How-To Archives

How to Get Started Blogging

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Donald in How-To 1 Comment

It’s good to have a purpose… a reasoning behind publishing content on the web. Some do it for entertainment purposes, right? Others for teaching others (How-To’s). Without this focus, then why do it?

I started the aspkin.com blog long ago to be my personal notepad (a secret static HTML site), to jot down my ideas, cool things I discovered, things that I usually wrote down on my computer and forgot about. I was tired of writing stuff down and losing it.. I wanted a place to store my thoughts, and thus aspkin.com was born.

And with that my mini How-to guides were born.. I’d have a problem, figure out the solution and blog about it. I guess I would be a teaching, solution driven blogger. I solve problems. Those who solve problems make money I later found out. And thus eBay Stealth, Amazon Ghost, AutoBlogBook and SixFigureBoss were born.

All started from this blog by solving other people’s problem.

Isn’t that cool?

I have written actual books because of this blog, a real book you can hold in your hand. It’s my platform that will be around forever. It’s a platform I control.

While social media has made things easier for the masses both on publishing content and connecting with others, blogs are still going strong and carry a lot of weight.

If you were a blogger what would you blog about? At one time I had a Weight Loss blog, a journal really where everyday I would blog about my progress in losing weight. The blog was a HUGE success in it’s goal, my weight loss. I lost weight! It was motivating. It kept in my check and because it was online, kept me accountable to my peers.

Whether your aim is simply to jot down notes (like how I got started), teach others something cool or even blog about losing weight, do it! Sharing your story online is easier than ever.

This is How You Can Get Started

1. Purchase a Domain Name

I suggest Namecheap.com, you can’t go wrong with these guys. Go for a brand name, something vague.. make a nickname you use online.. something cool.

Isn’t aspkin.com cool? 🙂

2. Get Website Hosting

I suggest HostGator, the baby-package for starters. Here is 25% off coupon: aspkin25off

3. Install WordPress

Get Blogging!

The great thing about WordPress is it can be more than a blog… heck, I use WordPress for 90% of my websites, and they’re ALL different. I have Membership websites, Sales Pages, Squeeze Pages and more. WordPress is awesome!

Talk soon!

Thinking About Starting An Online Business?

Posted on February 15, 2010 by Donald in How-To, Recommends Leave a comment

Are you thinking about starting an online business? You want to get away from the online marketplaces and start focusing on your own website?

Well you’re in luck! Starting a website and building it is easier then you think. First things first you need is a domain name!

Here are Five Tips on selecting a successful domain name:

1. Brainstorm Five Keywords
When you first begin your domain name search, it helps to have 5 terms or phrases in mind that best describe the domain you’re seeking. Once you have this list, you can start to pair them or add prefixes & suffixes to create good domain ideas. For example, if you’re launching a Bean Bag related domain, you might start with words like, â€œbean bag, chair, sac, rocker, lounger” then play around until you can find a good match.

2. Select a Dot Com (.com) Domain Name
If a person is surfing around looking for a website, and they know its name, most people will try widget.com, before widget.net or .org, etc. So for the website owner who wants their site to be found, the rule is: if at all possible, get a .com domain name. Trust me on this; itâ€™s a must if you want a long term successful business.

3. Make Your Domain Name Easy to Type
If a domain name requires considerable attention to type correctly, due to spelling, length or the use of un-memorable words or sounds, you’ve lost a good portion of your branding and marketing value. I’ve even heard usability folks tout the value of having the letters include easy-to-type letters (which I interpret as avoiding “q,” “z,” “x,” “c,” and “p”).

4. Make it Short
Should you choose a short or long domain name? Most people may argue that a short domain name is better than a long domain name. Well, I agree. A shorter domain name is usually easier to remember. Of course, it depends on the situation. For example, â€œIAmADatingCoach.comâ€ is a better choice compared to â€œIAADC.comâ€ since the former is easier to remember. Yet, you wonâ€™t want to choose â€œIAmADatingCoachWhoHasTaughtThousandsOfStudentsSuccessfully.comâ€. People wonâ€™t remember such a long domain name and even if they do, it would be a chore to type. Short names are easy to type and easy to remember. They also allow for more characters in the URL in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) and a better fit on business cards and other offline media. Short is good. 🙂

5. Make it Easy to Spell
Make sure it passes the phone test, if you were to say the domain name of your website to a friend over the phone, would your friend be able to spell it correctly the first time without your having to spell it for them? If not, youâ€™ve failed the phone test and should likely try a different domain name. Also, be careful about double letters. Take CyberRodeo, for example. Their domain uses a double R, as you might expect, but there is an uncertainty there. The two Râ€™s together look a bit strange if written without capitalization, and a good name will not force the user to assume anything about the name. If you must have a double letter, the best solution is to buy both versions of the domain.

