcast by giving them ideas on what to look forward to.

This means high-quality audio recordings or video presentations.

The Higher the Quality, The Better

Any chance you have to make things look or sound better, you should.

A couple of months ago, I was speaking to Cliff from Podcast Answer Man, about some new podcasting equipment that I will be getting very very soon (for the SPI podcast, yay!). Anyways, he was telling me about just how important sound quality is in the podcasting arena. He even told me that The Grammar Girl, who hosts a very successful podcast on iTunes, won’t even give an audio file a 10 second listen if the sound quality is bad, no matter what it is.

I like to think of it like this: you put in the hard work to create the content that you’re about to present, so you’ll want to give it the best chance to succeed, right?

Learning Good Design

Design is a TOUGH thing to learn, and even presentation too. Luckily, I went to school for architecture, which is all about both design and presentation.

That being said, as tough as architecture may sound, it’s really all about common sense, and putting yourself in the shoes of those who you want to read, subscribe, or buy from you. And when common sense isn’t so clear, then it becomes all about trial and error – testing, and honing down on exactly what does work for you.

That’s why since the beginning of this blog, I’ve had 5 redesigns, although I’ve only publicly announced the last two. That’s why I’m still constantly learning, testing and tweaking to make sure that I give my content the best chance of getting noticed. So far, it seems to be working.

If Content is King, then Design is his beautiful Queen that’s there to make him look better.

The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Newsletter

Pat — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:34:57 +0000

At the beginning of the year, I started a newsletter here on SPI and used an eBook I wrote, eBooks the $mart Way, as a free gift to help generate more leads. Three months later, I now have over 2,250 people signed up for the newsletter and it averages about 30 new subscribers a day.

I have no previous email list to compare these numbers with, so I can’t say for sure whether those are stellar numbers, or just average – but either way I’m very happy with the results and would love to share with you how it’s all done, especially for you beginners out there who have been emailing me non-stop about it. I apologize I’ve waited this long to write this post.

What is a Newsletter, and Why Would You Want to Offer One?

Before I get deep into the how-to of building a newsletter, I’d first like to address what a newsletter is, and why you might want to think about offering one for your blog or online business.

For the sake of this post, I’ll be talking only about email newsletters. Many websites, especially those doing hardcore business in a specific niche, offer a print newsletter, which is a fantastic way to keep in contact with customers and subscribers through “snail mail” (mail that is sent to your home address), but that’s a whole different ballgame that I have yet to experience, and it’s probably better suited for a more advanced type of post for the future.

When you setup an email newsletter, you’re offering your audience a way to subscribe to get emails from you that contain informal news or broadcasts that you send out. This is usually in addition to the content that you already have on your blog or online business website, and totally separate from an RSS feed subscription.

Now, you might be wondering: “What’s the point of offering a newsletter subscription to my audience, if they can already subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed?”

Good question.

The short answer is: the email list.

By offering a subscription to your newsletter, you’re giving yourself the ability to capture email addresses, which is something that you cannot do with an RSS feed. It’s important to capture email addresses because:

It’s a great way to communicate with your audience on a more personal level. There’s just something about receiving an email from somebody that makes it extremely effective at getting a point across, or making people take some kind of action.
An email list will never die. In other words, if you have an email list, you will always have a way to communicate with your audience. Blogs and websites can die. RSS readers and feed subscription services could vanish. But, those email addresses will never change and you can always keep your audience informed of what you’re up to, even if you go completely off the radar.
It’s where the money is.

Regarding #3, you may or may not have heard this expression before: “The Money is in the List.”

It’s an expression that has been used in the internet marketing industry since the birth of email (or “snail mail” for that matter), because it’s true. However, you have to be careful if you’re going to try and use your email list to make money online.

Like with any platform that you use to communicate with people (blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), the moment that you start to become “all about the money” is the moment that you might will end up losing credibility (and the respect) of your followers. That’s why I make sure that in whatever I do online, helping and informing people come first. I’m speaking from experience when I sat that if you can make your primary goal helping others, the money will come your way.

Online karma does exist.

Does it Have to Be a Newsletter?

You can setup an opt-in form to capture email addresses on your website and only email your subscribers when you need to – but let me tell you why I think this is a bad idea.

Imagine signing up for my free eBook and never hearing from me again until months later, when you finally get an email from me promoting some kind of product. You will probably do one of the following:

Forget who I was and think my email is spam.
Unsubscribe from the list because you’d realize that there’s really no point of being on it.
All of the above.

What you write in your emails doesn’t have to be “news”- it can be anything really. But, it’s important that you consistently contact your subscribers and provide them with some kind of useful information in order to keep them around. All it takes is one click to unsubscribe from your list.

What’s the Difference Between RSS Email Subscription and the Newsletter Subscription?

This is actually the most common question that I get about newsletters and email subscriptions, so I’m happy to finally address here on the blog publicly.

The RSS Email Subscription (through services such as FeedBlitz, which is something you can setup within your FeedBurner account) is a way for your readers to get your blog posts (and only your blog posts) emailed to them. This is convenient for many people, especially those who work 9 to 5 who like to catch up with their favorite websites at work, who are unable to use a standard RSS feed reader. Here on the SPI blog, I have this option in a link at the upper right hand corner of the page.

The newsletter subscription is totally separate from the content of your blog. With it, you have the ability to email your subscribers whatever you want, whenever you want. Again, it’s a more personal way to communicate with your readers and you can utilize that ability for marketing your own products, affiliate products, or just simply driving traffic. The possibilities are endless.

Yes – people will have to sign up twice if they want your blog content and newsletter both sent to their email. And even though many email list services have the ability to send out broadcasts that contain your blog’s RSS feed, I’d much rather keep those things separate so that people can have the freedom to choose how exactly they want to receive your content.

Now that I believe I’ve answered most of your questions, let’s get down to business…

How To Start Your Own Newsletter Subscription

Understanding the Process

First, it’s good to know exactly what happens once someone signs up through a form on your site. Here’s a diagram below that outlines everything that should happen:

As you can see, there’s quite a bit involved, but I’ll help you through the entire process below. Please note that rectangles represent webpages, and circles represent emails.

Step One: Signup For an Aweber Account

You have many options when it comes to signing up with an email marketing service, but Aweber is by far the best in my opinion. I use it and have been really impressed with the ease of use and quality of customer service. In fact, the other day I sent them an email about a small issue I was having, and they immediately solved the issue and 4 days letter I get a postcard in the mail thanking me for contacting them and being a customer.

Aweber is definitely the way to go.

Also, you have the ability to manage several lists from different websites under the same account, if you choose to do so.

Step 2: Setup Your First Email List

After you register for your account and sign in, you’ll be taken to your control panel. Now, we need to setup your list.

First, click on “create and manage” lists:

Second, fill in the settings for your list. The “From” Name:, and “Address” are all things that your newsletter subscribers will see when they get your emails. The “List Name” and the “List Description” are mainly for you for organizational purposes.

Lastly, the “Contact Address” is the address that is in your account settings. It will be shown at the bottom of each of your emails, as required by law (the CAN-SPAM Act). If you’re on my email list, you can see this address at the bottom of my emails, which is my business address. If you don’t have a business address, that’s okay – you can simply insert your home address, but just know that whenever you send an email to your subscribers, your address will show up – so you may want to use an address other than your home address if possible.

Step 3: Setup Your Confirmed Opt-In Email

A confirmed opt-in email is an email that gets sent to people immediately after they subscribe to your newsletter. This email contains a link that is used to confirm that the person is indeed a human and is someone who is interested in joining your list. Also, it helps you make sure that the email address that they entered is valid, and not a fake one that they used just to grab a hold of whatever freebie you might have to offer.

You are given the option to turn this feature off, but it is not recommended for the reasons mentioned above.

This email is usually already pre-written for you, but you can customize it a little if you wish, just to make it a little bit more personable. Here is a snapshot of mine below:

You may have noticed at the top of the email a piece of code that look like this:

{!name}

This is code that can be inserted into any of your emails (both in the subject line and in the body), which will automatically convert into the person’s name who you are sending an email to. In fact, there are several different types of codes that convert into various kinds of text. You can normally find a drop-down menu with all of your options next to the field where you are writing your emails, which look like this:

And here is a link that shows us all of the variables and what each piece of code converts to.

