[Build Great Backlinks] How to Become a Traveling Nomad Entrepreneur in 5 Steps

Build Great Backlinks

Imagine visiting a new town every day, skipping from one country to another over the course of a few weeks.

Sounds like an ideal vacation… but it’s an even-better job.

More and more people are making the decision to become a location-independent, traveling entrepreneur. Below I’ll walk you through how to become a “digital nomad” in five steps.

#1 Save up Money

Before you jump out of an airplane, you strap on a parachute. Before you hop on the nomad trail, you make sure that you have some cash saved up so that you can ride out the rough patches.

“Put your head down and put away some money," advises Matt Wilson (Under 30 CEO). He continues, "You need some savings… as a buffer if you are going to make a long-term habit of living outside of the United States."

How much Money Should You Save?

The answer depends on (A) the cost of living per month where you’re going, (B) the cost of travel to/from this location, and (C) how much your willing to go without luxury and security. You’ll also want to consider the travel cost of renewing your visa every 30, 60, or 90 days.

Let’s say I want to begin my nomad life in Costa Rica. I’m going to need at least enough money for the flight to and from Denver (about $600). Then I’ll need about $500 for the first month of food, lodging, wifi, and bus fare. Then it’s just a matter of how much I would want for luxuries (about $100) and a "rainy day fund" (let’s say $2800).

For this example, I would save up $4000 before buying my ticket to San Jose. Depending on where you’re at in life, that may seem like a fortune or chump change.

Given the risk of your laptop breaking, you needing medical attention, or your best friend getting married back home… it’s always a good idea to save up more money than you think you’ll need.

…or Don’t

"Leap and the net will appear."

Zen saying

Like to take risks? Thrive under pressure?

If so, you don’t have to save up much money before you start. John Bardos of Jet Set Citizen had just $1000 dollars to his name when he arrived in Japan and began his life as a nomadic entrepreneur. Bardos hit the ground running and never looked back. He says, "It was easy because I had nothing to lose."

Not having a financial safety net will motivate you to succeed, since you won’t have any other choice. Still, I recommend you have at least enough money for one month’s rent and transportation to get home at all times.

 

#2 Get the Essentials

Some items are no-brainers. If you’re a photographer, obviously you’re going to need your camera. Most everyone is going to need a laptop and a padded bag for it. Of course, you won’t forget your toothbrush.

Here are some essential items and resources that you may not have thought of:

External GPRS/EDGE/3G USB Modem

These little doodads plug into a USB port and turn a cell phone data network into an Internet connection. This vastly expands the number of locations you’ll be able to work while traveling.

Theft Protection Software

For most digital nomads, their laptop is their livelihood. But the value of electronic devices also makes them attractive to thieves.

If your laptop, tablet, or smart phone is ever stolen or misplaced while traveling you’re going to wish you had a way of locating it remotely. Prey anti-theft software is just that. Registering up to three devices is free and it only takes a couple minutes.

Online Backup

Services like Mozy offer regular cloud-based backups in case anything goes awry. For one computer, it can cost as little as $5.99 per month (about $72 per year).

External Hard Drive

As a video producer, my work eats up Gigabytes like PacMan eats dots. For me, an external hard drive is the cost of doing business.

But even if you don’t need an external hard drive for the storage, you should have one for a backup. Online backups are great, but you won’t always have access to a consistent, high-speed Internet connection.

You can pick up a 1TB external hard drive for under $100.

Pocket Notebook

When you’re hiking the Himalayas, you may not have your laptop handy. Ditto for when you’re laying on the beach.

But those are both times when you’re likely to feel inspired and creative. Always have a notebook on you and you’ll always be able to catch lightning in a bottle for your business – even when it strikes in the most remote of places.

A Grasp of the Language

A few important phrases in the native language goes a long way. I’ve personally used DuoLingo to sharpen up my Spanish. It’s amazingly robust (and free!) language learning software.

Unless you’re fluent, pick up a travel-sized phrasebook. Once you’ve settled in, look around for a tutor. One-on-one lessons are highly effective and may be surprisingly inexpensive.

Eliminate the Unnecessary

I just listed some of the things you’ll need to have as a digital nomad, but the list of things that you’ll need to lose is even longer. It’s important to travel light. You’ll probably have to shed the majority of your possessions unless you’ve got some generous friends/family with a big garage.

 

#3 Choose a Starting Location

Here are a few of the more popular countries for digital nomads:

- Thailand

- Cambodia

- Argentina

- Columbia

- Laos

- Vietnam

- Malta

- Costa Rica

There are hundreds of different factors to consider, but ultimately there’s no “best” country for digital nomads. Whether you carefully weigh your options or picking a starting location at random, the most important thing is having the right attitude (and a wifi connection, of course).

#4 Find a Reliable Location-Independent Income

Earning money is about providing value to others. The Internet has made it possible to provide value to people who live very far away from you, all around the world. It isn’t easy to do, but it is easier than ever before – thanks in part to sites like Income Diary that are completely devoted to teaching people how to make money online.

Many nomad entrepreneurs have single-person businesses that are based on providing a service (much like freelancing). This is the quickest path to being able to finance a nomadic lifestyle. If you’re interested in this path, I’ve written a guide on how to make money with a service business and another on how to attract leads and clients online.

Here are some of the more common fields for nomad entrepreneurs to take up:

The Written Word

The market for people who can write high-quality blog posts has never been larger. You could finance a modest lifestyle in many countries by writing four articles like this one per month. Of course, this job also requires an understanding of online publishing, SEO, photo-editing, and more.

There’s also work to be found transcribing, editing, and translating text.

Digital Media Specialist

If you’re a graphic designer, web developer, or software programmer, you know that there’s not much difference between working 10 miles away from your client or 1000 miles away.

Photography and video production are also well-suited to location-independence. Plus, you’ll surely find plenty of inspiring vistas to capture on your travels.

Remote Work Agreements

Increasingly, businesses are allowing their employees to work remotely. It saves on office space and can lead to higher employee satisfaction and productivity. If you’ve already got a good job and you don’t technically need to be on-site to do it, consider asking your boss if you can work remotely.

Passive Income

Developing a passive income takes more time but also offers a greater reward at the end. Create a great website, cultivate an audience of people who trust you, and you could one day make a six-figure income by selling ad space and products.

The List Goes On…

Nomadic jobs are only limited by your imagination. Nunomad’s list of location-independent careers includes everything from the bizarre (balloon artist) to the mundane (insurance agent) and everything in between (consultant, coach, camel trainer, radiologist, property manager, virtual assistant, English teacher, dancer, and importer).

#5 Hire a Virtual Staff

What’s the fun of traveling the world if you have stare at a computer screen eight hours a day, five days a week? Most businesses require daily attention to keep running smoothly – and if you’re on safari in the Serengeti, that’s just infeasible.

The solution: a virtual staff to pick up the slack.

I’ve never hired a virtual staff member myself, so this section is reinforced by one of the world’s leading experts on outsourcing, Tyrone Shum. Back in 2005, Shum started an online Dragonboat paddle business. Business was so good that Shum was working 60 hours a week. That’s when he decided to hire a virtual staff. Within six months, Tyrone was working just 10 hours a week.

Use a Virtual Staff-Finding Service

If hiring someone who lives in a different country to be a part of your business sounds like a daunting task to take on on your own, you’re right. Tyrone Shum told us about his misguided first attempt:

"When I first started, I spent weeks on end trying to find the right person, to negotiate the best price, the best working conditions, and all that kind of stuff. But in the end, they didn’t even stay."

from Web Domination 20

After this, Shum turned to a virtual staff-finding service and he’s never looked back. He recommends Virtual Staff Finder: "They go through the whole process and you pay a one-time fee. They come back to you with three candidates, you meet them and find out if they’ve got the right skills for you, and then – bang – you’re up and away."

