It needed more than a Florida Keys Facial. It needed a Florida Keys Facelift. So I went to work. I thought that this would be a good project for you to see how I tackle a project like this so I recorded all my actions in a series of articles. If you are interested in how the Optimizer Man performed the Florida Keys Facelift on the Florida Keys Facial site, check out the following articles:

A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 1
A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 2
A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 3
A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 4
A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 5

If you don’t have time to read through the articles, here is what the face lift accomplished:

As a temporary solution, we are going to take advantage of some short cuts available to us on the Internet. The first thing I will add are some on topic news feed videos. There is a service called The Voxant News Room that will provide you with an embed code for different news streams. They have a science and technology news feed that will work well on the Cool New Inventions site. I will create a page called Science and Technology and paste the embed code there. I will then temporarily set this new page as the default page for the site. Once I start writing articles I will change the front page back to showing the articles. I am also going to grab a video news feed about technology press releases and put it in the right sidebar. This news video service could actually provide you with a little income if you had a lot of people watch the videos. For most sites, you will never see any income from Voxant but it is a great page filler.

I am also going to take advantage of an RSS feed from another site about new inventions. I will take the RSS feed and put it in the left sidebar. With the videos and the RSS feed in place, I am providing useful information to anyone who visits the site. I am also able to place Google Adesnse ads on the site. I am allowed to have three different Google ads on one page. I am going to put a 468 x 60 image ad up in the right side of the header, a 300 x 250 text ad at the top of the right sidebar, and a 120 x 600 text ad at the top of the left sidebar. Take some time with your Adsense text ads to get them to color match the rest of your site. You want them to be visible but you don’t want them to look like they don’t belong there. Our hope is that visitors will click on the ads when they visit the site. You can’t ask people to click on the ads on your site as that is a violation of your agreement with Google, so you need to try and place your ads in such a way that people are drawn to them naturally. There is a lot of information on the Internet about how to work with Adsense, but if you get frustrated you might want to hire me for a little blog consulting on how the process works.

These additions to the site took about 20 minutes, and you can see that our new site has taken on the look of a well established site:

Now that there is some information on the site I can begin working on the initial link building. In a few weeks I will start working on the articles for the site. When I do I will write another article here about article marketing.

The cost for this is a little over four dollars a month if you pay for the year so the total is $50.88 for the year. You don’t need to buy any of the other options that they will try and sell you. Just follow the on screen instructions until you have completed the purchase of the web hosting plan.

For this website our annual cost will be 12.17 + 50.88 or 63.05. We will also spend about 10 hours putting it all together and then about one hour a month after that, so we will have about 20 hours in it by the end of the year. For this to be worthwhile, we will need to earn back the $63.05 plus a reasonable wage for our hours. I would consider $75 an hour to be reasonable so this site will need to produce 1563.05 in the next 12 months. That breaks down to $130.25 per month or $4.28 per day. You could save the $50.88 hosting fee by using the free hosting service that Good News Domains offers (when you use the free service you get some ads for Good News Domains in the header). I use the free service for some sites, especially if I think I will just be selling the domain name and not the site in the future, but for these articles I am going to host the site and see what happens. From my keyword research in the first article, I wrote that we could probably make about $1 dollar a day from Google adsense on this site which will be well short of the $4.28 to make it worthwhile.

Once you have purchased the web hosting plan, go back to the Good News Domains home page, roll your mouse over Web Hosting and then click on My Hosting Accounts. You should see your new web hosting account like this:

Click on the Setup Account tab and you will be prompted to accept the hosting service agreement and then you will need to enter a user name and password. Be sure you write these down somewhere so you can find them in the future.

Next you will be prompted to associate your new hosting account with the domain name you purchased previously. This domain name should show up under existing domains:

You will then be prompted to select which PHP version you would like to use, (select 5.x) and the confirm the information that you have provided and click finish. You should see a screen that says your account is pending setup. This process can take anywhere from five minutes to 24 hours. We will take a short break and then get Wordpress installed as our content management system in part four of this series.

Let’s start by doing a little keyword research on the potential topic of our site. I was thinking that there might be some interest in a blog about green inventions since everyone is all about being green these days. I will use the Google Keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to find the information I am looking for to see if the site will be able to generate any traffic from the search engines.

