In our culture looking for opportunities to save money more often than you look for opportunities to spend money freely is generally looked upon quite highly. Frugality obviously has it’s place and it’s virtues, but I believe there is a dark side that can limit our lives in a way that most of us don’t want it to be limited. I sure don’t.
Can you believe that we all are where we financially are in life, not directly because of our past, not directly because of how we were raised, and not directly because of how much money we are currently making .. but instead we are where we are financially because this is where we BELIEVE we should be. And if this is true, that means that any amount of money we want is ours for the receiving, if we just believe it!
I was going through some old papers the other day and found a tax form my parents filed when I was applying for federal loans for school. Would you believe my parents were bringing in as an income back then, almost the exact amount that my husband and I are currently bringing in as an income today!? My husband and I are in very different industries than my parents were, are two totally different people, and yet we have recreated the almost exact income that I grew up with. Could this be the income we believe we can achieve? Could this be our fincancial set-point?
I believe so, and I want to make more money! Because I want to spend more money! I want the material freedom that more money will bring me! So where is the danger of being thrifty? Won’t being thrifty allow me to spend more money on the things I want even though I am still making the same amount? Yes, probably, but I also have to wonder if it doesn’t limit me to making that amount of money or about that amount of money for the rest of my life!
Think about it, if I spend my entire life spending only a certain amount, worrying with every purchase on where I can find my best value and stay within my budget - does it seem like I believe that more money is coming to me? No! And if I don’t believe more money is coming to me can it? No! I don’t think it can!
I want more money to come in. And I feel constant frugality - a frugal mind - limits me to spending within my resources, rather than attempting to expand my resources to meet my spending! So, how can I get myself into a place of believing more money is coming?
Abraham of Abraham-hicks recommends the Wallet Process in their book Ask and It is Given. This is a good way to feel more abundant and start attracting some ideas to be more abundant, in my opinion. Click here to read my experience with it.
Mike Dooley, the author of the audiobook Infinite Possibilities gave me this little gem: when handed a large bill say to the person who gave it to you, “It’s a good thing I’m rich.” Talk about a stress reliever! I tried this on my husband after our garage door broke and we learned it would cost $300 to fix it. I said “It’s a good thing we’re rich” and it was great! I giggled, he snorted, and there, no more complaining in our minds about “what are we going to do - we could use that money somewhere else”, etc. Instant relief is the absolute best you can strive for and it usually is all you need. We both know we’re not rich, but if we can find that kind of relief about money - that kind of stop worrying and start looking at the solution - we can be rich soon! I just know it!
Abraham of Abraham-hicks also says something like ‘when you condemn the $4 strawberry, what are you walking towards? When you appreciate the strawberry at any price, what are you walking towards? When you condemn the $3 gallon of gas what are you walking towards? When you appreciate this miracle of fossil fuel that lets us all zip around in these miracles of transportation, what are you walking towards?’
I know what I am walking towards when I condemn anything: bittterness, anger, fear. I know what I am walking towards when I appreciate anything: happiness, joy, love, appreciation … and when I feel like that, it doesn’t matter how much money I do or don’t have. The world opens, my heart follows. Resources and opportunities lie endless before me. Life is Good, All is Well, My world is Amazing, and the Money is coming in! (plus, I get idea after idea of how to make money, businesses to start, etc - people even send me checks!)
—–
I do think that the best thing about learning thrifty-ness if you have no concept of it is how abundant if can help you feel, and if you can feel abundant, abundance is on its way. I learned by reading the Tightwad Gazette. My life has been changing ever since.
This is a review of the Complete Tightwad Gazette - The Gazette was a monthly newsletter with articles, then three books, and now it is available in this one book - a kind of bible for saving money.