Start with a Virtual Assistant

Eventually, you may want to hire a whole staff: programmers, designers, writers, and more. But Shum says that "the first position to outsource is a virtual assistant." Virtual assistants can do anything from handling your emails to maintaining your blog to running your social media.

They give you more time to focus on growing your business – and allow you the freedom to go on adventures without the gears of your business grinding to a halt.

How much does it Cost to Hire a Virtual Assistant?

The price is always in flux. Shum told us that when he started the going rate for a full-time virtual assistant was "roughly $300 a month" but that the price had already crept up to $450/month.

More skilled positions, like web developers, will be a bit pricier.

Note: If you’re really serious about outsourcing, I recommend you check out our interview with Tyrone Shum in Web Domination 20. He goes into detail about his hiring process, his management style, and what he’s learned to look for in a virtual staff candidate.

 

Ready to Become a Traveling Nomad Entrepreneur?

Then book your flight and pack your bags! If you’re still not sure what you want out of your work and life, you may want to check out our page on how to get your ideal lifestyle as an entrepreneur.

Post Image Photo Credit: Claudio Vaccaro.

The post How to Become a Traveling Nomad Entrepreneur in 5 Steps appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

You may view the latest post at
http://www.incomediary.com/how-to-traveling-nomad-entrepreneur

Build Great Backlinks
Nick
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] 2 Million Backlinks and 15 SEO Answers from Google’s Matt Cutts

Build Great Backlinks

I’ve covered some pretty controversial topics in recent weeks when it comes to SEO. Revealing I’m a scammer, showing how freshness is being abused and then doing a follow-up blog post to show the same again. Though at times it may seem like I’m being a bit harsh on Google, I have acknowledged that the job their staff have must be one of the hardest in the world. Trying to defend yourself against thousands (millions?) of people who are focused on nothing more than gaming their system on a daily basis.

I still feel though that the search results from 2011 and 2012 are just far better than what we’ve seen in 2013. Google should not be getting tricked by people simply changing the date on a blog post and thinking that it’s suddenly fresh and deserves better rankings. There’s also no doubt in my mind that Youtube has a huge algorithmic preference over other video platforms like Vimeo, Wistia & DailyMotion, no matter what Google say about keeping things fair.

My original plan with this blog post was just to share with you the answers from the Webmaster videos that Google share on their channel which are primarily hosted by their head of web spam, Matt Cutts. Then my brain went off on a bit of a tangent and I wanted to cover how much you can really trust about what Google themselves preach. Their head of webspam, Matt, is someone who has no doubt made millions of dollars from his Google stock options (he joined 13 years ago) so my only prognosis is that he genuinely enjoys his job and the intelligent people he gets to work with every day.

On the face of it, you have to give Google credit for making the effort. They don’t really have to give any advice to SEO’s or webmasters; they can just ignore the whole lot and I honestly don’t think it would impact their search market share. Good luck convincing your friends outside of search to start using Bing or Yahoo anytime soon. On the other hand though, it’s also clear to see that most of the videos are just a PR stunt for Google, trying to encourage their ideal internet to make their own jobs easier.

The biggest thing that stands out to me from all of these questions and answers on their Youtube channel is just how scared of SEO the general webmaster seems to be. So much talk of penalties, the disavow tool and updates like Penguin and Panda have put the ‘mom and pop’ on the back foot and worried about doing literally anything to their site.

15 SEO Answers Directly from Google’s Matt Cutts

Whether they give you information you can actually use or should take with more than a grain of salt is debatable, but I recommend every internet marketer who focuses on search to at least watch and read the information Google put out there. It can be a little tedious to go through lots of 5 minute videos from their Webmaster Help Channel, so I did it for you and put the answers together here.

Is load speed a more important factor for mobile? Is it really something that can change your rankings, all other things being equal?

“All things being equal, if your site is really really slow, we do use page speed in our rankings. All things being equal, then yes, a site can rank lower. Look at your neighborhood of websites and if you’re the outlier – your site is very very slow – then you may rank lower.

It’s not that in mobile we apply that any more or any less for desktop search.”

What should we do with embeddable codes in things like widgets and infographics? Should we include the rel=”nofollow” by default?

“My answer is coloured by the fact that we’ve seen a ton of people trying to abuse widgets and abuse infographics. We’ve seen people with a web counter and they don’t realise there’s links with mesothelioma in there. I would not rely on infographics and widgets as your primary way to gather links. I would recommend putting a no-follow, especially on widgets. Depending on the scale of what you’re doing with infographics, you might want to put a rel=”nofollow” on those as well”

What can I do if someone – like my competition – is trying to harm me with bad backlinks?

“You’ve done the right thing; you got in touch with site owners and you’ve said look, please don’t link to me I don’t want to have anything to do with your site. If those folks aren’t receptive then just go ahead and disavow those links. As long as you’ve taken those steps you should be in good shape.”

As memorable .com domains become more expensive, developers are choosing alternate new domains like .IO and .IM which Google geo-targets to small areas. Do you discourage this activity?

“You can pick any domain you want, but if you pick a domain like .ES or .IT because you think you can make a novelty domain like Google.it – “Google it” – or something like that, do be aware that most domains at that specific level do pertain to that specific content. We think that content is going to be mainly intended for that country.

There are a few country code top level domains that are sort of generic because, for example, .IO stands a for something related to the Indian Ocean but there were very few domains that were actually relevant to that. We might go ahead and say okay this is a generic country code level top level domain.”

How does Google treat hidden content which becomes visible when clicking a button? For example a page to buy something then a “show details” button which shows more information.

“If you’re using a tiny little button that people can’t see and there’s 6 pages of content buried in there that users can’t see and that’s keyword stuffing, then that is something we could possibly consider hidden text and probably would consider hidden text.

In general if you just have an ‘ajaxy’ sort of site and things get revealed and you’re trying to keep things clean, that’s not the sort of thing that’s going to be on the top of our list to worry about because a lot of different sites do that. It’s pretty common on the web.”

How does duplicate content that’s legally required (i.e Terms & Conditions across multiple offers) affect performance in search?

“I wouldn’t stress about this, unless the content you have that’s duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing or something like that I wouldn’t worry about it. We do understand that various places across the web do need to have disclaimers and various legal information.”

Should a customer with 20 domain names link them all together or not, and if he does should he add no follow to the links?

“First off, why do you have 20 domain names? *Giggles* If it’s all cheap online casinos or medical malpractice in Ohio, having 20 domain names there can look pretty spammy and I would probably not link them all together.

On the other hand, if you have 20 domain names and they’re all versions of your domain in different countries then it can make sense to have some way to get from one version of the domain to another version. Even then I wouldn’t link all of the domains in the footer, all by themselves. I would probably have one link to a country locator page on the main .com.”

A client got unnatural link warnings in September 2012 without any example links. 90% of links were removed and I asked for examples in every reconsideration request. Shouldn’t it be better to have live / cached “list” of bad links or penalties in Google Webmaster Tools?

“We’re working on being more transparent and giving more information in messages as we can. I wouldn’t try to say “hey, give me examples” in a reconsideration request (RR) because a RR will read what you say but we can only really give a small number of replies.

Yes the RR has been granted or no you still have work to do. There’s a very thin middle ground which is ‘your request has been processed’. That usually only applies if you have multiple web spam actions.”