Moving on…

Step 4: Set Up Your Success Page

Below where you customize your confirmation message, you’ll see an area marked “Success Page”. This is where you insert a URL back to your website which is exactly where your subscribers will be taken after they click the confirmation link in the email (Thank You Page #2 in the Diagram):

On this page, which you’ll have to create on your own website/blog first, you can do a number of things:

Thank the person for their confirmation.
Welcome them to your newsletter, and announce that they will be shortly receiving an email from you.
If you’re giving away something like an eBook, for example, you can let them know that links to their gift will be included in the next email.
You can ask your new subscriber to “white list” your email address so it will not be blocked by spam filters.
You can provide a way to easily contact you in case they have any issues regarding your newsletter.
Advanced: This is also a great opportunity to add in an offer for either a product that you already have for sale, or an affiliate product related to your niche.

If you’re interested, here is my Success Page.

Note: The “pass subscriber info (for personalizing this page)” option you see is an advanced option that allows you to insert certain pieces of code on your own website that can convert into things like the subscriber’s name, for example.

Note #2: Thank You Page #1 as shown in the diagram is setup when you create a web form that you insert onto your webpage. I’ll talk more about this in a second.

Understanding “Follow Up” Messages

A followup message is a pre-written email that gets sent out to your subscribers. The first one is always a welcome email that is sent out immediately after they click the confirmation link in the first email that they receive. An unlimited amount of additional followup messages can be pre-written and setup to be sent out in certain time intervals that you can customize. This is where the term “autoresponder” comes from, because after new subscribers sign up for your list, they are automatically sent the series of followup emails that you create in the time interval that you set.

So for example, I have about 15 pre-written emails with killer content that are timed to be sent out every 7 days. It doesn’t matter when you sign up, you’ll be taken though the series of emails from the beginning. I add about 1 new followup message every week, just to keep content fresh and expand my “autoresponder series”.

To create your Welcome Email and any additional followup messages, you can simply hover over the “Messages” bar at the top, and click on “Follow Up”, and then click on “Add New Followup Message”:

Step 5: Writing Your Welcome Message (Follow Up #1)

Your first followup message is always sent out immediately after subscribing, so it’s always good to put some kind of welcome message within this email. In it, you might want to include:

A formal welcome and thank you for signing up for your newsletter.
Any links to any freebies that you might be giving away.
What to expect in the newsletter (i.e, what your subscribers have to look forward to).
Again asking your subscribers to “white list” your email address.
A way to contact you.

You can add other things if you’d like, but as far as a welcome email followup message goes, those things are pretty standard.

Now, when you write your first followup message, you’ll notice that you have the option of writing an email in html format, or plain text format:

Aweber recommends writing your emails in plain text, because plain text emails can be read by those who cannot receive html messages. However, I’ve ran split tests before and the open rate (the percentage of emails that you send out that get opened) are virtually the same. This is why I choose to write HTML Messages instead, because I have a lot more options to dazzle up my emails.

When I say “dazzle” up, I simply mean having the ability to make words bold or italic and underlined, which you cannot do in plain text format. You also have the ability to add color and even some fancy looking templates with html, but I don’t want my emails to look like a newsletter you’d subscribe to from a retail store.

It’s really up to you though.

Step 6: Send Yourself a Test Message

After you finish writing any email, you should always send yourself a test message first so you can see exactly what your subscribers are receiving from you, and so you can re-read your emails and check for any errors too.

After you save your messages, you’ll be shown a screen that lists all of the messages you have in your autoresponder series. To the right of each message, you’ll see the following options:

The “Spam?” number you see there is a rating that is given to each of your emails that show you how “spammy” your email is. It’s based on a number of things, including some of the words you write in your email, as well as the number of links you include (and what they link to), but if you write an honest email, even if it includes a few links, you should no problems at all. A high score will be a good indicator that your email may be blocked by some your subscribers’ email programs.

When you click on “Test”, you’ll have the ability to send a test email to any email address that you want. If after you receive your email you want to update or change a few things, you can always go back and click on your message to edit it. Make sure you save it for any changes to actually take place.

Step 7: Setting Up Your Opt-In / Web Form

The web form is the form that you will place on your blog or website to collect email addresses. The one you see here on SPI was custom built for me by my web designers, but you can actually customize really well using the built in web form builder within Aweber.

Click on “Web Form” at the top, and then “Create Web Form”:

This will load a “web form generator”, which gives you the ability to choose from several options, fonts, colors, etc. to create your own form. You can play around with this until you finally come up with a design that you like. Remember where you will be placing this opt-in form on your website, as this will have an impact on the size of the form that you create.

Many people, including myself, choose to place an opt-in form in the sidebar, mainly because it gets shown on every single page. However, you can create multiple web forms for several different pages of your site, like the one I created on the page where I explain more about my eBook.

Typically, people collect just the name and email address of the subscribers, although depending on what you do and what niche you’re in, you can add different fields, including phone number, address, or any customized field that you’d like. Some people don’t even grab the names, and simply ask for an email address, although if you do this you won’t have the ability to use the {!name} code for personalizing your emails, which we talked about earlier.

Additional Tip: The default text within the submit button is simply “submit”. I recommend changing this text to something better that either tells your potential subscribers what they are getting, or is an actual call to action. For example, on my own buttons I have “Free Instant Access”, because it’s describing the free access you get to my eBook.

The Settings

After you’re happy with your web form design, you’ll need to customize your settings. Under the settings tab, you’ll see the following screen:

The Form Name is a unique name for the specific form you just created. This is mainly to help you keep track of each of the forms you create.

The Thank You Page is the “Thank You Page #1″ that is in the diagram that I showed you earlier. This is the page that people arrive at immediately after clicking on the “submit button” while the confirmation email is being sent to them at the same time.

You have 5 options of what you want to happen to your subscribers at this point:

The first three options are pages on Aweber that they’ve created for our convenience. They each let the subscriber know that an email will be sent to them that contains a confirmation link that they must click in order to subscribe to the newsletter. The Audio and “Smart” Video Versions are cool because they tell the user exactly what to expect and what links to click, so there is no confusion. However, understand that many people may not be able to listen to audio, or may not have the ability to watch a video (i.e., people subscribing while at work who have restrictions on internet access).

I choose to use a Custom Page because it keeps the subscriber on my site. Here is what you should include on this page:

A short note that a confirmation email has been sent to them that contains a link that they must click.
You can include pictures of what the link will look like, just to avoid any confusion.
What to expect after they click the confirmation link in the email.
A notice to “white list” your email address so their spam filters will not block your emails.
Advanced: This is again a great opportunity to add in an offer for either a product that you already have for sale, or an affiliate product related to your niche.

What you decide to happen to your subscribers at this point is really up to you.

The Code

After you design your web form and finish with the settings, you’ll need to grab the piece of code that you insert onto your website that will show the form to your visitors. It’s not as hard as you probably think.

Under the Publish tab, in “I Will Install My Form”, you can either grab the Javascript Snippet, or the Raw HTML Version of the code. It’s much easier to copy the javascript snippet because if you go back into Aweber and change your form, it will automatically update on your website. Also, you can keep track of statistics like impressions and signups easier too.

Here is a screenshot of what this screen looks like:

You can see the code above which starts with “

51 Blogging and Online Marketing Tips for the New Year

Pat — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:01:18 +0000

Here are 51 blogging and internet marketing tips that you can use as inspiration for the upcoming year.

Mindset

1. Revisit your goals. Take a moment and rewrite your goals. You may find that they may have changed since the last time you really took a good look at them. If you don’t have any goals, than what are you working towards?

2. Remember where you were. Where was your online business or blog at one year ago? Are you seeing any improvements? If yes, be proud of how far you’ve come along and the fact that you haven’t given up. If you haven’t seen any improvements, why do you think that is?

3. You can always do a little bit more. If you’re up to it, try this 2-step exercise:

Raise your hand as high as you can.
Raise your hand even higher.

If you do this exercise, you’ll notice that you can always stretch your hand a little higher, even though you were told to put it as high as you can at first. When I did this exercise as a teenager, it changed how I thought about everything I did after that moment. It made me realize that I can always do a little bit more. Apply this to what you do online.

4. Take action. As I mentioned in my first law of business and success, every business in a state of motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. With that in mind, you can read and get inspired all you want, but nothing will happen unless you take action. Become the external force that is required to get your blog, business and life to exactly where you want it to be.