The author is a practical genius at saving money. She readily admits that some of the things she talks about are something you may not want to try to do yourself, like re-using wrapping paper, but don’t let that stop you from reading about them! Honestly! If you read every word she writes you will find yourself looking at ANY situation and coming up with ways to save money in that situation. She may be talking about how to discover if fresh-popped or microwaved popcorn is cheaper when you factor in the energy costs, cost of your labor, and the cost of the machine - and you may not eat popcorn - but now you are absorbing how to truly assess any of your money saving attempts.
This book does not just lay out a bunch of ways for you to save money - it teaches you HOW to be a money saver! HOW to be someone who pays 10 cents when everyone else pays a dollar - on just about all things. It teaches you how to think like that person.
I found the Gazette at the library when I was paying a mortgage on a house I was trying to sell AND paying rent on a house I was renting and having to face the truth that after I sold this house for almost three times as much as I paid for it I was still going to have some consumer debt after the sale of it. I should have been $100,000 ahead, and yet I was still in debt.
So, I found the book, learned to think like a person who sees the money-saving opportunities everywhere, and changed my life. I just can’t recommend it highly enough. I completely refurnished my house with new-to-me, nice stuff and spent less than $1000. I got two beds, a dining room table, a couch, and a desk.
I remember truly needing a new dining room table but being unwilling to spend $1100 on the absolute cheapest one I could find at a furniture store. I got so frustrated that we just made do with a plastic folding table. After reading this book I started watching my local newspaper classifieds and found a beautiful, like-new dining room table with 6 perfect chairs for $150! I have had it for over a year, and when I move soon we are going to sell it for $150! I could probably sell it for more, honestly! Imagine - making money because I had a great dining table for a year! lol. And I won’t have any moving expenses because I’ll just sell it, and find another beautiful table when we get where we are going for about the same money. woohoo.
Overview
Offline methods of getting people to your website are not covered in this book, only online methods.
Your ultimate goal is to get traffic from people that are interested in what you are offering.
Traffic from just anyone won’t help you – it will just waste your resources. For this reason, do not waste any time thinking about banner exchanges or traffic exchanges or anything I don’t cover here. Concentrate solely on:
- Finding out how people search for what you are offering (what keywords and keyword phrases they use)
- Getting your site seen by these people
- Convincing these people to buy your product or service
For the purpose of the book I will create a fictional business called “John’s Scuba Diving in Kona” and refer to this business for examples.
Keywords and keyword phrases are the lifeblood of websites.
A keyword can be thought of as any word that a user types into a search engine. A keyword phrase can be thought of as any collection of words a user types into a search engine.
Which Keywords are Important
When someone types a keyword, lets say something related to “kona scuba diving”, into a search engine, they are normally looking for one of three things:
- information about the keyword (dive spots in kona)
- to purchase something related to the keyword (cheapest scuba diving in kona)
- entertainment related to the keyword (pictures of scuba diving in kona)
Of these three types of searchers, we are most interested in the one looking to purchase something related to kona scuba diving. If we have what they want and they get to our page, we have a good chance of getting them to purchase it from us! A virtually effortless sale!
Axiom 1: Our most important keywords will be any keyword that has a
moderate probability of leading to a purchase.
Of these three types of searchers, after purchasers, we are next interested in those seeking information about the keyword, mostly because they may eventually become purchasers, either online or once they get to Hawaii (or wherever you are).
Axiom 2: Our second most important keywords will be those related to our product or service of interest to information seekers.
Lastly, we are still interested in the entertainment seekers. If we have what they are looking or, they may eventually purchase from us, or they may talk about our site in forum or on their log or they may LINK to our site. Links are so very important, and links to internal pages of our website are just as important as those to our home page (Google sees natural links to internal pages as a signal of quality, and may rank websites with signals of quality higher than other sites). Also, links to internal pages increase the overall site’s pagerank. An internal page is any page in your website that is not the home page.
Pagerank is a system that Google uses for ranking webpages. (Very) Simplistically, the higher your pagerank, the higher your website will probably rank for any given term.
