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Making Money Online Search Engines SEO Tutorial

Free On-Page SEO Tutorial – Part 1 What Are My Keywords

Wildflower display, spring, Kings Park, Perth, WA

A few months ago I wrote a Scribe SEO review which created a lesson in online reputation management in the comments – which was interesting  – but hardly the point. My point was that there is nothing difficult or technical about “optimizing your blog for SEO” – and I promised that I would write more about on page SEO. A promised and then I promptly forgot about. But I have had more than one person contact me about a free alternative to a tool like Scribe SEO – so here is my version of it.  Its free – its here, you don’t even need to subscribe for the e-book – frankly there is not enough to write to fill an e-book – well not the important stuff anyway.

Baobab Tree - Native to the Kimberley's this example relocated to King's Park, Perth, WA

I am NOT an SEO Expert

I can do SEO, I know what I need to know to rank sites in Google. I am not an innovator, and I don’t do a lot of testing. This seems to appeal to the inner Geek – I am a part-Geek but not with SEO. I do practical SEO which works for my sites.

SEO Changes

SEO=search engine optimization – but what we all really mean is Google optimization – Google is the only game in town because it has so much of the search traffic.  Ranking top in Yahoo or Bing is nice but pretty worthless as far as search traffic is concerned.

BUT Google changes all the time – most recently was the so-called MayDay Update – which caused angst and concern throughout the online Internet Marketing world – if you haven’t heard about it – don’t worry – and save yourself several hours of reading – don’t Google “Mayday update”

On Page SEO – A Practioner’s View Point

Not every post I write here is focussed on getting search engine traffic – in part this is just a social blog which allows me to connect to readers – and mix it up a fair bit.  That’s OK and it doesn’t affect the site’s rankings for  the keywords I DO target. Because Google ranks pages not sites in general. But before we even get to where you should be using  your keyword on-page lets step back to ask the most basic question? If you have a popular site you can get traffic to any post – just my publishing it! But if you want to draw in new readers the easiest way is to have at least some posts which are keyword focussed.

What Are My Keywords?

You can’t rely on any tool to tell you what you keywords are! To do so is like sitting down and writing a novel and then working out what the plot is! You must have at least some idea before you start!   Which is not to say that you should completely ignore market demand. If you want to write about garden design – it doesn’t require a genius to know that anything with the words “eco” or “green” in the title may sell better than others.

But even if you are short of ideas – Google will help you for free!  In particular Google will tell you what terms they think your search is related to.

Sturt's Desert Pea, Kings Park, Perth WA

For example – go to google in and  type indigenous landscape design. Google will tell you what it thinks you mean in two ways: as you type in the drop down it will offer alternatives, and at the very bottom of the page – you will see “searches related to indigenous landscape design ”

Now this particular keyword is an excellent example of having to know something about your niche and the way that niche uses language. Indigenous means “the original people (or other things: plants etc) of an area” – any biologist, anthropologist, zoologist would know that. But in Australia it is also the term very specifically used quite often in the media – where an American might talk about Native affairs or Native title and a New Zealander would talk about Tangata Whenua or Maori title – politically correct Australians would use the term Indigenous to reflect the people who were living in Australia when the Europeans happened upon the so-called Terra nullius. Aborigine is incorrect (it excludes Torres Strait Islanders and implies that almost all of the original Australians are the same race (they are not)), and native is associated with previous racist policies of white Australia.

Now having lived in Australia I know that Australia has huge issues with using the land inappropriately – e.g. commercially growing rice (which needs huge amounts of water) in the semi-arid Murray-Darling basin.  Even home gardeners seem to grow far more more roses and  lawns than the local flora (which is quite beautiful – I am using this post just to show off some of my better shots of it LOL)

So with that background when Gordon from Indigenous Landscape Design Australia asked me about a free alternative to Scribe SEO a thought his site was a really good example of a site which is doing most things right – but could be improved with a few additions. First a note about

Country Specific Keywords

Almost nothing is more country (if not region) specific than anything related to gardens and gardening. The information is specific, the plant varieties are specific and the stuff that grows in Cairns certainly won’t grow in Tasmania or Alberta.  If you are targeting a specific country – get the specific countries TLD in this case .com.au – but also co.uk, .ca. .co.nz etc.  This is the biggest hint to Google that your site is relevant to  a single country – in fact the default now is for Google to show “sites from NZ” if I search from Google.co.nz – which is the default browsers for users in NZ. It doesn’t really matter where you sie is hosted (US is generally cheapest) – but you do need that TLD as a big hint in the domain name. As we are talking about an Australian site with an Australian  audience I am using the Australian Google from here on:

So from google.com.au

as I typed in indigenous landsc… I got suggested:

  • indigenous landscapes – too broad
  • indigenous landscape design Australia – nice lots of searchers will add their country
  • indigenous landscaping – possible – might be too broad
  • indigenous landscaping ideas – excellent seracher wants info
  • indigenous landscaping omaha – huh – don’t think so
  • indigenous landscaping systems – hmm maybe – I don’t know enough about the topic to comment

once I insisted on searching for my original term – at the bottom of the page I got the related terms of:

