Internet Marketing 4 Noobs

Last night just before I turn off for the day, I did a search on Google on the terms "secret affiliate weapon review" and "ewen chia review" just to see if I can find my blog at all in the results.

Really wasn't expecting much…but then as my eyes ran down the results a BRIGHT LIGHT SHOT out at me…

Internetmarketing4Noobs.com is in the tenth and twelve slot for "secret affiliate weapon review" and "ewen chia" respectively!!!

Now, just 24 hours later my site can't be found anywhere!!

At first I thought the Meta-Head-Description plugin I was trying out for today messed up something…and immediately went off to deactivate it. Thankfully the deactivation removed the meta description tag it added to my source code automatically.

I then went off to post in the forums at Wordpress.org for help, and searched at a prominent SEO forum for information.

I found at High Rankings.com forums that just earlier this month another guy experienced the same thing. The owner of the site, Jill Whalen replied that it's normal, and will settle back in a few weeks. Here's the original discussion.

BTW, Jill is a prominent and very experienced Internet Marketing guru. She is PROMINENT enough to have someone post about her at Wikipedia.org!

I really hope that this is indeed temporary, and my ranking will be restored…

If not it will be a hair-yanking experience!!!

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While I'm waiting for response in the forums regarding syndication…

…AND waiting for ARTICLEMARKETER.com to APPROVE my review article on Secret Affiliate Weapon,

I will be fixing up the meta-tags in this blog. Kind of important I think, from what I learnt when setting up KaiWorksOnline and various Search Engine Optimization articles I have read.

Have to say I'm quite happy to use Wordpress. The support and documentation is superb. Wordpress.org have documents detailing how to set up meta-tags…so I think I can get this done by the end of this week.

In case you want to know, here is the link to the Wordpress.org doc on setting up meta-tags.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Meta_Tags_in_WordPress

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WHAT A BUGGER!!!

As stated…ArticleMarketer rejected my review article on Secret Affiliate Weapon once again. Kinda of getting used to it…but why should I be paying US$40 to put up with this kind of nuisance???

Alright, to be fair, ArticleMarketer.com did point out some minor mistakes that I should have taken care of. Such as having my article's title capitalized or having a signature/resource that can accepted to as many directories/mailing list as possible. They also have two types resource boxes, one with HTML links and one without. This is good, as this will ensure my signatures and links are displayed correctly.

But now, ArticleMarketer.com claims my review article is TOO self-advertising and not informative enough. I really wish to point out to them that there are TONS of review articles being published out there in major directories such as EzineArticles.com. I believe mine is acceptable too…why? I wrote my review following their style of writing!

Now really thinking whether I should just skip using ArticleMarketer.com for this review article and move on. I have spent literally a week writing and polishing and polishing again before I started submitting it.

To rewrite? I PAID US$40 to have someone tell me to rewrite my article??  

I cleared up the smaller mistakes in my article, and submit it again. Hope for the best… 

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The comprehensive review is finalized, along with the summarized version which I will submit to the article directories today.

I will submit the summarized article both manually and using Article Marketer. Taking no chances with this one!

From there, I hope readers will go directly over to Ewen Chia's site, or to come over to my blog and read the comprehensive review. 

Hope my review will give readers a good insight of what they will be getting for $9.97, and click on the links to visit Ewen Chia's site.

Lets begin!

#Edit  (5 hours later)

Just finished submitting to around 42 article directories manually, and submitted a copy to Article Marketer.com

Eye-watering work staring at the monitor for 5 hours… 

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Right! 22nd Jan has come around, and it's time to see how well my manually submitted article has been distributed.

Here's the original post on the experiment.

On 6th Jan 07, I have submitted an article titled  “What’s Your Problem? Yourself” to 25 directories manually. I spent 1hr 45mins to do that.

I am going to search for the article using the following search query. 

"What's Your Problem? Yourself"+"Thien Kai Wei"

The title of my article is quite common I believe, so I will have to add in my name after the title so the search engines only return results for my article.

Google: 137

Yahoo: 110

Live/MSN: 28

Disappointingly, almost all the results comes from the directories I submitted to. Did not really see any results coming from other sites.

Now, though the results for the article "Why Some of Us Lose in Affiliate Programs Before Even Starting", which I submitted using only Article Marketer, is still 4 days away, let's just see how it is getting along.

Google: 157 

Yahoo: 298

Live/MSN: 13 

Not bad huh? Even so, I'm not sure if these numbers result in any quality traffic.

We'll finalise the results on 26th Jan.

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Just went through both my comprehensive review for the tenth time. Really amazing (or frustrating) to still be able to spot mistakes and imperfections.

The "Make Your Content PREsell" eBook is really good. The fact that I have posted about this eBook before and mentioning it again shows what an impression it had on me.

