Categories
Publish The Book Self Publishing

How To Write and Self Publish a Book – Formatting, Violence and Hard Liquor

I need a holiday!

OK I’ve done it I’ve published a book! I was beaten to the chase my good friends Tracey, Terry and Dave all got over the line first – but we all know that line is just the start of the race!

But bloody hell could someone at least mentioned that the formatting step was going to steal 2 days of my life, and awful lot of coffee, 1/2 a bottle of gin, and the odd flounce! I mean FUCK ME how hard is it to get the formatting right!!!!

I need a holiday!

(3 weeks and counting!)

But its OK – I am – almost – over it. Deep breath.

Its been a learning experience – and I need to write some of this stuff down so that I can get it right for the next book.

What You Need to Start 

  1. A nice cover design Sybille Yates did mine and I’m very happy with it. If you use photos you didn’t take make sure you have the right license for those to – hint you will have to pay!
  2. Unless you are very good – you will need an editor. My editor, Debi Willis, took some time out from California vacation planning from her Kauai beach condo, to do mine – awesome job.

Formatting and Publishing an eBook

Two places to start with Amazon and Smashwords – at least as a non-American. There are LOTS of formats for ebooks – there is a huge fight going on about formats – its all politics and patch protection.  You can totally ignore it quite happily. But basically it appears that most ebooks sell like this:

  • Amazon sells Kindles and they read a format called mobi which is what you buy from the Kindle eBook store. But you can also read Kindle formatted books ;
  • Barnes&Noble sell nooks, other major stores sell Kobes in Australia, NZ and I assume elsewhere – they use a format call ePub;
  • anyone with a PC or Mac can download free software (for Kindle/mobi)  or Adobe Digital Editions (for ePub) to read these formats.
  • people can read both of the above using apps on their iPad or iPhone – or they can buy books straight out of the Apple bookstore;
  • Blackberries have their own proprietary format called PalmDoc.
  • Most people already have the software to read a pdf.

How To Use a WordProcessor Initial Formatting Steps

Now I started typing on a typewriter – so I’ve only been using wordprocessors for over 30 years – I have used everything from Display Write, to WordPerfect – I was an expert on Word Processing before Microsoft even produced a WordProcessor.

I thought most people younger than me would know the follow two golden rules – apparently not:

  • do not EVER create indents by using tabs or spaces;
  • do not EVER create spaces between paragraphs by putting in extra carriage returns – use paragraph styles instead.

Phase 1 Getting a Clean Manuscript 

Time Taken: About 2 hours

Required: Coffee (about 2)

Also Required: a text editor and a word processor

  1. Get all your editing done and get an absolutely final version of the actual words – congrats you are about 10% there!
  2. If you’ve been using page numbers and a auto-generated table of contents for editing ease – delete both.
  3. If your copy has been through a few versions, or back and forth from different software – get a clean copy as recommended by the Smashwords Style Guide: copy and paste all the contents into a text editor; cut and paste it back as plain text into a new document. Yes really – it saves time – trust me it does – I’ve done it both ways!
  4. Decide whether you are using indents between paragraph OR a space between paragraphs – YOU CAN’T HAVE BOTH if you want Smashwords to distribute your book (and you do).
  5. Add in as few as possible paragraph styles – I used just one, add the spacing or indents that you want in this paragraph style. Add heading styles to anything you want in your table of contents.

Phase 2: Formatting and Submitting to Amazon

Time Taken: 2 -4 hours depending on whether you used bullets

Required: Coffee (about 4),  gin (but not too much): optional dog (to kick), sound proof room (for the screaming).

Also Required MobiPocket Creator (free), notepad++(free, or your favourite html editor)

Amazon has its own formatting tool – but its a command line piece of software which absolutely no one uses (well unless they are a publishing house with an IT department). You can however upload any of html, doc or prc files.  Trust me this is not too bad compared to Smashwords.

  1. Take your current doc or odt format book and SAVE IT – in several places – be very, very sure to do this!
  2. Export your book to html.
  3. Fire up MobiPocket Creator. Import your html document, add your cover (kindly supplied by the talented Sybille Yates), add you content, tell it to make a table of contents and tell it to use h1, h2 (to whatever level) for the TOC (you did use header styles didn’t) you?
  4. Hit compile (don’t do the submit thingy – that’s all out of date you just submit using the kdp dashboard).
  5. Celebrate – you now have a prc file, do happy dance, open up file in Kindle for PC – see it all looks great – drink gin.
  6. Get happy and download the prc file to your Kindle to show off your cool new eBook. Notice that the bullets are fucked, notice other weird format stuff (drink more gin, kick dog, scream etc).
  7. Remember that this is all in html – open up the file in some html editor like notepad++ Notice that withing <li> tags of bullets you have <p> marks – delete all of the same. Get rid of other miscellaneous formatting crap and realise that you shouldn’t have skipped Phase 1 #3
  8. Repeat steps 3-7 until happy, pissed off, successful, drunk, taken in by the SPCA.
  9. Submit to Amazon.
  10. Go to bed – trust me don’t skip this step…

Phase 3: Formatting and Submitting to Smashwords

Time Taken: 8 hours++

Required Option 1: Hard Liquor (bottle or 2), partner to abuse, padded room (for flouncing), rugged laptop (for throwing)

Required Option 2: $25-$50 to pay someone

Required Option 3: Son-of-Satan, piece-of-crap, over-priced, bloated, piece-of-shite (aka Microsoft Word)

Smashwords does have an adventurous scheme – they have a piece of software that converts your single file to multiple formats – now that is hard thing to do. But all that said I am still genuinely bemused that they chose to use Word as their input format.  I don’t own Word (see note above) – but I’ve used OpenOffice on doc files for years and its never failed me – until now.

After at least eight hours – were I totally followed the Smashwords Formatting Guide – my files passed the meatgrinder – I got no error messages from them.

But the results were crap. Specifically

  • the bullets were off i.e. the bullet was the line about the content;
  • the TOC was not clickable at all (pdf) or partially (ePub, Kindle);
  • my non-indented content got indented (Kindle)

After I finally I had given up before I did serious damage to my fairly fragile laptop – I finally had someone offer for free to run my file through Word – after that everything was good – except for the third point – at which point I decided I didn’t give a shite whether I had indents or not (it was consistent after all).  After all that I needed to curl up with some easy reading so I bought Danielle Blanchard Benson’s cool chick lit eBook (yup it was Danielle who helped when I flounced on Facebook!).

So I am the stupid one – did no one else have serious formatting issues? Or do you all own Word???

Categories
Market The Book Self Publishing

How To Promote a Non-Fiction Self-Published Book

County Down, near Downpatrick, Northern Ireland

Yeah I know adding “non fiction” to my title probably cut down my potential search traffic by 9o% but what the heck – I really do think fiction is a whole other beast. Also I am only talking about eBooks – not dead-tree books (dtBooks) – though so a lot of  what I have to say is probably relevant for them too.