Method One: The Long Tail Method (takes work)
What’s on your website right now? If it’s hierarchical you probably have a home page, an about us page, maybe a rates page, maybe a products page or category, maybe a pictures page, these are all probably grouped together somewhere – those links are called your navigation. If it’s chronological (like a blog) you probably have dates or categories pointing to your past posts, these are still called your navigation. It’s best if your navigation, or some form of your navigation links are available from every page on your site.
You want to add a link to your navigation called something like *Your topic* Information or About *Your Topic*. This link should be to a page that lists all your keyword articles. If you were going to write a lot of articles you could break them down further and list the entire breakdown in your navigation.
You are going to write (or have someone write for you) articles that impart unique and interesting information about each set of phrases on your keyword list, targeting at least two phrases or words on each page.
It is imperative that each article has a unique, targeted title tag, is not spammy, and is unique, interesting, personal to your business, and at least 200 words in length.
…. because this is what the user sees when they search in a search engine. You want the title tag to tell them exactly what they will find when they click over to that page, and you want it to be accurate and enticing. Ensure it is accurate, because lots of people clicking on your page and then hitting the back button and going to another page on the list tells Google your site is not a good result for that particular search. You really want mostly people coming to your site that find exactly what they are looking for and spend a bit of time there. This will tell Google that your site is real, and worthy of high rankings.
Google can tell how much time people spend at your site two ways:
- If you use Google Analytics (which is free and lots of people do)
- If a user on your site has the Google toolbar installed (completely out of your control, and hundreds of thousands of people do).
…. because eventually the search engines will figure it out and ban your site from their indexes, or at least push you off the front page where you won’t get any traffic anyway. Spammy, to me, means any attempt to trick the search engines into giving you undeserved high rankings for any search term. In my opinion, the absolute only valid, long-term, sustainable way to deserve high rankings is top-notch, high-quality content, products, and services. So, don’t use hidden text, don’t buy links at an attempt to gain PR, don’t do crazy linking schemes, don’t count keyword density, don’t chase the algorithms, and don’t put any words on your page that don’t belong there.
… because Google has a duplicate content filter. If you just take your keyword list and write one article, then stick a different title tag on it for each keyword phrase and maybe change a paragraph here or there, well Google will only show one of those articles in the SERPs if you are lucky and if you are unlucky they may ban your site for attempting to spam the results.
… because otherwise why would anyone want to read it, what purpose does it serve, and how does it speak of your business?
… because this will make your business stand out, pulling both the customers and the search engines to you.
This is really an arbitrary number. You will probably find ‘experts’ advising 150 words, but what can you really say in that few words? Basically, just make sure you are actually saying something of value – if not, combine the article with another. As for how long should the articles be? Experts will say no more than 500 words, but I say that’s baloney. Make it as long as you want, just don’t ramble. People want the knowledge you have.
Ok, now that we know our ultimate goal is an article from about each like set of keywords, let’s take our keyword list and see what we can do with it now. *See the pdf file of this ebook for detailed information on how to determine keyword lists and how to break them down and determine which keywords are best to base articles on and how to do it.
Ok, so that’s the long tail method to traffic. Basically, it’s based on the principle that searches that only one or two people search for a day are, in total, much more numerous than the sum of each search that bring in hundreds of people per day. And it’s true. One of my sites sat at number 3 for the term Hawaii Travel for years. You would think a term like Hawaii travel would bring hundreds of people in a day. Well, it brought in about 30 people a day. That’s it. And now that I sit between number 6 and number 9 consistently for that term I get like 3 people a day from it. Obscure searches like big island snorkeling beach may bring me only one person a day, but I get thousands of people at my sites daily from thousands of similarly obscure search terms.
For insightful instruction into this method read this article. It is from early 2002 so there are two things from it that is completely outdated: do not submit your site to the search engines anymore (you want them to find you through a link), and don’t be free about reciprocal linking (I talk more about that kind of linking here). Also, I wouldn’t bother with a dedicated server unless you really get serious about ecommerce. Other than that, it’s as valid as it ever was. This is how normal people maximize the visitors to their website.
