Hard Lessons! Follow no more!

Today, I'm a bit disappointed because this blog seems to have been delisted at Google. And that includes my feedburner link that was in the top 3 for the keyword 'Internet Wealth Code' for the past few weeks. (maybe someone got jealous and flagged my blog as objectionable!)

Fortunately, blogger did not close my blog but I've no idea why that should happen since I'm putting in original content plus non-objectionable ones. The only thing that I suspect could be because some of the words I use in my blog tend to be 'hot' keywords that spammers tend to use. I was told 'S'E-O' or "searc'h e'ngine" are pretty hot terms. (I wonder if those trick of putting other characters in between words really work but I'm sure those bots are getting smarter by the day)

The other reason could be because I accidently accepted comments from a spammer that pointed to objectionable links from my blog. I had turn on the moderation of comments and wanted to delete them but accidently accepted them instead and got them all published.
For more about comment spam, check out this post at GoogleBlog
Nevertheless, ALWAYS turn on comment moderation to ensure no comment spams gets through. Just make sure you are not half-asleep when doing the moderation like yours truly.

A teacher of mine suggested it's also possible if Google finds too many affiliate links in one site
to delist the site. Hmm, well, perhaps. I'm still puzzled why I got delisted after being there for more than 3 months.

If really that is the case, then a tip he gave would be useful. In the GoogleBlog post I mentioned earlier, this was also highlighted.

As you know the search sites have things call search bots (check wikipedia for more explanation) that crawls website for links etc. It also happens to be the one that raise red flags if it find something it doesn't like.

So if really it is the case of detecting too many affiliate links on my blog (which shouldn't be the case because I didn't had THAT many!), then maybe it would be a good idea to put the rel="nofollow" in those links. That would ensure the bot don't crawl to those sites.

An example courtesy from the GoogleBlog

Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.


Good idea also to use this nofollow for links pointing to your 'ThankYou' pages where you normally put bonuses after they have opted-in etc! You really don't want those pages to be indexed and searchable, do you?

-The Hunz-

Anyone wants to be happy?

Today, I helped a fellow IWC friend who signed up for Tom Hua's package to build his website.

Check out www.happyessence.com, he wants to help you become happy!

Basically, if you are also on Tom Hua's package you could simply do the following

1. Select a book from ebookwholesaler.net
2. Brand the book with your links (get your affiliate links ready)
3. Download the branded book and the sales page
4. Change the sales page with the appropriate links
5. Register a domain name
6. Link it to the hostingbay.net 'gold' hosting that was provided (go to the domain registrar, update the hostingbay DNS for your domain)
7. Sign up with clickbank (activate the merchant account)
8. Put in the clickbank order links into your sales page
9 FTP all the images and sales page up to the webhost
10. FTP the branded PDF where the link in your thankyou page points to

If you want to add others, can put in a pop-up with opt-in box. If you enable pop-up in your browser, you should see the popup at the site.

-The Hunz-

Stephen Pierce Masterminding

We organised a Mastermind session for participants of Stephen Pierce coaching in Singapore. The turnout was great, almost 40-50 people turned up. Check out the photos here Stephen Pierce

The group will be split into smaller groups with the leaders organising the mini-mastermind sessions.

Yours truly will be one of the leaders so once we sorted out the division, those in my group will expect a call from me.

Anyway, during the session I talked about Blog & Ping, RSS and Feedburner. I'm planning to do a camtasia video on Feedburner and I'll post it over at stephenlive.blogspot.com

Tag and Ping

There has been a lot of talk about Tag & Ping recently.

Well, here's a tip from an Internet Marketing 'Non-Guru' that I feel makes some sense. Well, at least for me that is. Also, get some understanding about tagging.

Tag and Ping Hype

You can also check out my bookmarks at del.icio.us, http://del.icio.us/thehunz

- the Hunz -

Forums & Coupon Code

As an internet marketing newbie, one of the first thing you need to do is get your own domain and webhosting services.