If my site goes down for a day, does it affect my rankings when this happens?

“If it goes down for a day then you should be in good shape. If it goes down for two weeks then there’s a better indicator that your site is actually down and we don’t want to send users to a site that is down. If it was only just a short period of downtime I really wouldn’t worry about that.”

If I write about another article, where should I link to the original source?

“Whatever way you choose to do will work fine for Google’s ranking because the link – whether it’s at the bottom of the article or whether it’s in that first paragraph – it still flows pagerank either way. Credit will flow to the website that you’re referring to.

For my personal preference, I prefer when a link is relatively close the top of the article.”

Which aspect of Google updates do you think the SEO industry simply won’t get? Where do you see many SEOs spending too much energy on when they could be taking care of other things?

“One is the difference between an algorithm update versus just a data refresh. When you change an algorithm the signals that you’re using and how you weight those signals are fundamentally changing. When you’re doing just a data refresh, then the way that you run the computer program stays the same but you might have different incoming data or refresh the data that the algorithm is using.

I’ve seen a lot of accusations after Panda and Penguin that Google is just trying to increase its revenue. Let me confront that head on. Panda, if you go back and look at Google’s quarterly statements they actually mention that Panda decreased our revenue.

A lot of people have these conspiracy theories that Google is making these changes to make more money. Not only do we not think that way in the search quality team, we’re more than happy to make changes which are better for the long-term quality of our users.

A lot of people think about “how do I build more links” and they don’t think about the grander global picture like how do I make something compelling and then how do I make sure that I market well. You get too focused on search engines and then totally miss social media and for example social media marketing.”

Why does Google continue to present multiple results from one domain on a search result?

“In the past it was the case that you could search for ‘antique green glass’ and all of the results might be from one domain and that was kind of a bad experience. We introduced something called host clustering which means for each hostname – so like per subdomain – you only get two results.

We then saw people – spammers and bunch of different webmasters adapt – say “ok, do a bunch of different sub-domains and get two results from one hostname, two results from another hostname” and they can get back to crowding up the whole results page again.

We changed things again because we do want diversity in our search results and we made it such that you can get results from one domain then another result from one domain then other results from that domain get progressively harder and harder to rank.

We then made another change not too long ago where we say – if someone is searching for rental cabins in Tennessee – and there’s a really good website about that it may be helpful to show more than just a few results from that domain.

Once you’ve saw a cluster of results from one domain, once you go through subsequent pages we wont show you that domain again so that should help improve the diversity.”

What does Google think of single-page websites? There are some great websites using only a single page (& lots of CSS and Javasvcript) bringing the same user experience as a regular website with many subpages?

Google has gotten better at handling javascript and a lot of times if you’re doing some different or strange JavaScript interaction or having things fold in or out we’re pretty good at being able to process that. In general I wouldn’t bet your SEO legacy on this one single page working well.

If it works for you and users to have that all on one page, for the most part it should work for Google as well.”

Do Google take action on sites that do keyword stuffing (with phone numbers)?

The answer is yes we do. We get a lot of complaints about that. When you type in a phone number of you just get page after page after page of those cookie-cutter sites you get really annoyed and we hear those complaints internally within Google. We treat it basically as keyword stuffing as you’re repeating very similar words after each other – just like someone throwing a dictionary up on the web (but with numbers).

We do consider that web spam.”

Matt’s Comments in a Video about Negative SEO

“We try to think about whether there’s a way that person A could hurt person (competitor) B. We try really hard to design algorithms which are robust and resistant to that sort of thing.

At the same time, a lot more people are thinking about their backlinks…what if people try to do negative SEO? Where they point links at a site to try and make that site rank lower. In my view there are very few people who talk about negative SEO and fewer who try it and fewer still who actually succeed.

We’ve just uploaded a Disavow tool which allows people to upload a text file of links and say “I would like Google to ignore these links to my site.” If you’re someone who wants to do Negative SEO it’s probably a much better use of your time to try and do something productive.”

How Much Can We Take Seriously?

It really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to you that spamming Youtube to death works pretty well after my last few blog posts, but it’s a shame that it happens in such prominent industries. And even more of a shame when it comes from networks that Google definitely seems to know about.

First came the tweet from Matt:

I didn’t actually catch this at the time (hat tip to GOS) but it definitely went viral among the Blackhat forums which you can see with pretty much any Google search on the topic. Many of them who relied on Russian link networks started getting a little worried.

Further confirmation came a month later when the highly respected Barry Schwartz covered the topic on Search Engine Land. SEL is without a doubt the most respected publication when it comes to search engine news, so it wasn’t hard to put two and two together judging by the dates on the tweet and their post.

It’s easy to think when you read something like this that you should totally stay away from any of these networks. Especially when they’ve been called out specifically. I mean something so public surely isn’t going to work in Google anymore is it?

How’s this for irony. Let’s look at two popular SEO related search terms. These are arguably some of the most competitive search terms on the web not because of their search volume (although they do get 40K+ exact searches per month) but because you’re literally competing against other people who consider themselves to be among the best at getting top search engine rankings.

And what do we have ranking number #1 for ‘SEO Company’?

Note: I did edit this screenshot to remove the Adwords ads but didn’t alter the positioning of results

An awful Youtube video. I use proxies any time I perform these kind of searches and I’m not logged into Google. The comments I’ll show you in a second clearly prove I’m not the only one seeing these results either. They might change in a few days from this post – I don’t know – but the ones I’ve called out in recent blog posts over the last few months haven’t changed.

Let’s put in another search term like ‘SEO Services’ which gets over 40,000 exact searches per month. It’s a pretty ideal buyer’s keyword if you’re looking for SEO clients:

So where are these links coming from? Well, you can of course start digging into the backlink profile, but other members of the SAPE network pretty much give it away themselves:

And if you’re not convinced, tell me when you last saw such a natural link profile like this one below. Over 2 million backlinks in such a short period of time, more than likely from the SAPE.ru link network.

Please be aware that there are a lot of imitators in Google trying to rank for the name of this network to get customers because of how well it works. They are not the service I’m referring too here. We’re focusing solely on the Russian network that was supposedly taken down and ‘dealt’ with already.

I could do this stuff all day long. Oh wait, I do. The list of examples I have is mind-blowing.

As a side note: My ‘private SEO circle’ is opening 20-30 new places on September the 2nd (will probably max out after an hour or two) so send me an email to HQ @ name of this website if it’s something you might be interested in.

The Google PR Spin

I really wanted to leave some feedback after each Matt Cutts’ answer but I didn’t want to ruin the flow of your reading. Comments like “[don't do negative SEO] it’s a much better use of your time to do something productive” and “just go ahead and disavow those links” aren’t exactly ideal to me when you consider that Google don’t show all of the bad links they supposedly know about pointing to your site. With great timing, Jim Boykin shared some responses from an interview he just did with Google’s John Mueller over Google Hangouts. Here are some of the main takeaways:

• Google supposedly have technical limitations for how many ‘bad links’ they can show in Webmaster tools (1,000 links from 1,000 domains) – I find this hard to believe by the way
• Don’t think you’ll get help from Google on this when Matt commented above that you shouldn’t expect people who handle reinclusion requests to send you example links
• It’s up to you to disavow links even if they’re from sites that scraped content from those that already link to you
• The links in webmaster tools in many cases are years old and rarely get updated (this is from Jim’s experience, not mine) making the job even harder

My thoughts for a while now – which I’m glad Jim touched upon – are basically why can’t Google just give those links no value rather than relying on us to do the job for them and report links which may have been built unnaturally. John’s response: “Well, if we could recognize all of them I guess that might be a possibility.”