For an incredibly comprehensive search engine help ebook see the ebook Winning the Search Engine Wars. I bought this ebook several years back and really got a lot of good knowledge out of it. The best thing is it’s all in one compact format with simple, easy-to-understand language. It comes with a six month subscription to the most up-to-date, tested advice about getting your pages indexed and ranking well in the industry. It’s even run by a Hawaii resident!
Method Two: Pay for Traffic (takes money)
Pay for traffic includes pay-per-click, affiliate, pay-per-lead advertising, and independent advertising. I rely strictly on organic listings (free) and have never paid for traffic, so I can’t help you much here, but I’ll point you to some good reading material. Important: for any and all pay-for-traffic: You must create landing pages with marketing methods geared towards your keywords that brought in the click! Do not send everyone to your home page or any general page. You’ll just lose money that way.
I don’t advertise using any sort of pay-for-traffic methods, but I do frequently click on ads, both on webpages and in search engine results. I normally will not take the time to search for what I want. If the page I click over to does not tell me exactly what I thought it was going to because of the ad I clicked on, I just hit the back button and try the next one.
How to Write a Good Landing Page:
Create Effective Landing Pages
Create Landing Pages that Convert
This is when you pay either a website directly, or a search engine, or a broker of some sort an amount of money for every click you receive via the service. You then try to convert them into a buyer of some sort.
Beginner’s Guide to PPC Search engines (part 1)
Beginner’s Guide to PPC Search Engines (part 2)
Pay per click Guide
For affiliate advertising, you would set yourself up as a merchant, and then your affiliates would advertise your products or services for you. For every sale that comes from an affiliate site, you would pay the affiliate a commission, usually between 7 and 20 percent.
The big facilitator networks like linkshare and cj charge merchants big bucks, but that’s where most of the affiliates are. There’s also shareasale which is easy on merchants and good to affiliates, but still new. Or, you could be an indie (independent merchant) who runs their tracking software in house. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any good, unbiased information about becoming a merchant, you could just start by reading the “become a merchant” spiel at each affiliate network.
This is very affiliate like, but instead of paying when someone buys something, you would pay the affiliate each time someone from their link signs up for your newsletter or fills out a form. I am in a pay per lead program right now that pays me $1.25 every time someone signs up for a newsletter.
For Hawaii activities especially, there are tons of booking engines and specialty sites that will advertise your service for a fee. Just about every site here is a booking engine or site.
If you are Selling Products
If you are selling several products, you probably want to use the long tail method. You’d start by writing good descriptions of each and every product, detailing not only the features of the product but also the benefits. Give each product its own page. Use good, mild SEO on each of these pages. Use Wordtracker results to help determine what keywords should be targeted and placed on each page. Once your product pages are all indexed and hopefully ranking in the search engines you can add an informational section to your site to garner links and extra searchers. Make sure you have prominent links to a related product at the top and bottom of each information article to funnel searchers to your product pages.
A good definition for Search engine optimization is the act of altering a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines.
My never-break rules of SEO are:
These days, it’s better to underdo SEO than it is to overdo it. In the last couple of years Google implemented an Over-Optimization Penalty, meaning that some sites that were obviously heavily optimized fell in the rankings entirely, for every search term they formerly ruled.
The major thing that people found triggering the penalty was links in to the site almost entirely to the home page and all using the exact same wording in the anchor text. This points to a lot of bought links in, or links otherwise under the control of the person receiving them. However, things like too many keyword-repetitions also triggered it. Nobody knows what too many is, so don’t overdo it. Text should read naturally.
This is oh-so important for 3 reasons.
- If the search engines can’t find your pages they can’t index them.
