What a nice guy that Traffic Travis is. Did I say guy, sorry I mean what a nice program for helping your keyword research.

What is Traffic Travis?

Traffic Travis provides a huge complement of SEO research and page analysis tools, as well as a powerful host of PPC research and monitoring tools. Regardless of whether you’re building a website for search engine optimization or pay-per-click, Traffic Travis is an indispensable research tool: tracking your own site’s performance, and peeking under the hood of your competitors’ sites as well.

The Keyword Finder

This is going to be the tool you won’t want to be without in the future. Keyword Finder uses Yahoo, Ask, Google and WordTracker to help you find popular keywords in your market.

Once your search terms appear in the keyword list box you can move them to the saved keywords box and then continue looking for more keywords.

After collecting all the keywords into your saved box you can then move them to the sort which is another very useful Traffic Travis Tool.

The Keyword Sorter

The first thing I do in the keyword sorter is to have it remove any duplicates I may have added while doing my keyword research.

Need specific keywords for ad campaigns, not a problem. Just enter the word or words you want to sort by and those that match your search will be in the matched keyword box and those that don’t, well they go in a box that says they don’t match your search. Very simple but most powerful.

Then you can save those keyword sets and continue searching out different phrases for other campaigns, like your PPC campaigns.

that’s only the beginning for Traffic Travis, from here you can continue on to Search Engine Tools, PPC Analysis and Page Analysis.

All in all it’s a pretty powerful tool and worth your time checking it out so head over to Traffic Travis and see for yourself.

Tweet This Post

My wife and I are baby boomers ready to take on a new life of travel as soon as she gives up that day job of hers and retires. I’ve been ready to go for a couple of years now, let’s get the show on the road.

Travel is a hobby that we both share so it works out perfect as way to make money online. We look for helpful info online all the time as do so many others. People want to know what will make their travels much more memorable for all the right reasons.

Also advertisers are willing to pay us to place ads for our readers to see and that makes us money month after month.

Another hobby we share is backyard gardening. People want to know HOW about everything gardening and we are more than willing to share what we learn in our backyard garden.

I have a few hobbies my wife doesn’t share, like my fishing but she will come with me and just enjoy the day out. As long as I don’t drag her back into the woods too far.

The fact that she doesn’t fish isn’t a bad thing because she can take pictures for our travel site, gardening site and fishing sites. So one day out fishing can mean a weeks worth of posts on three of our blogs.

Life is good and just seems to get better and better.

Note to self… Get my wife a laptop so she can start her own blogs.

Tweet This Post

Image via WikipediaI woke up this morning, put on the coffee and booted up the ole PC and to my surprise Google is in the middle of updating the PageRank on my blogs again. I was wondering when they were going to get around to it again. I guess I should mark the dates down so I can have a better idea of just how long it’s been since the last update.

I don’t get as excited as I used to when the updates happened. I guess it’s because my sites don’t flucuate quite as much as they used to, but it’s still nice to see when I have new sites waiting for the PR update.

There was a time, not too long ago when I put a lot of focus on pagerank and would get royally ticked off at Google, and a little depressed, if they put my PR down. Fortunately my stress level went down considerably when a good friend, client and fellow marketer pointed out the fact that Google PageRank isn’t quite as important as I was thinking it was.

We talk quite a bit and he pointed out the fact that one of my sites has a PR1 and yet it makes more money for me than most of my other sites that have PR3. So as he says, ‘who cares’, as long as you’re making money online.

I still get excited when I see my PR rise though and today was no acception. I was very pleased to see a few of my domains increasing in PageRank, even though a few others dropped

I did browse to a few of the sites I follow in various  niches and see that Google is really coming down hard these days and I am sure there is going to be a few marketers crying in their coffee over the next few days.

I have a feeling we are going to see a flood of Google PageRank update posts from not so happy marketers.

Tweet This Post

I have found that most people I talk to that are trying to make money online without much success have a high anxiety and stress level. I think we all go through this unless we already have a grasp on the MMO market. The learning curve takes it toll on people every day.

As new marketers we all have those moments in life where it seems that we just cannot take another failure. I am sure most everyone goes through those feelings but the difference between people is how they handle it and how well they deal with anxiety and stress management. When it comes to anxiety and stress management, most people need to take a step back from their current situation in order to see what is really going on so that they can handle it properly.

In most situations that I see it comes down to trying too hard too fast without having learned the marketing ropes yet.