There’s a lot to take away from that statement. It’s near impossible for Google to be able to detect with 100% accuracy that certain links are good while others are bad and thus rely on us to report it for them. There are exceptions of course, but then again you have to keep in mind a) Whether something was Negative SEO on another site by a competitor and b) blanket rules for this in the algorithm would wreak havoc across normal search results.

Recently there was a bit of drama surrounding a Moz.com post which suggested that Google +1′s were the number one factor in getting search engine rankings these days. This was quickly debunked by Matt over on Hacker News and the post on Moz was edited to reflect that they had meant that shares on Google+ were getting sites rankings. I’m not here to bash Moz but the correlation does not equal causation. Sites that write good content generally have readers who will share their content on social media sites like Google+ and they are actively attracting new backlinks anyways which help their rankings.

I am here to point out how much Matt dodged a lot of questions on that thread and really didn’t want to talk about shares having an effect on rankings (all that juicy pagerank) but just reverted to the good old Google PR angle “focus on creating great content”. Just like that amazing video that ranks number #1 for SEO company and top 3 for SEO services, right?

If you’re new here, I did write a few blog posts recently which show lots of other examples of terrible search results and I tend to get a few dozen more in my inbox from readers every time I write a blog post like this. I really don’t like to be the person to call out too many examples though (I blurred the links in my last post on request from someone I had ‘outed’).

To wrap up this post, there are a few things I want you to keep in mind:

• Listen to what Google have to say via these channels, but don’t take it too seriously past common sense
• Do not do crazy SEO tests on your money site (the site you can’t ‘risk’) but do SEO tests
• Remember that while Google may have around 2.5 million servers, the people who put these algorithms together sit down for staff meetings at a conference table every week to try and deal with the challenges they face just like you or I would (but a little smarter)

Next week I’m sharing a replay of my first ever webinar which shows you some SEO tactics you can put into place that take affect immediately and will give you an upper hand on people who only read SEO blogs and don’t follow through with their own testing. You’re going to love it (I hope)! Thank you, as always, for reading…

You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/2-million-backlinks/

Build Great Backlinks
Glen
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] 3 Conversion Tricks I Use to Get More Leads Than You (+ Free Squeeze Page Template)

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When I released OptinSkin back at the beginning of 2012, one of the main marketing angles for the product was that it allows split-testing. Similarly, when I released my free training guide Cloud Blueprint, split-testing was stressed so much as something that can take you from being someone who does ‘okay’ online to someone who can quit their job. When changing just one word on your sales or squeeze page can literally mean a 1,000% change in conversions, I’m amazed when I don’t see people doing it.

Today I’m going to share some of my more private landing page tips that help me get more subscribers and sales than my competition in virtually any niche I enter. I’m also going to give you a high-converting squeeze page template you can customize until your heart’s content. Finally, I’ll share – step-by-step – how to implement split-testing so you have no reason not to be doing it.

100% Free HTML Squeeze Page

I want to kick off this post by giving away a totally free HTML squeeze page that you can use to easily collect email subscribers. I did have the idea of using WordPress and custom pages for this giveaway but I thought it would be too much hassle to make it compatible with people’s themes etc. (and there are premium plugins which do exactly this). The freebie is more about giving you an easy way to quickly get into split-testing without needing any technical knowledge (besides FTP) and start building your readership.

I designed this after putting together so many squeeze pages recently for sites in my PPC case study and this template was one of the best that I found to be working. You can view a preview of it and some of the features, below:

Installation

To install the template, you simply need FTP access to your server. If you do not have this, simply ask your web host what those details would be and then use a tool like Filezilla to access your site. Navigate to wherever your website files are – usually public_html – and create a new folder for the name of your squeeze page. EmailA or something similar is fine. Then just drag and drop the theme that I give you to this location, and it will be up and running instantly.

The theme can be found here: http://www.viperchill.com/SqueezePage.zip (Right Click > Save Link As)

User Guide

I did spend a lot of time putting this together so the user guide is behind a little ‘share please’ box. I’ve never done anything like this before, but would appreciate it if you could help me spread the word. If you are more technically inclined already it should be very easy to edit the theme without the guide. However, if you are a beginner, you’ll get access to a huge page on this website which gives you a lot more information.

6 Things I Learned from My Last Round of Split-Testing

Please keep in mind that the following lessons may or may not work well in your industry. The true beauty of split-testing is that you really never know what is going to convert highly for your audience and the plus side is that there’s always a lot of fun in trying.

1. A laptop screen above my opt-in form worked better than a DVD style cover, an eBook cover and an audio CD graphic. The audio CD was by far the worst graphic that I tested. Keep in mind that I did put an image on the laptop screen that was relevant to what I was giving away and didn’t just leave it blank

2. A blue opt-in box worked better than any other colour I tested. Even when I matched the opt-in box to other colours on the site (such as having a red box with a red title) I still couldn’t beat blue with blue for my particular niche.

3. Having a Facebook like box on the page lowered conversions every single time. I’ve had it help when I’m selling a product, but for a squeeze page it just seemed to take people’s attention away from what I was actually doing. Heat-mapping tells me that people weren’t clicking on it – which is fine, I don’t want them to – so it’s not simply that I was directing them elsewhere and thus lowering conversions.

4. Words like “Weird” “unexpected” “unexplainable” “shocking” and so on which increase people’s curiosity helped a great deal. For instance, it would be better for me to say “This weird piece of software sped up my PC overnight” then something really clean and clear like “I installed this software and my computer became faster”. That’s just an example; I’m not involved in the speeding up of your computers.

5. The title still has the biggest impact for me when it comes to increasing conversions. This not only includes the words used as mentioned above, but the colour and even more importantly the font that is used.

6. Having an image underneath the opt-in box (even like the grass you see in my example) could not be beaten. It increased my conversion rate every single time. I played with this to show people’s faces, screenshots of the software they were getting, random ‘press’ images, and so on. Though not all of the images worked much better, every single one increased conversion rates in some way.

Using My Magic Grass Idea for Higher Conversion Rates

The last point there, number 6, was what I refer to as ‘magic grass’. It’s a really simple idea but something that just seems to work over and over again for me when it comes to getting more opt-ins. Have something on your page that people are likely to click on and then remind them to opt-in using a javascript alert.

Click on the grass below to get an idea of what I’m talking about (you’ll have to be viewing this on site, and not in an RSS reader or your inbox):

If you’re using this on a really long page – like this blog post – you’ll have to pick a point in the page using the anchor attribute for HTML links where the user is returned to after they click OK. You probably noticed you got redirected to just above the grass. Typically I don’t have to do this on opt-in pages as they’re short enough that people don’t have to scroll, so it’s fine if someone is taken back to the ‘top’ of the page.

Here’s the code:

<a href="#" onClick="alert('Hold on quick fingers! Enter your email address in the box for INSTANT ACCESS to your free guide!')">IMAGE CODE HERE</a>

Make sure you put the code for an HTML image or whatever it is you want to trigger a pop-up where I have written ‘IMAGE CODE HERE’. It works especially well for:

• Any graphics on the page showing what you’re promoting
• Graphics showing underneath your opt-in form (possibly as wide as the page)
• Thumbnails showing a clip of a video they’re about to get access to

You can make the message be anything really. Just make sure you’re not condescending and make sure you do write in a fun, playful way. The key point is to remind people that they’ll get the bonus or benefit once they opt-in.

If you use any kind of heat mapping software (I use what’s built into Visual Website Optimizer which I’ll cover later) then you can see where people are clicking and then use that section of your page to trigger this kind of javascript alert.