5. Flaunt your unique. In other words, know what makes you stand out from the crowd, and milk it. In order to succeed, especially online, you can’t blend in and just be another blog or website that talks about X. Your site can still be about X, but you should be one of the only ones that does Y, or Z.

6. No fear. Fear kills progress, and it kills business. When you’re reluctant to take an action or do something new, take a minute and think to yourself, “what’s the worst that can really happen?”. The worst usually isn’t as bad as you might think.

7. Failing is okay. We all want to succeed, but we shouldn’t ever be afraid of failing. Failing is part of the process and teaches us valuable lessons along the way. Learn from your mistakes, and improve on your next attempt.

8. Don’t work more, work smarter. When we think of putting in the extra mile to get things done, we often think that means just putting in more hours of work. Instead, think of ways that you can work smarter, which will accomplish the same (or even more), in a considerably less amount of time. It may take a small investment of time in the beginning to figure out how to work smarter, but you’ll make up for that time (and stress) soon enough.

9. Give back. I truly believe in “online karma”. The more you help others and the more you give back, the more success you will find. If your primary motivation is just to make as much money as you can and do things just for yourself, you’re only going to see a limited amount of success, if any.

10. Just freakin’ enjoy what you’re doing! If you enjoy what you’re doing, it doesn’t become work anymore. You’ll accomplish more, and be happier. If you’re not doing something you enjoy, why not?

Blog Content

11. Be consistent. Write new content on a schedule. Whether it’s once a week, three times a week, or every day – pick a frequency and stick with it. It will not only help your readers know when to expect a new blog post, but it will help you consistently put content out there that Google will crawl to improve your site’s ranking and authority.

12. Be different. In most niches, there are a number of blogs talking about the same thing. Like I mentioned in tip #5, if you do what everyone else is doing, and talk about what everyone else is talking about, you’re just going to blend in. Give people a reason to notice your blog over the rest.

13. Use keywords in your title. It’s cool to have a clever title, but it’s inefficient to leave out important keywords. One of the top things the search engines look at when determining how relevant your site is to certain keywords is the title of your post. This is why so many bloggers who understand search engine optimization rank higher in the search engines for topics that online newspapers and companies write about, because they are so concerned about catchy headlines, with no keywords.

14. Use relevant anchor text for your links. When linking to another website or blog within your posts, don’t link to them in words like “click here for…”, or “which you can read here.” Use the phrases or keywords that are relevant to what you’re writing about. As far as SEO is concerned, it will help you a little, but for the websites you’re linking to, it will help a lot. It’s good practice.

15. Break up your post with different text styles. If you write an entire blog post in the same text the entire way through, it’s going to be difficult to read and hard to scan. Use different sized headers, bullet points, and numbered lists to separate your content and make it easier for your readers to consume.

16. Emphasize parts of your content with different text styles. If there’s a particular word or phrase within your paragraphs that you’d like to emphasize, make it bold or italic so your points are even more pronounced.

17. Use stories. People love stories because they can connect and relate to them. It makes what you’re writing about more real, and it often serves as proof for your points as well. Are you just telling people what to do, or are you illustrating how it worked for you? I believe that my internet success story is part of the reason why I’ve been able to amass a considerable amount of subscribers in such a short period of time.

18. Use data. Other people are more attracted to data and logic, rather than stories. Support your content with raw data, and your arguments will seem that much more believable. I use data all of the time, for example when I talk about my success from writing on eHow.

19. Write for your readers, not yourself. Unless you have a strictly personal blog, one of the biggest mistakes you can make while writing content is writing for yourself. Your audience should be your first priority, and you should do what you can to write about topics they are interested in. In the process, you’ll get more comments, more subscribers, and have more people linking back to you as well. Now who doesn’t want that?

20. Enjoy what you write! Believe me when I say that your readers can tell when you are just trying to finish a blog post versus really enjoying the writing process and having fun with it. I hope you can tell that I’m having fun writing this one

Blog Design

21. Perform the squint test. Go to your blog’s homepage and squint. By doing this, you’ll notice which parts of your design stand out the most. If the things you notice first aren’t the most important pieces of your website (featured content, opt-in/subscriber areas, about, etc.), then you have have to redesign a little. Advertisements are okay, as long as they aren’t the very first thing people notice (in which case, they’ll probably leave).

22. Work on your blog’s “elevator pitch”. Can new visitors to your blog understand exactly what your site is about in the first 10 seconds without clicking on anything? If they can’t, then more than 70-75% of people will leave almost immediately. In your web stats and analytics, check your “bounce rate”, which is the percentage of people who visit your site that leave without taking any action. To improve your bounce rate, work on your tagline and/or include an “about me” area on the homepage.

23. Make it easy for people to subscribe. People are lazy, so the more searching, clicking, and scrolling have to do before they can subscribe, the more chances they have to skedaddle. (I love that word.) Put your RSS feed button (and any other buttons you want them to click on) on the homepage, above the fold, at the top where it can easily be found.

24. Avoid clutter. I know you’re trying to make a buck with all of those advertisements and affiliate links, but seriously – there is a thing as too much clutter. People are becoming smarter and smarter as more and more people go online these days. They aren’t just going to click random ads that blink, turn and twist anymore. Keep your site clean, and people will be more likely to stick around and respond to what you have to say.

25. Show yourself! If you’re hiding behind a logo, or even a caricature, I can’t help but wonder why. Your blog is yours, and you shouldn’t be afraid of showing your face. If your blog took off and you were asked to do an interview for a television station, would you hide your face behind a cardboard cutout of your logo or a caricature during the broadcast? You want your blog to take off, don’t you?

Getting Noticed

26. Comment on more blogs. Find other blogs in your niche and leave useful, insightful comments on posts that interest you. You probably comment on a few already, but look for other “rising star” blogs that seems like it has good content. Many of these blogs will appreciate your comments and begin to notice who you are. Kind of like how I’ve started to notice Howie, Ms. Freeman, and Azad on mine. Thanks guys!

27. Write guest posts for other blogs. This is probably the best technique for getting lots of traffic and subscribers, in the shortest amount of time. Write a killer blog post on other blogs in your niche, and you’ll begin to become a part of the network and community yourself. In addition, you get some nice search engine love from any links back to your own site, which most host blogs of your guest posts will allow.

28. Participate in forums related to your niche. Here’s a quick tip. Type in “forums:keyword” into Google, and you’ll see a number of forums related to your niche, usually listed in the order of most popular at the top. Join them, because part of the community, and be sure to include your link in your signature so people can click over to your site. If you become a knowledgeable authority for a particular topic in the forum, chances are people will head to your blog for answers too.

29. Do interviews. There are tons of people who host shows and podcasts, and some of them are probably related to your niche. Contact the hosts (contact info is usually on their main page, their itunes page, or through a voicemail line in their show), tell them a little bit about yourself, and offer to do an interview if they are in need of content for a show. Now, you will be speaking live to this person and they will be asking you questions, so you may have to step out of your comfort zone for a bit. It’s good practice, and again – what’s the worst that can happen? If you have a website about something, you obviously know a lot about it, so don’t be afraid, and get some exposure!

30. Write about something controversial. One way to get noticed is to go against the norm. Not all websites may be fit to do this, but if you can spark up a heated debate, you can get your readers involved and grab some new ones at the same time.

Networking

31. Join a mastermind group. If you hang out and chat with like-minded people with similar goals, you can’t help but improve what you’re doing online. Every mastermind group I’ve been in has been such a blessing, and I attribute a lot of my success to ideas that came directly from those meetings.

32. Utilize meetup.com. Meetup.com is an awesome site where you can type in any topic and find groups of people in your local area who are interested in the same topic, and when and where they meet next. I’ve been to a few meetup.com meetups for “internet business” here in the San Diego area, and I’ve met some great people, all doing different things online. It’s pretty cool!

33. Go to a convention. For almost any topic, there are conventions where mass amounts of people gather who are interested in that topic. For comics and fantasy stuff, we have Comic-Con. For LEED, there’s GreenBuild. For bloggers, there’s the Blog World Expo. Although there are usually speakers and experts who present new ideas, the biggest benefit from attending these conventions is the networking that takes place between the attendees. You can be sure I’ll do my best to buy my ticket for the Blog World Expo next year.