Even More Related Keywords

So armed with this knowledge – and what very little I know about the topic – I head off to Google’s free keyword tool . Set the results to the relevant country (in this case) – toss in all the terms I think might be relevant from the above search and voila:

A note about search volumns and cost per click. This tool is designed for the USERs of Adwords ie the advertisers who pay for those  Adsense ads that some of us make money from. This doesn’t mean its not useful even if you are not an adwords advertiser or publisher. If someone is paying to advertise for a term such “landscaping design” there is probably some chance of making money from it. Though if you change the search volumne over to “exact match” you will see that its not a huge volume. Even if you get the “not enough data” against a term – this doesn’t mean there are NO searches – again you need to know your  market. Almost all New Zealand specific terms come up with that statement (there are only 4 million of us living here) – but that’s not to say that people don’t search for “small garden design” in NZ! It just means compared to the global demand for a term  like  “erection problems” its not very high!

Wildflower display, spring, Kings Park, Perth, WA

You don’t necessarily need high search volume to make money if you are offering expensive products and services e.g. a garden design service.  But you do need to be using your customers language – and Google is offering you these suggestions because this is what your customers are using to search in Google for. Yes “outdoor landscaping” is a tautology – but 58  people a month in Australia search for it!

Now this site may be too specific – Gordon is already #1 and #2 for “indigenous landscape design” out of over 3,000,000 results. This suggests that there is not much competition  and probably not much demand. But he will know what the demand is by checking  his  Analytics or other stats package –  once  you get to the top of the rankings you will know exactly what your traffic is!

And while you are there – your statistics are another excellent source of keyword ideas – people will find your site by using the oddest searches – and your stats should show you these.

Maybe I was wrong,  perhaps  my free on page SEO guide should be a book! Anyway its going to be a multi-part post obviously! Click here for part 2: Using Keywords in Your Site

Categories
Online Business Passive Income Australia/NZ

Is Lis Lost Down Under?

Taranaki Egmont New Zealand
Mt Taranaki taken from New Plymouth

Life is for living has always been my motto – its one of the reasons I now own my own business rather than make obscene amounts of money as an IT contractor.  Being that miserable isn’t worth any amount of money. And sometimes going to work just seem too trivial to be bothered with. Unfortunately my online business has felt a bit like that over that last little while!

Taranaki Egmont New Zealand
Mt Taranaki taken from New Plymouth

Well life went from interesting to worse really. After I wrote that post (when we had sold the house, and my partner’s mum had died) – we found a new place we liked and bought it. There was gap of about a month between during which we stayed with friends – which was very nice and saved us a fortune. In the 4 weeks we stayed I managed to write-off our car by running  it into a bus – no serious damage to me but the back is only just about recovered from the whiplash now. My partner’s uncle died in Australia so he  had to fly over for that funeral (its only 4 hours flying from here though – slightly shorter than if we’d still been in Perth).

My partner then ended up having an angiogram (he’s OK – but it was seriously scary for the few days it took him to have it done).  It could have been stress (duh!) .That was rock bottom really.

Then stuff started improving:

  • We bought a new(er) car (NZ has a wonderful deal where we import used Japanese cars with low mileage so we are now driving a 2005 car for less than US$7000 (NZ$11,000) )
  • We took a long weekend and gave the car a run  to New Plymouth (I’d never been) and even got to see the mountain (unusual in winter).
  • We moved into our new house, we unpacked (mostly).  We bought new toys like a dryer and a digital video recorder thingy that will watch TV for you (yes I know about video tapes but I couldn’t be arsed connecting it really -and its really hard to buy tapes now). Eyeing up a new thin TV and some furniture to put it in but the credit card is over-tired this month LOL
moving house - too many boxes
Don't you hate unpacking!
  • We moved into our 5-year-old townhouse to discover that insulation really does work, even in Wellington, as the weather was seriously cold even for us, that we really did like the place (I am never sure once I’ve bought somewhere), that it’s super convenient , and we really don’t need to do much redecorating.  And the vegetable plot even seems to be growing non-weedy things (I understand they are called Brassicas).
bassicas in the garden
IThey are growing - so I hope they are Bassicas not triffids!

Stuff has been happening on the Internet Marketing front too – but I might save that for another post – and no it won’t be as long this time! Too main points though:

  • no – I haven’t given up on the Keyword Academy Case Study – and although I haven’t built anymore links my rankings are basically holding from my last update.
  • if anyone is still considering the The Keyword Academy – the price has dropped back down to $33/month (after the first month @ $1) – if you signed up under the $67 rate – check your email and follow the instructions to get your fees retroactively reduced.
  • I have decided to work smarter not harder – more details soon.
Categories
Online Business Passive Income

Slope Stability, Earthquakes and Passive Income

Big Pit, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia

You may not know – I used to be a Geologist and even know useful stuff about how to make sure your house didn’t fall down a hill in rain storm or earthquake  (here’s a hint you probably need a 3D slope stability program to do the calculation!)  Having a science degree in real physical science has always been extremely useful – even long after I left the profession – because it taught me about cause and effect – and  that just because something happens at the same time doesn’t mean they are related.

