The Challenge
Take a brand new wordpress blog with a brand new domain name and make $100 or more using Adsense in the month of December 2008.
If I fail I will send each person who has commented on every blog post reguarding the Adsense challenge one dollar.
How will you know I’m not lying?
You won’t but I don’t lie, ever!
Keywords I’ll Be Targeting
My main keyword phrase: Arrested Development Movie
My Broad keyword phrase: Arrested Development
The Website
www.ArrestedDevelopmentBlog.com
The Battle Plan
Week One:
1. Make as many friends on Twitter and StumbleUpon as possible regarding Arrested Development
2. Bookmark all my pages on StumbleUpon and Delicious
3. Submit Blog to every blog directory and every rss directory I can in one week or less
4. Write one or two new blog posts every single day
5. Create GOB widget for viral marketing
6. Create store and start selling t-shirts
7. Add sitemap to Google Webmaster tools, Yahoo and MSN
8. Create a Hubpage.com
9. Create a Squidoo page
10. Comment on every blog post that mentions Arrested Development
11. Add Blog to MyBlogLog.com
If you would like to participate in this challenge, just comment your progress on any of the ADsense Challenge Post. We are all in this together!
What next?
I have been slowly compiling this list for 3 days. These are all tips that I used to build my websites and even this one.
1. Redirect 404 Page
2. Use Header Tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>
3. Make your links the color blue, so that visitors know that it’s a link
4. Use CSS, for site wide customization and website speed
5. Use short meta data. Every page has to have a title, about 5 Keywords and a brief description
6. Use Google Analytics to track visitors on your website. It’s free.
7. Start a blog using wordpress (it’s the most SEO-Friendly)
8. Use a robot.txt to blog google from going into useless folders on your server.
9. Create an xml sitemap and submit it to Google’s Webmaster Tools.
10. Use large text.
11. Create great content. Content is King!
12. Twitter!!!!
13. Sign up for Stumble Upon
14. Sign Up for Delcious
15. Use flash animation sparingly. Google doesn’t read flash…yet.
16.Choose an easy to spell domain name
17. Get a .com screen name. All the others in my opiniion are worthless.
18. Be consistent in your design across all your pages.
19. Use alt tags on all your images.
20. Check your spelling
21. Create an about us page
22. make sure your webpage works on every browser.
23. Do not play music on your site. If you do make sure it’s the users choice to play it
24. Stay away from intro pages.
25. Add Search function to your website
26. Animated Gifs are tacky, don’t use them
27. Intralink within your website. If there is relevant content related to a page, link it
28. Less images = Faster load times
29. make sure every page has a different page title, keywords and description to match the content
30. Have someone else proofread your work
31. Do not submit to crappy directories that mean nothing
32. Review your website every week and make changes
What next?
If you are curious to know how I built this blog I will tell you. I bought my hosting through startlogic.com, a web hosting company. After much searching they were the company where I thought you could get the most bang for your buck. I was using ipower.com at first but startlogic.com was cheaper and it was built on the same platform. I pay about $60 a year for my plan and it comes with a domain name. The really good thing about this hosting plan is it comes with a Word Press plugin. So basically you don’t have to install Word Press on your hosting account, it does it for you automatically. Which is great because if your not familiar with databases then I wouldn’t mess with it.
Using Word Press
Once I got that set up I just installed word press in my main directory so all you have to do is type in www.theovernightsite.com and it takes you right to this blog. When you first install wordpress, your webpage will look like this:
In wordpress I was able to change the template of what the site would look like. Another great thing about wordpress is that there is thousands of free templates available on the web you can find. I started by using a template by WebRevolutionary. I found it at SmashingMagazine.com which is a great blog for web developers and web designers. I went to this blog post (100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes) and I downloaded a template called codeblue. Here is what it looked like originally:
From there I was able to manipulate it to look the way the site does now which isn’t so different from the orginal. A lot of my blog is based of the ideas of Darren Rowse of Problogger.net. His blog was the first blog I ever subscribed to and it is so easy to navigate and read that I thought it would be a perfect setup for me. So from here I just changed the logo at the top right corner using photoshop.
What next?