Please note that I actually wasn’t using a picture of grass in the heatmap above, but I was using something with the same image dimensions (wide but short) which was semi-relevant to what I was giving away. You can split-test this of course to see what works best for you.

Don’t Show Your Add to Cart Button Instantly

This works especially well if you’re doing one of those ‘free guide’ or free presentation style videos where you are actually using that free concept to push towards a sale. If people can see an “Add to Cart” button under the video from the very start they know you have more intentions than just giving away something for free. At least give them a chance to give you a chance by delaying the effect.

<script type="text/javascript">
function showBuyLink() {
document.getElementById("buylink").style.visibility = "visible";
}
// adjust this as needed, 1 sec = 1000
setTimeout("showBuyLink()", 230000);
</script>
<div id="buylink" style="visibility: hidden" align="center">
YOUR ADD TO CART BUTTON / LINK GOES HERE
</div>

Don’t forget to change the part in bold with how long you want the delay to be. 1000 equals a 1 second delay. If you’re promoting a 10 minute video then I recommend trying about 3-4 minutes in because at least this way you’re only showing it to people once you’ve really got their attention with it. As with the theme of this blog post though, this is something you should absolutely be testing.

Get People to Click-in and They’ll Opt-in

This was one of the random ideas I had a few weeks ago that I put into action. At first it sucked pretty badly but with some tweaking it did outperform other pages in some ways. I found that it worked best when someone already know of me / my website and then went to buy or sign-up for something. However for cold traffic it didn’t seem to be as effective as having everything on one page by default.

What this does is basically lure people into taking a very simple action – clicking a link – and then getting them to opt-in or convert in other ways after. For example, you would say you’re giving away something for free and then tell people to click a link to get that free thing – making them assume the link is the access. That link then just unveils more content on that same page and doesn’t take them anywhere else.

My guess is that – psychology wise – they’ve already performed one action and engaged with the page so they’re more likely to repeat it and engage again. Here’s an example below:

This wont work if you’re reading this in your inbox or an RSS reader, you’ll have to come to the post

Click here to download your 100% free PDF

What you reveal is not a boom graphic but the rest of your page where they convert. Hat tip goes to RS for the code. There is a much better way of doing it that I used to use but I can’t find the old code source I’m afraid. The “much better” way simply means that you don’t have to write Click here to download 3 times in a row in the code. It’s only a once off thing though.

Split-Testing is Everything

Split-testing is so crucial to your success when it comes to sales page and squeeze pages that I just can’t over-hype it enough. If you’re not testing, you’re losing money. I can enter brand new niches where I know less about the market than anyone else and quickly overtake their income because I’m finding out what a particular audience really responds to rather than just guessing based on my extensive “experience”. This is not just some broad statement either, I’ve done this for friends and clients where I know very specific figures about their income / leads and I’ve been able to surpass that through nothing but hardcore testing.

Here’s a good example from Mind Valley when they split-tested promoting the Silva Method which has millions of customers.

Recently for example, I removed all text from the Backlinks XXX sales page and replace it with a video. We’ve tried (and are trying) lots of videos on the sales page. Every single variation with a video beat the version of the page with a lot of text that I had in place for months. It sucks that I put so much time and effort into some of the graphics we had up on that page – literally a week of solid work – only to find out it’s not really helping us get sales at all.

But that’s what testing is for. You have to put your ego aside and accept that something else might be working better even if you don’t want it to be. I’ve put together two short guides for you on how to set up testing with different services.

Split-Testing with Visual Website Optimizer

I read the story behind Visual Website Optimizer (not an affiliate link) recently and have to say it was pretty inspiring. Started by one guy out in Mumbai, India, all he wanted was to make $1,000 per month from the service to replace his current income and then some. A few years down the line he’s pulling in millions of dollars per month, works with his best friends, and never took money from a single investor.

Not a bad end result.

The reason the service is so successful is because they’re great at every aspect of their offering. Great support, a great interface and most importantly, great (and fast) results for your split tests. When you first sign-up to the service you get a list of options for split-testing as you can see below:

A/B testing and Multivariate testing seem to be the most popular that I read about online. A/B testing will basically replace one object of the page for you with another. Like swapping between a red opt-in box and a blue opt-in box. Multivariate testing will variate through multiple objects on your page (such as titles, graphics, fonts — whatever you choose) and try to find you the best end result. Multivariate testing only really works well if you have a lot of traffic though, as there are so many variables that it needs to test.

I don’t actually use either of these, but instead rely on split-URL testing. I make too many odd changes (such as changes to the code snippets I shared above) that I find easier just to keep on separate pages of WordPress and use the split-URL options.

After you’ve then put in different variations of the page you want to test, it’s time to select what your goal is. Visual Website Optimizer have options for pretty much everything:

I generally use either visits a page or submits a form. Both of them can be used for tracking opt-ins as you put in your form submit URL from Aweber or you can put your thank you page in as the page that someone has to visit. If you aren’t sure what to track or how to track it then I recommend sending through an email to support. I had a unique situation with some membership site software I run (they go to Paypal then back to my website) and wanted to ensure it would be tracked correctly as the produce is expensive (and sales rarer) so I would have to wait a while for it to test properly.

They promptly responded and helped me select the correct variable.

With testing, your results aren’t always going to be better than your original page. Sometimes your gut instinct is pretty good and the changes you make actually lower conversions. Here’s an example of this happening for me:

Sometimes they go the right way but it’s hard to separate a winner (it can take a lot of traffic) and you need a little patience. I do have far more clear cut examples of of successful testing but this was such an anomaly for me that I had to take a screenshot. I know the traffic numbers are very low so it’s too early to pick a winner, but never have I ever seen the exact number of conversions from visitors for two additional variations that I’m testing.

Split-Testing with Google Analytics Experiments

Google used to have their own split-testing tool that was independent from Analytics called Google Website Optimizer. It seems these days this is now built into Google Analytics so you’ll need to make sure you’re running that on your website to take advantage of this free offering. I personally don’t use Google Analytics at all anymore – though my clients do – so don’t have any personal tests to show you.

I will show you how to set it up though. Once you’ve logged into your Analytics account, you’re going to want to click on Content then select Experiments. You’ll be faced with the following options window:

For the percentage of traffic to test I would probably go for 100% unless you’re making some drastic changes that might put off a large portion of your audience. If that’s the case, then scale things down accordingly.

The next option will then ask you to define the goal (conversion) you wish to track. Something simple like someone landing on your thank you page – where they get redirected after subscribing to your email list – is an obvious one you can use for testing both your own site and on my free squeeze page.

You’ll then see a preview of the experiment before it goes live with the tracking code you’ll need to install on your site.

Simply follow the instructions here and you should be up and running. As mentioned earlier, I don’t use Google Analytics for website tracking so unfortunately don’t have any reports to share with you like I do for Visual Website Optimizer. As with most things Google though, it appears incredibly easy to set-up and be on your way to getting more conversions if you don’t have the budget (or desire) to use VWO.

I hope I’ve inspired you to give split-testing a go if you aren’t doing it already. And if you are doing it, some code and ideas which might help to improve your conversions even further. If you have any questions or feedback, I’m here in the comments. I would love to know what you think…

You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/ultimate-squeeze/

Build Great Backlinks
Glen
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] Ultimate Guide to Making Your YouTube Videos Interactive

Build Great Backlinks

YouTube let’s you connect with people – 1 billion of them to be exact.

That’s how many people visit YouTube every month. The site’s extreme popularity is why we’ve highlighted YouTube in the past with posts like How to Go Viral on YouTube and The Top 10 YouTube Channels.