There are many out there so how do you know which is good? Also, you are bound to get friends or others recommending various sites. Well, there are many. If you have time, you can do some comparisons yourself.

Or you can always use google to do a search for "webhosting comparison" or go to sites like www.hostcompare.com

Another way is to check whether a company is reliable is to check out some forums and do a search on a particular company to see what others have to say about it. For example you can check out forums such as www.webhostingtalk.com It has a pagerank of 8/10 so it shouldn't be too bad!

Another good reason to sometimes check out forums is to know if there's an offer that can saves you money. For example, if you are about to signup a new domain name or webhosting, you tend to notice there's this 'coupon code' field at the shopping cart.

In case you don't already know, there are sometimes promotion that gives you some kind of discounts if you key in a coupon code.

How then do you know what coupon code to use?

I normally make it a practice to do a search for coupon codes before I sign up for anything. There are sites that compile all sorts of coupon codes but what I normally do is do a google search because I can then be specific.

For example, recently I wanted to sign up with SurfSpeedy webhosting.

So I did a google search 'Coupon code for surfspeedy' and checked the results.
That's where I found this link http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=519124
and found out there's a great promotion of only $1/mth for first 3 mths if you use the coupon code. (Depending on when you read this, the code may have expired, so do your own search!)

Well, if you are not a newbie you probably know this, but to some of us who are new, these savings are quite welcomed because there are really so much things to spend on on the Internet!

Hope you find this useful.

- The Hunz -

Progress after 2 months

After about 2 months plus of blogging, I decided it's time to do some evaluation of this blog page.

For traffic, I'm getting about 30-50 unique visitors a week.
For Adsense, I'm been getting pitance! haha! Ok, I'm removing it!
For other links, pretty ineffectual marketing.

But the good news is that my feedburner link to this site is ranked 3rd in Google for the search term 'Internet Wealth Code' (it fluctuates, but consistently on the 1st page)

So what does this tells me? Well, looks like all the strategies of doing RSS feeds, feedburner, claiming my blog in technorati, pinging sites, getting links have helped to get the blog ranked reasonably high on google.

But that still doesn't translate to good traffic and increased revenue. Why?

Well, that's the problem. The keyword that I'm optimising for, in this case 'Internet Wealth Code' does not happen to be one of the most well-searched term. No wonder the traffic is only trickling in!

Heck, sometimes we start a website or move into a particular project without thinking
of what the site is for. Ok, to be fair, this site is not entirely about revenue-generation, more of a place for me to blabber about Internet marketing.

So if that's the case, maybe it's time to do a revamp. Gone is the Adsense code following the advice of a mentor. Focus on generating traffic first. But I still want to retain my banner for my www.EarnReadingEmails.com I kinda still like some nice graphics at the top of the page. I'll remove the 2nd banner though.

I'll remove the opt-in box. Heck you want the ebook, I'll give you a direct link to it, no need to opt-in.

And I'll be using some SEO strategies to optimize for other keywords. Shan't say what it is yet. Need to do more research to see what keyword is good.

Finally, time to broadcast to more people about the site.

Hopefully, I target to increase my unique visitors to 100/day. Well, keep a lookout for this blog because that means I need to put in more valuable content to keep everyone interested.

In the meantime, if you like what you have read at my blogs, do help to spread it around and maybe even get people to link to me. I'll be eternally grateful. :)

-The Hunz-

Search Engine Optimization

These 2 days, I'm attending an SEO Design workshop from another mentor, Shi Heng Cheong.


He has been spending years to learn about SEO and is arguably Singapore SEO Expert.
Check out his blog at www.timmguru.com

I'm updating this as I attend the class so you get the latest offerings! Haha, cheap thrill.

What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, there are some strategies to help optimize the page to have good rankings in search engine.

Last night I did an exercise to create an optimized webpage. Do check it out and give me your comments (especially if the topic is useful to you! :))

Check it out here www.hairloss.achever.com