OK so you did some keyword research before you decided on your book’s title (you did, didn’t you?) – so if for example you don’t have a book titled “Packing Secrets of the Not So Famous” – rather you have one called “Vacation Packing List: How to save your back, time and money”. You also have a series of books planned so that you can get the most bang for your buck in terms of cross-promotion.

County Down, near Downpatrick, Northern Ireland

The Key To Promotion – Promote to Customers NOT Writers!

When I started getting into this writing a book gig I went searching I found a bunch of forums and an even bigger bunch of blogs about publishing your book – usually written by writers who had – yup self-published their book!

This all felt very, very familiar – yup its like Internet Marketing – complete with a Warrior Forum analogue! Gorgeous self-promotional signatures, heaps of experts, everyone selling to each other  – yeah been there done that got the T-shirt!  Of course times have moved on and there is an active Facebook group to (this one isn’t too bad) – but again its pretty much about selling to your peers.

You don’t want to sell to your peers – you want to find where people who are interested in your niche hang out. 

So where do my customers hang out. Stepping back – who are my customers:

  • they are holiday-makers/vacationers/travelers/tourists;
  • they are probably first-timers or first time overseas visitors or first time solo travelers;
  • they may be just looking for something to read about their favourite topic without actually doing anything about it – yes I do own guidebooks to places I’ve never been to or got around to going to!
  • they aren’t terrified of technology (they are going to buy an ebook) – but they may not be that confident online (haven’t found that any question will find an answer if asked on the popular travel forums).

Great so this is who I’m doing to promote – pretty much its a blend of sound SEO with a bit branding thrown in without getting into the dark, dark time-sink of social networking.

Yes I do have my book in my sig link on some forums – on TRAVEL forums – not writing ones – get it?

Direct Promotion 

Now this stuff I can’t do until the book is live and this is the bit which is going to be fun.  Amazon listing are loved by Google – you’ll see Amazon listings at the top of Google all the time.  My little book’s Amazon listing is going to be linked to from every website and hubpage that I own that have anything to do with travel or vacation. I will of course use my affiliate ID so I get the extra 4-8% commission when someone buys.  I am picking that this will be enough to get my Amazon listing #1 for my main keyword – watch this space!

My book will also be published at Smashwords.  This gives me access to other distribution channels (Apple, Barnes&Noble, Whitcoulls) – which I can’t get to otherwise so why not? And again it should be a listing that I can rank – though its not nearly as keyword rich -as
Amazon’s

So with some, hmmm, luck links,  I aiming at controlling the first three listing for my favourite keywords – before it even gets hard…

Note you will get three Amazon listings: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazon.de. Really though I see no reason why I can’t just send some links to the dot com version – if you land on the uk Amazon site when you are supposed to buy from the dot com Amazon will send you on to the right place.

Oh and I have done a profit-sharing deal to get a German language version of my book to, I know Germans travel a lot – and it must get tedious reading about it in a foreign language!

Building Your Online Home(s) 

  1. Author you, or your pseudonym, needs an identified home – for many this would be your own dot com – johnsmith.com or johnsmith.me. As MY online home is already occupied and not really associated with travel – I needed a new one – which was branded for the new niche – hence http://listraveltips.com (made with my favourite theme Catalyst).
  2. Next your book needs a home – you may have noticed that many movies now use a domain like e.g. gonewiththewindmovie.com – well books are starting to do the same thing – so we get Vacation Packing List – Book – this isn’t a blog in the sense that it will ever get updated – its a static mini-site, developed in WordPress – which is basically an exercise in getting the person who arrives there to buy the book and linking them back to the overall “author home” site – this is a set and forget it website (all done with pages for the technically minded, and I again I use Catalyst theme because I’m too lazy to use anything else now).
  3. On your author website add the compulsory social media buttons – now one of the reasons I decided against yet another persona for the books is that I already have a (genuine) FB profile and an (entirely automated) twitter one . People who buy eBooks don’t necessarily read blogs – so for once I find a genuine reason to use social media.
  4. Decide what the aim of all this is for. My aim is to a) build a list (I can’t believe I just wrote that down LOL) and b) sell my books to my list.
  5. Link to your author home from both your Smashwords profile  and your Amazon author’s page (which will take an RSS feed) using either your brand or your name.

Well that’s a start! One thing I’d say about the author home – you need to keep it focused on the niche – not on how to write about your niche and publish a book about it!

My Lis’s Travel Tips site won’t be getting updated at all regularly – I threw some content up – note how you can’t tell which dates the updates were posted? But really this is more like a once a month event not once a week! After all I want most of my content on SALE not being given away on my blog!

Categories
Research The Market Self Publishing

Finding the Right Subject For Indie Non-Fiction

Will anyone buy my eBook? Well people will buy stuff if it solves a problem for them – at the right price. I know this because I make a living from it from affiliate marketing and advertising. Would someone buy something I wrote? Well I don’t know for sure, but I know that when my hub ranked well it got about 50,000 unique page views last year.

Is There Demand?

What if, instead of finding a hub at the top of the serps, the searcher found a cheap little Amazon eBook.  Say a book for $2.99 – would they buy that?

If someone bought my book on Amazon for $2.99 – I’d get about $2 (if they were from the US, UK and some other places I can’t recall, otherwise about $1). But the topic is an American term, not a UK English usage. So lets assume $2.

So if all 50,000 visitors bought the book – that would be …

But they won’t maybe only 10% of them will buy – still $10,000/year – who around here has made that off a website yet?

Maybe only 5% of them will buy… bummer only $5,000 – its still not bad for a 20,000 word book which has taken me a couple of weeks to write because I am still trying to work out how to do this.

Basically even if only 1% of searchers buy my book its worthwhile. That’s an annual income, this is not a topic that grows old or out of date…

Who Reads eBooks 

Some stuff does brilliantly well on a Kindle.  A books on a Kindle is anonymous – no one can see what you are reading. What is the most profitable part of the book market that no one talks about in critical circles but makes huge amounts of money? Romance, Mills&Boom, Harlequin – no one admits to reading it or writing it, it sells like hot cakes.  Amazon has a HUGE erotica selection.

Old people buy Kindles – why – because they can’t see well – you can change the font size to any size you want – you can create your own large print book. You can even have the Kindle read to you.  Have you ever walked around a town or a museum with a really good guide or a really boring audio guide?  You probably paid more than $2.99 too…

Travelers buy eBooks – I can fit 3500 books on my Kindle (apparently) – you have no idea how much my back loves the thought of that – the only real question is whether my partner will need to buy his own or whether we can share …

Commuters buy eBooks – have you ever tried to read while standing up on a bus or train  for 40 minutes on the London tube? Even with a seat its difficult to read a broadsheet paper, its heavy to carry a book, a Kindle is neither.

People who can buy eBooks from the Amazon for a lot less than “real” books in their own country: that’s New Zealand and Australia to start with, and I thinking of any non-English speaking country with a sizeable expat English-reading population…

Will the Punters Pay?

Yes I think they will. I took a walk downtown today. I checked out the bookshops. They may be struggling – but they still have their big popular sections: displayed prominantly – near the front. Cookbooks, celebs, travel. Lots and lots of travel.