But we’ve never written about YouTube annotations – and how they can greatly improve your videos by adding an interactive element. This post is all about delving into interactivity on YouTube:  why to do it, how to do it, and what you’re capable of doing once you master it.

Why Make Your YouTube Videos Interactive?

More Views to More of Your Videos

The most basic reason of all — who doesn’t want more views?

YouTube annotations allow you to create links from one video to another or to a playlist. The right link will turn a one-time viewer into a serial viewer. And since YouTube allows you to make a link to your subscribe page right in the video, interactivity can boost your subscription rate as well.

Up-to-Date Messaging

After you publish a blog post, you can return to it and edit it whenever you want. A YouTube video isn’t so malleable:  once it’s up there, it’s up – and if you want to make substantial changes you’ll have to take it back down and re-upload it (losing all of your views and comments in the process).

That’s a problem because the world keeps spinning and so too will your message.

That’s where annotations come in. Since they’re tacked on after you’re video is uploaded, they’re easy to change in just a minute or two. That means you can keep your YouTube videos with whatever is new with you — whether that’s a list of upcoming events, your newest products, or your most recent blog posts.

A good YouTube video will continue to amass thousands of views for years and years after it’s posted. Design a video with YouTube interactivity in mind and it can still be working for you decades from now.

Easier to Navigate Videos

Have you ever been watching a tutorial video and had to skip around for minutes trying to find the one part you need to learn? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to skip right to the part you need?

With YouTube annotations, it’s possible. You can set up a series links in your video with titles referring to its different “chapters” — just like a table of contents. Your viewer will be able to read through the list, click on their desired chapter, and — poof — the video skips ahead to that exact location on the video.

Get Started with YouTube Interactivity in 3 Steps

(1) Access Your Video Manager

Log in to YouTube and click on the gray arrow next to your name in the upper right corner.

From there click on Video Manager in the ‘YouTube’ Column.

 

(2) Access Annotations Area

From the list of videos you’ve uploaded, select one to add interactivity and click on downward arrow next to edit. Select Annotations from the drop-down menu.

 

(3) Add Annotations to Your Video

Click on the Add Annotation button to the right of your video, then start working down the list. You’ll have the option to add text, adjust its placement within the video, and make it link to other pages or videos.

I’ll dive into these features in the next section.

Making and Adjusting YouTube Annotations

There are five types of YouTube annotations. In the example above, we’re using the Spotlight style of annotation. A spotlight is a just thin outline of a box, so they are useful when you want to use an existing part of the video and turn it into an interactive element. In this case, we’ve incorporated a short clip of another Income Diary video and put a spotlight around it’s edges, essentially turning the video clip into a link to the full video.

I’ve made an image with an example of the remaining four types of annotations:

Titles allow for the largest font size; the Speech Bubble creates a playful cartoon speech box; Notes make a simple, useful rectangle; and Labels look a lot like spotlights, but they reveal text when you hover over them with your mouse.

Adding Text and Color

Use the white box to write in the text you want to appear with the annotation. You have a choice between four font sizes (11, 13, 16, and 28) unless you’re using a Title (48, 72, and 100). If you increase the font size but you don’t notice a change on the video, then you likely need to make the annotation box bigger.

Text must be either white or black, but you have an assortment of 34 colors to choose from for your annotations — including transparent. Your first priority here should be clarity, so make sure that there is a high amount of contrast between the text and the background color. You may also want to consider using colors associated with your brand or using attention-grabbing colors (e.g. red, orange, yellow) when making a call-to-action.

You also have the choice between two styles, Normal and Impact. I prefer the simplicity of Normal.

Positioning Annotations

When you make a new annotation, it will appear over your video. You can adjust it’s position by placing your mouse over the middle of the annotation, clicking, and dragging. It’s usually a good idea to place annotations on the periphery of the screen so that they don’t distract from the video, but in some cases you may want the annotation to be the focal point – front and center.

You can adjust the size of an annotation by clicking and dragging any of the black rectangles that are on each corner. YouTube limits the size of the annotation so that it cannot take up more than 30% of the screen.

Annotations in Time
Once you’ve added your annotation, it will appear in the dark gray area underneath the video. By putting your mouse on either side of the annotation, you can extend it longer or make it shorter. By putting your mouse in the center of the annotation, you can move the whole thing forward and backward in time. You can also make these adjustment with the Start and End time fields to the right.

Choosing the right duration for your annotations is important. Too short and the viewer may not have time to read your message or click on your link. Too long and the annotation may distract from the video and overstay its welcome. Give your best guess at how long an annotation should stay up (probably about 5-7 seconds) and then watch the video from the beginning with the annotation. That will give you the best idea of whether or not you’ve chosen an appropriate length.

If you’re having trouble fine-tuning, you can use the magnify bar in the bottom right to get a closer look.

Turning Your Annotation into a Link

Here’s where we finally get to add interactivity:  YouTube allows annotations to link to other Videos, Playlists, Channels, Google+ Profiles/Pages, Subscribe Pages, and Fundraising Projects. 

Types of Interactive YouTube Links and their Uses

Videos

This allows you to link to any other video on YouTube. This is the type of link that we use in the example video (Will Smith Explains How to Bend the Universe). Use it to link to one more related videos.

Since you can start the linked video at a second-marker of your choosing, you can select very specific portions of videos or even link to different parts within the same video. That’s how you make a table of contents for your video:  a series of video links to different times in the same video.

Another use could be to allow the viewer to go back and re-watch a particularly tricky part of the video:  “That last part about SEO was pretty technical, so click the button in the bottom right to go back and hear it one more time.”

Subscribe Pages

This is one of the most powerful links, since every subscriber you get is another long-term viewer. When someone clicks on a subscribe link, it takes them to a special landing page for your channel with a big button saying ‘subscribe’.

I see no reason why you shouldn’t put a subscribe button in every video you post on YouTube. It’s as easy as putting a note in the bottom left corner that says ‘Subscribe’ in 13 pt text.

Channels

Your channel page is like the home page for your YouTube channel. This is a great stepping-stone for viewers who are interested in learning more about you and your videos but who might not yet be ready to subscribe.

Google+ Profiles/Pages

You can’t link a YouTube video to your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram — but you can link directly to your Google+ page. If you have an active YouTube channel and a social media presence, then this is an awesome opportunity to start building a relationship with your viewers.

Playlists

For audiences, a playlist can mean more entertainment/information queued up for them without them having to bother with browsing for the next one. For you and your videos, it can mean the difference between getting one view or ten views. If you have a series of videos that make sense being watched in a particular order, you make a playlist and put a link to it in each one of those videos.

Fundraising Projects

YouTube recently started allowing users to link to their fundraising projects on 18 approved websites, including Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. This makes YouTube a great place to promote your campaign

If you’re thinking about crowd funding, you can check out our Ultimate Guide to a Successful Kickstarter Campaign.

Can I Link from a YouTube Video to My Website?

This is the one interactive elements that my video clients ask for most — and unfortunately the answer is no:  you cannot link directly to your website from a YouTube video. Your best bet is to leave your full web address (including the http://) within the first three lines of the description area.

How to Design Your Video from the ground up for Interactivity

When I set out to make interactive videos for Income Diary, I made a special 1920 x 1080 px background in Photoshop comprised of branding elements taken straight from Income Diary’s site (above).

The focal point of the design is the spot in the center for a previous Income Diary video. When I finish each new video, I import the above template and the previous video file. Then I scale down the previous video so that it fits in the box and speed it up so that there’s more movement. After the video’s uploaded, it’s as easy as putting a spotlight around the miniature video and linking it up.

