[Journal/Method/spoonfeed] The 'Crashed Challenge' 30 Days to Money...

Thanks for that.

Can I also ask, although it isn't really important - What is the section Feeds? In Statpress V. I only have 1, but not sure what it actually is. Although my site is only 6 days old, so this may increase?

Feeds are your RSS feeds, at the minute you have a feed for your posts. If you get comments on your posts, you will also have a comment feed.

It's like a list in computer speak of your blogs content so instead of visiting your site people can see your feed in a Feed Reader program. It's also useful for other things which we will be covering very shortly!

speaking of feeds have you ever set up google adsense for a feed? I have tried to do this on another site but when I check the stats it is only a few impressions per day while statpress says I have 100's of views?

I'll talk about this in Day 12, as view count/tracking keeps coming up!

Short answer is I have not, feeds are useful for somethings, but not for feeds.

Also adsense may not show an ad depending on a number of reasons, or the view may not be long enough for the ad to show!

Cant wait for day 11 to arrive

Have a couple of questions for crashed or anyone really who wants to listen....

1. How are you using facebook to bring in visitors?? i've set up a page but dont really know what to do from there, i keep putting my links onto it but nobody has 'liked' it yet :|

2. On Wordpress on the Ad Places i have lots of hits but no clicks, i know what clicks are but what are hits?? does it mean it was viewed on the page but not clicked?

3. I still cant get my BlogContentAreaSquare advert to merge into my blog text, i can get it on the page sitting at the top of the text, but i want to put the writing in an L shape and have the advert in the top right corner of the text like on crashed website

4. My main page is fine, however when I click on a post it opens up a new page with that post on alone, but my sidebar has now gone and is wierdly at the bottom of my page in a line, how can I get it so that the menu bar is normal like on my home page?

5. Back to Twitter, how often do you tell your followers per day about your new post?? do you tell them just the once or at differant intervals through out the day?


Sorry for rambling on lol, as you can tell I am a noob at this but any help would be much appretiated, thanks

does anyone know if you can rotate ads with the simple ads manager plugin?

wmoriarty said:

does anyone know if you can rotate ads with the simple ads manager plugin?

Click to expand...

Yes, its covered in the post and the video. Simply click on the ad place, and it will let you add the Ad's to be rotated in that place. You can even set priority.

5. Back to Twitter, how often do you tell your followers per day about your new post?? do you tell them just the once or at differant intervals through out the day?

Click to expand...

I usually schedule posts (on socialoomph) for around an hour - 2 hours apart, not exactly the same because you want it to look like a human being, but this is effective and boosts views i found. I'm up to just under 70 views today, from 50 yesterday, im hoping for a hundered on friday Hope this helps

Been accepted into MaxBounty after a small chat on Skype with my AM and then a 2 minutes phone call!

Told her it was my first time using a CPA network and it went through no problem.

Thanks again Crashed! Just setup my ads.

I'm also trying to figure out why my website is nowhere to be found without the first 100 results in Google since my main keyword looks fairly easy to rank for...

Day 11: Multiple Income Streams...

Now I've said it before and I will say it again, multiple income streams are good, in fact I like redundancy all round. And my number 1 argument for not focusing on SEO is that Google can (and has) in the past made a single change which may put your site on page 100...

Same with income, I prefer to look at many different methods rather than relying on just one. In Day 10 we covered some techniques, the original plan for today was to increase the range of techniques, however I am slightly concerned about information overload. To this end I have edited today's post to focus on other stuff, and will then be introducing 1 moneytization method per day from now on instead of trying to do it all at once.

Competition

The winner of the first Crashed Challenge was radomly selected by Random.org at midnight Sunday 5th June. They have replied to my email and their articles will be heading their way soon. Maybe they will make themselves known here, however I will leave that up to them...

A little rant...