I checked Amazon – to find there were were two other  proper traditionally published books which had eBook versions priced at $9.99 – presumably these were published because people would pay three times as much as I would charge.

Its no guarantee of course – but its a start.

What’s the Upsell? 

But you know the drill in Internet Marketing  – you hook the suckers in with the cheap $7 product and then they spend another $77 for the one-time off of the video course plus 33 bonuses they never knew they needed.

Amazon doesn’t upsell. It cross-sells. I have sold stuff on Amazon that I didn’t even know WTF it was until I looked at the product listing! People click through on Amazon and go on a bloody buying spry.

I bought my Kindle about a month ago. in that time I have bought about 10 books, my partner another 5 – neither of us had ever bought a book to read online. I hadn’t bought a fiction book for years – I’ve bought at least three this month.  Everytime a read a book on the Kindle Amazon tells me right on the Kindle what other books previous purchasers of this title bought – and I can buy them too, with one click.

John Locke – who I mentioned before – didn’t sell a million books by having one title – he sold a million books over 9 fiction titles (I imagine his how-I-did-it book won’t do too bad either).

You Need More Books To Sell 

If you are familiar with the terms used in the Keyword Academy – you need to build authority you can’t be a one-book wonder.  You need to focus on a bunch of related keywords – or don’t mix your travel guides with erotic cowboy stories (use a different pen-name if that’s where you are at).

The trick is blindingly simple – at the end of your book you add an offer: you suggest to your reader that they might want to go on they might want to check out your website where they can sign up for the newsletter that will let them know the very moment you release another title. 

You write a good book, a book that solves a problem.  You get a decent cover for it so it looks appealing. You triple check it for typos. You hire an editor. You get some reviews – from people who have actually read it.

Now your book shows up if anyone searches in Amazon for your topic, and also shows that it has good customer reviews and it may even show in the best-sellers list of your category.

When you publish the next book – you revise the first book to include the cross-sell to the second book – maybe the first chapter or so .. and you let the list on your website know.

Now you have traffic from your website,  from your email list, from showing up inside Amazon’s search engine -oh yeah and Google may rank the book listing and your book’s website too.

Once you have some momentum happening though – it doesn’t really matter WTF Google thinks of it all though does it?

Once Amazon gets old, of course there is smashwords.com – they distribute to

Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Borders Australia and Angus & Robertson Australia (both powered by Kobo), Whitcoulls (New Zealand, powered by Kobo), the Diesel eBook Store and other distribution outlets coming soon… all Premium Catalog titles available as single-book apps for sale in the major mobile app marketplaces including Apple, Android, Windows Phone 7 and HP’s WebOS.

So who even cares which eBook reader is best (apparently lots of people use the Kindle free software to read Kindle books on iPads).

Wow writing this down – having been thinking it through (and writing) for the lost month still does my head in!

Oh the book – well its not out yet – but you check out my Lis’s Travel Tips website – and make sure you sign up for the email list – so you’ll be the first to know – but only if you are interested in travel!

 

Categories
Self Publishing

Indie Non-Fiction v. InfoProducts

Bags packed for another trip...

For nearly as long as I’ve been in Internet Marketing I’ve heard the old “you must have your own product” to really make it in this industry. The “product” most commonly cited was , of course – an “infoproduct” – a pdf of your real or perceived wisdom typically retailing for around $27 to $97 or $147 – didn’t really seem to matter so long as the price a) ended in a 7 and b) did not exceed your ability to keep a  straight face when promoting the price.

I couldn’t buy into it  – it sounded like a border-line con to be, and what is worse it was a favoured technique for some of my least favourite people in the game.

But it niggled – how hard could it be to write a book? I’d read books almost all my life, and like any vociferous reader I’d started writing my own book, several times, I never got past Chapter 2.  Was it actually possible to produce a “info product” at a fair price, that someone might want to pay me for and read.

I kept on making money with Adsense, and affiliate sales, eBay and Amazon.  Panda happened, trashed hubpages, and made me look at a long-ignored hub  that was getting good traffic  for a keyword that paid very little in Adsense. And which I was an expert on.

Bags packed for another trip...

And for which there must be a market because a) I knew what the search volumes were and b) there was a new book coming out on the same topic, at $9.99, and there was a real dead-tree version of it to. Publishers only publish books that have a market right? (Well quite possibly arguable – but WTF sometimes they get it right).

So I did some research. I’m good at research – closet academic if not for the students – I figured that someone must have figured out this untapped gold mine of unlimiteless wealth already.

Had The Marketers Figured Out How to Put InfoProducts on Amazon?

Maybe I was late to the party – I’d been spending all my time working, and not keeping up with the latest scams business opportunities. Was writing and promoting eBooks on Amazon – the bloody site that kept out-ranking my little affiliate niche sites – yesterday’s news?

I went to the font of all knowledge – I went to the WarriorForum – nope I’m not helping you by linking to it – lets put it this way its like swimming with sharks, without a shark cage, and with an open bleeding wound …

And naturally enough there was some Kindle Killer Kash Katastrophies (or similar names) for offer at the very reasonable price of $??7.87 – but only for the next 5 minutes.  In fact the one I found and bought wasn’t too awful – standard promotion stuff: blog, video, social media, oh and keywords, oh and buy some reviews (are Amazon that stupid?).

But there was a little bit missing – how to write the actual (or virtual) flipping book. I mean I can ramble on this blog until the bovines get bored – but how to write the book?

Oh I didn’t need to write a book – I just needed to add some pictures to some public domain content and then I could charge for a book already available on Amazon for free The Holy Bible yeah right, not feeling like such a good idea anymore.

Or string some PLR together – well most of the reading public wouldn’t know public label rights if they fell over them – but interesting every book I found on Amazon which was PLR had awful reviews – funny that.

The marketers knew how to promote the book, they thought they knew how to find the topics that would sell (I disagree we will come to that), but they were bloody terrified about writing.

But There Are Heaps of Self-Published Writers on Amazon 

The joke of course is that there are thousands of self-published writers on Amazon. Check out the popular listings which have anything to do with “twilight” “vampires” “erotica” and quite a lot of sci-fi – check for the 99c and $2.99c prices  – yup you found them.

I had met the Indies.  Yeah I had to Google it too – Indie=independent NOT Indian (though I imagine some are), as in independently publishing not waiting to get signed by an agent and the agent getting them a book deal. Traditionally (like before 2007 which was when Amazon launched the Kindle) as a would-be author you could either:

  • get a deal with a Publisher (preferably one of the “big 6”);
  • self-publish

Self- publishing is basically print on demand ie a fancy photocopy of your book bound  and which you pay for. Good for publishing your family’s local history – but frankly I’m more interested in making money than spending it.