Once you select a domain you want to use, go to NameCheap and register your name ASAP! NameCheap is a well established trusted domain register and web host. I use them for a lot of my domains.

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready for web hosting and I’ll talk about that with my next post!

AutoBlogBook Snippet – Market & Keyword Research

Posted on August 13, 2009 by Donald in How-To, Internet Marketing, Making Money Leave a comment

Since I haven’t posted in awhile I decided to post a snippet of my new eBook AutoBlogBook.

Now in this post I won’t talk about creating autoblogging so much, but instead the process of researching a niche to dive into. I added this to the beginning of AutoBlogBook because without the initial research for any website, you’re going to have a hard time breaking into a niche. Now this can be helpful to anyone about to start a new online business.

Without further ado, here are a couple pages from my new eBook on Autoblogging.

Market & Keyword Research:

First off before we dive into creating your first autoblog, we need to figure out what you want your autoblogs to promote. Now I’m not going to hold your hand in searching for the perfect niche for you. For me any niche that has plenty of affiliate offers to promote, and has decent adsense earnings is good enough. Really there isn’t a niche that is too saturated if you do proper keyword research first.

Before we do keyword research I recommend you check the health of the niche you want to promote by using Google Trends. What you should do is head over to Google Trends and type in your main niche keywords to see if the search trends are going up or down. If the search trends are up or holding steady, that means we have a solid niche to promote. If the trends are going down then you might want to select another niche to focus on.

Let me add I do my research first before creating autoblogs. I find niche ideas mostly from looking at different affiliate networks for example: Clickbank, CJ, Neverblueads, Peperjam Network, AzoogleAds etc. If there is a good offer out there, I’ll do my research and if it can be easily cracked I’ll setup a dozen or so autoblogs to test the waters. Once I see that it’s profitable I’ll continue building autoblogs for different high traffic, low competition keywords.

Once you find a niche you want to focus on, you must to do the research to find high traffic, low competition keywords. And I stress you MUST do keyword research because if don’t and you start building autoblogs blind your traffic results WILL suffer.

Think of it this way, you don’t want to build your autoblogs targeting highly saturated keywords that you’ll never get traffic for when there are plenty of low competition keywords with just as much traffic, but are much easier to rank for.

Okay, enough talk.

Let’s do some keyword research.

Keyword Research:

Generally I tend to focus on keywords that have more than 1000 searches per month, and have less than 50,000 search results in Google doing an exact keyword search.

An easy way to find solid keywords for your niche is to go to Google’s Keyword Tool, and do a search for your main niche keyword.

The keyword tool will generate new keyword ideas.

Once your search is complete, you’ll see a list of related terms.

I like to add the column ‘Show Search Volume Trends’ when doing my searches.

Also make sure to switch from Broad match type to Exact Match Type.

You’ll want keywords with at least 1000 searches per month under Exact Match.

Once you select a few keywords, go to Google and do a search on the competition. What you need to do is an exact keyword search and look for total search results. An exact keyword search in Google is your keyword in quotes, for example “keyword”.

Basically you want keywords that have less then 50k search results. The fewer search results there are, the easier it will be to rank on the first page of Google for that term.

So are you getting the idea now? You want keywords with high traffic and low competition!

Now this can be a tedious task, but you know what? It’s free and works.

If you want a faster and easier way of finding high traffic, low competition keywords then I highly recommend using Micro Niche Finder. It’s the best keyword research tool I’ve used. It does exactly what we need it to do but it goes a step further in analyzing the competition to determine their keyword strength. Actually it does that and a lot more, check it out here.

It’ll save you a lot of time in your keyword research.

To learn about creating Autoblogs from A to Z be sure to check out AutoBlogBook. It was written by me about a month ago and so far I’ve had nothing but positive feedback about it.

Be sure to check out AutoBlogBook.com!

Good luck!

Firefox Broke Images Fix

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Donald in How-To Leave a comment

So I’ve been using Firefox for a couple years now and the one thing that I hated about it was how broken images were not being displayed.

As a webmaster I need to know when there are broke images on my websites and it has been a pain switching to IE and then to Firefox just to see if there are broken images.

Well after some searching I found a solution!

In order to see broken images with Firefox you need to do two things:

First install the Greasemonkey addon.

Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org.

You can write your own scripts, too. Check out http://wiki.greasespot.net/ to get started.

Now install the Broke Image Placeholder code from userscripts.org.

That’s it!

Now as long as you have show_image_placeholders set to true, which by default it is. You should now see broke images! Yay!

Now to find those cookie stuffers!

How to Motivate a Lazy A$$!!

Posted on December 5, 2008 by Donald in Adventure, How-To Leave a comment

So you’re a self motivated person right? Let’s just say you are. But your friends and family are only motivated with fear and desperation. What can you do?

Well if you don’t have the time to inspire them into motivation, the quickest way to get them to do what you want, and this may seem like common sense, is to make them desperate!

For example: If you take a teenage boy to the middle of a lake and you throw him overboard. Okay, yes I know.. this is just an example. Let’s say this boy is very lazy. Okay so we throw him overboard and you hold his head under water. Again this is an example. Now this boy turned from a lazy unmotivated person into someone who is desperate and motivated into getting free. Ahh motivation at its best!

Okay, bad example.

But you get the point right? Some people can only be motivated with fear and discontent while others can be inspired into motivation. While everyone’s motivation is different it’s up you to figure out whether you need to inspire that person or fill them with FEAR to do what you want.

Usually I like to try a combination of both inspiration and desperation.

For example let’s say I try to get my brother to mow the backyard. Heâ€™s the laziest person in the world. What I would do is slowly bring up the topic during the day. I like the take the long sales letter approach. I give him a nice welcome in the morning, â€œHowdy!â€ (I’m from Texas) then sneak in something about the backyard being a bit high. I don’t say much more than that.

Okay an hour later he’s playing video games because that’s what he likes to do, I sit down with him and we talk about the game, I beat him a couple times and I say â€œhey that grass is still growing? Those were some fun times, mowing grass, fun timesâ€¦â€

I get it into his head about the grass again. I make it a neutral topic, not bringing fear into the picture just yet. Then later on I try to persuade him into mowing the grass because it could be a nice gesture towards our Mom. â€œHey buddy, yeah you’re a hoot, fun gaming with you, hey you want to mow the grass? That sure seems like a great surprise to mother!â€

I encourage a sense of excitement so he would want to partake on said adventure.

He’s pretty stubborn though and doesn’t budge from his firm stance of â€œnahâ€.

So I go into the desperation motivation I had as backup. Since I own the game system and game he’s playing on. I simply say, â€œhey buddy I gotta take my game system with me. It’s getting late and I gotta go home nowâ€. I don’t live with him so I can use this excuse.

So now he has a sense of urgency and leverage if he mows the yard maybe I’ll let him keep the game system overnight. At this point he becomes desperate because he’s only level 45 on Call of Duty 4 and wants to reach level 55 to get the next prestige. So he begins to weaken on his objection over mowing the backyard.

I sweeten the pot by giving him 10 bucks and he mows the yard!

Yay! So you see, if I can motivate the laziest person in the world into mowing his own backyard… you can motivate a Lazy A$$ too!

Just know to motivate someone you have to keep all options on the table. You have to work both with inspiration and desperation to have the best results. And if that doesn’t work get your self a boat… take said person so the nearest lake… and … I kid..

Good luck!

Note: While he was mowing the yard, I quietly took off with the game system.
Bah! Itâ€™s Meh game system! Lol..

Starting a Blog From Scratch

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Donald in Article Writing, How-To, Making Money, SEO 2 Comments

A daunting task I know, so how does one do it? You buy a domain, get your hosting setup, install WordPress… now what?

wordpress scheduel post For me, I don’t have the time to start writing in a new blog everyday. I hardly have the time to write in this one. So what I do is either buy articles from the DigitalPoint forums or I find content that is free but not in the search engines already. You want to use unique content because search engines do not like duplicate content and they will penalize you for it. Then I use WordPress to schedule articles to be posted in the future. I can schedule hundreds of post to be published days, weeks, months or even years a head a time. That saves me time and I don’t have to worry about the blog for the most part.

Then I start creating backlinks. A member of the eBay Suspension forum has been working on a list of sites that give you free dofollow backlinks. Go through the list and start creating backlinks for your site using the keywords you want to rank for in search engines.

That’s all there is to it. Add unique content often, and create a lot backlinks. Easy right?

Here are my stats for a blog I started a little over two weeks ago. It’s a brand new blog with only a couple backlinks and about 20 articles so far.

New Blog

I plan to scheduel 1-2 articles a day to be posted and create more backlinks as time goes by. It seems to be going in the right direction for just being 19 days old.