Big Pit, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia
Its predictable whether this slope will fail or not - it won't because the right slope stability calculations have been done on it!

Where am I going with this – and does it relate to making passive income online? Well it does relate – we mix up cause and effect all the time: we think life is more dangerous for kids these days then it was in the old days – but most children survive to the age of 5 in developed countries now – something that would have been beyond imagining  even 200 years ago, and unfortunately still is in some parts of the world.

We think that working hard on a site should see Google loving the site, sending us heaps of traffic and making us lots of money. We get mad if it doesn’t happen inside a month, most of us quit – and most people quit Internet Marketing just before they start to succeed at it.  We chase the dream – but miss the obvious – starting your own business is about risk and reward – but first comes the risk. Building a passive income online is always about building a business: in might be a rental property business or an active share portfolio. Don’t get me wrong you might not be actively managing that business –  my tenants don’t call me when the hot water breaks – they call my property manager – that’s his job –  I pay him to work work for me – but I own the business – I take the risk – no tenant, I still get to pay the mortgage.

Its a lot like building a passive income business online. There are heaps of different models out there – unfortunately the most common one is parcel up shiny objects and sell those to the beginners – and persuade them that the more they pay the more likely they are too get rich overnight. Make no mistake someone is getting rich – but its not the person buying!  At the end of the day – it doesn’t matter really how many make money online products your buy or how many membership sites you enrol in. Unless you are actually building a business i.e. creating some income producing assets e.g. websites – then you are just dreaming.

On that note –  yes I have still been doing not very much to make  passive income  online – I mentioned in a previous post that life had been getting in the way. Well its pretty been going from bad to worse and now back again – I wrote off the car (me v.bus) – not sure whether I was in the wrong or not yet but have the pay out and am not much the worse for wear. Slightly annoying but as the 10-year-old car which we’d stored for 3 years while overseas had been running well until it impacted said bus.   We have also bought a new house and weathered a health scare (that’s all it was a scare not a reality) – I am really looking forward to getting back to some level of normality next week!

Oh and the title – well hopefully most of you will know why the term “slope stability” needed to be in the title – the earthquake was the personal kind not the real deal and the passive income really has been just that for far too long now!

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Case Study Lis Recommmends Paid Tools The Keyword Academy Tools

Keyword Academy Case Study 2 Month Update

Pack me to!

How was the month – well not very productive – as I have already mentioned.  But I did say I would keep on updating the Keyword Academy Case Study series – so here we go!

Pack me to!

Rankings As of 2 June 2010

Rankings on 2 June ( 30 April ,14 April 2010 in brackets | 8 April 2010)

24 pages indexed in Google (26, 15 |13 pages)

backlink recognized in yahoo 13 (6,1, 0)

domain name exact match long-tail: 12(14, 17 | 17)

main keyword: 21( 17, 34 | 61)

main keyword singular: 19 ( 19 , 31 | 61)

cousin keyword #1 ; 33 (24 ,63 | 47)

cousin keyword #2: 15( 22, 43 | > 100)

cousin keyword #3 90( 82 ,>100 | > 100)

cousin keyword #4  >100 (100, > 100 |>100)

cousin keyword #5:  38, (25 (and 78 double listing),49 | 37)

cousin keyword #6:  50 ( 39, 60 | 71)

cousin keyword #7:  35 (33 , 60 | 71)

Postrunner Articles Live

27 articles are live – and yes I’m slack and haven’t added any more!

So really should go away and right some more articles write now!

How’s the Competition

Alana seems to be the only one left updating her Keyword Academy Experiment

Tiffany has now got her Keyword Academy Case Study update up now!

Categories
Online Business Passive Income Passive Income Australia/NZ

Passive Income Online – Where Has Lis Been?

Sorry I don’t usually do purely personal posts of Passive Income Online – so you may want to skip this one – unless you were wandering what happened.  Well first off from the online point of view – nothing bad has happened – in fact its looking like a record breaking month on my passive income goals – and I mean truly passive income because I have really done very little focused work this month.  We’ve had a month of it.

Sold House in Khandallah

First we finally sold our house in Khandallah (BTW ranking #2, #3 behind the major Real Estate Institute in the country – just wondering how much an Agent will want to pay for the site …). Got pretty much our price in a very slow flat market which was freaking out about the budget (now been and gone). We move out in a few weeks. Where to – who knows I’m  no fan of bridging finance – we may have to rent for a wile or we may win the tender that closes today – something will happen.

I don’t know how it is in your country – but in New Zealand the Internet has been a game-changer for selling your own home. The standard deal is you pay around 4% plus tax to an agent to “market” your property. They will probably charge you for advertising on top of that – but even at that rate you are looking at NZ$20k for our  place (US$14k). I paid for advertising too – it cost NZ$160 for 2 large signs complete with photos (we are in a cul-de-sac these were essential and an agent would have charged for them anyways). We spent NZ$300 to advertise on Trademe.co.nz – eBay didn’t bother opening in NZ – Trademe is  the local equivalent – but  actually has fair fees and is the only way to buy and sell garage sales stuff here now.  We wasted NZ$500 for one colour photo ad in the Saturday night newspaper – I tracked how many came from that ad to the website – about 3. The Trademe add had over 2,500 hits in the 2 1/2 months it was up. Many people found it from the sign as well because its a neighbourhood people like to stay in because of the local restricted zone school.