Writers are waking up to the fact that eBooks give them a way to publish without getting past the gatekeepers of the publishers. And they make more than 10% of the profits, and they don’t have to wait years for their book to get published. Amazon allows anyone to self-publish at Kindle Direct Publishing

There is not just demand from readers for cheap books on Amazon’s best selling product – the Kindle – but there is supply – as writers realise that 70% of lots of $2.99 books is much better than 10% of $14.99 in about 2 years, maybe.

Marketers want to make money – they know how to promote any old crap to make it sell – and a surprising amount of it will. But a considerable number of them are terrified of writing. Writers (may) know how to write – but are mostly are clueless about promotion – particularly online.

I’ve found one guy who managed to combine the two skills sets.  I found out about him because Amazon’s newsletter was promoting him (killer promotion tactic that one):  How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months by John Locke – even if you don’t write fiction – you should read this, if you don’t think there is money in fiction, you should read it, if you think you have to be a Pultzer Award Nominee to publish a book, you should read this, oh and the fiction is his hobby he’s a successful marketer and entrepreneur. No prizes for supposing that he had decided to hit a nice round number like 1,000,000 before he put pen to paper.

But I was still wondering: was there a market for Indie non fiction?

to be continued ….

 

Categories
HubPages Self Publishing

HubPages is a Train Wreck – And The Next Big Thing

Boat leaving, Kaiteriteri Beach, Nelson, NZ

Hey no one can accuse me of always having keyword-optimized titles OK! Oops sorry missed June, left you hanging about the next big thing – me bad.

First the hubpages.com train wreck – if you are thinking about joining hubpages to make money – don’t. If you are thinking about using them for backlinks – maybe. Basically the problem with hubpages is not Panda – if they’d had competent management they could have come through that, in fact the hubs I’ve promoted are pretty much back to where they were pre-Panda. The issue is the unpredictableness of what will happen to the company. They’ve lost their Amazon affiliate status, being a California based company, and they are now experimenting with moving hubs to sub-domains. Titanic and the deck chairs spring to mind, too much stuff not in my control  so I can’t recommend them anymore.

Boat leaving, Boy in Water, Kaiteriteri Beach, Nelson, NZ

But there may be a good side to the loss of hundreds of dollars of hubpages income – while I was resurrecting my vacation packing hub I actually looked at where the traffic was coming from. It was from a slightly different keyword.

At around the same time I bought a Kindle – I like the Kindle, a lot – its not just at a nice price point if you want to give me the commission – but the books are so bloody cheap its unbelievable! In fact I now have about 100 books downloaded inside a month, at least half were free, quite a few others were 99c.

You see its really easy to buy a book on a Kindle – you can browse right from the device, or you can download a preview, and then after reading that the preview says: would you like to buy it now and you click YES. No “are you sure?” no “fill in 25 forms and sign up for a newsletter” – just “YES” and a pre-approved credit card.

Its amazing – and even at full-price the books are a fraction of what I pay for

  • real softback-paper-dead-tree books, and
  • infoproducts – the all-singing dancing pdf of 119 pages of 24 pitch font with 25 additional videos plus bonuses worth at least $997.77 all for $27 – today only – last 5 left.

As I got excited about my new toy – the news broke that Amazon’s ebook sales were higher than their hardbacks. Hmm what does this sound like? Remember how once you could only buy music from record shops, now you download the track you want from iTunes – does anyone else see an industry dying?

In fact it could  already be  on life-support in Australia  with Angus&Robertson and Borders both looking for a buyer, and the major chain bookstore in NZ – Whitcoulls – will only survive by selling cards and wrapping paper, which is pretty much all they sell now.  The trashy novels you can buy in The Warehouse (our local version of Walmart), the odd specialist, high-quality bookseller may survive. The chains not so much.

Which has got precisely what to do with the business of making money online? Well think about it.  Do you know how much a writer makes from a published book, well apparently its an appalling low 10%, in fact sometimes your Amazon affiliate commission may be higher than what the actual author gets!

What does an author get for an ebook on Amazon? If the price is between $2.99 and $9.99 and some other conditions are met – 70%, otherwise 35%.  Plus your affiliate commission.  This has not escaped the attention of smart published authors like Tracey Edwards.

Who can publish on Amazon?  Anyone.

Did you just hear ka-ching?

Do I need to point out that Google does NOT control the best-selling lists on Amazon…

To be continued …

 

 

 

 

Categories
Back Links HubPages Paid Tools

Hubpages Money Making Update

Traffic still dropping on HubPages.com - from Quantcast.com

OK about a month ago I asked if you could still make money with Hubpages in 2011. You might want to read that again quickly but here are the results of my two case studies:

Case Study 1 Adsense Niche

Starting positions

previously top ranking hub #4

niche vacation site #7

All links were built using BMR (Build My Rank review here). All dates in proper format!

16/5 Adsense  hub  is back to #1 on scroogle.org  42 articles live on BMR

31/5 after sitting at #1 consistently for a week, today is back to #2 – 60 articles live on BMR

16/5 niche site dot info – #8 on scroogle.org – 32 articles live on BMR

31/5 after sitting consistently at #2 and #3 for the last week – has now dropped to #6/#7 – 60 articles live on BMR

Conclusion – a hub will rank again if you build links to it – whether you have to keep building links to it remains to be seen.  For the amount of work you have to do – you might as well just build your own site. Hubpages.com will continue to drop traffic because most of the writers there believe passionately in the old chestnut “build it and they will come”.

Case Study 2: Product Hubs

Starting positions

New hub published 9/5.

16/5 new product hub not int top 100 – 1 link.

31/5 sitting at #28 on scroogle.org – 15  links.

16/5 niche site #15  12 links.

31/5 now at #5 with 15 articles on link.

My niche site is a only a bit over a year old – but is a fairly closely related excact domain match. Its less effort to get the new page on it ranked then to rank a new hub – no prizes for figuring what is the best decision going forward.

What To do About HubPages?

  • If you haven’t started – don’t bother.
  • If you have hubs that have dropped – then it might be worth a backlinking effort to get the top-paying ones back in position #1. For the ones that never ranked well – I’m seriously considering un-publishing them, waiting for them to de-index and placing them elsewhere ie on my own websites.

The Quantcast figures for HubPages -continue to tell the same story as last month:

Traffic still dropping on HubPages.com - from Quantcast.com

It should all be slightly sad really. In some ways it is – but much more so this entire little exercise has made me really excited. While I was looking at the data for this experiment I had a real “duh” moment. The moons aligned – the scales fell from my eyes – and figured out the Next Big Thing on making money online.

But that’s a whole other keyword – so another post ! Sorry!

Categories
Lis Recommmends Making Money Online Paid Tools Product Reviews Tools

Niche Reaper Review – Scam or Legit?

Well the whole world is buzzing about the launch of the newest, greatest, bright shiny object of the Make Money Online world – Matt Garrett and Gary Prendergast’s Niche Reaper – this is pretty much the best thing since the invention of the Internet  – on account of it it will pay me a nice recurring affiliate income  and hey you guys might have fun playing with it – was that hardcore affiliate marketing enough for you?

Anyone still here? OK. WTF Lissie why are you doing flogging yet another MMO product – well Splork has a way about him that makes me buy shit that gets past his bullshit radar.