34. Online Groups. Many of you may not live in an area where you have easy access to groups of people interested in what you’re interested in, so a live mastermind group or a meetup.com meeting is out of the picture. But, there are online groups that you can utilize to get your networking on. You can get connected with people in forums related to your niche (see #28, above), you can find groups on yahoo, Facebook, or even pay to join a like-minded community like I do with the Internet Business Mastery Academy.

35. Utilize Social Networks. Social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, are excellent ways to connect with people in your niche. A lot of deals and joint ventures sprouted from connections from within these social networks. If you aren’t utilizing either Twitter or Facebook for your blog or business (or both), why not?

Twitter

36. Get Targeted Followers. So you’re on twitter, and have 10 followers (2 of them happen to be family members). That’s ok. Here’s the trick for getting targeted followers for your niche, if you didn’t know it already. Find a top player in your niche by doing a twitter search, and follow that person’s followers. That’s it. Some of them will automatically follow you back because they have auto-follow on, but others will visit your profile, and if they like what you’ve tweeted so far, and your bio, they will follow you back too.

37. Twitter Bonus Trick. Using the method above, you can use this bonus Twitter trick of mine (3:36 YouTube video) that I use to increase the amount of people who end up following me back.

38. Use a nice, personal photo for your profile picture. If you’re on Twitter and haven’t changed your profile picture yet, you’re using their little default birdie picture, which just screams “PLEASE DON’T FOLLOW ME OR READ ANYTHING I TWEET!”. If you have a logo, that’s better, but most people will respond to you (and click on the links that you tweet), if you have a nice picture of your face.

39. Use a custom Twitter background. If you visit my Twitter profile, you can see a custom twitter background in action. It’s just a background picture, so you can’t have anything clickable on it, but it’s perfect for quickly showing any new visitor to your profile exactly who you are and what you’re about. Some people put all kinds of text in their background, but personally I like to keep it clean and simple. If you’re a designer out there, my background is simply 259?×?1707, and the right edge of the vertical image matches the twitter background, which you can customize as well. One of my favorites is Darren’s from Problogger.

40. Track your links and test your copy. Use a url shortener such at bit.ly, to not only shorten huge urls that you don’t want to eat up your 140 character limit, but also to track the links you tweet as well. Test different kinds of copy each time you tweet any links to see how your particular group of followers responds to each.

Facebook Pages

41. Setup a Facebook page. If you haven’t explored Facebook as an extension for your blog or business yet, I would definitely do that as soon as you can. I don’t want to make any predictions, but I think Facebook has a lot more in store for us as they begin to cater towards businesses and non-personal type accounts. Although everything you need to know about how to setup a Facebook page is already written on my blog, I will reiterate a few important points below.

42. Utilize a Facebook landing page. If you’re trying to get fans for your page and you don’t have a landing page, you’re wasting your time. A landing page will drastically increase the number of people who become fans. Without it, visitors will end up on your “wall”, which is ugly and doesn’t tell people what they have to do. Trust me.

43. Engage in conversations. Because of the way Facebook works, it’s really easy to engage in multiple conversations, with multiple people at the same time. This is why I like Facebook better than Twitter, and the people who click over to your webpage from Facebook generally tend to have a lower bounce rate and stay on the site longer as well. Ask questions, write compelling thoughts, and your audience will respond. Some of the comment strings on my Facebook page are 30-40 comments deep at times.

44. Encourage others to post links and start conversations too. Another cool thing about the Facebook page is that your fans can post links and start their own conversations as well. This is a nice way to reward those who are your fans who may have something to add from their own sites, or who just have questions they need help with. You have full control of what’s shown and what’s not, so if anyone posts something naughty, you can simply remove it from your wall.

45. Don’t get lost in Facebook. Although I love Facebook, it’s really easy to get lost in it, especially if you have a personal account where you can see that your friend from high school has just gotten engaged. Remember, it’s important to engage with your fans, but your blog or website should be your primary focus. It is where you will be linking to from your Facebook page anyways from time to time.

Take it to the Next Level

46. Expand into other forms of media. So you have a blog. Have you ever thought about expanding your content into other media types, such as video, audio, or even going live? If you really want to take yourself to the next level, you’re going to have to branch out. Even just one episode or video a month is great practice.

47. Create information products. So you have a blog. Have you ever thought about expanding your content into information products that you can either giveaway or sell for an extra income? Now’s the time. You can create eBooks, audio, video, or a membership website, all of which are great information products you can use to expand your brand and increase your reputation and authority in your niche.

48. Hire some help. As one person, we can only do so much. Even if we put in more hours and work more efficiently, we’ll eventually reach some kind of plateau. Hire some people to do some of the mundane work that you don’t really enjoying doing to get to that next level. For example, if you spend a lot of time editing and submitting videos, or social bookmarking your blog posts, you can easily find cheap help from places such as Elance.com or oDesk.com to do those kinds of things for you. Soon, you’ll end up with your own virtual assistant team you can go to for anything when you need it.

49. Work 1 hour extra for yourself a day. Maybe you work a 9 to 5 job, maybe you don’t. Either way, try and devote at least an extra hour a day to you and your online business. Yes, finding an extra hour a day may be close to impossible, but if you really want to “crush it”, you’re going to have to hustle and sacrifice a little. Gary Vaynerchuk suggests working in the late hours of the night if you have to, and I totally agree with him. Do what it takes to get to where you want to go. Even just an hour a day would be huge for the growth of what you do online, especially if you know exactly what to do with it, which I hopefully have given you some ideas for in this post.

50. Be confident with every decision you make. Excuse my language here, but if you go into something half-ass, you’ll see half-ass results. Whenever you make a decision, small or big, go into it knowing that it’s the right decision, because you made it. Even if it ends up being a wrong decision, at least you know that it wasn’t from putting less than all of your effort into it. You can then learn from your mistakes, and put confidence into your next decision. You don’t want to end up with a

And Lastly…

51. Shoot for the stars. Seriously, try to be the best. Wait, let me rephrase that…

BE THE BEST.

Know that you have what it takes to be a top player in your niche, and don’t think anything less of yourself, ever.

Here’s to your success in the upcoming year.

Please click here to subscribe and enjoy more content like this in the future.

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

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51 Blogging and Online Marketing Tips for the New Year

How to Get the Most Out of Your Custom Website or Blog Designer

Pat — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:22:49 +0000

Using a custom blog theme or website design is not necessary to succeed online.

In fact, when I started doing business online, I used a free wordpress theme and was still able to generate a great income from both Adsense and selling information products. So, if you’re worried about how much money it takes to get something started online, don’t – because it doesn’t cost much at all. Find a niche, get a domain and a host, and start creating content and building authority for yourself.

Free themes are great, but there two major drawbacks:

Their features can be very limited.
They are not unique.

Everyone has access to them, so it’s not very uncommon to come across a website that uses the same free themes, even in the same niche. Although content is what really matters, I have to be honest and say that if I came across two websites that had the exact same design, it would bother me. Maybe it’s just me.

Beyond the Free Theme

You may have considered using a premium theme for your website or blog.

Premium themes are great because they usually have wonderful features that you cannot find in any of the free themes. Also, depending on where you find them, premium themes usually have excellent customer support for any customizations or troubles you have while setting it up.

That being said, I personally don’t really like to use premium themes for the following reasons:

Although they have more, cool features, they may not be combination of features that I want or need.
Even though they are far more unique than free themes, they are still not totally unique. (The Thesis Theme is excellent, but I’ve stayed away from it just for this reason.)

Personally, I think a website should be designed to how you want to present your content, not the other way around, meaning – your content shouldn’t be adjusted to tailor to a certain theme just because it looks cool.

This is why I chose to eventually go with a custom design for both of my primary blogs. Not only do they have the exact features that I want, but no one else in the world has the same design.

