Big Foot Web Marketing

This is something any blogger simply MUST have. One of the most awkward and cumbersome parts of writing a new blog entry for me has been inserting a link. It makes me nuts. I often have 7-10 tabs open in FireFox, I will find a great bit of text or an idea I want give credit to in my blog. I go back to my blog, write the post, think up some anchor text or go back to the inspiring site, copy the URL, back to my post draft, click create link button in my WordPress blog.. blah blah blah. Sometimes just not worth it and I take a pass and promise myself I will “write about it later” and it will end up in possible post purgatory aka Evernote.

The simple little little extension, Copy as HTML Link available for both FireFox and IE7 , has improved my ability to blog and add quotes and links add links ten-fold.
All you do is highlight text you want to use as anchor text, right click and you will have option to pick “Copy as HTML Link” , paste into post. DONE.

It is probably one of my top five favourite extensions and I use it constantly. After you install it you will seriously wonder how you did without for so long.

related Copy To HTML Links
Plugin Author’s website : Justin Watt

Tags: Free Tools and Utilities, Tuesday's Tool by Lisa Stewart
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Using Predictive Analytics For Long Tail Search

If you are working at building your blog traffic you have to have a solid understanding of how people are finding you. You can use that information to develop content, generate more traffic and make more money. There are many tools that try and take the pain out of analytics for you. One tool is HitTail which not only reports your top search terms goes one step further and predicts what terms people will use to find you.

Analytics are fantastic for coming up with ideas. When I am stuck for blog post idea and realize then playing Peggle endlessly is just avoidance I will often do is turn to my analytics. When you look at your stats using analytics program like like Google Analytics, webstats or MyBlogLog ( I use Clicktracks ) you will start to see patterns. You can use those patterns build a better site.

If you are blogging for money then you will find that a handful of your posts make you the most money. With a closer look at your revenue you find that while some post make you a lot of money they do not make up ALL of your income stream.
It is also true when you look at your stats that you may have a handful of keywords that are always at the top. These are your prime keywords- you rank well in search engines and you may even think they are the bread and butter of your site. You could be wrong.

Look at your earnings. If you have you are an Adsense publisher you probably have a page or post or blog that does really really well. The shining star of your blog revenue. I suspect the amount still only accounts for less than half of your total blog income. I have a blog that outpaces all my other sites- however my other blogs combined still make more money than that one blog.
The same will be true with your keywords. You will have terms that bring about 20% of your traffic. You may focus a lot of time and energy on those terms. If you run an AdWords campaign you may be dumping all your money into those terms – however- its the other 80 percent you should be looking at. You will get more traffic for less effort and/or less money.
Do not bend over backwards chasing after the hard keywords- go after the ones that are easy. If you write blog posts using keywords that are based on user behavior and current content and you may get more traffic and make more money.

I have been using HitTail from Connors Communications for about a year on all my blogs. They have both a free version and a pro version. For most users the free version is more than adequate. You get search results for your site in real time and find out which keywords people use to find your website. Based on the keywords people are using right now to find your site- it will suggest what other keywords you could be using. I found this to be extremely useful.

How To Use HitTail

You need to put a script in your pages. You can add manually in your body tags or use plugin to do it for you.
When you login you can look at multiple blogs and various windows. At a glance I can see my top performing keywords in graph form. It will tell you what percentage of searches come from your top 10 keywords and what come from long tail search. All of my blogs have a split of about 20/80. Interestingly my worst blog is 10/90 split and my best is a 25/75.

It will also show you search hits from major search engines and what keywords strings were used and most valuable information for me has been suggestions which give suggested keywords based on current search results. Admittedly some of the string are odd , however often there is a little gem of an idea or a combination that works very well.

The best ideas for your blog posts I believe still come from instinct- watching news or seeing trends and writing about what you know or what your are working on. The best advice I ever heard about writing a blog came from Greg Jarboe- he talked about a blog in terms of a news source. That you need to brand yourself as an expert in your field and become the “news hub” for that niche. Wonderful advice. Using your expertise along with stat tools can be a powerful combination.

Writing for search engines is a a slippery slope and getting tangled in keywords can cause more problems than it solves. NOT looking at your keywords and seeing what keywords are performing is a huge mistake. You must use the information you have stored in your logs to build your traffic and to make your blog more profitable.