So when I was procrastinating today Splork came up in my Google reader – and I am now $67 dollars frigging poorer – thanks mate.

Niche Reaper Review

So what does Niche Reaper claim to do – well their main claims are:

  • Uncover Hidden Keywords – Over 20,000 brand new fully researched keywords unearthed every single day!
  • Dominate Entire Markets – Keywords are grouped into niches so you can build authority sites, not just keyword landing pages
  • No More Keyword Research – Simply log-in and pick a colour-coded niche we’ve done all the hard work for you
  • Remove Uncertainty – Know the dollar value of each niche BEFORE you risk your precious time and money promoting it
  • Save Time, Earn More – Quickly filter by expected earnings to build your personal portfolio of killer niches
  • Rank Faster via Google’s Backdoor – Discover hundreds of new keyword domains every day with a virtually guaranteed page one ranking
  • Join The FaceBook Gold Rush – Build Fanpages and boost their value with thousands of available keyword-rich FaceBook URLs

Been been there done that you might think – well I did anyways – as I am old and jaded. But what caught my attention was the second claim – build authority sites.

Now I’ve said before that niche sites work just fine for me, but I also know from experience of this site that once you rank for one term e.g. “site build it scam” then ranking for “hubpages scam” is a lot easier than ranking a new site for the same term.  So if you can start a site based around a bunch of keywords rather than just one – its easier – particularly if those keywords are closely related.

But stepping back one step further – Niche Reaper will actually suggest keywords to you – no not just by you putting in a keyword and it returning the variations –  they have a ticker tape screen / running board of new keywords on the front page – and within minutes I’d found some new keywords which not only have never thought of but actually had a hope in hell of ranking for with my existing sites.

The Niche Reaper’s method for calculating the ease of ranking of keywords and their potential value seems to be fairly similar to that of the Keyword Academy  not identical but nothing stupid like looking at the total number of competing sites  – but what made me put me hit the subscribe button was actually the feature that the computer itself would come up with suggestions for me.

The suggestions aren’t bad –  some are more commecial than others, a few were in Spanish, some related to the UK market – but it would be hard not to find something useful in an hour or two’s browsing.

What I Didn’t Like About Niche Reaper

  1. There is no way to add your own keywords into the tool – if they are not there already – or picked up by whatever method they use to find new keywords – you are out of luck.  There’s a comment somewhere in support saying this is a possible future enhancement.
  2. There seems to be no way to download you keyword lists – you can classify keywords of interest by adding a star – but you have to stick with the tool (and the monthly subscription) – to easily access them. Looked harder you can download them into a pretty little spreadsheet.
  3. I’m pretty cynical about the suggested values of the keywords  – I happen to have been #1 for one of the keywords I found in Niche Reaper – according to them its worth  $40,956 /month. That would be nice – my experience is that when I am #1 its worth about $333/month. (Niche Refinery from the Keyword Academy thinks its worth $3600). Now this may be a fluke keyword and exposes another limitation – the keyword I rank for (and I’m #1 in Australia and #3 in the US) gets me six times more Australians than Americans – and according to Google – most of the searchers are actually from the UK (where I don’t rank at all) – so take the values with quite a lot of cynicism.
  4. Frigging two upsells before I even bought the produce – for goodness sakes – the product looks good  – you just cheapen it by offering me a one time chance to get $XXXX value for $49.95 – or whatever it was – I wasn’t paying attention. AND DON’T SHOUT AT ME WHEN I TRY TO LEAVE THE PAGE – you will not make me a customer by getting me fired from my current job where I wasn’t supposed to be surfing the web.
  5. Too much emphasis on social media particularly Facebook – for getting traffic, never found anyone who goes on Facebook to buy stuff- just saying.
  6. Most of the training videos aren’t yet available. This may because they are just not ready yet – or it could be a ploy to keep you subscribed for month after month. I didn’t like the titles of the upcoming videos on getting traffic either – I think the Keyword Academy offers a much more solid approach for traffic generation.

What I Like About Niche Reaper

  1. The software works – its not always a given online – but this has a nice interface and it works for me. I had a look in the support pages (nice they have those too) and the only people having problems are running Internet Explorer. Use Firefox or Chrome and your life will be better – in general – I promise.
  2. The keywords are reasonable keywords – they seem reasonably commercial – ie you may actually make some money if you rank for the terms being suggested and I haven’t seen one “make money online” keyword yet!
  3. They acknowledge the value of exact match domains – still working for me  though I would stick to 3 or fewer words if at all possible.
  4. The training videos are clear and no fluff.  They recommend namecheap for domains and Hostgator for hosting both solid companies that provide excellent service  even though there are others out that paying better affiliate commissions.
  5. It appears there will be step-by-step videos for the basics of getting a site up and running and they recommend that you outsource your articles (though I thought the particular recommendation was a little on the expensive side).
  6. This is a Clickbank product – you get 60 days to get a money back refund – and Clickbank provides the refund so there is no question about it. (Although I’ve not bought a subscription product on CB before – to be on the safe side I’d unsubscribe and request the refund before the next payment is due).

What I haven’t Reviewed

I didn’t review the upsell videos/ebooks on the initial purchase.

None of the training videos under First site – after “Getting Articles”, Facebook, Twitter, Traffic, Monetization, Resources were available at the time of this review.

Who Do I Recommend Niche Reaper For

  • Someone starting out who has no idea what a buying keyword was – that was me for years – so even if you are not a beginner if this is your weakness check the product out.
  • Someone who wants to find more related and easy keywords for existing sites – this is what I’ll use it for and its nice
  • Procrastinators. I don’t think its unreasonable that its a monthly subscription – there will be an overhead maintaining the system. For many people though you could subscribe get enough keywords for the next 6-12 months in a day or two and then unsubscribe. So don’t stay subscribed for months not using it (though my paypal account will thank you if you do) – get in, get out.
  • If you know how to setup a website but not how to do keyword research – this product may be worthwhile for you.

Who Shouldn’t Buy Niche Reaper

  • While the basic training videos aren’t complete – I wouldn’t recommend this for the complete beginner – try Keyword Academy instead.
  • If you can’t afford the $67 already gone up to $77/month – obviously really but possibly needs to be said in this age of credit card debt.

This May or May Not Be a Time Limited Opportunity

The claim is that Niche Reaper will be limited to 1000 subscribers (at one time I assume) and that they are about 1/2 way there as of the the time of writing. Now a time limited offer, act now or forever miss out – is an oldie but a goodie in online marketing.

It may however be true in this case because if it became incredibly popular then there would be a) a huge load on their servers and b) the keywords they are identifying as  easy to rank for would suddenly have a whole rabble of marketers going after them – thereby shooting their prediction in their metaphorical foot.

If it does close I bet there will be a waiting list though – thought the price might go up (because they have proven the demand).

Genuinely – I don’t know if you should hurry or not but:

HERE IS MY HONKING BIG AFFILIATE LINK

if you want to.