And remember for long term success on the internet, having your own website is one of the best ways to go. Good luck!

Also read: How to Generate Search Engine Traffic – SEO Tips

Paypal Mass Payment – How to Use!

Posted on June 11, 2008 by Donald in How-To, Paypal Leave a comment

I’ve noticed not a lot of people know what Paypal Mass payment is or how to use it. Even a few eBay and Paypal experts that I’ve known for awhile have never used it before. I can understand why though, Paypal doesn’t actively talk about it like they do every other feature on their site. But it’s pretty easy to use and it can even save you a ton of money! To find the Mass Payment link, simply scroll down to the bottom of any page in Paypal and click on ‘Mass Pay‘.

Find Mass Pay

Okay so what is Mass Payment? Basically it’s a way for you to send multiple Paypal payments or just a single payment with a very minimal fee. For example: I sent over 2k to a friend of mine a few weeks ago, I used Mass Payment and it only cost me $1 to send and Nothing for him to receive! You can send to just one person or to many people very easy.

Click on ‘Make a Mass Payment‘ to continue.

Make Mass Payment

Send Mass Payment

Okay here’s the tricky part. It’s not the usual what’s the email address and dollar amount you want to send. You need to upload a tab delimited file for things to work.

Paypal has some examples here: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_batch-payment-format

Basically if you want to send $50 to Bob who’s Paypal email address is IownPaypal@gmail.com this is what you need to have in a text file (notepad) to upload to Paypal.

Tab!

Save it as whatever and upload it through ‘Send a Mass Payment’. Of course change the email address, amount and currency type if you’re sending in another currency other then USD.

So that’s about it! Pretty easy right? Save your friends some money and use Mass Payment, again this can be used for multiple payments or just one!

Learn more about eBay and Paypal in the eBay Suspension Forums!

Create Your very own PHP Redirect!

Posted on February 29, 2008 by Donald in How-To Leave a comment

Hi guys! Sorry for not posting in awhile. I’m working on a number of projects that are taking up a lot of my time. Right now it’s like I’m in the eye of a hurricane. And this is my break from the bad weather. While I’m here, I just wanted to post a simple but effective way I use to hide my affiliate links from search engines and make my links look more professional.

The first way I hide my affiliate links is through a PHP redirect.

First thing you want to do is create a new folder called ‘go‘ or ‘goto‘. Just something to place files into later. Then create a new PHP file and paste the following code into it:

<html>
<head>
<title>Yahoo redirect</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
<script>window.location=”http://yahoo.com”;</script>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=http://yahoo.com”>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page does load after 5 seconds,
<a href=”http://yahoo.com”>click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

Save that file as yahoo.php or whatever you want to call it and place it into the go or goto folder. Upload the folder to your web host, and call the file in your browser.

I created a folder called ‘go’, and in this folder I created the file yahoo.php. You can see it in action bellow.

Yahoo redirect

The good thing about a PHP redirects is if you ever needed to change the URL, all you have to do is edit that one PHP file and you’re good to go. Also by using redirects, when someone goes to click on your link the status bar won’t show the affiliate URL, which is good and may help increase affiliate sales.

Next time I’ll talk about link cloaking. It’s a little more advance, some cloaking better then others. But a necessary if you want to protect your self from affiliate commission theft.

Until next time!

The Girl Scouts Marketing Got To Me! But HoW?

Posted on February 15, 2008 by Donald in How-To, Internet Marketing, Making Money Leave a comment

So I’m on a Low to No Carb diet for the most part and man… up until 10 minutes ago I’ve been crazy low on energy today. I woke up around 7am, did the usual updating sites, checking the forum and affiliate sales and passed out around noon until 3pm.

Luckily! My usual route of checking mail boxes, visiting some neighbors, going to the local stores I found my self being slammed by girl scouts and their cookies. Twice I encountered these little screaming girls and sad to say I gave in the second time. *half of sleeve of my thin mints is down!

I got to thinking and in my crazy mind of marketing, the first group of girl scouts I wasn’t much interested in, but they got it in my head the idea of cookies. The second group had me sold before I walked up to them. They simply let me walk by without saying anything, but on my way out, I knew they would still be there; wanting me to buy their cookies. I know about their product, I’ve had it before. I had a demand at the time, I was low on energy and needed a quick carb pick me up. And damn the second time was a charm. I bought the cookies.

girl2

Marketing…

How does this tie in with Internet marketing? I’m getting there…

Email Marketing does wonders in gaining confidence in potential customers who just aren’t ready to buy from you.