Getting A Custom Design

If you’re thinking about a custom design…sweet! Here are some of the places I’ve used to find really good designers:

Elance.com: On Elance, you post your job description, and like eBay, people will bid to work on your project. Depending on your project requirements, you could get numerous bids ranging anywhere between $100 and $2000. For this blog, I paid $175 – so hopefully that just shows you it doesn’t cost as much as you’d think. You’ll have to spend some time carefully selecting your designer by reviewing their previous projects, their reviews and feedback, and their portfolio. Usually, you end up finding one that has a portfolio that matches a style you like, and you can go from there. Again, the turnaround time depends on your project requirements, but for this blog, it was a little over a week.
Odesk.com: Odesk is just like Elance, except it has the capability to make sure your designer is working on schedule and doing things that meet your requirements. Odesk will actually require the designer to upload screenshots of their work in certain time intervals, so you can sporadically check up on his/her progress and message them if something doesn’t look right, before they go further into it and waste time. Pretty cool. Again, you’ll want to do a thorough portfolio and feedback check before selecting a designer. Remember, most of the time, you get what you pay for.
The Footer of Websites That You Like: More often than not, a webmaster will give credit to his or her designer at the bottom or footer of their website, especially if the design is good. If you find a website design you like online, you’ve already seen and have been impressed by what the designer can do, so now it’s your turn to initiate contact and hope for a response. I’d recommend selecting 3 or 4 designers in this way so you’re not waiting around for a single response that may never come, however if they are good, active designers, they should respond to you in no time. Just so you know, quotes from these types of designers are usually (but not always), more expensive.

Selecting the right designer is very important, but there are a few things you can do on your end to make sure you get exactly what you need (and pay for) from your designer, no matter who you end up selecting.

If you’re on, or planning to use WordPress as your blogging platform, make sure you mention “Custom WordPress Theme” in your inquiry.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Designer

1. Share Your Inspiration Sites

Inspiration sites are websites that you like that may have a certain style, or certain features that you’d also like to include in yours.

Of course, you should never copy someone’s logo or text verbatim, but if you really like how something works on a website that you dig, there’s no reason why you can’t do something similar. For example, I really liked how many websites began to use a “tabbed” area to organize information like “popular posts” and “recent comments”, so I asked for that in this blog. Unfortunately, I took it out in an interim redesign, but it’s coming back in soon.

On my blog at greenexamacademy.com, I have a feature that reloads a different testimonial on the homepage after every reload. I didn’t come up with this idea on my own, but it totally works for what I do here.

Realize, however, that you can’t have every feature that you like from every website, so you’re going to have to prioritize. After selecting inspirational websites that you like and prioritizing the features that you love, your designer will create a custom design for you that is totally unique and your own.

2. Draw It Out

You can talk it out as much as you’d like, but there is no better way to communicate your custom website or theme than actually sketching it out. By doing this, you’re going to eliminate most of the “is this what you mean?”, or “like this?” conversations that often lead us amateur bloggers into headaches and frustrations. You’re going to have to sketch something up front, but you’ll end up saving time and money in the end.

You don’t have to be perfect. Even just boxes with descriptions of what they represent will help. If there is something you’re not sure of that you want them to figure out on their own, point that out on your sketch too. I usually point to a section and say something similar to:

“Here, I’m not exactly sure how to organize these three parts. I’ll leave it up to you and your creativity, but just make it looks nice and congruent with how the rest of site looks.”

Here’s a sample sketch I did for the redesign of greenexamacademy.com:

and here’s the result after the redesign:

3. Ask For a “Mock-Up” Design

In each successful custom web design experience I’ve ever had, each of the designers showed me a photoshopped “mock-up” version of the website before they actually went in and hard-coded everything. I’m not quite sure if this is standard practice within the industry, but if you find a designer that you like, and they don’t mention any kind of preliminary design review or mock-up – make sure you ask for it.

Making any changes during this phase requires far less work than after everything is coded.

4. Don’t Settle

Remember, YOU are paying THEM, so you should be satisfied with your end result. If you get a design that you feel is not up to par with what you had expected, make sure you tell the designer to fix it right away.

I’ve seen so many custom designs that are sooooo close to being perfect, but just fall short on one or two things because the webmaster just expected the design to be perfect on the first try. Don’t settle, but at the same time, don’t try and get more than you negotiated for.

My Current Redesign

The redesign of the Smart Passive Income blog is soon to come, and I’ve been having a great time working with my designer, which is why I was inspired to write this post. If you’re interested in some of the things the redesign will entail, as well as some tips that might help you for your current or future websites, I invite you to watch this 7 minute video:

(if you cannot watch this video, click here to watch Is Your Website or Blog Optimized? Here Are 5 Questions You Can Ask on YouTube).

Wishing you all a fantastic week! Thanks again for your support, and if you’re new to the blog, please feel free to subscribe to get automatic updates to your favorite RSS reader.

p.s. Here’s a bonus tip. To save some money, lots of people end up buying a premium theme they like and hire a designer to customize it, instead of creating a custom site totally from scratch. If you see a premium theme you sort of like, but its missing some features you want, this may be the best way to go. Have fun!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

How to Get the Most Out of Your Custom Website or Blog Designer

A Step By Step Plan To Rank Higher in the Search Engines

Pat — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:11:54 +0000

Today, I’m going to outline a plan to rank higher in Google for a certain keyword phrase. Before I tell you exactly what I’m going to do, we must first understand how things work.

In my experience, there are three primary ways that search engines (namely, Google), will determine the rank of your website relevant to certain keywords:

1. The number of backlinks to your website. We all know that one of the biggest things search engines look at is not the quality and quantity of websites that we link to, but the quality and quantity of websites that link back to us. It’s no wonder then why there are tools dedicated just for finding backlinks and showing you exactly which websites are linking back to you.

2. How active your website is. Have you ever heard anyone say that “Google loves blogs?” Well, it’s true – Google and other search engines love blogs and will often rank them higher than static websites on the same topics. This is because they know that blogs are more active and there is an actual discussion about the topic on the website itself. I’ve also noticed that some of my posts will get a little “bump” in keyword position soon after a new comment on that post was made.

The cool thing is, the more active your website is, the higher you will rank. The higher you rank, the more active your website will be. It’s a nice little perpetual cycle once it gets going.

3. Relevancy. This is the biggie that ties everything together. How high you rank for certain keywords is determined by how relevant the information on your website or post is to those keywords. Relevancy can be determined by:

The Domain / url. Duh.
The Title or Headlines on the Page. These are usually wrapped by the
tags, and they tell the search engines exactly what the page is about. If you create a title or headline that doesn’t encompass the keyword or key phrase, you’re not giving yourself the best chance to rank as high as you could.
Vocabulary. If your website or post is just sprinkled with the keyword that you’re trying to rank for and nothing else related – it’s plainly obvious to the search engines that all you’re doing is trying to rank higher for that keyword, and you’ll be penalized. For example, a title or headline shouldn’t look like this: Fly Fishing Tips for Fly Fishing in California that Fly Fishing People Use to Go Fly Fishing. Use vocabulary throughout the page that is related to the keyword or keyphrase you’re trying to hit, and you’ll be far better off.
Backlinks. How relevant the websites are that are linking back to yours is very important too. If your site is about Fly Fishing, and you have a link coming in from a Model Train website, that really won’t do anything for you. Why should it? However, if you have a link coming back from a Fly Fishing Magazine website, then that will definitely help.
Backlink Text. You can think of backlink text as the clickable, blue, underlined text that contains a link to another website. That particular text matters. If it contains the keywords or any related vocabulary, it will help show relevancy of your website for those keywords. This is why it’s smart to have keywords in your business name or domain. When people link to you, chances are they will include the keywords for you automatically. For example, when people link back to this blog, they might say something like,”Pat at Smart Passive Income writes…”. My top keyword, is Passive Income.
Media. If a website has media, such as pictures and video, those will be taken into account for relevancy as well. Of course, the search engines won’t actually look at the pictures or watch your entire video (unless a manual review of your website is done), so the relevancy happens through the name and description of the media. Are you optimizing your media for keyword research?

There are many other factors involved with keyword rankings and search engine results, but these are the major ones that will have the most impact for you. Taking these into account, I’ve created an experimental plan. I’ll go over what I’m going to do, why it should help, and how long it should take.

The Plan

In my previous post, I had asked you to help me determine a keyword to focus on for this experiment. Here are the results below:

Thanks again for your input. The keyword selected was actually the one I ranked the lowest for (I wasn’t even on the radar), which makes this even more interesting.