Categories
Back Links Free Tools HubPages

Hubpages – Can You Still Make Money in 2011?

Traffic drop on Hubpages.com as measured by Quantcast

I started on Hubpages.com – because of Hubpages I made my first $100 online and got paid out by Google’s Adsense program. In fact the precursor of this blog was built to support my hubpages – not the other way around!

Until recently I highlighted my pages explaining how I made money on Hubpages – the posts were genuine – but I also made money from those writers who signed up using my affiliate ID – personally I’d moved on from Hubpages, Hubpages is no scam, but I prefer  to put time into my own sites – but my hubpages were still making me hundreds a month – until recently.

Panda Update and Hubpages

I’ve already written about how the Panda updated failed to deliver quality to the searcher – and still my niche sites are  ranking pretty much where they were before the so-called update.

But Panda was originally nicknamed “Farmer Update” by SEO’s – because the update seemed to particularly focus on large content sites – sites like HubPages.

The official figures – as provided by Quantcast – seems to support this:

Traffic drop on Hubpages.com as measured by Quantcast

Looking at my own analytics for the same period – its the same but different :

hubpages traffic drop April 2011
Analytics on my main Hubpages Account - same period as Qantcast

My point is that – over all comments about the site – you need to look at your own stats and apply the data. The peak on 1 March was because my Wellington Earthquake hub ranked well in NZ before the local news papers woke up to the fact that locals were panicking about about a barely felt shake in the wake of the wall-to-wall coverage of the previous week’s major Christchurch quake.

Ignoring this outlier – my traffic seems to have only slightly dropped – unfortunately that drop is much more dramatic when I look at my Adsense stats for the last couple of months compared to the same period last year (my traffic is seasonal so the only fair comparison is the same time of year).

Its against Adsense TOS to give you details but I can tell you that my eCPM  is down over 50%.

My best ranked hubs have dropped – but are still on page 1 or 2 in most cases. However the drop in traffic from position 1 to position 7 or 8 is huge – as anyone who has been there will attest to.

Experiment to See If I Can Get My Rankings Back

I’m lucky because I have two cases study where I have hubs and sites which target the same keywords.

Case 1: Adsense Niche

In this case my hub has been in #1 position for a couple of years – after Panda 1 in early Februrary it dropped to position #2, in April’s Panda 2 (Panda roll-out worldwide) the site dropped to position 4 for its main keyword. This is a seasonal niche that peaks in the US summer so I want it back!

I also have a niche site sitting in position 7 for the same main keyword  – frankly I haven’t built a link for either the hub or the site for at least 2 years – its not the world’s most profitable niche – but its perfect for the purpose of answering the question.

Will backlinks still work for Hubpages?

Now lets be clear in the past – hubpages didn’t need backlinks – or not very many – if you had a trusted profile and wrote a good long hub – the hub in question above is nearly 2000 words you could get the hub to rank for a non-competitive keyword using a combination of site authority and internal links.

In May I will be building 60 links to each of the hub and the niche site. The links will be based on a mixture of the main keyword and related cousins – using  Keyword Academy methods.

Case 2: Product Hubs

I have a product orientated site which I have also used hubpages for back links from. I’m going to try adding a new hub on the product – backlinking it from related hubs and then backlink the hub to see if it will rank – this is on a different user from my main one – so will be interested to see what happens.

Issues with HubPages reactions to Panda/Farmer Update

Some would say that changes to Hubpages TOS has caused more damage to their earnings on HP than the actual Google changes.

1. Hubpages has launched their own Ads program.

I’ve signed up for the HP Ads program to see if it will give me a better return than Adsense. I signed up all my accounts about 10 days ago but my two more niche focused identities are reverting to Adsense – I’m not going to hit the $50 payout without decent traffic. In contract my main profile has made that $50 minimum in 10 days  – I’ll leave it on for another month to see how the eCPM compares to Adsense. I have a lot of popular hubs on that account that get traffic but few clicks so the HP ads may work for this account.

2. Hubpages  may be struggling to stay in business.

There has been pandemonium in the Hubpages forums but I doubt that its even 1/2 of what is happening in Hubpages HQ – the company has got to be hurting a lot and probably wondering how to make payroll. Whether they  survive the next few months – will be of interest – there is always lots of knee-jerk changes being made. In the meanwhile I advise anyone who has content on hubpages to back it up.

3. Hubpages is losing a lot of “marketers” because of their changes to TOS

Recent changes in hubpages have varied from the incomprehensible (banning pixelated images), to the odd (reducing the number of Amazon and eBay capsules allowed), and from  the sane (banning duplicate content) to the not sane (banned affiliate links).

This is losing some hubbers a lot of money – some at least are unpublishing and removing their content. Its very hard to know how significant this is – but it could be that hubpages is losing a lot of high ranking content and suffering from a lot  broken links both internally and externally – this would certainly hurt my websites – so I imagine its hurting hubpages too.

Unfortunately the hubbers they are loosing were the ones who knew how to promote their content – those that are left are the “write it and they will come” camp – which worked so long as someone was promoting the site – if no one is…

4. Hubpages has reduced the number of Adsense ads on hubs

The loss of a the well-placed links unit on hubpages is unfortunate – I continue to make great money from link units on other sites.

At the moment I ma pretty sure that Hubpages isn’t a good way to make money anymore – what I’m trying to establish though is if it still has enough authority to be useful backlinks – watch this space.


Categories
Adsense beginners Blogging Catalyst Paid Tools Product Reviews Tools

Catalyst Theme and Adsense Review

My Dutch is about at the same level as my php - I can recognise some bits but I can't write it!

OK this is another instalment in my collection of articles about how the premium WordPress theme Catalyst: it may not be free but it allows even the technically terrified to  do cool stuff!

On of the things that I like about Catalyst is that its one theme that I can use for everything – from a mini-site to this site, to a client’s professional site. I use Catalyst for all  of them. Today I’m concentrating on using Catalyst with Adsense.

Now there are plenty of WordPress plugins that promise to manage your Adsense easily with any theme. But plugins have their own issues- every plugin you add to a site adds a level of complexity and invariably need upgrading every time WordPress upgrades, and sometimes they break and sometimes they even send a quiet percentage of impressions to their author’s Adsense publisher ID!

There are a number of ways to deal with Adsense using the Catalyst theme – I think I have the simplest – and I will point you to a couple of alternative solutions at the end of this post.

How to Manage Adsense on a WordPress Blog

My Dutch is about at the same level as my php - I can recognise enough to order lunch but I don't speak it!

My requirements for when I want Adsense to show – and more importantly NOT to show on my websites come straight from the terms of service provided by our friends at Google.

  1. I only want to display at most 3 ad units and 3 link units on any one page.
  2. I don’t want to display ads on “filler” pages such as the privacy policy and “thin” pages like the “about” page.

More specifically I want:

  • to have a front page which consists of my last 3 posts;
  • a link unit in the header to show on all pages and posts except the “filler” and “thin” pages;
  • a honking big rectangle of ads to show near the top of each post  floated right in the text – including the 3 posts on the front page;
  • I want an ad block to show at the end of the post and in the sidebar – but only on single posts – not on the front page.

