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?
I am using Google analytics and webmaster tools to track my websites and I have been using it for about a month. The problem that I’m having is that my page rank is still at 0. That’s not helping me at all. I posted a question on Twitter this morning -
“I just cannot get my page rank up, what’s with me. It’s taking forever.”
@yuyudin responded to me with some really helpful tips on trying to get my page rank up. She mentioned at one point that page rank was overrated but still helped me out anyway. Here are some of the tips she gave me about this site.
Increasing Your Google Page rank Tips
- If you are using Wordpress to host your blog make sure you create different more specific link categories. Which I implemented. She mentioned to split it into categories like SEO Tips and so forth. You can see how I did it on the right hand side of this site.
- If you have articles on your website or blog posts, you should like to other posts in your blog or website that are relevant. So for instance on SwimUniversity.com I have a blog post about Killing Swimming Pool Algae. In that post I mention that one way of killing algae is by using pool shock. I have another article called The Right Way To Shock Your Pool. So anytime I see pool shock in the Algae Article, I like that Pool Shock word in the Algae Article to the Shock Article. Because when Google scans your website it picks up links faster than all other text.
- The quickest way to get inbound links to your website is by signing up for Social Media sites and using links to that site to your site.
What next?
When I first started this site using wordpress I went to serveral different websites looking for the best wordpress plugins to get me started. I’m sure I’ll be adding more, but if you are starting a blog using wordpress I suggest you add these plugins.
- Akismet -Believe it or not you are going to get spam comments from drug companies and porn sites. This plugin weeds them out. Without this plugin you will get a ton of useless comments. Plus it’s time consuming to delete them all. This is a must have plugin.
- All in One SEO Pack – If you want your blog to be picked up by the search engines (which we all do) you are going to need this plugin. It is one of the most popular wordpress plugins. It allows to you add all your meta data in one simple form.
- cforms – On my contact page I have an example of this. It will create forms that users can fill out and it will send that information to your email. Pretty simple to use as well. And It’s fully customizable for any style form.
- Google XML Sitemaps -Google can take a while to index your pages, especially if you are a new blog. This plugin creates a dynamic sitemap that constantly updates everytime you add to your blog. As long as you submit this sitemap to Google using Webmaster Tools, your webpages will be constantly indexed so that google doesnt have to pick them up naturally (which could take a while).
- Simple Tags – Instead of trying to think of tags to relate you posts to for SEO purposes, this plugin scans your post and the internet and comes up with tags automatically so you don’t have to think about it. A huge time saver!
- Subscribe To Comments – some people after they comment on your blog want to know what other people are saying. This plugin allows commentors to get an email every time someone else comments on that same post they commented on.
- Tweet This – This plugin sends a tweet using your twitter account about this post. So if you want to share this post with your twitter followers, you can easily!
- WP-Polls – People love polls, they are easy, quick and fun and this plugin makes it even easier. Create multiple polls and have them rotate on your blog or just create one. Immediate poll results.
- WP Ajax Edit Comments – this plugin allows those leaving comments to edit their comments for a short period of time after they leave a comment.
What next?