Tags: Blog For Money, Blogs and Blogging, Internet Marketing and Blogs, Tuesday's Tool by Lisa Stewart
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[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.bigfootwebmarketing.com/galleries/example/example.swf" base="http://www.bigfootwebmarketing.com/galleries/example/" height="450" width="400" /]

Adding a Flash gallery to your blog can really make your pages and posts pop. If you are a small or home based business a flash gallery can really step things up a notch and breathe life and visual interest to a page. They add a professional look and give blah pages pizzazz. You don’t have to be an expert programmer or know anything about Flash to create a slick Flash slideshow – here’s how.
[Read more →]

Tags: Free Tools and Utilities, Internet Marketing and Blogs, Tuesday's Tool, Web Site Accessibility, WordPress Plugins by Lisa Stewart
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This weeks Tuesday’s Tool is the WordPress Plugin, Alinks by Headzoo. Alinks will let you define a set of keywords and attach a link to them – sitewide and instantly. Being able to create mass crosslinks on your blog can create traffic for “lost” posts, make your blog more easily crawled as well as giving pages and posts better rankings with proper use of keywords. With the ability to add Amazon links to any text you will greatly increase your potential for Amazon affiliate revenue with very little effort. Alinks used with FAQ posts will also help you educate your readers.

Simple Use of Alinks: Crosslinking

The simplest use of Alinks is to define a regularly used set of words on your site and having them to link to a specific page. For example I can set up Alinks to find all references to “Tuesday’ Tools” on my site and have them point to ‘Tuesday’s Tool Category Archive”. I don’t have to manually add the link every single time I mention Tuesday Tool. I may refer to a plugin or site often and its a hassle to stop and paste the URL in every the time. I can just have Alinks do it for me. I do this with frequently mentioned sites like Google or Digg , etc.

Having crosslinks in your blog will keep your site healthy and well crawled/indexed. Using another WordPress plugin Related Posts also crosslinks posts with the added bonus of offering your reader related content. You should be getting into the habit of manually crosslinking to all your posts; however plugins like Alinks are a handy tools to have in your chest.

Breathe New Life into Lost in The Deep Posts with Alinks

You may have several posts in your blog that just don’t get read. The content is good but the posts are “lost” in your blog …floating around … they never quite took off like you thought they would. I suggest you get in the habit of finding those posts and creating crosslinks to them. Use more popular posts on your blog to link to your undiscovered gems. You can also use Alinks. Define a keyword or keywords phrase in Alinks and have it link to your post. It takes about 30 seconds. You will now have multiple links on your site using keywords linking to the post you want to promote.

Use Alinks Plugin To Help Readers Understand Your Posts

So many times I will write a post and use a term I am not sure is familiar to reader. I prefer to write under the assumption every post I write might the primary portal for a reader- it may be the first post they have ever read n my blog or even the first post they have read about my niche..
I can sometimes get bogged down and have trouble deciding how much to explain about a term . Using Alinks I can easily link possible insider terms to a definition, post or FAQ page. Using the Faq-tastic WordPress plugin you can link industry terms with in-depth pages that explain a term; i.e. link “linkbait” to a page with definition of linkbait.
This will help new readers fully understand what you have written and will not turn off readers who all ready have a working knowledge with the added benefit of you being able to write a post without getting sidetracked.

Increase Your Amazon Affiliate Earnings Instantly

I cannot emphasize how important it is for you to have deep links for your Amazon Affiliate links if you want to make money. You can’t just slap up a link in your sidebar and sit back and wait for the money to roll in. The real money comes from having post after post of content on your blog that link out to Amazon ( using your affiliate ID ).
You may not have the time to write a pre-sell page for every single book or product you mention. Using Alink is a fast approach to making money from Amazon affiliate links and is by no means a substitute for harder work . . A part – some would say a major part- of making money from Amazon getting a reader to click onto the Amazon website and have an Amazon cookie with your affiliate ID sitting in their browser. Using Alinks you can add hundreds of affiliate links to your blog in minutes.

How Do I add Multiple Amazon Affiliate Links to My Site With Alinks?

In Alinks admin settings panel you enter your Amazon affiliate ID. You can then go to general set up and set up keywords and Amazon product grouping. For example I can set up term ” Harry potter” and then have Alinks create links to “Harry Potter books” whenever it finds the term ‘Harry potter” on my blog. It isn’t elegant but it does work.

Take some time this week to install and experiment with Alinks this week. It does not replace good old fashioned manually added links but it does serve a purpose and can be a valuable tool . By using it to create crosslinks and deep links to your posts and setting up with FAQ posts you will have a blog that is more user friendly and spider- friendly. Older posts may get read more often and offer value previously hidden. Use Alinks in conjunction with Amazon Affiliate links and your Amazon revenue will go up.

There are also several additional modules you can add to the standard Alinks plugin including ebay, iTunes, Commission Junction and Clickbank .

Creates links for Commission Junction. Created by Martin Brinkmann at ghacks.net.
# Tag Pages

Let me know of your experience with Alinks. If you decide to install- tell us about it and how it affected your blog ( and revenue!) .

All links in comments will be followed. More information on dofollow blogs and the dofollow directory.

Tags: Blog For Money, Internet Marketing and Blogs, Tuesday's Tool, WordPress Plugins by Lisa Stewart
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