Go to the Google keyword tool and type in the captcha code that you are presented with. Once you are in, there is a place on the upper right side of the page that says “previous interface”. I still use the previous interface because I am used to it. I am sure you can do the same thing with the new interface. Now type in the keyword phrase you want to search for, in my case green inventions. The result will look something like this: (click on the image to get a larger view)

We need to change a couple of settings on the Keyword tool to get more accurate information. First, you need to change the Match Type from broad to exact. Secondly, you need to gp to the choose columns to hide/display and select Show Estimated Avg. CPC. The result will look something like this: (click on the image to get a larger view)

Two things I can see right away from this information. First, 720 global visitors with no data available for local search volume means that there isn’t enough traffic. Second, the .05 average CPC means that the site will not generate any money from Google Adsense. So, I need to look for something that is a little more attractive. By scrolling down the page and looking at additional keywords to consider I might find a workable alternative. I would like a keyword phrase that gets good traffic and has a reasonable Average. CPC. Of course, that is what everyone wants. As I scroll down the page I find one keyword that I think we will work with. There are some other more attractive keywords but they already have a lot of competition and for the sake of this exercise I want to use a keyword that we can get ranked fairly simply. The keyword that I will use for this series of articles is “cool inventions”. Check it out on the keyword tool with the exact match and Avg. CPC still selected: (click on the image to get a larger view)

This information tells me that “cool inventions” gets 9900 searches a month in the United States (my local search) and that advertisers are bidding 1.73 to place their ads for that keyword phrase. Does that mean that I can get 9900 times $1.73 every month for my site? Wouldn’t that be great? Unfortunately, the reality is not even close. First, we have to be able to get our site ranked number 1 on Google. Coming in second or third will get some traffic but not as much. First position should get you about 40% of that 9900, or 3960 visitors a month. Of that number only about 2 % will actually click on an ad on your site, so you might get 80 clicks a month. You don’t get all of the $1.73 either. Google gets a bunch of it and not all of the ads on your site will be worth that much, so you might get about fifty cents per click on average. So, 80 clicks at fifty cents would get you about $40 dollars a month. There might be some affiliate marketing money that can be made for this keyword phrase but that will have to be seen. Normally, I would say that a $40 a month return is not really enough to justify the work and cost involved but for this series of articles it should be an interesting exercise. The next thing to do is check out the competition. We will do that in Part 2.

Then I spent about thirty minutes doing a little keyword research for the site. What I discovered was what I expected, there really isn’t any steady generic search engine traffic for this narrow of a keyword. The only keyword that was even close with any measurable traffic was “Florida keys spas” which gets about 1000 searches a month. Of course, that keyword already has quite a bit of competition and is really not all that practical to pursue. Our focus will be to figure out what people will be typing in to the search engines when they are looking for the services my client provides. This will require a little research by asking some people what they might type in and then building a keyword response for those searches. I am guessing people will type in things like “manicures in florida keys” or “pedicures in florida keys” or “body wrapping in florida keys”. Keyword research is made possible by a handy little tool that Google provides for people trying to figure out how to best use adwords. Fortunately, for those of us who work to get our sites to respond to the search engines the tool works just as well for us. You can find the tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. To use the tool, type in the keyword or keyword phrase you are looking for and Google will tell you how many times it gets searched for in a month. You can define and filter your searches to give you very detailed information.

One last little note, I mentioned in one of the previous articles in this series on the Blog Consulting site that I had made some changes in the code of the theme. This is pretty common in order to get a theme to work the way you want it to. If you are going to be tweaking the code on a theme or a plugin there is one thing you should always do first. That one thing is to make a copy of the code and paste it into Notepad. That way if you mess something up, you can just copy the original code back in and try something else. From project start to where we are now, we have nine hours and thirty minutes into the project, which leaves us thirty minutes to finish the last little content update and still be within the ten hours we estimated for this phase. Since we have covered all the information that I think will be helpful to you, this will be the end for this series of articles. I hope you find them useful.

Good content is one of the most important factors for a healthy blog. If you don’t write regular articles with some useful information in them, your blog will tend to be lethargic and not respond very well with the search engines.

Good links are developed mostly by a lot of hard work. There are a lot of shortcuts available, but they usually result in getting links that are subject to penalties from Google. One of the methods I use for link building is article marketing. Write some original articles on topics related to your blog and then publish them on various sites on the web. You can usually get at least two links back to your site every time the article is published. Using a service like Ezine makes the publishing process easy and you can often have one article published hundreds of times resulting in hundreds of links to your site.

Time is the one element that makes most people give up before they see their blog get really healthy. When I introduce the time element to my clients, they often think that things should happen much faster. Depending on how competitive a keyword is, the more time it takes to get ranked.

There are a lot of things we will have to cover in tghis series.  We will discuss how to get ten websites for ten dollars, how to set them up, and we will talk about the process of what kind of websites to start.  We want to create websites that will eventually develop traffic and that have some adsense value.

Let’s start by talking about Adsens value.   Google has a great little tool available that is called the Goodle Adwords Keyword tool.  You can access it at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool is designed for the people are going to advertise with Adwords but it works very nicely for giving you some idea of the value of certain keywords.  What we need to find out is if the keywords we are going to use on our sites have any measurable traffic, and what the going rate for a click for that keyword is.

By typing in a keyword phrase and checking out its estimated CPC we can get a rough idea of the adsense value for a keyword.  After much blog consulting thought, I have decided to demonstrate this process with the keywords alternative energy.  While this is a very competitive keyword, which is not one I would suggest for anyone, it shoud make an interesting demonstration site and perhaps ultimately I will be able to sell the site to someone who is trying to promote an alternative energy business in the future.