Here’s the Plan:

1. Create a New Post That Contains the Keywords in the Title. Besides actually having a home domain name that exactly matches the keywords, the second best thing you could do is have the keywords in the title. This will show relevancy to the search engines via the

tags, and also from the keywords in the domain name from the blog post title. Also it will help when people link to it from their websites with relevant backlink text. (1 hour)

2. Create a YouTube Video That Contains the Keywords in the Title, Description, and Tags. Putting a video on You Tube will definitely help show relevancy for the key phrases and will make the process happen even faster. Hmm…who owns YouTube? Oh that’s right…Google does. (30 minutes, including upload time)

3. A Call of Action to Comment. In the video, I’ll throw out a question at the end so that people will be more inclined to comment and will keep the post a little more active. It’s tempting to offer a “prize” or something like that to generate even more comments (especially from readers who rarely comment), but I don’t want you to think you have to do some kind of contest in order to rank higher in the search engines. So, I’ll stay away from that for now.

4. Utilize Social Bookmarking. After the blog post is published, I’ll bookmark the post on various social bookmarking websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and a variety of others. I’ll use Social Marker to bookmark the post to the lesser known social bookmarking websites even faster. Of course, I’ll be including the keyword phrases in the descriptions and tags for all of these. This will create backlinks to my post from higher ranking websites with relevant backlink text included. (1 hour)

Please note that you should never use these websites just for bookmarking all of your posts for the sake of search engine optimization. For many of the sites, if you create account today and bookmark a bunch of your own material, you’ll get kicked out. You should have an account with many of these sites already and have a history of healthy, bookmarking etiquette, in which case you won’t have any problems if you bookmark your own site, especially if it’s something useful.

5. Utilize Social Media. I’ll also use my social networking connections (Facebook and Twitter) to bring people over to the post and hopefully keep it active. Although the links you post on many social networking websites won’t actually translate back to you as backlinks that will help (because they use a “nofollow” rule, which helps control spam), putting my post out there will give more people the opportunity to come by, as well as the opportunity to see a good post that they may eventually link to on their own websites. (15 minutes)

6. Write Related Articles. After a day or two, I’ll probably write an eHow article, an article on eZineArticles.com, and Squidoo.com to create some high-quality backlinks going back to the post, as well as just expand the “network” that’s connected to my blog and the particular post. It might be smart to link some of these articles to each other in addition to back to my post as well.

These articles won’t be entirely new articles. To save time, I may transcribe the video from my blog post and just use that instead. (2 hours)

Total Time: 4 hours and 45 minutes (over two days)

The Results

After the post is published, I’ll check the search engines every 2 hours to determine when something happens, if anything does. I’ll be keeping a log of my results. After a week (I’ll be doing other posts in between), I’ll do a fancy report. Fun times =)

As pointed out before, this may be fairly easy for me to accomplish since I already rank high for passive income. I am, however, off the radar for the key phrase I’m trying to hit, so I think this will still be useful as far as how fast it can happen and how powerful these techniques may be. I’d be up for doing the same thing with a keyword that I don’t currently “own” in the future as well, if this work out.

Thanks everyone! I’ll be starting the experiment on a Tuesday to give people on Monday a chance to read this first.

Cheers!

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A Step By Step Plan To Rank Higher in the Search Engines

Camtasia for Mac, Bamboo Tablet, Omni Dazzle, and Branding

Pat — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:13:00 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot this past week as far as expanding the Smart Passive Income brand. I created a Facebook Fan Page, which has nearly 100 fans already. Today, I setup a YouTube Channel and decided to post my first video, which I’ve embedded here on the blog for you below.

Part of branding is staying consistent with how you present yourself and your products/blogs/business/whatever. So, in an effort to do this, I’ve tried to create some continuity in the web addresses where people can connect with me. Here are some examples below:

I’ll also be using the picture below where ever I am online. It’s my profile image for all of the forums I’m in, it’s on my Facebook page, my YouTube channel – everywhere. Black and white, so it’s pretty unique, and I think the smile brings a nice welcoming feeling (correct me if I’m wrong…LOL). Again, it’s these kinds of things that start to brand yourself pretty much automatically. It’s like billboards, TV ads and magazine ads – constantly showing the same things to people over and over again, even if they don’t know it.

I’m pretty excited about all of this stuff. I hope it get’s to a point where people who I’ve never met before say hi to me on the street because they know I’m a part of this brand. We’ll see – I’ll definitely post about that if or when it happen.

In order to do this kind of thing, you definitely cannot be a shy person. I think that in order to go big, you have to put yourself out there. You can’t hide and succeed – especially today when everything is about being open with who you are online, social media, and all of those kinds of things.

Anyways, here is my first YouTube video below for SPI. There are some links to things I mention in the video underneath it as well.

Time: 3 minutes.

Here are the tools I mention in this video:

Camtasia for Mac - for screen captures
Camtasia for PC (Camtasia Studio) – for screen captures
Bamboo Tablet by Wacom – to use the pen instead of a mouse
Omnidazzle – to draw on screen

Thanks everyone! Enjoy your weekend!

Please note that some of the links above may be affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you choose to purchase the programs/hardware.

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

Camtasia for Mac, Bamboo Tablet, Omni Dazzle, and Branding

10 Ninja Techniques to Get More Subscribers, Followers, and Opt-Ins

Pat — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 08:35:25 +0000

So you want more subscribers, followers, and opt-ins for your website or blog? Here’s a list of 10 strategies and techniques that are being used today. Some of these you may already know, and if you do – kudos to you.

Don’t take this as what you SHOULD do, but rather what you COULD do. Every website is different, but I’ve seen many of these strategies applied successfully many times. Read through them, and if you think there’s a technique that may help you and your website, try it out!

1. “Right” at the Top

If you have a blog, then the best place to put an RSS feed button or any kind of subscriber form is around the top right side of your page, which usually happens inside a sidebar so it appears on all pages and posts too.

“But Pat!? We all know that for the most part, the eye reads from left to right, so shouldn’t the best spot be on the left, not the right?”

Well, you’re correct, the “best spot”, the spot someone sees first, is generally somewhere on the left side. Even Google points this out in their heat maps for Adsense Ad placements:

But, what do you want your visitors to see first when they land on your blog? A subscriber area, or your featured content?

Your featured content, of course. No one is going to subscribe to you unless they first read your content and know what you’re about, so why put the subscription area in a place they would see first? You might think that it doesn’t really make that much of a difference, since it just takes a nanosecond to move your eyeball to the other side of the screen. What does it matter?

Well, it does matter. Subconsciously or whatever, over hundreds of thousands of clicks into your blog (which is what you want, right?) it will matter. You put your featured content where they would want to see it first, and then put your subscriber area in the second best spot, at the top on the right hand side.

Don’t believe me? Well, then check out these top bloggers and where their rss and subscriber areas are:

2. Don’t Give Them a Choice

This is more for those of you who are collecting email addresses for an email list. Not so much subscribers for a blog or a newsletter.

Many internet marketers choose to use what’s called a “squeeze page”, a kind of page that leaves people no other option than to sign up for the list to get whatever it is you’re offering. Usually, a squeeze page will consist of nothing more than really good header, some bullet points, and an opt-in area (on the right side, of course). There are no sidebars, no footers, and no links – just some text, and the opt-in form.

Is this bad practice and unethical? I don’t think so. People can still exit their browsers or press the back button. What I hate is when I used to go to websites and it would take me to FULL screen without any toolbars or way to exit. I haven’t seen this kind of thing recently though, so I think these people finally got the idea that it was just making people very angry.

As far as the squeeze page, I think it’s a good tactic because it basically shows your visitors exactly what you want them to see with no other distractions. Their choice to enter their email address is just based on the information you provide on that page, and that’s it.

3. Cater to Scrollers

In the first strategy, we mentioned that the top right was the best spot for the subscriber area. But, what happens to that area of your blog or website when people have to scroll down to read all of your content? It gets lost! People aren’t going to read to the bottom of your page and say, “I loved that, I think I’ll subscribe,” and scroll all the way back to the top. Some might, but most won’t even think about subscribing at this point. All you have to do is kindly remind them they have the option, and it will happen.

So, including a second opt-in area or subscriber area somewhere below the fold isn’t a bad idea. Back when my blog was at intheleed.com, I had actually placed a subscriber area at the top of the right-hand sidebar, and at the bottom of every single post. It did look a little weird, but I was getting an average of 20 to 30 subscribers a day, whereas before, it was about half that. If you can figure out how to integrate this nicely into your website, it may help out a lot.

Once you get to the bottom of this particular post, check out my RSS subscriber area and how I address this issue.