Once you have someone on your list, you can email them again and again until the confidence is built and they’re sold on you. I have auto responders on a few of my sites where when someone signs up, they’re sent an email once a week for about 5 weeks. It really should be more but I haven’t had the time to write more emails yet.

Anyway, usually seven emails sales a customer if you can gain their trust. The seventh email is the proven money maker if you do things right.

A simple 7 week course on something you’re promoting is enough to gain the customer’s confidence and for you to make that sale.

I use GetResponse, it’s cheap at $19.95 per month and is easy to setup and implement. If the Girl Scouts can do it with their sidewalk Super Sales, you can do it too but on autopilot! Try it out!

Breaking the Blog Money Making Code!

Posted on January 7, 2008 by Donald in How-To, Internet Marketing, Intresting Stuff, Making Money Leave a comment

So you have a blog that cost you more in hosting fees then what contextual advertising can pay you. You had a dream of making money online as a blogger, you read John Chow Dot Com and you’re inspired but you can’t seem to break the money making code?

First things first… most people who are into making money online know about John Chow dot com. His blog is about making money online, and his goal is to generate as much money through his blog as possible. He has monthly income reports that tell you exactly what he does to make money online. The information he gives is priceless! Check out December’s report:

Private Ad Sales: $10,480.00
Affiliate Commissions: $5,701.48
ReviewMe: $5,400.00
Text Link Ads: $2,097.74
Kontera: $1,000.00
TTZ Media: $321.14
Subscription: $40.00

Grand Total: $25,040.36
Read the rest of the report here: John Chow Blog Income Report

How does John Chow make most of his money online? Through private ad sales, affiliate commissions and ReviewMe post. Everything else requires the huge amount of traffic to see at least 1/100th of the value he’s getting out of it.

Example: Kontera advertising. Those in text double links. Every time someone clicks these links, John Chow makes money. But actually John Chow negotiated a salary from Kontera. He’s making a cool $1000 a month through them for a set period of time. Though its better then adsense, you won’t make more then a couple bucks a day without serious traffic. So Kontera ads aren’t worth it.

Another example is Text Link ads. Though John Chow makes some serious cash through Text Link Ads, mostly through their affiliate program, it’s too risky to sell Text Link Ads if you depend on Google’s organic traffic. Google has been lower the quality scores of known text link sellers as a punishment to selling text link ads. Simple look up ‘John Chow‘ in Google, you won’t find JohnChow.com until the 4th or 5th page. Google has slapped his site, as well as tons of other sites that sell TLA. If you have a website that depends on Google traffic, I wouldn’t recommend Text Link Ads no matter what.

Google Adsense is all but dead. Since introducing separate content bids, advertisers have the ability to lower what they pay website publishers and man or man you’ll be lucky if you get 5 cents per click these days. As an advertiser my self, I set my keywords to around 10 cents for content networks or I shut content ads off all together. It’s simple not the targeted traffic I want or need. I’m surprised Google Adsense is still alive and kicking. The way it’s going, it’s not profitable for anyone anymore. What should be done is have site targeted advertising take over adsense. That way the advertisers have more control and publishers make more money. Either way adsense as it is just about worthless to promote.

So John Chow makes the big bucks from Private Ad Sales and Affiliate Commissions. That’s huge!

Would you rather make $1-$2 a day with Kontera or Adsense advertising? Or would you rather make $20-$100 a day with affiliate sales and even more with private ad sales? Replace you adsense with affiliate programs and you might be surprised! You could also try Google referrals, which is basically Google’s answer to affiliate sales.

Private ad sales – I’ve yet to do this, but I found a very nice piece of software that can help you with your ad sales. I plan to buy it when I get the chance and try it out on a couple sites. It looks like its very easy to use and something that’ll make you big sales for years to come. You can download a copy here: OIOpublisher

So that’s it! Contextual advertising isn’t the way to go. It’s all about Private ad sales and affiliate commissions. Be sure to check out OIOpublisher to get started with your private ad sales, and start looking up some affiliate sites like CJ, NeverblueAds and Clickbank. I’m doing pretty well with Clickbank, and working my way into other affiliate networks. If you’re new to affiliate marketing or just making money online in general, one resource that has helped me a lot are the Digital Point Forums. They’re basically a huge internet marketing forum which talks about Search Engines, Marketing, Business, Design & Development, and Products & Tools. If you’re serious about making any money online, this is one resource you won’t want to pass up.

Hope this helps with your money making adventures!

Have a great day!

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