Now entering the 24hr "aging" process for the wine to get even better. Tomorrow morning will go through my review for the final time before I start to submit the review article to the directories.

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Which one to use?

There are so many of them…and what do they do? Are they actually all the same but just different services?

Spent an entire afternoon trying to figure out what all these syndicating stuff is all about. All those terms got my head wobbly trying to differentiate what they are.

Just another of those days when I come across something new erh? 

This feeling is kinda same when I was trying to sort out what is affiliate marketing, blogs, article marketing, SEO, email marketing, joint ventures, meta-tags, keywords, and such…

And see those weird positions of those smiley faces? Can't seem to get them to appear in the same sentences without messing up the following lines… Need to learn how to deal with those too..

Will sort this out eventually…

#Edit 24th Jan 07

One nice guy by the name of Sadish responded to my post at Wordpress.org forums and gave the following information.

"open up the style.css and remove this line from it.
p img {float: left; margin: 0 18px 12px 0;} "

Did that…and volia! The smiley icons now appear in the same sentences I placed them in, and no longer mess up the following paragraph.

Thanks Sadish!

BTW, I'm using Ocean Mist v1.1 theme by Ed Merritt, so if you have this problem the solution may be different. Here's the link to my post at Wordpress.org

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/101471?replies=5 

The Power of Forums!

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As you can seen above, I have a review page up for the product I am promoting, Secret Affiliate Weapon

I currently have an article review written up for submission to the article directories, but still under scrutiny to make it as good as possible. 

Just yesterday I came across a free eBook on why good content is important for your e-commerce sites, and how to go about producing it. I spent the whole of yesterday reading it.

VERY GOOD. Its from this book that I decided my review articles can be much better than it is, and showed me how to improve it.

Ken Evoy's "Make Your Content PREsell!" Here's the link.

Make sure you read it! It's that good, and free too!

Now also trying to find out how to have subdomains like www.internetmarketing4noobs.com/reviews.

So far I only know how to turn out subdomains which look like review.internetmarketing4noobs.com. Not nice…

Just a few hours ago, I have also found a script that ensures that your visitors have their cookies activated so that the affiliate links are functioning correctly. Nowadays many people, myself included, have various security software such as Norton or SpySweeper installed preventing cookies from running at all.

What happens is that when visitors click on your affiliate link to buy the product, your referral is not recorded by the affiliate vendor, and so your commissions will not be recorded…

Here's the link, please take a look at what is discussed before installing anything.

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In my previous post I stated that the Drag and drop feature used at Wordpress.com is missing from this self-hosted Wordpress blog.

I have found the plugin for this, installed it and volia! Back to the interface which I enjoyed using back at Wordpress.com

It is from installing this plugin that I understand what people have been saying about Wordpress being very flexible and have a lot of control.

Really, just find what you want in Google, do some research on the best plugins for that job, download and install it in your server. Then just activate it, and you have a new feature to toy with.

Since yesterday, I have installed these plugins.

• Ultimate Google Analytics, for tracking traffic at this blog using Google Analytics.

• SideBar Widgets, for installing that Drag and Drop feature found in Wordpress.com blogs.

• WP-Cron, with the backup feature already installed, it basically enables the daily backup feature, and have those backup files sent to my email account automatically. Very important IMO, especially what happened back at Wordpress.com

• Wordpress to Wordpress Import Plugin, the name says it all. Saved me quite a lot of work in transfering the contents back at Wordpress.com to my new hosted Wordpress blog.

• Wysiwyg for Wordpress 2.0+, a text editor to replace the one which comes with Wordpress 2.0.6. The standard text editor is rather short of essentials. There isn't even the underline tool available!

I have looked around for recommended plugins. There sure is a LOT to look around. Currently interested in installing this Ultimate Tags plugin for the tagging feature, and WP-Cache for speeding up this blog.

However, I still do not understand the significance of using tags, and WP-Cache seems to be a little troublesome to install from what have been recently commented at the download section of the plugin. 

So I guess I will make do for now. Back to getting my review articles up!

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Whooo…

Finally got this blog up and running on LunarPages.

But one thing surprised me…

The reason I decided to purchase a host for my Wordpress blog is because Wordpress.com does not allow affiliate links, and I read around in numerous sites and ebooks that hosting your own Wordpress blog will allow you LOTS of flexibility and control.

But I realized it’s definitely not as user/newbie friendly as the one offered at Wordpress.com. 

For example, to change the arrangement of the stuff at the right sidebar, you just have to drag and drop the parts under ‘Presentation/Sidebar Widgets”

Now, under Presentation, I only have this “Theme Editor”, and LINES AND LINES AND LINES of code….

Got to spend quite a lot of time reading up…….

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