4. Cater to the Blind

The truth is, it can be really difficult to direct where you want your readers to look, click or go within your website, even though you may think something is completely obvious and optimized. This doesn’t just have to do with subscriptions and opt-ins, but everything including how to navigate and sometimes just reading through your site too. If you have never heard of or read through Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, then I definitely recommend you check it out.

Amazon Affiliate plug aside, you may have to be super ridiculously obvious in order to maximize subscription conversions on your page. You may need something like this (and I’m not kidding):

Ok, well maybe not THAT big, but you get the idea. Just placing an arrow like this next to your opt-in or subscription area can make a world of a difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of you have seen this in action already.

5. Pop-ups

“Oh no you didn’t!”

I know – most people will probably agree that pop-ups are annoying. For the most part, they are. But guess what…they work. You still see them around today, because they work.

Pop-ups that say things like, “Congratulations! You’re our 1,000,000th visitor, click here to claim your prize!” don’t work anymore. People live on the internet now, and aren’t THAT stupid – and if they were, well, I don’t want that person using my services or product and asking me questions about how to do this and that.

Anyways, pop-ups were huge a couple years ago, then they went away for a while, but they are coming back. At least this time, people are being a little more smart about it. Sometimes you’ll see pop-ups that just “peek” up from the bottom of the browser a little. Other times you’ll see ones that don’t “surprise” you right away, but rather slowly make their way onto the center of your screen as if to say “Please, don’t close me. I’m one of the good ones…”

They do what they are supposed to, which is catch people’s attention. It kind of goes along with #2, where you don’t really give people a choice but to read what’s inside and take action. I wonder if there’s a pop-up script or service that allows me to control exactly WHEN a pop-up appears, like for example, when the person reaches the bottom of a post, and may need to be reminded to sign up. Just an idea.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

6. Just Ask

There’s nothing wrong with asking. Remember, there’s a difference between asking nicely, and being annoying. If you believe there’s an appropriate place in your blog post or website to ask for a subscription or an opt-in, just ask!

Oh, and by the way, would you like to subscribe to my RSS feed?

7. Offer an Incentive

In order to get people to subscribe or provide an email address, you have to offer something in return. If you have a blog, maybe you just promise good content, or even information or content that is shown only to people in the RSS feed.

If you’re collecting email addresses, then you can offer something like a free report, E-couse or eBook in return. Show some graphics or even a preview of what you’re offering, and possible throw in a little video explaining what they’re going to get if they subscribe. Make sure you follow up and deliver what you promised, or your new subscribers will be new unsubscribers in no time.

8. The Button

Ahh, the buttons.

First, let’s briefly talk about the RSS button. Here’s the standard button that you’ve all seen before:

Nowadays, the RSS button can come in many different shapes, sizes and even colors. There are seriously a million different variations out there and for a while, everyone was trying to use the most unique RSS button because they thought it would catch more people’s attention. Although I had mentioned earlier that you should cater to the blind, I think the RSS feed button is one of those instances where sometimes less is more. In my opinion, I’d just make sure you use a button that works with your blog’s theme and overall design. It’s ok to be creative, but don’t go crazy here.

Next, let’s get into the “submit” button for your opt-in forms. Here’s what a generic web form and button looks like:

This is obviously a crappy webform because it just asks you to enter your information for no apparent reason. For this tip, however, we’re just concerned about the text inside the button. It’s just a button, but the text inside can trigger a desirable action from your readers. The best technique is to insert text that is somewhat relevant to what you’re offering.

If you’re offering a free e-course or email class as an incentive (see #7), then you might want to try this:

If you’re offering a free Ebook, it might look like this:

I think you get the idea.

Here’s some more explanation. How often do you enter your information into a web form and kind of wait a few seconds before pushing the button? Don’t worry, most people do this. If the text inside that button is relevant to what you are offering, it will give people that little “push” in their mind to just go ahead and click.

You can also embellish the button a little – make it bold, make it bright, have it change colors when it’s highlighted – it all helps that person make up their mind to click and submit.

9. Test

All websites are different, and different techniques will work better on different websites. The ONLY way to know what works best on your website is to test each and every part of it. Companies spend millions of dollars doing this offline, professional internet marketers are spending hordes of money doing this online, and we should be doing this too. Luckily for us, we don’t have to spend any money.

I wrote a post about this tool a while back, but you should definitely check out exactly how to use Google Optimizer to do some A/B split testing on your website. The point is to test everything so you can optimize your website and KNOW that it’s pulling you in the most subscribers, opt-in and money as possible.

You’d be surprised, but just one little change can have a huge impact on your conversions and sales.

Finally, here’s Ninja technique number 10…

10. Test Again!

Yes, testing and optimization is so important that I had to mention it here twice. If you’re not testing, then you don’t really want to succeed. It’s the best and most powerful technique anyone can learn online.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post, and I hope it helps you on your journey towards online success and wealth. Cheers!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

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Thank you so much!

10 Ninja Techniques to Get More Subscribers, Followers, and Opt-Ins

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for an Opinion…BUT

Pat — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:07:16 +0000

I recently redesigned this blog and asked for your thoughts about it in my last post. If I was the way I was in high school, boy – would I be livid! Let me explain…

When I was a little boy (yes, I was still a little boy in high school. I finally reached 100lbs. my junior year), I didn’t take criticism very well. I think this is why I tried to be the best at everything, because if I was the best, no one could really say anything.When someone did say something, I would become really defensive and not handle the situation very well.

Luckily, since then, I’ve changed. I love criticism.

Free Advice

I see criticism as free advice. No matter how harsh or negative it is it’s someone opinion about what I’m doing. That opinion doesn’t become a seed for guilt or anger, it becomes a way to see how I can improve, for free. And the best part, it’s related to whatever it is I’m doing. I don’t have to read a book, take a class or try to figure out what I’m doing wrong – since it’s directly pointed out to me.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask

If there’s something you want to be successful at, you should always ask for an opinion. Whether it’s a website design, a blog post, marketing plan, or even an idea – knowing what other people think about it will help you improve and succeed.

This doesn’t have to apply to just internet business either. If you want to succeed in a relationship, buying a home, cooking dinner – all you have to do is ask. Never just assume.

What’s the Worst that Can Happen?

This is the question that changed my view about criticism. Even though I was criticized for many things throughout my life (who hasn’t), the fact is that I’m here today – happy, healthy and successful. If you’re worried about what people think, just ask yourself, “What’s the worst that can happen?”.

So you might get some negative opinions. Now you know what to do and how to improve. Like I said before, that information is gold.

You Don’t Have to You Can’t Please Everybody

The theme of this post is that other people’s opinions are valuable. However, you have to understand that you don’t have to please everyone, because you can’t.

If you tried to conform to every single opinion and criticism that was directed towards you, you’d be running around like a chicken with no head because everyone’s opinions are different. You have to learn how to understand which opinions fit your ideas and proceed by making changes and updates accordingly.

My New Blog Design

So, taking all of what I previously said into account, I just wanted to thank you all for your opinions in my last post. I got some nice ones, and some critical ones too – which is awesome. I’ve since “compromised” on a few items, such as putting back the “about me” part in the sidebar, because it’s what really gave new visitors that first impression about what I do.

What’s most important is to consider who your audience is and try to balance their opinions with your goals.

Up Next

I hope you’re ready for the next post. I’ll be talking about something that will change my life forever…

The New Site is Up!

Pat — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:00:01 +0000

As you can see, the new Smart Passive Income Blog Design is live! I’m really happy with it, and so far, the response has been mostly positive. I think my VA did a great job of implementing ad spaces and a new updated look, while still keeping the feel of my old design. Here’s a comparison between the two:

Old Design

New Design

New Changes

Here is a list of changes and updates, in case you’re wondering:

I’ve put in some ads, hoping to not have the ads take over the website.
New logo design.
Rearranged widgets for better navigation.
Subscriber area with both twitter and rss links and counters.
New items in the navigation area:
- A page dedicated to just my monthly income reports. These seem to generate the most buzz on my website, so I decided to compile them into one easy to access link.
- A resources link, which holds all of the passive income tools that I’ve used or heard of that are worthy.
- A blog news page, which has some press articles, interviews and other features around the web.
Updated fonts throughout the website.
Dynamic flickr picture rotator.

I’m adding a few more features in the next week or so, but I’m at a point where I could launch the updated design – so here it is!