There is still several glossy magazines that vendors pay to advertise their homes for sale  in (only available if you have an agent) – it does a great job in advertising the Real Estate Agencies. Its fun to flick thru from time to time – but now I’m serious about buying a house – I use Trademe which allows me to easily see the new listings in suburbs and price brackets of interest.

About a week after the house sale – my mother-in-law (well we’re not married but there’s not a short way to describe the relationship in English) – Jeanne Malthus died.  Its not normally my policy to name and identify my family here but  I’d just like to make sure that Jeanne’s tribute page stays #1 for name – and that link should do it.   I think its a very nice development that Funeral Director’s now run tribute pages for clients. Hopefully they have a lot better chance a longevity than the Facebook versions!   Jeanne  was a lovely lady who was one of the generation who remembered when home phones were a special thing (her father was a policeman so he had one – that was unusual in small town NZ at the time) – who lived to learn how to send emails and read friends and her (other) son’s  blog.   My father died over 15 years ago – before the Internet became common – but he grew up in a world without indoor plumbing and died while still selling computers (in his 80’s).  To anyone who thinks that change and progress is bad – really should read some more history – Dicken’s was wrong –  we live in the best of times.

See I told you this post really had nothing much to do with Passive Income. I’ve done very little work this month. So to all of you who are just starting off this making passive income online caper and wondering why you’ve only made 2c after writing 10 articles – its because this business is the ultimate in delayed gratification – you will get paid months down the line – not now – later. The money I will bank this month  came from work I did a year or more ago.

Categories
Passive Income

My Sites Have Dropped Out of the SERPS – Does Google Hate Me?

I have the habit of near the start of the month using the Rank Checker in Market Samurai to check where my sites are ranking. I did it a couple of days ago and was sad to see one that had been turning a few consistent pennies had dropped out of the top 100 positions. Odd I thought because it was an exact domain match which had happily sat on the first page for  three or four months.Now I didn’t notice this for every site put it down the Google dance and got on with life.

But it was new – I’d never seen an EMD drop so hard after so many months.   With the disturbing stories coming out recently of good people getting  de-indexed . I was concerned – not so much for the $10 the site earned me a month – but the fact that this could be the start of a trend.  I hoped I wasn’t next in G’s sights – but I couldn’t really believe that I had that much influence on the WWW but I  had started cleaning up in order to do the right thing , even if Adsense had asked for it – and I knew that not every bad arsed marketer had been hit.

Now I’ve seen the explanation – you may have noticed that Google has changed their interface to the new one:

Whether or not this is making any difference to people’s rankings in the SERPS – I haven’t heard so yet – but  what it has done is broken all the scrapers. How does this affect you? Well if you use a tool like Market Samurai or MicroNicheFinder or almost anything else  (except Google) to check your results  – its broken and the results are misleading. Market Samurai has announced an update on Twitter – but its not out yet.  I  suspect because the roll out of the new Google interface is gradual across  all its data centres that’s why sometimes the results are OK and some aren’t. If in doubt check scroogle.org for non-personalized results – scroogle does seem to be working BTW.

So if you do see something odd in a tool double check – check your stats –  if the traffic is about the same – nothing much has actually happened. But far more importantly in the immortal words of Jonesy – put your tin hat on  and DON”T PANIC!

Categories
Back Links Case Study Lis Recommmends

Keyword Academy Case Study – One Month Update

c
http://beginner-blogger.com/make-money-blogging-keyword-academy-experiment-day-31/

End of the first month with my little Keyword Academy Case Study with the statistics for my new site after a month of Postrunner submissions. Basically the site seems to be growing naturally with  solid page 2 rankings for both my exact domain match and my main keyword. I have the distinct feel that the exact domain bonus drops siginficantly down if you have more than two words in the domain (this domain has four).

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Supreme Court, Wellington New Zealand

Rankings as of 30 April 2010

Rankings on 30 April (14 April 2020 in brackets | 8 April 2010)

26 pages indexed in Google (15 |13 pages)

backlink recognised in yahoo 6 (1, 0)

domain name exact match long-tail: 14 (17 | 17)

main keyword: 17 (34 | 61)

main keyword singular: 19 (31 | 61)

cousin keyword #1 ; 24 (63 | 47)

cousin keyword #2: 22 (43 | > 100)

cousin keyword #3 82 (>100 | > 100)

cousin keyword #4 >100 (> 100 |>100)

cousin keyword #5: 25 (and 78 double listing) (49 | 37)

cousin keyword #6: 39 (60 | 71)

cousin keyword #7: 33 (60 | 71)

Postrunner Articles Live

25 articles live 2 still waiting review. Over all iIve had 3 or 4 articles returned after 7 days because the directory owner is asleep at the wheel.   When you schedule posts in Postrunner – they are not  actually sent to the directory you select until the date scheduled so you may have to wait for another 7 days for the article to be approved.

