How To

How To

Favicons: How Can One Help You?

Did you know that adding a favicon (short for “favorite icon”) can give your site a boost in more than one way? A favicon is a small image associated with a website, and you can usually see it in one of the places:

– in the address bar
– in your bookmarks
– in your history
– in your tabs, if you use a tabbed browser

So, how can a favicon help you? First of, all, it brands your website and implicitly, you. How? Every time someone looks in their favorites/bookmarks, instead of seeing the standard web page image, they’ll see your specific image, because it will be different and it will stand out.

Here are some other favicon benefits:

– if you work with lots of tabs at one time, it will help you identify which tabs have your specific site
– your site will be easier to find in the sea of bookmarks we all have these days, and you will get repeat traffic
– it will decrease the number of 404 errors in your logs, since browsers look for the favicon

How to Create a Favicon

Creating a favicon is not hard if you have the image you want to use. You want this image to be as simple as possible, without fine lines or text, as it needs to look good in a small size, since the favicon size is 16 pixels by 16 pixels. You also need to match your favicon to your site’s logo and color scheme as much as possible.

Once you have your image, you need to convert it to the .ico type file, and this can be easily done with any of the free favicon generators found online.

Your next step is to upload your favicon.ico to your root directory. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

If you don’t have a favicon for your site, I suggest you go get one now: it’s easy enough and you’ll reap the benefits almost immediately.

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How To

Update Your Copyright Notice Easily

copyright notice

It’s important to keep your site updated and looking fresh. One of the ways to do this is to have your copyright notice updated, and not showing last year’s date.

With a WordPress site this is a very easy task that can be automated. I LOVE  automation, as it gives me more time to do other things that need my personal attention.

Here is how to set up your WP site to do an automatic copyright update:

– Log into your WP dashboard
– Go to Appearance –> Editor –> Footer.php
– Scroll down to your current copyright and replace it with this:

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(”Y”) ?>

The above will look on your site like this: Copyright © 2009

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(”Y”) ?> <a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a>

The above will look like this for my blog here: Copyright © 2009 My Online Business Journey – Internet Marketing Blog

Now, if your site is not a WP site, it will be harder to do, but still possible to simplify for future years. This year, when you change your copyright, make sure you use a sever side include. Of course, you’ll need to ask your ISP to set your web server up to recognize includes.

Create a file on your computer named copyright.html, where you enter your copyright statement, and then include that page on all your pages, wherever you want your copyright to show. Then, next year, you only need to change that one file instead of having to go thr0ough all the pages.

Here is the code you’ll need to include on your pages:

<!–#include virtual=”copyright.html”–>

Hope that helps you. Have a very Happy and Prosperous New Year!


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How To

Cloaking or Redirecting Affiliate Links?

Yesterday, Paul asked:  Can you tell us how to cloak an affiliate link using no cost ways?

That’s a great question, and timely one, as we approach the New Year, and many of us are looking for ways to streamline and improve our websites for a better 2010.

Let’s first see what the definition of cloaking is, from dictionary.com:

cloaking definition

As you see, cloaking is hiding something. Cloaking links, or to be correct, pages, is a black hat method you don’t want to use on your site.

Cloaking a link/page, means showing the search engines a page, and the visitor a different page. This is done by framing, and is SPAM.

On the other hand, affiliate link redirection is something you should be doing. Let’s see why:

Makes it Easy to Change Links Across Your Site

Let’s say over the years, as I write on my blog, I suggest Lynn’s Elite Forum, and end up with hundreds of links to her site. If my links look like this: http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com/156.html and Lynn decides to change her affiliate program for some reason, I’ll have hundreds of pages to look up and change the code individually. But not if I did a link redirect.

Makes it Easier to Track

If you redirect your affilaite links, you can track how many clicked on your links without having to rely on the merchant. Some merchants do a very good job, and others couldn’t care less if you can track or not. With a redirected link, you can always see how many times that link was accessed through your stats program.

Shortens Long, Unreadable Links

Those long links with all kinds of letters and numbers may scare some people away from clicking on a link, thinking it may be a virus or malware. But if the link is short and has a name they can read, will ease their fears.

OK, now that we know why we should be redirecting links, let’s see how we can do it. There are a few different ways to do it, depending on what you are comfortable with.

.htaccess Redirecting – WARNING! You can mess up your site is you don’t understand your .htaccess file, so be careful!

This is very easy to do, if you are comfortable with your cPanel. Log into your cPanel, and open your .htaccess. At the end of it, add this code:

redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.you.com/newpage.htm

My favorite way to redirect my links is redirecting from the server side with php, like this:

– create a page with the name of your product.php
– include this code: <?php header(‘Location: http://www.affiliatesitelink.com&#8217;); ?>

– make sure you don’t add any spaces, or your code won’t work.