I’d be curious to hear what you think, or any recommendations you have to make it better. Thanks everyone for your patience and support!

5 Free and Random Tips for Bloggers You Probably Didn’t Know – My 100th Post!

Pat — Thu, 21 May 2009 06:22:55 +0000

Yep, this is officially my 100th post on the Smart Passive Income Blog! It’s come so much faster than I thought it would, and I think that’s because I’m having a lot of fun writing for all of you. Your kind comments and frequent questions keep me motivated to provide you with interesting and helpful posts, so keep ‘em coming!

Since I know most of you are current or future bloggers, I thought I’d give you 5 free and random tips that I’ve learned since I started this blog 100 posts ago. You may know some of these already, but if not – all the better. Enjoy!

Free Tip #1: How to Shorten, Hide and Track Clicks for Your Affiliate Links

My new favorite tool is from a website called Budurl. You may recognize budurl links from other websites or from twitter too.

At budurl, you can shorten any website address AND track how many clicks it gets. You can also create notes for each link, so you can remember where you placed the link. Here’s how this can help you:

Say you have a super long link: http://www.internetbusinessmastery.com/cmd.php?af=866217

With budurl, it turns into this: http://budurl.com/8y8x

You can then keep track on your budurl account homepage, seen here:

If you had another website, you could create another budurl for the same link, put a different note on it, and test to see which one performs better. The power behind this is enourmous – testing different placings and ad copy to help maximize your clickage and earnings. Awesome.

Another cool think about this is that it “hides” the link. Looking at the super long link from above, you can tell it’s an affiliate link from the numbers at the end, and sometimes this turns people off because they think you’re just trying to earn an extra buck from them.

Oh, and it’s free. (There is an option to pay to get more data, which seems interesting too…)

Free Tip #2: See Who Is Linking To Your Website

I’m always curious to see who is linking to my websites, and I’m sure you’re no different. There’s an easy way to check your “backlinks” using a service from Backlinkwatch.com.

Just type in your website url and it spits out every website that links to you. It’s nice because it feeds you urls that you can easily click on so you can check out your link on those pages. Pretty cool!

Backlinks are important because they do help your search engine rankings. This is why it’s vital that you fill out the text field that asks for your website url when you’re commenting on other people’s blogs. They do count as backlinks most of the time, and will show up in your backlinkwatch report.

Again, it’s free.

Free Tip #3: Don’t Be “This” Guy

Who am I talking about? This guy:

…or in the case of this website, this thing:

Where is this found? In the comments section of lots of blogs, including this one. If you leave comments and you’ve never set up a Gravatar, these are the usual default pictures that come up next to your name.

It may not be a big deal to you, but a cool or professional looking Gravatar could earn you some more clicks to your blog and it adds a little more personality to your comments too.

If you don’t have one setup, don’t worry – it’s easy and free. Just go to the Gravatar website, link a picture to your email address, and you’re all set. Everytime you leave a comment that uses Gravatars, you’ll no longer be considered a Newb…hehe!

Free Tip # 4: A Small Thing To Upgrade Your Website, Bigtime

Have you ever heard of a favicon? It’s the little icon that appears on your web browser, sometimes right next to the web address or on the tab of the webpages you have open:

If you don’t have a favicon for your website, it will just look like this:

Having a favicon is a quick and easy way to make your website look much more professional.

So, how do you make one? It’s easy. You can create one by going to my favorite favicon generator, and playing around with the drawing template or by uploading your own picture. It may take a bit of practice before you get one that looks good to you, but just follow the instructions and in no time, your website icon is no longer a blank piece of paper.

Free Tip # 5: Free Pictures!

It’s by personal preference, but I choose to put pictures onto every post on SPI. I use stockphoto from iStockPhoto.com, which you have to pay for, but you can get quality pictures for free by utilizing the creative commons license.

Flickr has a cool section that will show you which pictures you can use freely, based on how you will use them. You can check out the Flickr Creative Commons page to search photos and read about the different licenses, which I’ll show you below. You will have to credit each photo that you use, which is the least you can do as a thanks for using other people’s photos.

Thanks!

I just wanted to say thanks to all of you for your support. Here’s to another 100 posts! Cheers!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

5 Free and Random Tips for Bloggers You Probably Didn’t Know – My 100th Post!

Passive Income Tools of the Trade

Pat — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:59:59 +0000

I thought it would be helpful to create a resource page that you can always come to for all of your passive income needs. I’ll add to it as I learn more, but you’ll notice that in the future I will reference this page quite often. I recommend bookmarking it for your reference and convenience. Enjoy!

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links to products that will earn me a commission. These are all things that I have experience with that I am recommending because they are helpful and are companies that I trust, not because of the commissions that I may earn from you using these products.

Blogging

WordPress: The #1 Blog Publishing Platform. Free and easily customizable with wonderful support. All of my blogs use WordPress.
WordPress Plugins: Download any plugins, widgets, or customizable elements for your WordPress blog.
Woo Themes: The ultimate resource for premium looking WordPress themes.
Revolution 2: Another resource for premium WordPress themes.

Hosting

Bluehost: All of my websites are hosted using Bluehost. Easy to use, 1-click automatic WordPress installation, and good customer service.
PowWeb: Another fantastic and easy to use hosting service. Also includes 1-click WordPress installation.
Amazon S3: The Amazon Simple Storage Service. Reliable internet storage, which is great for putting large files like podcasts and videos, so you don’t create bandwidth problems on your own website.

Product Distribution & Shopping Carts

E-Junkie: The shopping cart I use to sell my eBook. It’s compatible with Paypal Standard, Paypal Pro, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, TrialPay, Clickbank & 2CheckOut. Works like a charm, very low price to use. Comes with a decent affiliate program for your products.
Clickbank: Another digital products retailer. Probably the most popular. Decently priced, but comes with an amazing affiliate program for your products.
Paypal.com: Paypal is just ok for selling your own products through them, but you’ll need an account anyways to configure with and accept payments from the above shopping carts.

Keyword Research

WordTracker Free Keywords Tool: Spits out a number for the popularity of a keyword of your choice. Search volume numbers can be compared to find the perfect niche, or to choose keywords for your blog posts.
Google Adwords Tool: A tool to help you decide what keywords to use for your Adwords campaigns. You can also check to see the popularity of certain keywords and the competition for ads for those keywords as well.
Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool: Another fantastic keyword research tool, with even more information and numbers to compare and select the perfect keywords.

Advertising Stuff

Google Adsense: Make money by placing relevant ads on your website that are generated from advertisers using Google Adwords. This is free to use, but you have to register for an account.
Google Adwords: If you want to begin advertising on Google, you can select keywords and locations and you pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement.

Email Subscriptions & Marketing

Aweber: The internet’s most powerful email opt-in service and email marketing/broadcasting tool.

Testing Results

Google Analytics: Google’s free website tracking and analytical tool. A must have for anyone with any type of website.
Clicktale: You can use clicktale to watch actual recordings of how people use your website. It is actually like watching their own computer screen, so you can then optimize your website if you don’t like what you see. You can view a small sample of website viewers for free. It will cost more for a larger sample.
Google Optimizer: This is another free tool from google where you can test different webpages of the same content, only changing one or two things, so you can see which one works/converts best. It’s basically a website optimizer testing tool.

Outsourcing Work

Elance: Hired service for just about anything you can think of.
Odesk: Another outsource website for freelancers, IT companies, programmers and web designers from abroad.
99Designs: This is a unique website that you can use if you need a logo design. It’s in a contest format. You submit the description of what you want, and designers will compete against each other to win money.

Health Insurance

eHealthInsurance: Here, you enter your information, and it generates a number of different health care plans for your particular situation with a variety of different prices and specifications.
The National Association for the Self-Employed: NASE has a variety of different benefits to it’s members, including a unique, customizable health insurance plan for the self-employed.

Legal Stuff

LegalZoom: Easy online incorporation or LLC creation.

Books

The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich: Pretty much the most awesome book in the entire world. I reference this quite a bit in my posts.
ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse: The best book about blogging from the number one online blogger, Darren Rowse.
Moonlighting on the Internet by Yanik Silver: I also own this book and it’s really what insipired me to go full time working online. I finished it in 1 day because it’s so good.

For eHow Users

If you can think of any more great tools and resources, please feel free to leave a comment below. I will review it and add it to the list.