For some people, these skills come naturally and they are able to count on themselves as being rational and being able to handle the whole situation. But for others, they may find themselves facing trouble in difficult situations, as they do not have a lot of experience with anxiety and stress management. But there is still hope as these skills can be taught and can be learned with ease as long as the person truly wants to develop these life long skills. All it takes is the desire to learn and then so much can be accomplished through these classes.

Personally I find that when I get in over my head on something and find I am getting stressed I have to stop, maybe even walk away from the situation and come back later. The longer I wait to walk away the harder it gets to walk away and the higher the stress level goes.

Finding A Class

I have a friend that just can’t control stress level and if left unchecked she can go into a depression and then nothing goes right for days, weeks and even months.

If you are finding that you are having trouble with anxiety and stress you may be also experiencing other problems as well. If this is the case then you may already be speaking with a therapist and that therapist is a great person to turn to for a recommendation on an anxiety and stress management class. He or she would be able to send you off into the right direction of a class that will be well worth your time based on their knowledge of the course and the instructor. This will help you from saving wasted time on a class that is not up to the high standards of society and of yourself.

If you are not able to find a class through a therapist then there are still ways to get your foot into the door. Simply by looking through the yellow pages of your local town or by searching the Internet will bring you all sorts of results. There are probably a lot more anxiety and stress management classes then you thought. All you have to do is find one and then sign up in order to change your life forever. When you are finished with the classes and see how much you have learned through them, you will wonder why you did not take these classes years ago.

Tweet This Post

In my previous XSitePro post I mentioned that I was starting a backyard gardening web site, well it’s begun and this post is the first in a short series on how to create your own web site using XSitePro 2.

Having a few things started first is probably best. Keyword research and the place where you will host your website for the world to see, is a great place to begin.

Step One is Keyword Research

It’s important to have a domain name that reflects your web site theme or topic as the search engines will see the site as more relevant which in turn gives you more search engine brownie points. Read more about keyword research.

For the past month I have been using WordZe for my keyword research. WordZe has been performing better for me than most other tool I have used to this point.

Purchasing Your First Domain

Having a domain that is keyword will help your web site build relevance in the search engines which will give you an edge over those that don’t find a domain that is keyword rich.

I use GoDaddy for all my domain purchases. They have never given me a problem or concern so I am quite happy doing business with them.

Where You Host Your Web Site Makes a Difference

I have more than one hosting account and I have definitely noticed that one of those accounts suck royally and my search engine rankings and income from that site shows it.

You don’t want a hosting account that goes down a lot or gives timeouts that suck the life out of your site. When the search engines hit a site that can’t be found a lot of the time they will drop you in the rankings.

I now much prefer HostGator where you can learn more about good hosting.

XSitePro Version 2

Now that you have your keyword research started and a place to host your new domain it’s time to learn a few things about XSitePro.

Once those two steps are completed you are ready to start using XSitePro 2. Of course you don’t need to do either of the previous steps but you may pay dearly for skipping them. I have skipped both in the past and am still paying for it today.

Tweet This Post

The WordZe Keyword Research Tool

will help you find more keywords by searching for related keywords, then dig even deeper with other tools to learn about the industry, keyword search history, or to dig deep into the search engines to see what online marketers are optimizing for.

First we need to understand KEI…

KEI – Keyword Effectiveness Index is an important measure that will help you increase your web site traffic more effectively. It does require a bit of work but that gives you the edge as most marketers don’t understand KEI so they ignore it, great for you, not so good for them.

The higher the KEI, the more popular the keyword phrase is, and the less competition it has, giving you a better chance to reach the top 10,20 or 30 position in the search engines.

Options

Before you hit the search keyword database button to get the results for your keyword phrase click the Options link below the text box.

Here you will find a few helpful options.

1. You can set Filter Options to filter out Adults sites, Drugs, Gambling and Warez & Hack sites. You can choose any one of these or the option to filter all of these topics.

2. You can also specify how many results you get per page. You can go with the default of 20 or as high as 100. I personally set it to 50 keywords.

3. Exact Match/Broad Match/Any -

Exact Match means your keyword phrase, ex. backyard gardening, would show backyard gardening as an exact phrase with other words around it. Ex. Your backyard gardening planting tips

Broad Match means you will find your keywords with other words in and around them. Ex. fly fishing trout could show as fly fishing for brook trout or even fishing for trout on the fly

Any Match is one option I don’t use as I get what I want using the previous two matches. I don’t really see the benefit of this option as it gives keywords based on each word in your keyword phrase.