One of the questions I am getting asked a lot is how I deal with SEO. As I am getting sick of explaining it I am including it here. For those that have wondered I do not like SEO, I do not believe in SEO, and I think SEO is totally volatile. Recently I have known people that have lost 100's of sites from Google Rankings on page one, and with that the majority of their income. Just overnight these people have losts hundreds and in some cases, thousands of dollars from their income.

Whilst I am aware that having good SEO may make you money, it is easier to start without looking at seo. All the marketing efforts we will be covering will indirectly affect SEO, and increase our rankings. However I will not specifically look at how to improve rankings through SEO methods for at least the first 60 days of building a site...

In addition some people are getting rejected from MaxBounty, the reasons for this I've heard include fake phone numbers and using blogger/blogspot instead of your own domain. If you are doing the challenge you should have your own domain and hosting. And there is no reason at all for a fake phone number, sure they call you, but that call is 99% to make sure the number is you.

Money Stats...

I am aware of 5 people that have made money from their Crashed Challenge sites! Including at least two who have earnt through MaxBounty, if you have not joined MaxBounty follow the instructions in Day 9: The Magic Money Tree...

Unfollow...

Now on twitter we are limited to how many people we can follow, and we want to save it for people that are following us. Now I tend to say that people that do not follow you back after 2 - 3 days after you have followed them it is likely that they won't. Therefore I will unfollow anyone that has not followed back after this period to allow me to follow other people instead that may follow back.

The free version of Tweet Attacks that we downloaded allows us to do this easily and this is how its done...

1. Run Tweet Attacks
2. Update your account statistics as you would normally (Switch Module->Account Statistics->Click Update Statistics.
3. Goto the Follow/Unfollow module
4. Select your account in the list of accounts, then in the Task list select the Unfollow task.
5. If you want to add a follow task to replace the people you unfollow feel free.
6. Click Start.

The video is here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns-gztzmLRk

Amazon (& Clickbank) Money

Now there are so many ways to make money from Amazon I barely know where to begin! I guess its best to start with the simpliest methods so we will look at how we can use reviews to make Amazon Money... I should probably say here that this method also works amazingly for other Clickbank and Plimus products.

Basically all you do is write your own review for the product and add it to your blog with a link to the product at the end. However it gets even easier, and I want to introduce you to a new plugin that is an amazing help for Amazon marketing.

1. Goto your dashboard, and click Plugins.
2. In the search box enter Amazon and click search.
3. You want to find the plugin "WordPress-Amazon-Associate" in the list, click install and then activate.
4. Click goto settings.
5. Untick the Active box for any amazon sites where you do not have an associate account (or sign up to them as each country has its own affiliate program).
6. You then need to log into your amazon account. In the left it will have your tracking ID. You need to copy this into the settings for the amazon plugin where it says Associate Tag. Do this for each country you want to support
7. You then need to goto Amazon Web Services at http://rfurl.net/aws and create a free account. Once you have done this Login.
8. Click the Account link at the top of the page, and goto Security Credentials. Scroll down to the Access Keys section...
9. You need to copy the Public Key to the plugin settings page, and then click Show and copy your Secret Key to the Secret Key box on the plugin settings page.
10. Click Validate Credentials to make sure you have done this right, and then click Update Settings.

The video for this is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bWjzeXbfPQ


The Best Books For Technique...

Now we've got Amazon configured to work with our site, it is time to put it to good use. Just so long as someone arrives at Amazon after clicking one of our links, we get commission on whatever they buy. The easiest way to do this I find is to add a "Best Books For..." post with some colourful and interesting looking titles from that topic. Also I've found when people are searching in general they will use the "best books for" phrase in Google.

For the first post I have chosen to do "Best Books for Coaches", now lets see how we do this...