Now if  you know php you will be already shouting something like “use php if single command to only display on single posts” – but remember I’m an idiot and I don’t know anything about php, I struggle in html and  my CSS only got fluent since the last upgrade of Catalyst gave me the brilliant – “hold your hand point and click CSS builder” thingy.

Adsense Using Catalyst Theme Layouts

If you are used to free themes you may expect that every page and post has to have the same basic layout of sidebars and widgets. With Catalyst there is no such limitation, Every post and page can have a different layout.

Catalyst allows you to create an unlimited number of layouts – each of which can have a different arrangement of widths, widgets, sidebars – anything really. I use a combination of custom widgets and layouts to control where my Adsense ads show. This involves no php coding and a very little CSS –  it goes like this:

  1. Create a custom layout  called supportpage – this is for use of the privacy policy and about page. After creating the layout – you need to edit each page or post that you want to use the new layout by changing the drop down below the edit post area. Now you have a simple layout for these ancillary pages – job done.
  2. I also create a layout for each post page I want to display Adsense on – this I called “postpage”.
  3. Now for the custom widgets – I create three widgets: bottominpost, rectangleinpost and headerlinks – I think you get the idea what I might be putting in these! Each custom widget is hooked into a different place on the catalyst theme – a hook is just where you attach a widget into a theme – that’s how I have the yellow boxes below the header on this blog – there an awful lot of them – here is the visual for the main default catalyst home page hooks! 
  4. For each widget I have the option as to which of my layouts I want to use the widget on: so I control that none of these widgets show on the supportpage layout – but the headerlinks  and rectangleinpost widgets shows on the default and the postpage layouts and the bottominpost layout shows only on the postpage layout. You may be getting the idea about now – using descriptive names is good- because you end up with a lot of widgets!
  5. Now this is the techie bit – sorry – you need to click on the custom CSS option. The only thing we haven’t done yet is made sure that honking big rectangle of an Adsense ad floats right within your text – you can build what you want with the CSS builder option (this is a good place to change the colour or other styling of a widget too!) – or you can steal my code -here its is – suitable for the large rectangle Adsense layout:

    .rectangleinpost {
    width: 340px;
    height: 284px;
    float: right;
    padding: 2px 0px 0px 2px;
    }

    Now head over to your widgets page and drop text boxes in all your new widgets – into each text box drop the correct piece of Adsense code – job done!

Bonus – using the layouts will give you a new sidebar (if you chose that option) on your posts – so you can toss another tasteless skyscraper Adsense block in there as well.

Adsense on Catalyst Using Hook Boxes

Costa’s post on How To Create An Adsense Optimized Child Theme will walk you thru this one- must admit that post meant I kinda  understood hook boxes for the first time too! But it has that scary stuff php again …

Adsense on Catalyst Using Widgets

RT an American living in the Philippines has a similar approach to mine and wrote How To Display Adsense on a Single Post with Catalyst Theme as a guest post for Costa. But because he isn’t using layouts he’s forced to use the evil php stuff in his widgets – ugg!

Seriously there are lot of ways to achieve the same result in Catalyst –  all of these approaches will get you to the same place – but your mileage may vary depending on your skills and exactly what you are trying to achieve.

I actually think the use of layouts is really powerful – if for example you wanted to have different advertising (or no advertising) on different types of posts – e.g. some of your articles may suit Amazon ads – while others will have an affiliate offer or Adsense. In fact I may play around with something like that on this site – keep watching 🙂

I tell you what however you do it – once you have used the power of a decent framework theme like Catalyst you will NEVER EVER want to edit theme’s code again – just avoiding the whole drama of upgrading and losing all your customizations is so worth avoiding!

Oh and yeah – honking big affiliate link for Catalyst here! I’d be curious to hear from others doing something similar with a fancy theme – or are you all using plugins?

 

Categories
Paid Tools Product Reviews Rants The Keyword Academy Tools

Postrunner Review: The “Quality” Debate

These cars aren't Quality - but tourists now pay a premium to hire them in Berlin!

UPDATE: April 2012 – Postrunner V2 Review

If your response to my title was WTF is Postrunner – then check out my earlier post. If you are a member of The Keyword Academy you will know  that Postrunner is system used with TKA in order to create keyword anchored links for your sites.

I’ve compared to BuildMyRank to Postrunner – and Mark is now trying to differentiate Postrunner from BuildMyRank and similar schemes.

His argument is that Postrunner needs to evolve:

  • needs “better quality” sites in Postrunner.
  • the reason more “quality” sites aren’t in Postrunner is because of the “quality” of the articles being sent to them.
  • his proposed solution is an author scoring system which will reward the writers (or buyers) of superior articles.

The Argument About “Quality” Articles

As soon as the thread started in the forum the predictable grammar Nazi’s (Nazis’? Nazis’s ??) were out in force. Too many trailing commas – FAIL. Use of nonstandard spellings FAIL. To be fair to Mark, in the seminar he specifically mentioned that he wasn’t concerned about grammar and spelling problems, he was more worried about the articles being relevant and having a point.

Its all looking like this will be seen, by many, most of whom haven’t hit the $10/month income level yet, in the community, as an opportunity to FAIL all of those authors who use too many commas in a sentence…

I have two sites in Postrunner at the moment – one is a niche, passion quality site, the other one is a general site full of trashy Postrunner articles, which I just put back in during the webinar yesterday – inside 12 hours I have received over 7 articles.

These cars aren't Quality - but tourists now pay a premium to hire them in Berlin!

What I Look For When I Get Postrunner Articles on My Quality Postrunner Site

I put my Independent Travel site into Postrunner – basically to get content when I couldn’t be arsed writing, and to see what keywords people were trying to rank for in the travel niche – a niche that is my passion but pays me very, very poorly. Now it gets about 2/3 posts a week – which is a nice number. I reject at least a third of those. So this is how to get your well-written, gramatically perfect article declined from my site.

  1. The site linked out to – only consists of a “hello world” post (seriously its happened).
  2. If the site linked to is a general postrunner site, or similar article directory – this is a new automatic DECLINE  I picked up from Build My Rank.
  3. The 2 anchored links are in the the last words in the article – normally on separate lines -I don’t know who the hell is teaching this – its certainly not TKA – but please stop it – it looks stupid and its a loser for SEO duh!
  4. The two links are to the exact same page on the site being promoted (less of this seems to be happening these days).
  5. Write about all-inclusive vacations – like duh! The site’s main keyword is not a secret! If you have glanced at the front-page you know I, and my readers, are not interested in all-inclusive vacations!
  6. Write about timeshares – timeshares are IMHO (and its my site so my opinion rules) – an investment scam – not a holiday option.  (Note to Mark – I would explain this to the timeshare peddlers if I could have a longer site requirements description).