– now go check the page you created and make sure it redirects to the page you intended it to: you have no idea how many people don’t check and lose a lot of money.

One more thing about redirecting affiliate links: put all you affiliate links in a folder, and create a blank index page in that folder. This way, not everyone can see all the programs you are promoting.

Also  this makes it easy to go in periodically and click on all your links to make sure the merchants didn’t change the landing page.

Go work on your redirects now, and start 2010 with a better, easier to maintain affiliate business.

Do you have any questions? Ask below.

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How To

How To Create an Anchor Text Link

broken link

As simple as creating a text link is, it trips many marketers, when they need it most. A broken link is useless, even detrimental, so learning how to do it properly is important.

Text links are an effective way to drive traffic to your website or to internal web pages by linking to them in your content or from external pages. They’re usually referred to as a “link” or a “hyperlink”.

In many word processing programs, like MS Word, you can simply highlight the text you want to use to create the link and then click on the link icon in your toolbar. Once that pops up, you simply type or search for the appropriate page you want to link to and you’re good to go.

However, if you’re creating your links in a text document or using HTML to write your content, then you’ll need to know a few things.

First of all, by default, all links will appear as follows in all browsers:

* An unvisited link is underlined and blue
* A visited link is underlined and purple
* An active link is underlined and red

In order to write your own anchor links you’ll need to know some basic HTML. Here’s an example of what an anchor link would look like and what the various codes mean: <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”</a&gt;

* The <a> tag opens an anchor and </a> closes the anchor
* href      URL      Specifies the destination of a link

So if I wanted to point someone to my Free Niche Research the code would be: <a href=”https://www.myonlinebusinessjourney.com/category/free-niche-research/”>Free Niche Research</a>

It’s pretty straight forward and easy to accomplish whether you’re doing the coding yourself or using a WSYWYG type interface. Regardless, anchor text  links are a great way to link with your desired keyword phrases to specific pages in your content.

There are other things you can add to your anchor links:

* open your link in a new window: add target=”_blank” , so the above link ‘s code will look like this: <a target=”_blank” href=”https://www.myonlinebusinessjourney.com/category/free-niche-research/”>Free Niche Research</a>

* to change the link’s color, add style=“color: #CC0000”, where #CCoooo is a red color, and so my link above would have the following code: <a style=“color: #CC0000” href=”https://www.myonlinebusinessjourney.com/category/free-niche-research/”>Free Niche Research</a>, and it woudl look like this: Free Niche Research

* you can also add an HTML hyperlink title, like this: title=”describe your link here”, so my link above would look lie this with the added title tag:  <a title=”check out these niches, already researched for you” href=”https://www.myonlinebusinessjourney.com/category/free-niche-research/”>Free Niche Research</a>

All of the above examples should be in one line (the width of the blog here is too narrow to include the entire line of code, so make sure you don’t have any hard breaks in the middle of your link code)

There are other, more advanced ways to modify your links, but the above should get you started. Make sure you format your anchor text links properly for maximum success.

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How To

How To Choose Your Next Niche

It seems as though many of us struggle with picking out a good niche to concentrate on. Here are a few ideas of how to go about finding that elusive profitable niche you want for your next site:

Start by making a list of topics you are interested in and/or passionate about. Don’t rush this process, and don’t try to “think” to much. Just let your thoughts flow and write down everything that comes to mind: you’ll have time later to trim your list.

Once you have your list it’s time to see if there is a demand for the topics on your list. Head on over to the Google Keyword Tool or the Free Wordtracker Tool and do some keyword research. The Google tool give you monthly results, while the Wordtracker tool gives you daily results.

You are looking for topics with a good number of searches. What is a good number of searches? It depends: if the key phrase describes a broad topic, even if your phrase gets a few thousand searches a month, it may be hard to rank for that phrase, and the traffic may not be as qualified. But if the key phrase shows commercial intent, as few as 20-30 searches a day may be all you need.

For example, if I search for “bread machine” I get the following:

bread machine keyword research

As you see, there are 234 searches a day for that phrase, but I would rather go for one of the more specific phrases this search uncovered: Zojirushi bread machine, Welbilt bread machine, Oster bread machine, etc. These more targeted searches, while having less searches, show that the visitors know what they want. I’d probably dig deeper, and search for model numbers for those bread machines, and concentrate on those.

After you find the keywords you want to use, it’s time to research your competition. Go to Google and look at the top 5 sites: check to see how many back-links they have, how large and/or established their site is, how often they update it, etc. How easy/hard would be for you to acquire the same amount of links? Could you get better quality links? Could you do something different to stand out from the crowd? Will you be able to provide lots of content for your niche? If you can do those things, then you may have found your niche.

There is one other thing to check before you go buy your domain name: can you make money in this niche? Are there good affiliate programs for your chosen niche?

If you need a head start on the process of finding new niches, stop by here every Friday to see the new niche research for that week.

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