Another aspect of the above template is that there’s room in the bottom center for another annotation. That’s a prime spot for a note that says ‘Subscribe’.

How to Add Interactivity to an Already Uploaded YouTube Video

If you want to add interactivity to videos after the fact, don’t fret. You don’t need a fancy template and you don’t need to have planned anything in advance.

I recommend keeping it simple. Try putting a note in the bottom left that says, “Previous Video” and a note in the bottom right that says “Next Video”. Or simply put a note in the bottom center that says “Subscribe” and links to your subscription page.

In most cases, the bulk of the action will be in the center of the screen so it won’t be particularly distracting if there are notes discreetly placed at the bottom. Nevertheless, I don’t recommend putting these links up until the last 30 seconds or so of your video.

Conclusion

Do you have any questions about interactivity? I would be happy to answer them in the comment section.

Furthermore, if you have any insight into using YouTube annotations please share with our community below.

Finally, if you want to learn more about how to succeed on YouTube check out our 21 ways to Dominate YouTube.

The post Ultimate Guide to Making Your YouTube Videos Interactive appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

You may view the latest post at
http://www.incomediary.com/ultimate-guide-interactive-youtube-videos

Build Great Backlinks
Nick
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] How I Doubled My Money With Facebook Ads

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Share

Facebook ads have transformed the way we make money with our website. We have our ads set up so that we always make more money than we spend, and always have a positive return on investment.

It could be anywhere from 20% to 400% depending on what we’re advertising.

Needless to say, it’s worth sharing with you guys.

We’ve learned everything we know on this subject from Brian and Scott Moran at Get10kFans and their Facebook Ad Academy course.

If you haven’t already, I would suggest reading my ‘Top 10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid‘, as it will start you on the path to making money more before you’ve even started.

The Basic Premise

Lets say you’re selling a $100 (for the sake of round numbers) digital product online. Every sale makes you $100 clear profit.

So long as you spend less than $100 on advertising that product (and make a sale), you’re making a positive return on investment.

Just how much that return on investment is all comes down to how you market the product.

So how do you advertise the product?

Advertising Option 1

We’re first going to look at a popular technique of collecting emails first, and then redirecting people to sales pages, and chasing them up with emails.

Step 1 – Collect The Email

You set up a Facebook ad campaign to advertise a free ebook / report / course, in return for someone’s email address. This can be done with a page template in OptimisePress, and a whole host of other software.

When they enter their email address, they get added to your list, and the first followup email they receive contains the free offer.

Step 2 – Direct Them to a Sales Page

You have their attention; don’t waste it.

You can automatically redirect your leads when you collect their emails. Either when they enter their details, or confirm their email address. This is when you want to send them to a sales page.

I send people to my sales page, only I change the video to include a small introduction so that I can connect with people, rather than just saying ‘Here, buy my stuff before you’ve even received the free stuff I promised you.’

This is called a thank you video, and my introduction goes a little something like this:

“Hey, thanks for signing up for your free ebook, it’s on its way to your email inbox, but real quick, while I’ve got you here…”

And then I lead into a sales pitch.

That’s just one way of doing things though.

You could send people to a one-time-offer page, where they can a limited discount on a product if they purchase within the next hour.

Or you could send people to an affiliate page.

Or you could send them to a page with a bunch of discount codes for multiple affiliate products.

I’ve tried all three, and I prefer the first method as I can easily do the other methods later on through email too.

The possibilities are endless, and you should test for yourself, but there’s one thing that they all have in common: each page is monetized.

This means that the traffic you’ve paid money for is then being sent to pages which will make you money.

Step 3 – Add Them to an Auto-responder

You’re only going to make an initial return on investment from a handful of people in step 2, so it’s important that you keep in contact with these leads, providing them with a mixture of content and sales.

Because there’s still loads of money in that list.

Auto-responders are a different subject altogether though.

The Cost

Lets say for example that it costs you 20¢ a click to send someone to your squeeze page from Facebook.

And that your conversion rate on the squeeze page is 40%.

That means that for every dollar you spend, you will get two leads.

50¢ a lead, if you will.

Now, looking back at our $100 product, we know that for $100 we can get 200 people to our sales page, while collecting 200 emails at the same time.

All you need to do is ensure that your page converts, your offer is great, and you’re targeting the right people on Facebook.

If you can get everything right, and one in every 100 people purchases your product, you will double your money.

It’s that simple.

It’s not always that easy, but it is that simple. The most important factors here is making sure you have an offer which converts, and you’re targeting the right people.

If you can get that right, you’ll be laughing.

Of course, you can completely skip step 1 and 3, and send people directly to your sales page, but I find it’s best to build a list at the same time.

After all, the money is in the list.

But lets look at that option now.

Advertising Option 2

You can simply send people directly to your offer.

Why would you want to do this?

Well, for one, if you’re paying 20¢ a click still, then you can send 2.5 times as many people to your page before breaking even. Rather than sending 200 people, you could send 500, which is quite an appealing idea.

But this is not an option I recommend, and I’ll show you why now.

3 Reasons Why I Rarely Choose Option 2

First, it’s unlikely that you will still only be paying 20¢ a click.

Your cost per click depends on your click through rate (how many times your ad is shown before it’s clicked on), and people are much more likely to click on an ad for a free offer, than a paid one.

This means that your CPC goes up. In my experience, it’s usually by around 50%.

Second, if people choose not to buy your product, then you’ve kissed that advertising money goodbye. At least if you send people to a squeeze page first, you can collect their email.

Third, people like to know who you are before they buy something. Especially if it’s an info product, and not software.

They want to see that you can provide quality content to them, before they start paying for it. Which you can do in the form of a free report or ebook.

You have to make that human connection.

As I sell info products, I rarely choose option 2, but there are times when you might want to.

When To Choose Option 2

If you’re targeting your fans with information on a sale you’re having, then option 2 is a great idea. They already know who you are, and they’re much more likely to buy from you then.

It’s also a good choice if you’re marketing an affiliate product. I’ve seen lots of people advertising OptimisePress 2.0 in the past few weeks, because it’s killer software which people actually want to buy. All you have to do is send people to the page, and the software’s found, James Dyson, does all of the hard work.

Another good idea is if you’re advertising a customer testimonial.

Brian Moran, the founder of Get10000fans runs a sponsored story every day, detailing a customer’s testimonial for his Timeline Blueprint course. The reason that ad runs every day, is because it converts like mad. It leads people direct to his sales page, but the conversions on the ad are great.

Bonus Tip: Be Careful About Tracking Conversions with Facebook

I’m not saying you shouldn’t track conversions using Facebook’s methods, as it does work; you just need to be careful.

If you’re running a campaign and you have it optimised for CPC, and then you go in and edit the campaign to track conversions, Facebook will automatically change the ad from CPC to ‘Optimised for Conversions’.

This essentially means that you’re going to start paying a lot more for those clicks.

That’s at least what happened to me.

Rather than paying 20¢ per click, I ended up paying around $2.50, with terrible results. It spent my whole daily budget in just a couple of hours.

I don’t know if Facebook is trying to be sneaky with this one, but watch out for that.

So there you have it, there’s an introduction to Facebook advertising. Want to learn more about it?

Want to learn how to build successful ads that clicked on just a few cents?

I very strongly recommend Brian and Scott Moran’s Facebook Ads Academy, which you can see here.

For the next 48 hours, they’re running a limited half price launch sale, so get it while it’s still cheap.

Also, if you buy through our link today, you will receive a free copy of Site Profit Domination.