Of the 25 articles live – all but 4 are indexed. One of those has only been live 2 days the others have been live for over two weeks so I may need to build some links to get  them indexed.

Expenses to Date

25 articles @ $3/article from The Content Authority = $75

Income to Date

I haven’t put Adsense on the site – but I may do soon because I am starting to get trickle long-tail traffic. I have an affiliate product which as so far has had a bout 30 clicks (but no sales).

Hows the Competition Doing?

Alana has battled through hardware failures to update us on her Keyword Academy Experiment

Tiffany’s posted her one month’update at Passive Income Goals

Has anyone got an update? Let me know and I’ll link you here!

Categories
Online Business Passive Income Passive Income Australia/NZ Plan Review

Passive Income: End of the Quarter Review!

Dancing Rumba on my 48th Birthday, Nelson, New Zealand

Well a little late but so long as I get this out before the end of April! In fact the last time I did one of these was 6 month’s ago!  Anyway its the end of the tax year here so I had to do some tax stuff first.  First off a huge  tip for any of you who aspire to wander around the world logging in occasionally to make a little more passive income online!  Sort out your tax status and try to be tax resident in only one country! After several years of doing tax returns in two countries I am significantly over it!

Dancing Rumba on my 48th Birthday April 2010, Nelson, New Zealand

Now I did indeed write down my Passive Income Goals for 2010 so perhaps I should see whether I am quarter of the way there yet!

After all I only had three goals:

  • US$5000/month – $3000 of which would be passive (e.g. affiliates) income;
  • develop a website trading business;
  • develop my own products.

OK – so what have I actually achieved in the first 3 months of 2010?

  • Total income of around US$3000/month – of which about 1/3 is passive;;
  • lost the enthusiasm for the website  trading business – frankly it would be just as easy to sell niche sites on The Keyword Academy forums where there  seems to be a constant demand;
  • the whole own product thing hasn’t inspired me yet either – though I am thinking about doing some Frugal Theme skins – possibly just to give away for people who sign up with my affiliate!

So I’m not too unhappy with the way my actual gross revenue is going – though I am now starting to track my expenses as well to make sure they don’t start creeping up.

Tracking my Business Growth and New Zealand Taxes

I am still using the simple spreadsheet I described in my October post – for the end of the tax year I added up the income over the last year , converted to NZ dollars, and came up with a figure which strongly suggested I should start worrying about provisional tax!  For the record I have no understanding of people who whinge about paying tax – I am bloody delighted to be paying  tax – it means I am making some money!

Mind you my next step was to register for GST to minimize the tax I was paying by being able to claim 12.5%   (soon to be 15%), discount on anything I  buy in New Zealand. Then I bought a rather nice 21″ monitor!

I don’t know how they do it in your country, but in New Zealand (if your business is small enough) you get to choose whether to pay provisional (estimated) tax on what you have earned or what you have been paid. Given that most affiliate programs pay sometimes  months in arrears I chose a payments basis – which means I now have to run my accounting on a cash (payments) basis for my accountant – though I still will use the actual earning figures for my planning and personal gratification!

The irony of course is that people who skip paying taxes are also skipping the ability to legitimately deduct their expenses – even expenses they have anyways like rent and power and Internet!

What I am Planning for the Next Quarter

I am trying to get my passive income up a LOT for the second half of this year. My partner is not very happy with his current contract – I’d like to replace his contract income  and give him the option of not working. That would be the equivalent of an extra US$7500 /month that’s a lot for such a short time frame.

More realistic might be to make sure I can cover our total household expenses – I’ve been paying 50% since the beginning of the year – so to pay the lot would be around another US$2500/month – bringing my total monthly income to US$5500 – that’s a bit more realistic I think. So long as the US / NZ dollar exchange rate stays in my favour.

A Note About the Photos

I like taking photos – and I particularly like my new fancy camera,  but I don’t really want a separate photo blog like  Sire’s Scenic Adelaide or Todd’s Picture a Day blog about Iraq, weather and kids.

So I decided my long-suffering readers needed to see them, after all proper professional type blogs always have very sophisticated and shiny photos  which mainly look like they came from the same stock photo source. Mine are at least unique!   After all don’t you get tired of all the perfect  I think some of my photos should be forced upon my loyal readers – so – I started adding them in – around the time I moved back to New Zealand.

Sometimes the photos are a play on words, sometimes they’re allegorical, sometimes they’re random – you get to figure it out!  If I actually have real screen shots to illustrate a point I’ll use those. But most of the time waffling on about passive income online isn’t  that much of visual topic – so hence – the completely irrelevant photos!

Having just added all the thumbnails back in after swapping themes – it stuck me that not a lot of passive income blogs feature photos of Wellington and Australia – so you might have been wondering!

What About You ?

Its not just slackness that has meant I haven’t talked much about my income recently – when I was making  under $200/month from Adsense and Affiliates I wasn’t too worried about sharing that fact. Now I was a little worried that I sound a little arrogant talking about it – but I know the frustration of many beginners who wonder if they will ever see any believable income figures – which are over sabout $10/day – the level at which many bloggers quit at.

