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Google Show Us Their Synonyms For Content
January 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment
On Google’s official blog today they explained a little bit more about how they are changing the way they rank and score synonyms in their search results and their search queries. Matt Cutts did respond to the blog post with some good recommendations for webmasters, SEOs, and website owners.
“Think about the different words that searchers might use when looking for your content. Don’t just use technical terms–think about real-world terms and slang that users will type. For example, if you’re talking about a “usb drive,” some people might call it a flash drive or a thumb drive.”
Google also stated that a user can control how this synonyms function of Google works. Users can turn the synonyms function off by putting quotes around their search term, or putting a + before the a word in the search query. They also mentioned that a user can request more synonyms from Google by typing in the tilde symbol.
What does this mean to you. If you are an Internet marketer who has been doing article content, or spinning content for social media sites, does this mean that Google is also taking note of spun content? In other words, does all that spinning actually do you any good if Google already knows that you’re spinning articles and just substituting synonyms? When spinning an article or a profile I recommend not only spinning the actual text, but retyping each sentence to ensure that it is unique in Google’s eyes.
Better to be safe than sorry because we always tend to find out that Google knows more than we think they know. What do you think?
How To Turn WordPress Into A Membership Site
January 19, 2010 By 6 Comments
How do I turn WordPress into a membership site?
There is no doubt that WordPress is a very functional and flexible way to bring your business online or market other other people’s products online.
About two years ago, I decided that I wanted to turn one of my websites into a membership site. There’s quite a few different ways to do it and I researched a ton of different scripts that allowed the interaction of WordPress and their particular membership script. There was amember, membergate, memberwing, and a couple other ones that I looked into. After a lot of research I decided to go with amember.
So, I installed the script, bought the extra plug-ins to integrate with WordPress, and got it all put together. Now it’s time to test it. After hours and hours of testing in trying to manage the scripts and getting very frustrated, I gave up. Maybe I just wasn’t meant to have a membership website.
About one year later, I got an e-mail about WishList Member. I was pumped because WishList member integrates directly into WordPress via a WordPress plug-in. Now I didn’t have to worry about separate scripts and trying to integrate with WordPress because this membership plug-in made it so simple. I had all set up and figured out within about two hours instead of two weeks. There was also some great video tutorials on how to get set up.
Now it was time to put to the test. I set up a member only site that only allowed people to view the site if they were signed up as a free member, and they had the opportunity to upgrade to a premium membership. I did some YouTube videos to drive traffic to my membership site. No matter which page they landed on, they were redirected to my sign-up page. All with one click of a button.
To my surprise, I was able to drive 4000 people to my site one day, and one out of four signed up as a member. So, in one day I had 1000 members using the WishList member plug-in. Not that success in quick fashion.
I also set up to integrate automatically with aWeber to deliver my emails. If you are looking for a way to make wordpress a membership site, make sure to check out the Wishlist Member plugin.
WordPress Training Resources
December 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment
WordPress is just a great tool overall. It has millions of users all over the world. The best part is that it is always evolving with technology and changes in the internet world. If you really want to start to build your business online, wordpress is a great way to go.
Here is a good blog post from wordpresstraining.com that I think you will like about how to use wordpress and how to learn more about it.
My next batch of WordPress training videos is currently in the planning stages. To be honest, I’ve been hesitant to put a lot of effort into producing a bunch of new videos with the WordPress 2.5 release just days away.
In the meantime, I wanted to take a moment to point out a few other WordPress resources that some of you might find useful:
- The WordPress Training Group on Facebook: The official Facebook group for this website. The group currently has well over 400 members and the discussion forum is turning into an valuable support resource. If you’re on Facebook, be please join us.
- Lessons for WordPress Beginners: A set of lessons designed to help the WordPress newbies get up to speed quickly. The lessons are part of the official WordPress Codex. While the Codex tends to be somewhat technical, these lessons are clearly for beginners.
- WordPress University: Ben Cope’s new site promises to be a valuable collection of WordPress training videos. Ben covers a couple of topics not covered on this site, including inserting YouTube videos to your WordPress post, and installing up WordPress on a GoDaddy account.
- iTheme’s Free WordPress Tutorials: Another collection of free WordPress videos that overlaps somewhat with the videos provided on this site. A few videos deal with issues I haven’t gotten around to yet, like setting up FeedBurner and installing Google Analytics.