1. Login and goto New Post.
2. Write a title and an introduction, to what your post is about
3. Goto Amazon.com, do a search for your subject and find 5 or 6 books that catch your eye.
4. Now you need to copy the ISBN number, go back to your Post and click the down arrow next to the Amazon Icon, click Product Link.
5. Click on the Product Search button, enter your ISBN for your book and click Search. Find it in the list and click Select.
6. You need to change the Link Type to Image, and in Image Size select Medium. If you are happy click Insert.
7. Next to the image and before the "[/" type the products title.
8. If you like you can type a review under each product... If not just repeat this for the rest of the products you've found.
9. Write a couple of sentances at the end to finish your post.
10. Click Publish. Preview your post and make sure your links are working.

The video is here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3honuYXIxuA

Note: This plugin is very very powerful, I recommend that you make a test post or page to test out what the other options are for putting amazon products on your site!

Summary

Day 11 has been a long time coming, I guess I worked too hard over the weekend and made myself ill. I apologise. Today we've looked at using content to moneytize the site, and how we can use tweet attacks to unfollow people on twitter.

It feels a long time since I started the challenge, and we now have 5 people earning already just from what they had done until Day 10. Now it is time to ramp it up a notch or two and increase that number, and the amounts involved!

Till Day 12 my friends...

Questions and Answers

Q) I didn't spot any mention of submitting a sitemap to G, do you think this is important?

A) No, for wordpress I do not consider this important. Sitemaps are useful if you have a static structure, loads of content, or loads of categories. Once you site grows it may be useful, but not until then.
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Q) We have made a Fb, Twitter and a Youtube Page. I am posting things on twitter and FB but my youtube has only one video from Day 1. Should I upload a new video everyday just like my fb status and twitter update?

A)If you know how to do this yes! Include a link to your site in the description! If you don't know how to do this, then I will be covering it soon!
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Q) Also I was considering to install a plugin which directly likes my facebook page from my website. It helps to increase the number and at times I can get lazy. What do you think? If you could also suggest me a plugin name that would be great

A) There are plugins out there, however doing it this way you miss all the general tweets you were supposed to schedule
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Q) Oh and another thing, ive been accepted to sell the primus ads, so what do i do now?

A) Most plimus vendors will have an affiliate section on their website (look for the link at the bottom of the page) where they will supply banners. Find these and add the to your Simple Ads Manager rotation with your affiliate URL.
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Q) Is there any way in StatPress to view bounce rate, or how long people are spending on the site?

A) No, it does however give tell you how many pages the average visitor is viewing
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Q) What do you think about using Google Analytics + wp plugin?

A) I think it slows your site down, and is unnecessary for what you need. Do you really need that information or are stats enough?
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Q) alternatively I found something like a opensource google analytics clone called piwik.
perhps even better. But you have to install it on your server.
What do you think?

A) Do you really need that information? Everything you add to your site slows it down. I don't need the detail these programs give me for this site (they are useful on ecommerce sites etc). So I think it is overkill
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Q1. How are you using facebook to bring in visitors?? i've set up a page but dont really know what to do from there, i keep putting my links onto it but nobody has 'liked' it yet :|

A) I've not started using facebook to bring visitors yet... This will be covered soon

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Q2. On Wordpress on the Ad Places i have lots of hits but no clicks, i know what clicks are but what are hits?? does it mean it was viewed on the page but not clicked?

A) Hits are each time your banner is shown, and clicks are each time someone clicks one of your banners

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Q3. I still cant get my BlogContentAreaSquare advert to merge into my blog text, i can get it on the page sitting at the top of the text, but i want to put the writing in an L shape and have the advert in the top right corner of the text like on crashed website

A) Have you added the Ad Before code that was given in the post?

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Q4. My main page is fine, however when I click on a post it opens up a new page with that post on alone, but my sidebar has now gone and is wierdly at the bottom of my page in a line, how can I get it so that the menu bar is normal like on my home page?

A) I'd guess that this was due to either your ad place code, or your theme. Try disabling your ad places and see if this fixes the problem. Then enable them one by one to find the causing you problems and see if ya can fix it.

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Q5. Back to Twitter, how often do you tell your followers per day about your new post?? do you tell them just the once or at differant intervals through out the day?