The Google keyword tool tell me the following about “alternative energy”

The important numbers are the estimated CPC $1.89 and the search volume, 368,000.  The higher the two numbers are the better, but, the keywords will be way more competitive.  Our strategy is going to be to look down on the list of related keywords and look for keywords that have a high CPC and a reasonable amount of monthly searches.  We are going to try and find ten keywords that fit our profile and then we will begin the process of starting the sites.

Some promising keyword possibilities that fit our profile are:

Renewable alternative energy, CPC 2.99, Searches 8100

Future alternative energy, CPC 5.78, Searches 1000

etf alternative energy, CPC 3.60, Searches 1600

We will continue to research the keywords and come up with a list of ten and then we are going to go shopping for a suitable domain name in our next blog consulting article.

If you are thinking that you should be able to make a lot of quick easy money on the Internet, you need some blog consulting, because you are wrong. If you would like to start your own business, that you work at part time and start by making a little bit of money that eventually develops into more money, then the Internet might be a good fit for you. There are actually a quite a few ways to make money. You can use Adsense from Google to monetize your site with other peoples ads. You get paid for clicks from those ads. Some clicks are worth two or three cents, while others can be worth one, two, or three dollars. For Adsense to be really effective you have to have a lot of traffic on your website. You can get involved in affiliate programs where you recommend products or services from your blog and you get paid by the sale or by the click. Again traffic is important. You can also sell advertising space on your blog once it is developed.

One approach to consider, is to start a lot of websites that make a little bit of money. If you can get a website online in a short period of time, that doesn’t require a lot of maintenance, that makes you fifty cents or a dollar a day, that doesn’t seem like much. But what if as you got used to starting blogs you realized that you could get a site up and running in a couple of hours. That you could easily get five new sites started every week, and if each site could make you a dollar a day, by the time you got a hundred websites running you could start making a reasonable income. You could then further develop the sites that capture the most organic traffic and turn them in to more significant income producers.

In this series of articles I will outline for you how to get blogs started for very little money, just like the title implies, ten websites for ten dollars a year. If those ten websites can make you ten dollars a day, then you have a good start. You can keep adding ten websites for ten dollars a year and over time develop a nice steady income. Each site will only cost you a dollar a year, so you can start an unlimited number of sites. In our next article in the series we will start laying the groundwork for the first ten blogs/websites.

Now, take the URL’s for the sites that show up and go to Yahoo.com.  Once you get to the search engine on Yahoo type in the following: linkdomain:and the URL address.  Here is what it will look like for the top result for blog consulting.

The result for that search looks like this:

And there you have it.  40,322 links is what you would need to compete with the position one return for blog consulting on Google.  Don’t worry, blog consulting is a very competitive keyword, and your keyword choice will probably not be nearly as competitive.  When you are looking for keywords to help your blog, finding out how many links the competition has can be a big factor in determining if the keyword is worth pursuing.  If your competition has 40,00 links, you should probably look for a different keyword.

That being said, how do you develop links?  One of the first things you should do is begin to read and comment on 4 or 5 blogs that are similar to yours.  If you build some online community you may be able to exchange links after a while.  You will also generate some traffic to your site by leaving comments, and the people who come to your site are potential links as well.  It is a good first step.  We will discuss more linking options in future articles.

The Blog Consulting Blog Start Up Package is a great tool for those of you who want to get a blog started but aren’t sure how to go about it.  With this package we will help you in choosing a suitable domain name and hosting provider.  We will then install your blog database and WordPress.  We will set up the blog with a theme designed to optimize search engine results, upload up to six plugins, and set up your sidebar(s) and widgets.  We will provide you with two hours of training (how to use WordPress, FTP, SEO techniques, etc.) by Skype or phone.  We will also set up free tracking software and teach you how to use it so that you can see the amount of traffic your site is getting.

The Blog Start Up Package will save you a tremendous amount of time and energy, and getting your blog started on a strong foundation will help the development of your site.   We realize how valuable your time is, and this package, priced at $400 will give you a quick ROI (return on investment).  Use the Contact page to get your Blog started today!

Golden Rule Bloging Preperation Package

If you like the idea of the Golden Rule Blogging system but have not yet developed the skill set required to meet the requirements then this package might work for you.  We will look at your blog and speak with you about where you are in your blogging journey.  We will then tailor a program including site set-up (sidebar and linking), plugin installation, social networking, beginning SEO techniques, and article writing and marketing.  All of these abilities will be extremely useful thorughout your blogging experience.  The cost of this package is $500.  Please note, that while the information provided will be helpful to the future of your blog, it does not guarantee acceptance in to the Golden Rule Blogging system.  You can not buy your way in to the program, but this training will definetely help you in your preperation.  Use the Contact page if you are interested in the Golden Rule Blogging Preparation Package.