Category Archives: Wordpress

Wordpress websites

SEO for Growth – Bend Google to your Way!

SEO for Growth

Bloggers often make fortunes with financialsamurai.com being a great example. The question, how do you become a successful blogger and more importantly a successful marketer. SEO for Growth by John Jantsch and Phil Singleton discusses how you can optimize your blog to beat those Google Search rankings and be listed on the first page. That can be the difference between getting no traffic and being like this cute pug watching money fall from the sky.

Isn’t he cute!

What does Google hate?

Spammy pages that look more advertisement then content!

You forgot smart phones exist!

You cover half your webpage with Eye Junk! The other half is infinite scrolling.

You are a copy-paste king/queen. Very original!

What Google Likes!

Google is in the business of answering search queries. Anything that detracts from that is bad business. Google is interested in original content that best answers search queries and penalizes websites that produce noise or distraction. To simplify marketers and web designers lives Google provides resources on best practices curate great content and provides tools to analyze your website (site maps, simulations of google crawls, viewing data and more). Google also graciously provides paid advertisement as well:

Adwords!

Each day, 3.5 billon people ask Google a question. Over a single year, that is 1.2 trillion searches. That’s as many searches a day as Donald Trump is estimated having in cold hard cash. You as an advertiser wants a slice of those people’s attention, which is where Adwords comes into (word) play. Adwords let’s you bid on search terms, the questions people ask. Rarer search terms have less demand. SEO for Growth says this is fertile ground as you can bid for more targeted terms that better represent your customer. In turn, your customer is more likely to convert into a purchase or blog reader.

Google Analytics!

Everyone loves a dashboard. Don’t they? Google Analytics might be a Marketers Mecca in that it prevents a view of your audience. Do people coming to your websites like your article on clothing or would rather stalk your About me page? Google Analytics also tracks other useful information. For example, where did the person originate? Did they start on another 3rd party website or where they intensively Googling for an answer? This type of information can help you fine-tune what appeals to your audience and, if you are clever, be utilized for A/B split test. A/B split testing is when you send people to two webpages that differ by a single feature. You then see who stays around, buys or clicks on more ads (group A or B).

Google of course provides a lot more tools than presented in this blog. I will most likely get into more details in the future. For now, I have a laundry list of site improvements mentioned in SEO for Growth!

Hopefully, with these tools, I can finally have my website pay for my next Latte!

Best Luck Blogging,

Chris

WordPress and Adsense (Google’s ad campaign)

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Good Afternoon Readers,

Google has an ad-network called Adsense. Adsense uses predictive intelligence to cater ads to people that visit websites. It seems to do this via cookies and google search results. Adsense now runs on: ChristopherKottmyer.com.

The process of getting advertisements is pretty easy. You sign up for google using your gmail.com account at: adsense.com. They then provide you with a small snippet of code, which you put in the header tags of your website:

<head>
Somewhere in here!!!
</head>

They then give you this ominous message about taking 3 days to verify your website (in case you display things like explicit content). After a bit of impatience, you can check your account and if you are lucky, you become certified and can start placing advertisements on your website:

After certification, you get can log-in to Adsense website. If you want to ad advertisements, you need to first define your ads and then get a code snippet that you can put in the body tags of your website. You can find this in ( My Ads > Add units ) section:

If you click the [ New ad unit ]. You’ll get a series of options to define you advertisement. These mostly involve things like the pixel size: 300 x 400, color of the advertisement and where the advertisement would be placed. A few examples of placements include between blog posts, on top/bottom of the blog or on the side bar. A cool thing I noticed is some advertisements are responsive, which means they resize for your phone (neat trick)! After setting all the options, google generates some code for you. Place these anywhere between the body tags to start advertising in your websites (where start can take up to 2 hours). You can’t control what advertisements you get (maybe…still exploring this).

How much does a click/impression get you in terms of dollars? The first click I got generated about $1.75. Now, it’s all gone down hill and I’m seeing $.30 a click. With just 3 clicks and a whooping $3.00 total, I’m completely lost as to what the average going rate is. Sadly, I won’t be able to cash this out until my account reaches $100.00 (at this rate 100 clicks). That’s googles policy.

Best,

Chris

My Personal WordPress Website

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Dear Readers,

I set up my WordPress website today. Amazon Web Services provides two guides, one on setting up a LAMP server (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) and one on installing WordPress on LAMP.

I also bought two domains, one from namecheap: ChrisKottmyer.com

and

The other from AWS Route 53: ChristopherKottmyer.com

Both are being redirected to this site.

After setting everything up, I tried a bunch of plugins. A bunch below:

Gmail SMTP -> This allows you to forward e-mails to your gmail account.

MonsterInsight Google Analytics -> Installs Google Analytics to your web page, which tells you what pages people are visiting.

Redirection -> Allows you to redirect pages to other websites. I created a link to my youtube account this way.

Simple Share Button Adders -> Adds a bunch of social media buttons to your blog posts. This one was really simple to install. They offer about 2 dozen different social media platforms.

TablePress -> This plugin provides the ability to produce data tables via CSV files. They provide the ability to upload CSV files.

Visualizer: Charts and Graphs Lite -> Provides simple graphs using googles chart API. This allows you to build graphs and charts for data visualization.

WPForms Lite -> This is a GUI that creates web forms. The data generated by the forms are directly sent to your e-mail address.

bbPress – This is a cool plug-in that let’s you run forums. Places people can post topics and reply to each other.

Knowledge Base for Documents and FAQs – This plugin let’s you produce a wiki with articles and categories.

Next thing I’m trying out is multi-site, which allows you to have many WordPress sites hosted on a single computer. I’m also going to add google advertising onto the website. I’m curious how you would monetize blogs.

This specific post is a test of the social sharing feature.

Chris