Categories
Blogging Catalyst Lis Recommmends Paid Tools Tools WordPress

Frugal Theme Review – Frugal and Thesis Themes Compared

I’ve been running Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme on this site for a while – last  July I installed Thesis. As I talked about in my last post : I am now running Frugal Theme not Thesis.

Why I Chose Thesis in the First Place

I am not a designer I know little CSS far less php, enough html to get by. But I wanted to be able to develop custom websites – not just for my own use but also for SEO clients. Thesis seemed to offer the promise of doing this without coding – their advertising is based around that, At the time I bought Thesis there was no money back guarantee – so I wanted to make sure I got it right. So researched, and then bought Thesis 1.4

I was never impressed with Thesis and although I bought the $87 single use licence intending to upgrade to the multi-site use Developer’s version I never did.  Instead I bought Elegantthemes for my other sites and retained Thesis here. I think my relationship with Thesis soured when I had to go their support forums to learn how to install my own header image and change the site’s background colours to match.

The Boxes Thesis Failed on – Is Frugal Any Better?

Originally I decided not to upgrade to the developer’s version of Thesis for the reasons I listed in this September 2009 post about Thesis. I recently updated to Thesis 1.7 and my issues still stand – so I have reproduced my original problems with Thesis and compared Frugal with the same issues. Yup this is genuine review of Thesis 1.7 and Frugal 3.3 from someone who has used and abused both.  The Thesis comments below are my original September comments – and then I’ve followed them with my take on how Frugal Theme stacks up.

THESIS: It has not one but two Thesis Options panels – this is confusing – I am always going to the wrong one – even after months. Actually its up to five now plus the Thesis Openhook plugin – which always felt like functionality which should have been in the base Thesis install.  But to be fair – this was my first experience with a sophisticated Framework rather than a simple theme – it took some getting used to!

FRUGAL:  Frugal installs a 6-option menu which I find quite simple to work my way through. The excellent videos from the developer Eric Hamm describing each and every option are extremely useful.

THESIS:  I  had to use code to add a header image and to match the background colour. This is the single reason why so many Thesis installs look like a default Thesis install.

FRUGAL: For comparison purposes I’ve included a list of Thesis and Frugal themes sites at the end of this post – just to show what “non-designers” can do with these themes. But the bottom line is that its really easy to add a header and then change the background colours of Frugal – much, much easier than it is with Thesis. If you can do these two things you can make your site look unique!

THESIS:  Using images is painful – I have to import an image and then cut and paste and add the thumbnail image code so that I can have the combination of having a picture anywhere I want in the picture plus having the thumbnail appear on other pages such as categories – its a nuisance. (Upgrading to 1.7 made this even more painful as I had to scroll a LONG way below the post past all the useless javascript libraries to get to the thumbnail options.

FRUGAL: Thanks to Thesis 1.7 ignoring the functionality of WordPress 2.9 native’s support of thumbnails I’ve had to go thru my past posts and nominate an image as a thumbnail – but going forward – images are very straightforward – import the image into the post – nominate as a thumbnail – job done!

THESIS:  Thesis is expensive if you want to deploy it. If you want to run it on more than one site you need that developers editions – that’s another $77 over the initial $87 for a single user. Plus if you want to sell a customised theme to a client that’s another $15 now $40 per a client theme.

FRUGAL: Exactly the same pricing! For one site $87 for a single site or $164 $164 for a developer’s licence  plus $40 per a client site. I notice that both themes now have a 30-day money back guarantee – something that Thesis didn’t have when I bought it. Nice to see competition doing its thing. Honestly I think Frugal should be a little more aggressive on their pricing in order to differentiate themselves from Thesis – once they have the market share they can then up the price – but until then – just my opinion though!

THESIS:  Thesis makes a big deal of being SEO friendly – but its SEO settings are no more difficult to use than the free all-in-one-seo plugin – it replaces that plugin – but most people would already be running all-in-one anyways.

FRUGAL: Is just as easy to set up for on-page SEO- if not more so (the defaults are much better than the Thesis defaults for SEO).  I’ve seen Frugal Theme criticized for  its SEO this over and over – there is no issue that I can see Frugal is just fine for SEO (and replaces All-in-one-SEO or Platinum SEO plugins).

THESIS:  if you are a designer Thesis really is a framework and you can no doubt do beautiful things -but its a bit like giving me a top-quality blank canvas and a paint brush and tell me go create – I am a rather more paint by numbers gal! You maybe able to do beautiful things with Thesis – or afford someone who can – I can’t do either.

FRUGAL: Frugal is astoundingly easy to to customise for a non-designer.  It is dead simple to produce a site which looks like a website not a blog. Its astoundingly easy to customise the look and style of the site. Its everything I hoped Thesis would be  when I bought Thesis 1.4 and which Thesis 1.7 has still failed to deliver on

THESIS:  The ability to display ads using the “multimedia” box is fine and the ability to control this down to post level is impressive. What’s not is the place you put the code shows at most 2 lines of a narrow column- you have to use a text editor to actually edit and update the code – this is because most of the screen space has been used on the unecessary design elements.