- Free eBook – How to develop money making niche sites with WordPress: Based on the early results of our WordPress training survey, it appears that quite a few of you are using WordPress with the goal of making money online. If this describes you, you’ll definitely want to check out Caroline Middlebrook’s free eBook. Even if you’re not hoping to get rich with WordPress, Caroline’s book offers pretty good documentation on setting up WordPress with Fantastico.
And finally, If you haven’t done so already, please take a moment to complete our WordPress training survey. Your feedback will help determine the focus of our future training videos.
Top 10 Steps To A Super Effective Blog Post
November 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment
When you’re writing a post to your blog, you won’t make it easy and fun for your readers to take a look. A post with a list of items is very easy for your readers to read, scan, and enjoy. There’s been some hugely popular list posts about online business and Internet marketing in the past. Let’s go through the steps.
1. Decide on the number of items in the list.
First you have to figure out how many items you going to post in your list. Yeah keep in mind that you don’t want to have the list of 100 items or 200 items because it just makes your reader take less value from each item listed. Instead have a short list. Anywhere from five to 25 should do the trick.
2. Make each item in the list flowed together.
Keep your items in your list in the general same structure and about the same topic. This may seem like common knowledge that there are tons of blogs out there that missed the step up.
3. Start a think about what you know and what your readers want to know.
If you’re an expert in a certain area, you typically get a lot of questions from people inquiring about your expertise. This should give you some great ammunition for your blog post as you think about what people usually ask along what lines they asked the question.
4. Order your list
make sure that you put the items in order to make the most sense. This means start from the very basic, and move to more advanced. This will help work your reader into the subject and help them build their knowledge as they go.
5. If you have a really long list break it into sections.
There’s nothing worse than trying to find the golden nuggets in a list of 50 items. Either bring some of the main points together and include them in one item, or get rid of any items that you don’t need.
6. Think about making your list a series.
It’s advantageous to give your readers or followers your information in small, easy to remember chunks. If you do it this way, you will get to put your face in front of your prospects are readers more often, and they will typically appreciate your knowledge even more because they can digest each section at their own rate.
7. Consistency in your writing
Make sure the structure of each item in your list is easy to read and structured in a way that is easy on the eyes. Think of bullet points, or highlighted sections of each point.
8. Always number your items
Trying to find the main points of someone’s list that are not numbered, it can be a pain. Make sure you make it easy for your readers to understand your blog post and pull out the main points that they want to take from the information.
9. Invite your readers to give their input
Your list is never to be perfect and your readers can be a valuable resource for you. Make sure that you give them the ability to comment on your post and add their own spin of what they think you may have missed on. Or they might just want to add what has worked for them in the past.
10. Make sure you have a great title
Just like any marketing out there your title is going to sell the reader on reading your blog post. If you have a crappy title, no one is even going to take a look.
What did I miss? Comment Below.
Technorati Tags: blogging, lists, tips
WordPress Dream Theme
September 2, 2009 By 137 Comments
If you have ever tried to use a wordpress theme for your website, you will probably understand how complicated it really can be to install and customize. I have tried about 20-25 themes in my days. I also researched like crazy to find one that looked great, and was easy for me to customize.
After all of my searching, I ended up using the Revolution 2 theme (Church). I went with it because it looks like an actual website rather than just a blog. You can use it for your entire CMS or just for a typical blog. It is great and has a forum and support site to help you with any customizing you need to do.
I recently did some testing of the WordPress Dream Theme. I was blown away with the great functionality of the theme and how dynamic it really was. Instead of having to hunt down plugins that might or might not work, this theme has a lot of them built right in to help you get off to a quicker start.
It has built in SEO features, feedburner support, widget ready, custom theme pages built in, thumbnails for each post, footer images, and best of all, and great support system to help you along the way. I have tried a ton of different themes that had no support to help you customize them. Unless you are an html, css, php expert, this is going to be a must have. Many of the free themes are especially hard to customize or figure out how you can make it your own look.
See the demo here of the WordPress Dream Theme. If you have used any other wordpress themes that you like, make sure to leave a comment below and let us know what you like. Especially if you have used the Dream Theme or Revolution 2 themes.