Hmm note how I haven’t actually read the article yet -all I looked for was the links and followed them. If I have to actually rate the article for the author score you are adding work for no good purpose here…

Now the following points – won’t get you automatically declined – but a number of them together will:

  1. The article is 301 words with 2 outbound links (doesn’t apply if there is only one link).
  2. Site still has the default header image from the default WordPress theme.
  3. If the site is selling a product but has only Adsense I am likely to reject the article.
  4. If the site is using one of Court’s old SEO themes  that have been done to death and are probably on G’s watch list.
  5. The title and sometimes the entire article is only loosely related to the anchored text of the links. Let’s get real here people – I want to rank your article – its good for you, its good for me! After all I thought you WANTED an authorative link! So don’t give me an article about packing tips and then link to fashion bags for ladies! This is probably the hardest judgement call sometimes I will get an excellent article – but with a bland generic title – frankly I rewrite the title – so we can both benefit.
  6. I rarely reject for grammar and/or spelling – sometimes I lightly edit.  If its embarrassingly bad language which is hard to read I will reject – but I do it very rarely.  Any automated grammar and spelling check would fail many of the perfectly good posts on the site – because some are written by native Englishmen, in fluent English,  some in fluent American, some in fluent English written by non-native speakers – all of the English is acceptable – and the quality can be great – but no automated system will ever deal with the complexity and depth that is English – certainly not Google.

What I Look For On My General Postrunner Site

Within 10 hours of reinstating this site into Postrunner during yesterday’s webinar, I had 8 articles! Hand on heart I do NOT read every article. I scan – if its appears to make some sense, is not badly spun and relates to the anchored text I’ll take it.

I do however check every link – and reject any article whose site fails the first 4 points above! In other words – what the article links to is FAR more important to me  than whether the nouns and adjectives are in agreement. I also reject any site promoting anything to do with owning or using firearms.

I will probably move this site to some other category – its starting to make money and I will focus on the niches that its ranking for.

Which is the Quality Site of These Two.

Well if you want passion and love and age – then midlifetravel.com is it – its my original site – its started off as an html site developed in Dreamweaver in 2007. Its been up in several forms over the years. It ranks #1 for my original keywords “travel over 30s” – unfortunately no one actually searches for the term LOL.  Its a PR0. I keep it, I love it, I post to it and I link to it. However this is a hobby site not a real money making venture.  Most of the content on it was written by me, a genuine expert, and has no outbound links.

The site that accepts practicably everything? Is just over a year old, has had very little link building to it (by me). Well its a PR2 and in the last month (when I published nothing new on it) made about $1/day – its on its way. I’ll start building out the content for which its already ranking for and adding more posts without outbound links on similar topics. In other words I will make it legitimate! Will I go back and fix the grammar and spelling -nope!

Still reading – you must be bored …

I have gotten a little fond of amplify. I started using it – because Griz did but I’ve found a use for it.  I use it to share the stuff I find genuinely interesting (or funny) in the weird and evolving world of making an online income – if you already follow this blog on Facebook (like in the footer) you will get my amplified updates – but otherwise follow Lis Sowerbutts on amplify directly. It also allows me to tweet without ever going anywhere near twitter – all good!

 

Categories
Blogging Catalyst Paid Tools Product Reviews Tools WordPress

Catalyst Theme Review

Yup its all changed around here again! Well not the content just he look and feel (ie if you are reading this via RSS – click thru !). I had hoped that going from Thesis to Frugal would be my last major change.  However Eric Hamm -the guy who created Frugal – upgraded the product so much – it now has a new name – Frugal is now Catalyst !

Catalyst actually came out just before I took off for a 2 month overseas trip with a 10″ netbook – netbook are good for lots of things but doing site design is not one of them!

When I got back I had a look at Catalyst and upgraded some of my niche sites with it. I liked it – but it didn’t have Frugal’s easy to install front page – with a wide choice of widgets. So I  didn’t upgrade this site. Then back in February Catalyst upgraded to 1.1 – and YES now there are EZI Widgets – which allows a flexible front page – like Frugal’s – but with even more options!

Still I hesitated – this site is a pain – it has a number of different looking posts and pages,  I didn’t really want to think about it.   Finally though I had to bite the bullet and get on with upgrading from Frugal to Catalyst – why?

  1. They have a discount for new sign ups of 25% (and incentives for affiliates) – so use the code: CATWP25when you sign up HERE – discount good to the 31 March 2011; (And yes I get an increased affiliate percentage in March too…);
  2. I think I can add value to Catalyst and do a series of tutorials here that will help the CSS-incompetent, design-disabled of you – you know people just like me!

I’ve already done a post on Catalyst’s SEO Options and I also what to talk about how to use Catalyst with the Keyword Academy’s Postrunner and also how to use it as a static site rather than a blog.

But I guess I should explain how I adapted the look of the site here.  I could have reproduced the look of the old site – but I decided to keep the general layout but change up the details and the look of the site.

From an SEO point of view its important not to make huge overnight changes to the main pages of your sites – or if you do be prepared to accept that your ranking will fluctuate until Google comes to terms with the changes.

How To Make a Catalyst Site Look Like This Site.

  1. Install Catalyst 1.1.1,  then install dynamik child theme and activate it.
  2. Go to dynamik options/import/export – and play around with installing some dynamik skins until you find something you like (I think this is fluid blue).
  3. I kept the same top navbar – but used a custom menu which is new in WordPress fairly recently – much easier to manage the order etc than remembering to change priority on individual pages.  Set the option Core Options/Navbar
  4. I dropped the header image – instead the header is plain text. The graphic of my sitting on the beach is a no-repeat image in the body background.  I played with the header dimensions until they were something that I liked – 930px x 75px
  5. To do the front page and also some of the featured content: I used Ezi Wiidgets and setup a front page with 1/1/3 layout PLUS 2 feature widgets above the content (not showing on the front page but they do on other pages) PLUS a “fat footer” of 4 widgets. Each Widget can be styled separately so I add a custom style to the top of the front page and use Custom CSS to make its background yellow. The middle widget  and the bottom three widgets on the front page are all featuring a single page (excerpts in the case o the bottom 3). This is why Catalyst is so easy to get up and running with – widgets are easy to rearrange and the Catalyst specific excerpts widget makes it easy to feature content from a specific page (an improvement on Frugal where you tended to write the content in text widgets which doesn’t have enough spell checking for me.)
  6. Although much of my site has a single right sidebar some major pages I prefer to minimize distractions on so they have no sidebars – for example any of the pages on the top navigation or the 3 along the bottom of the front page.  I use Advanced Options to create a custom layout with no sidebar – and then edited each page to use the “nosidebar” layout I’d just created.
  7. I’ve put most of my signup and navigational aids in the fat footer which is throughout the site -maybe its a mistake – no one will ever sign up again – but I prefer that stuff out of the way.
  8. I used 2 Ezi Top Feature widgets to create the two boxes highlighted below the header (again with custom CSS to change the background). These I chose to display on posts but not pages.
  9. I created a custom widget which shows grey at the bottom of my posts to display my TKA advertisement.

Hope this helps for someone who is trying to combining a fairly general blog with some rather specific pages!