Once your options are set and you have a keyword phrase you can either select an existing project to add your keywords to or you can create a new project for them.

Then you can click the Search Keyword Database button.

WordZe Keyword Research Tool Columns

When you specify a keyword phrase and hit Search Keyword Database WordZe comes back with the following information about your keyword phrase.

Count – is what Wordze has seen from Internet Service Providers in the last 30 days.

Estimated – is a cross calculation from Internet Portals. Around every 30 days, Wordze will evaluate its estimated traffic by reviewing top ranking sites and/or by us manually running PPC campaigns for keywords in various markets for a better estimate on over all traffic.

Note From WordZe: We estimate that we get anywhere from 7%-13% of total internet search traffic each month from our data sources, therefore we cannot guarantee that our estimated numbers are accurate. However, it will provide you a better understanding of what can be expect from a keyword by comparing our count and estimated data along with other factors like KEI and WordRank.

KEI – is the method of comparing the number of searches for a keyword phrase to the number of results in the major search engines. Keyword Effectiveness Index starts at zero and goes up to an indefinite number. The lower a keyword’s KEI the harder it is to rank for it.

History – shows you how your keyword phrase has been doing over the past 30, 60, 90 days or 1 year. You may also find keyword phrases that don’t have enough data to show so you will get an insufficient data page.

When you do find data you will see a graph based on your keyword phrase and a chart show how that keyword phrase has been doing over that time period. You can easily see its performance because WordZe uses red and green arrows to indicate performance, red is down and green is up.

The Regions section will show you best performance by regions such as United States, Canada, Great Britian and so on.

WordRank – is the method used to calculate the difficulty of a keyword by using multiple factors, like number of links each domain has, domain age, and number of results in the searches.

Wordze uses WordRank due to the overall view that KEI was NOT effective, or even an accurate method to calculate keyword difficulty.

WordRank Index is a compressed view of all the WordRank data that produces results like KEI, where the lower the number the harder it is to rank for.

NOTE: By using WordRank you will be able to get a better view of how hard it is to rank for a keyword. Combining the WordRank Index with KEI results will gage the authenticity of both results better.

Dig – Helps you dig into the search engines to see what other webmasters are optimizing for, or just to find more keywords. The Wordze dig tool will inspect over 10,000 websites, and return the keywords and count in a nice Excel format for you to download.

Dig does take a few minutes so you will be able to start the process and then move on to something else. When the dig is complete you will be able to download your excel file from the download manager.

WordZe makes the task of keyword research so much easier and effective. Come on over and check Wordze and see for yourself. I started with a $1 trial which gave me plenty of time to get used to Wordze and slightly addicted to keyword research.

Tweet This Post

As a Dreamweaver user it was tough getting me to switch to another software package as I had spent so much time learning to use DW.

Why change? Well I am moving on from designing websites for clients and want to teach my clients how to work on their own sites. People tend to think it’s too hard for them without even giving it a chance. Dreamweaver is just too hard for most of my clients so I had to find another website design package that was easier, much easier.

That is where XSitePro comes in…

I have been designing websites since the mid 90s. I actually started by coding all the HTML for my sites by hand. Then software became available. I tried a few but didn’t like them until Dreamweaver came along but the learning curve was pretty steep.

XSitePro is so much easier and doesn so many things DW just can’t do that I had to look at it. It just might be the tool of choice for none techies wanting power without the learning curve. Check out some of the great XSitePro features .

This post explains why I have come to love XSitePro and future posts will help understand the awesome features that will help you create a search engine optimized web site quickly and efficiently.

As I go through XSitePro version 2 I will create a web site for my backyard gardening hobby and share what how I do with you so you can make an educated choice about web desing software.

Keyword research is big and if you don’t use your keywords correctly they won’t do you much good. That was a big or should I say a huge factor in choosing XSitePro. It was most important to me that my clients know how to use their keywords on their web site and that is one of the things XSitePro does extremely well.

Over the next week I will create a couple of tutorials that should help to see the potential in XSitePro Version 2 software.

Tweet This Post

As an online marketer I love great templates for my website but I don’t have the skill right now to do any more than make a few modifications to any of the templates I get for are free, which usually come with too many links to places I don’t want to be linked to or I have to purchase templates.