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[Build Great Backlinks] 10 Ways To Improve Blog Security (so that you don’t get hacked)

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Every day, experienced hackers and nasty plagiarists flood the internet to look for security loopholes on websites. If they find your blog vulnerable, they may do anything from installing malware to redirecting your traffic to their own sites.

In spite of the thousands of hacking incidences that take place online each day, few people seem concerned about blog security. Do not think that your blog is immune to such attacks.

Well, hacking is not the only practice you should be worried about while working online. Content theft is possibly a huge problem, particularly in the world of blogging where uniqueness is the hallmark of quality.

While Google and the other search engines create algorithms to identify the origin of certain content, it is still not fun when you discover that people copied your content and pasted it on dozens of other blogs out there.

Since WordPress is a popular tool for setting up blogs, it can easily draw the attention of hackers. You can find the latest threats right here and you will understand what I mean.

Fortunately, you can take a number of measures to nip such security threats in the bud. This post will highlight 10 effective ways you should use now to make your blog more secure.

1. Secure the login

You may have noticed that admin is the default username on your WordPress blog. All hackers know it as well. So, change this one as soon as yesterday. Besides, use Captcha for the user login as a means of protection from the brute fore attack.

 

To implement Captcha, you can use the BWS Plugins. You will find the Captcha plugin useful in controlling against spam as well.

2. Do not advertise the version of your WordPress blog to the world

Typically, WordPress sites normally publish a version number, which makes it easier for visitors to know whether you are operating on an obsolete, non-patched edition of WordPress.

Exposing the version number of your WordPress site will make it vulnerable to security threats and attacks. While you can take off the WordPress version from your web page, you need to make an additional change: go to your WordPress installation directory and delete that readme.html file from the directory since it also advertises the version of your WordPress site to the world.

A number of WordPress themes contain login links to give you easy access to a login page. You do not need to reveal your login page in a manner that will invite everyone including hackers, to access it.

Therefore, if you have a theme with a login link, you should remove it. If you cannot remove it, consider changing the theme.

3. Automatically back up your blog

With regular backups, you can easily recover from even the deadliest hacks. In fact, at a click, you can restore the entire site.

Besides, before you make any significant changes to your site like upgrading the WordPress version or installing a new plugin, ensure you make a back up. The Better WP Security plugin, you can schedule back functions and enhance security for your blog.

4. Add the password authentication to your WP-admin folder

If you want to keep hackers away from your blog, make it hard for them to break in through your login page. To achieve this, add the password protection to your "WP-admin" folder. This will ensure that anyone accessing this folder will need to type in the correct password and username (aside from the user login).

The simplest way to add the password authentication is through the CPanel. Simply log in to your CPanel and then select this option – 'Password Protect directories.'

 

5. Add links to guard against copy/paste

You do not require any complex tools to steal web content. It is as easy as copying the article and pasting it in another place. Besides, you don't even need to bother about the formatting because that will be copied too!

Way too convenient for the content thieves, right?

Well, recently I started using a great service, known as Tynt. While Tynt won't disable the copying of your content, it adds an attribution URL to your blog anytime someone copies content from your blog.

The result will look like this – copied content+ read more at www.example.com.

Well, you might say that most content thieves will just delete that link though chances are most of them won't even realize it! I mean, most of them simply copy, paste and then publish.

 

 

After installing Tynt, you'll receive stats on the number of copy commands that occurred on your site in addition to the most copied posts. Moreover, this tool will help you know how many links you have generated from the read more links.

6. Setup Your Own Google Authorship

Whenever there is duplicate content, search engines may decide which content deserves a lower ranking by finding out the one that was published earlier.

However, that isn't always sufficient, especially if a person whose blog has a higher ranking steals your content. In such a scenario, the stolen content might continue to receive more link juice.

It is here that Google authorship comes in handy. If your authorship is confirmed, there's less likelihood for your content to rank lower than similar content stolen and posted on another site.

 

 

To setup your Google authorship, you should follow the following steps:

1. Sign up for a Google+ account.
2. In your profile settings, you will find "Contributor to"
3. You should add the link to your own blog there
4. Install the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast
5. Now go to users  then to your profile
6. Move down to the contact info
7. Add the profile link of your Google+ account

For more detailed instructions on setting up Google authorship in WordPress, go here.

7. Disable hotlinking

When someone copies your article, chances are he will also copy images   within the article. After the thief publishes your post on his or her blog, the image URLs will actually point to your server.

Consequently, your hosting will receive additional load thus lowering your blog's performance. The direct copying of images from someone's blog is called hotlinking.

 

The good news is there is a way to help you avoid all these headaches and the solution is CloudFlare.

Well, CloudFlare is simply a great content delivery network. This tool improves the loading times and to achieve this, it caches the content, collects information about the location of the visitors and then sends the cached data right from the local server.

The above functionality and the fact that it's free (though you may find more premium features), makes CloudFlare a must have for any serious blogger.

However, in our case, we need the "hotlink protection" checkbox, which you can get from your profile at CloudFlare. You simply need to turn it on in order to stop the hotlinking issue.

You simply need to click on the "Security Settings" and then scroll down to the "Hotlink protection" and just click on the "ON" button.

8. Install trusted plugins only

Hackers can easily access your blog through the plugins you install. When you install a plugin, you make it possible for one to access core files found in your WordPress installation. This is why you need to be cautious when installing any plugin to your blog.

 

 

Below are four major considerations you should do before you install any plugin

i. Ensure it features in the plugins directory on WordPress.org

If you cannot find the plugin in this directory, chances are it is either not legitimate or it is premium. Do not hesitate once there's a download option for it in this directory.

ii. Check the rating

Look at the star rating that users have given to the plugin as well as the distribution of votes. If the plugin has more one-star ratings than it has five-star ratings, chances are there could be a security concern.

iii. The number of downloads

Try to look for a popular plugin. You can tell this from the number of downloads under each plugin. Bad plugins hardly generate thousands of downloads because moderators would remove them in no time.

iv. Check out the third-party reviews

As aforementioned, premium plugins do not feature in the directory, making it hard for you to establish their legitimacy. So, when considering such plugins, find out more from the reviews of those who've used it.

You can also visit the CodeCanyon directory, which features premium plugins and you can find out whether the plugin is legit and safe to use.

9. Install the two security plugins

You can install two powerful security plugins that will keep hackers running from your blog. These are:

a. Wordfence

This security plugin has awesome features: it limits the login attempts, scans the themes and plugins against your WordPress repository versions for changes; scans the comments for phishing URL's and malware, and checks out for any outdated plugins. Wordfence is a great plugin that you can get free.

b. Limit Login Attempts

With this plugin, you can keep threats off of your WordPress login page. It enables you to restrict the number of times that users (based on the IP address or cookie) can unsuccessfully try to log in into your own blog.

10. Install a Firewall

Finally, to protect your blog against hacking and other security attempts, you should install OSE Firewall, the creation of Open Source Excellence.

This firewall has a built-in scanner that will scan your blog for any malicious codes. Besides, it has a new anti-spam feature that will keep your blog spam free.

 Conclusion

You can follow the above steps to protect your WordPress-powered blog against unsolicited access and also to keep content thieves at bay (although I am yet to find a sure-fire tool that can stop content theft from my blog).

Now, I'm curious to know the ways you guys use to secure your blogs. Do you use other security plugins or other methods not on this list? Kindly take a minute and share something in the comments!

 

 

 

The post 10 Ways To Improve Blog Security (so that you don’t get hacked) appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

You may view the latest post at
http://www.incomediary.com/improve-wordpress-blog-security

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Kevinson Libama
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com