FRUGAL: There is not quite the same concept as the multimedia box in Frugal – but you can do custom layouts for pages and the ability to add custom widgets at almost any point in the design – so I am experimenting with this. I’ve gone away from the standard 125×125 ads in the sidebar anyways – they use up a lot of space and rarely converted. Frugal Theme’s use of and implementation of hooks is brilliant – its a difficult concept but a truly understood it with Frugal – never had with Thesis. The fact that you get dummy text when you hook in widgets to hooks is fantastic for those who are learning this stuff (like me and most of their customers).

THESIS: Their affiliate banners are really. really ugly – yellow is the only option – and this is in the marketplace where people care about design. This may have changed with the outsourcing of their affiliate program – I’m not up to date but Costa at Bloggigs is not very impressed with the new Thesis affiliate program for international affiliates

FRUGAL: In-house affiliate program which pays 40% to affiliates running on the iDevAffiliate platform which I’m seeing more and more often (TKA uses it too). Nice set of pretty banners – like this one 🙂

On Going Thesis Development Issues

Since I raised the issues above in September I have found Thesis continues to annoy. Because I chose to have images in my posts in different places in each post – there is no way that I can create an automatic thumbnail for each post – which is used in the extracts of older posts (a feature I really like with Thesis, but is easier to use with Frugal). Instead, after importing an image to a post, I had to go to the advanced setting of that image and cut and paste it in the thumbnail url below the post – and then edit it to reflect the actual thumbnail name!

The latest version of Thesis – made this worse by adding a whole bunch of JavaScript libraries immediately below my post’s editing area – which I now have to scroll past to get to the image urls and options.

Thesis seems to be loosing the plot with what features are released when. There was an active debate in their forums expecting that Thesis 2.0 would be out in September 2009 – and that it would have such innovations – such as easy point and click to change the header image. Still waiting on that easy header change AND Thesis 2.0 – but Thesis 1.7 has a whole bunch of javascript library options? Sorry but WTF  –  although its true that customers don’t always know what they want – but wanting to change a header image – thats pretty darn basic!  Because if you can’t retain your customers they are going to go elsewhere – and the options are starting to improve – not just Frugal but Headway too.

Which is Best Frugal or Thesis

As my readers know I don’t mind calling a spade a bloody shovel and I think Thesis is slipping behind. The risk is though that its winning the marketing war – the line up of “big” name A-list bloggers really does seem to impress people into the desirability of buying.

I don’t know how much longer that is going to work though – I think Thesis has made three key mistakes:

  • they haven’t listened to their customers and responded to the customers fairly basic requests (e.g. easy custom headers);
  • they do now provide a 30 day guarantee so that people aren’t “stuck” with the product that didn’t live up to the hype;
  • they have pissed off a whole lot of their affiliates – eBay has discovered that pissing off the people who bring you traffic is dumb idea – it looks like Thesis is going the same route.

Frankly Thesis hasn’t kept an eye on the competition. Frugal  does everything that Thesis sold itself to me that it would deliver on:

  • easy to customize without knowing css and php;
  • easy to upgrade and modify as my site developed ;
  • easy to deploy for my clients and to maintain for them (or preferably, teach them to maintain).

Frugal Example Sites

Terrible for SEO – but different Jim Chao

Used as a CMS rather than a blog – variety of different page styles Real Estate Leads

Leo is running Frugal on his Internet Marketing blog using a static front page layout which I may adopt.

More “standard Frugal” – but still unique enough Living Frugal Tips

An in your face design who seems to have upgraded from Thesis to Frugal for similar reasons as I  Enemy of Debt

Zen Habits – no introduction required I think. There is a free skin available from  Frugal based on Leo’s blog’s design (with his permission).

Thesis Example Sites

Most of the Thesis sites I found using a “powered by Thesis” search – found me SEO ‘s sites – Thesis is loved by the SEO and design community because of its promotion by the “A-listers” and its opportunities for consulting by writing e-books on how to use Thesis and custom designs for those who give up on the books.

Friction Marketer again a basic Thesis look – well worth reading the article linked to from the point of view of Brian Clark’s social media skills.  (BTW that was September 2009 Brian is talking about the release of Thesis 2.0 – it hasn’t happened yet).

R James Horne – the classic “Thesis look” – sorry James !

Even More classic Thesis (sorry Steve!) Social Media

These are more sophisticated Thesis “looks” – but would have taken quite a bit of custom code to achieve:

SEO Pitfall

Quick Online Tips

Simply

Frugal Theme Reviewed  Big Thumbs Up

Sorry – the post is a bit long even for me! But I really found it an interesting comparing Thesis and Frugal – one should have the first mover advantage (Thesis), both obviously have extremely talented developers – but one (Thesis) has outsourced their marketing to the A-listers, the other (Frugal) is going it alone and trying to build a good affiliate network. Frankly one of the reasons I took so much time on this post (and it took days) was that I have seen very few in-depth reviews of Frugal – and  came across some downright misleading stuff (like the so-called lack of SEO). This is my attempt to fix that (oh and get a bit of affiliate income too!)