So until I learn how to create these templates from scratch I am stuck searching the net for just the right template.

I was reading a post this morning about DreamTemplates.com and jumped over to take a look. They have all the templates I will most likely ever need.

Here are some frequently asked questions about DreamTemplates.

Why would I want to do business with DreamTemplate.com?

DreamTemplate.com offers variety of graphic products for all different purposes. Our products are split into various categories which target webmasters and web developers. DreamTemplates offer website templates, flash website templates, navigation interfaces for websites, icons and much more.

What do I get for my one-time-fee?

Once you purchase your membership at DreamTemplate.com you are free to download as much as you want from our site for the period of your subscription. There are never additional charges applied.

What software do I need to work with your products?

Basically you need two things to work with DreamTemplate products. One you need an editor for HTML, like DreamWeaver, FrontPage or something similar, and secondly you will need to be able to open PSD files to modify the Adobe Photoshop graphics.

How often do you add new products?

DreamTemplates tries to add new products on a weekly basis.

Can I make money online driving traffic to you?

Yes, DreamTemplates.com offers 40% (percent) from each sale coming from the traffic you send their way. All you need to do is just to register as an affiliate at our website, download some promotional materials (banners, ads) from our affiliate area, put the affiliate links on your website and start earning money!

Will DreamTemplates refund my money?

They offer a 30 day unconditional money back guarantee policy.

Tweet This Post

I received notice that WordZe has a trial run open for the month, giving me the perfect opportunity to learn about WordZe and see how it compares to other programs aiming to do pretty much the same thing.

The first thing I did was watch the WordZe video. It was just 5 minutes but it gave me a great overview and well worth my time watching.

After watching the video I signed up for the trial offer and started researching.

Now I am learning how to use WordZe and have already found keywords that I should have been using on a few of my blogs. That info alone was worth the investment of both my time and money.

A good place to start with WordZe is by taking their tour. It’s entirely free and very enlightening as well.

Find more keywords with the WordZe keyword research tool.

Import keywords from existing projects, inspect their search count for multiple keywords.

Download saved results from your keyword research or search engine digs.

Plug in your desktop tool or roll your script to work with the WordZe keyword API.

Use the keyword misspell database to find confirmed keywords people misspell.

Research historical keyword trends by month and day.

Dig into search engines to see what other keywords people are optimizing for.

Take your projects and filter the keywords for high quality results and add to projects.

Check a website’s keyword density then use it’s keywords to find more.

Use WordZe’s robust thesaurus to find related keywords.

Learn what it takes to rank in the top 10 with WordRank.

Download weekly, or monthly top keywords from last month search history.

Find answers to common questions about terms, as well as how to use the tools.

Watch one of WordZe’s videos on how to get the most out of WordZe.

Make easy money by referring business associates and friends to WordZe.

Here is a video that I found that explains what WordZe does.

Tweet This Post

I find it pretty easy to get a ton of backlinks to my web site pages. There are so many sites designed for reciprocal linking but do these sites really work well for getting targeted traffic?

Are reciprocal link sites helping you to make money online?

Using link:www.yourdomain.com from the Google search box will give you a list of the backlinks Google considers relevant to your site content.

Now do the same thing in the Yahoo search box. How many links do you see that you have in Yahoo?

And don’t forget MSN, give it a try using the same command and see how many backlinks you have listed there.

I have a couple of sites that have almost a thousand backlinks in Yahoo and almost two hundred in MSN but Google’s algorithms feels that less than 30 are relevant to my site.

Most of my links to these sites are reciprocal links and Google doesn’t really like the ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ type linking.

If your goal is to make money online, as mine is, you have to have targeted traffic. The generic traffic that arrives and leaves just that fast isn’t going to put food on your table is it. I learned that lesson the hard, as I learn most things.

It really comes down to quality of links and not just quantity. Plus one-way-links are much better for your site, in Googles eyes.

For me backlinking comes down to finding sites that have:

1. High PageRank (PR)

2. Similar Niche, complimenting your content but not necessarily competing with it

3. I prefer DOFOLLOW links

4. I am at my internal pages, deep linking

5. I will take a one-way-link over reciprocal any day of the week

6. I vary my anchor text with keywords applicable to my site of course

I used to take any linking I could get and worked hard at it. Now I put thought into my linking instead of just hours of unrewared labor.

Tweet This Post