A) I usually link to it a couple of times a day but with different titles.

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Q) I'm also trying to figure out why my website is nowhere to be found without the first 100 results in Google since my main keyword looks fairly easy to rank for...

A) It depends just what your keyword is, your domain name, and site title. If the domaine exactly matches your keywords you will rank faster. Over the next few days I'll look at Keywords and how to increase your google ranking.

We all appreciate your efforts. I have been following since day one. I just haven't commented as I have been busy implementing these tips and others I have learned from being a member here.

I am currently receiving ~40ish per day. Usually more when I have posted an article.

I have placed certain ads as advised by your good self. I decided not to apply to MaxBounty as I have NeverBlueAds and Peerfly and feel its only fair to give them a test run.

I have started to notice great rankings, shooting in at #7 yahoo USA then straight to 100 lol within 7 to about 10 days of my first article.

Google ranking was the slowest. Surprisingly after ~3 weeks I saw that I was number one in the US. and UK. this afternoon. I would appear to be dancing as I have gone down to 6 and 8 respectively. This was for the term that statpress was listing as the most searched for. Moreover it isn't the exact term I am aiming but a very nice and popular term none-the-less.

The weird amazing thing also is I installed the SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 plugin as recommended here by a member.
It lists the search terms used to find your site. This is then, I believe, displayed as a widget like a top 10 then spidered by google and low and behold I seem to have been ranked for those terms.
I cant really offer any other explanation other than I have no article or any article optimised for the phrase, yet I have a very high rank for it?. Lovely Jubbly.

With regards SEO I simply have to agree to disagree. I am pretty much in the camp do it right from day one. Optimizing as I write.

Whats the saying?... Seo is king, Backlinks are Queen and together they make nice children?.

I do always look forward to your posts. I personally wish they would come faster like once a day lol. Only Kidding and I would like to say that even though I have used Wordpress for a couple of years, you do certainly appear to know your stuff.

HOmER.

HOmERCIdAL said:

The weird amazing thing also is I installed the SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 plugin as recommended here by a member.
It lists the search terms used to find your site. This is then, I believe, displayed as a widget like a top 10 then spidered by google and low and behold I seem to have been ranked for those terms.
I cant really offer any other explanation other than I have no article or any article optimised for the phrase, yet I have a very high rank for it?. Lovely Jubbly.

Click to expand...

Im in bed so quick answer here, the SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 plugin is thought to be responsible for google penalising sites using it as it has big footprints. There are quite a few threads here and on other sites about it recently. I know it works, however I would recommend against using it for the moment until more is known.

An alternative is using the Statpress search terms widget in your sidebar... But off course I wouldn't suggest such a thing

Ah ha!, Thank you kind Sir. I shall definitely look at changing that.

HOmER

@Crashed that SEO plugin is amazing. I wrote that "Best Books For...." like an hour ago and I'm already ranking number 39 for it in Google. My pages get indexed in minutes. It's sick!

lightning.god.zeus said:

@Crashed that SEO plugin is amazing. I wrote that "Best Books For...." like an hour ago and I'm already ranking number 39 for it in Google. My pages get indexed in minutes. It's sick!

Click to expand...

What seo plugin?

crashed said:

What seo plugin?

Click to expand...

The All In One SEO plugin you had us install

More great tips on day 11, Crashed. Do you guys know if we can use or Amazon Affiliate Account and Amazon Web Services key ID on more than one website?

I assume it is OK, but wanted to confirm, since we do enter our URL and they do ask about the website we'll be using to promote.

I look forward to feedback from anyone that knows about this!

Just so long as the website doesn't break the Amazon Affiliate account terms you are fine. Though for security reasons I would get a new Amazon Web Services access id for each site (just click get new key in the AWS Access Credentials section).

todays earnings:

update: its now
maxbounty: $5.60
CB: 8 order form impression count, 1 order form submit count, no sales.(almost got one hehe)

wohooo!