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Blogging Catalyst Lis Recommmends Paid Tools Tools WordPress

Passive Income Online – Now Running Frugal Theme!

Passive Income running Thesis

Update April 2011 – I have updated the theme again – Frugal became Catalyst – which is a really, really turbo charged version of Frugal -which I got a free upgrade to as an existing customer. To read more about Catalyst check out my Catalyst review

Hi all – if you click thru and get your  yourself onto the actual site – you will see some stuff has changed around here! I am still getting the  edges smoothed off but Passive Income Online has had a spring clean and  is now running the Frugal Theme by Eric Hamm.

I have a (very) long post coming out in the next few days describing why I decided to move away from Thesis ( a theme I’d already paid for) and install Thesis Frugal – this is the short version in case anyone happened to notice (or care) about what happened around here.

In case you have already forgotten: this was this site running Thesis 1.7:

Passive Income running Thesis

After a bit of practice with Frugal (I’ve owned if for a couple of weeks) I took the deep breath and installed it here. Out of the box – i.e. just after I hit activate after uploading the Theme I had a site that looked like this:

Frugal Default Install on Passive Income

It took me a couple of hours – and I had written down the details of the design from the Thesis install. But I now have a site which at least resembles what this blog looked like with Thesis. I’m going to change it more – but I thought I would be too radical to start off with just so people didn’t think they’d wandered into the wrong site!

Frugal Looking Like My Thesis Install

If you want the gory details of how I did the customisationisation without writing a single line of CSS code and very little html. This is the short version.

  1. I made sure that I had the custom header which was kindly given to me by Costa over at Blogigs: WP Easy Customization Tips.
  2. I trawled thru the custom CSS  being used in Thesis plus the font and design options and wrote down little details like fonts and sizes and colour codes for the backgrounds, fonts and other shite.
  3. I installed Frugal 3.3
  4. I was impressed that Frugal preserved my existing sidebar arrangement complete with widgets.
  5. I easy fixed my top of page navigation which has been broken since I upgraded to Thesis 1.7.
  6. I had read the Frugal manual and watched Eric’s excellent videos so knew that I could use his custom widget functionality to add my yellow welcome box at the top of  the page (I chose to change it so it was full width not just above the content column as in  Thesis – it was easy to change by choosing a slightly different hook).
  7. I also used a custom widget to add a the blue box at the bottom of posts promoting The Keyword Academy.
  8. I have to go through each post and add a thumbnail. I wasn’t surprised – Thesis 1.7 was suppressing the WordPress 2.9 functionality of thumbnails so I knew I’d have to go back and fix a pile of posts. The good news is that from now on to add a thumbnail all i have to do is click that option when I import an image – not more cutting and pasting image urls yeah!

So far there are two things that I can’t  find a way to reproduce with Frugal:

  1. I quite like the single post followed by excerpts  of older posts which Thesis does. Frugal well let me have 3 excerpts below the main post – but I haven’t found a way to do more than three (without code – I’m sure I CAN do it with code but that’s not the point) Confirmed by Eric (the developer and owner of Frugal) that I will need to look at a slightly different layout – given that some of you commented you hadn’t realized I’d changed themes thats cool;
  2. The comments on pages appear to have gone AWOL – not sure how to get them back! Answer go to the “main options” page and select comments on pages and posts options – duh!
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Back Links Case Study The Keyword Academy

Keyword Academy Case Study Update – 2 Weeks

Cape Tribulation, Queensland

This is my 5th post in my Keyword Academy Case Study series.  If you missed the earlier posts you might want to start at the beginning

This is too early to be doing an update – but I thought some of you would find this interesting. BTW I use the excellent rank checker of Market Samurai to check my rankings with a single touch of the button – saves me a lot of time:

Site launched 31 March 2010

Site indexed 1 April 2010

Cape Tribulation, Queensland

Rankings on 8 April 2010 (14 April 2020 in brackets)

15 pages  indexed in Google (13 pages)

1 backlink recognised in yahoo (and its the same directory which got me indexed) (0)

domain name exact match long-tail: 17  (17)

main keyword: 61 (34)

main keyword singular: 61 (31)

cousin keyword #1 ; 47 (63)

cousin keyword #2: > 100(43)

cousin keyword #3 > 100 (>100)

cousin keyword #4 > 100 (>100)

cousin keyword #5: 37 (49)

cousin keyword #6: 71 (60)

cousin keyword #7: 67 (60)

Backlinks Live

Number of postrunner posts live: 7

Number of postrunner posts indexed: 6 one of the most recent ones is not  indexed.

Note all those posts indexed organically i.e. it happened without any effort on my part. Whether the site owners built links to the posts I have no idea – but if you have been around Internet Marketing for more than 5 minutes you should realise that this is a truly awesome result!

So who else has got some results to report? Send me the link to your post and I’ll add here or updated us in the comments!

Loreecee has an update up: Post Runner Case Study

Alana has an update up: Make Money Blogging Keyword Academy Experiment Day 17