- Links from your site to your site count in spreading your PR around so all of your pages, even the ones without external links (links from other sites to that exact page on your site) have a chance to rank well.
- Good navigation may increase the amount of pages a user views on your site, which may make Google think your site is of higher quality, thus increasing your rankings across all search terms
More on navigation:
Good Website Navigation
Website Navigation Tips
Everything possible usually consists of writing really good content or offering really cool tools or pictures on these pages and then making sure people see them (showcase them on your home page in a what’s new section and/or put one of them in your emails or forum signatures).
Links make the web go round. It seems that new webmasters these days hoard PR and do everything they can to keep from linking out. However, those of us who have been doing this for a long time can guarantee you that if you link out to quality sites whenever there is an opportunity, you will only help yourself. Think of it as link karma and a way to identify yourself as an authority on your topic.
Typically, Google will not rank any page on your site for any word or phrase UNLESS that term is either on the page or in the anchor text (clickable part) of a link pointing to the page. Therefore, if you want to rank for kona scuba diving you must have the term kona scuba diving somewhere on the page or have a lot of websites link to the page using that anchor text.
Google ranks pages based on an algorithm. The algorithm is a set of rules. Simplistically the algorithm could say something like: Give a webpage 1 point for every time a word is on the page up to 10 times. Subtract 1 point for every time after 10 times. Add two points if the word is in the title once. Subtract one point if it is in the title more than once. Add a ½ point for every different form of the word (run, ran, running, runs). Add ¼ point for every site that links to the page using the word in the anchor text. Add 1 point for every pagerank point the page has. Then, the page with the highest point score would come up first in the search results. People who rely heavily on SEO oftentimes chase the algorithm, meaning they optimize individual pages as much as possible – they make changes in how many times the keyword is on the page or in the title tag or in a heading tag, and then they watch if the page goes up or down in the results. The algorithm changes usually three or four times a year, so chasing the algorithm is futile, in my opinion.
If you have a life outside of algorithm chasing, it is most important to do smart, mild SEO on each page, don’t ever spam or use spammy techniques, and keep creating new content for your users. If you do this, your site should weather most algorithm changes. Sure, sometimes your rankings are up a little and sometimes they are down a little, but it will usually average out in the end.
How I do on-page SEO
I use my major term I am targeting once in the title tag close to the beginning of the tag. I try to use it or a form of it again in a heading on the page, again in bold or italic on the page, and if I can fit it into the filename that’s good too. If I can I try to use it early on the page and again at the end of the page. I put it or some variation of it in a link out if that makes sense. I have no formula, I just try to use it in a wide variety of ways always ensuring my writing makes sense and looks good.
More on SEO
High Rankings.com
Google’s page on SEO and SEOs
Webmasterworld
Winning the Search Engine Wars Ebook
Method 1: Throw a Bunch of Pages at the Engines and Hope something Sticks
This is my method: I make a moderately large, user-friendly, easily navigable site. I write and write and write page after page of content. Each page targets a few keyword phrases, but very mildly (I don’t do anything more than make sure the major keyword phrase is in the title tag, a heading, and on the page a couple of times). I try to get some links in to the home page (maybe by writing some articles or asking for them). I make sure I have a lot of internal pages that people will want to link to (pictures, maybe a contest, really useful information). Then, I move on to the next site. I don’t check rankings, I don’t worry or obsess or change anything. Invariably, most of my pages move to number one or two for some keyword phrase, frequently even for a phrase I didn’t anticipate.
Basically, I write for the search engine user, and not for the search engine. Then, I hope that the obvious quality of the site garners me lots of natural links in and high search engine rankings. It takes a while these days, maybe up to a year, but it always works.
Method 2: Links
If you get a lot of links in to your site, your rankings will be higher, as long as the search engines think they are natural links (not bought strictly to increase ranking) so your home page should show up higher for whatever phrase you are targeting. A lot of these links should have some form of the phrase you are targeting as their anchor text (clickable part of the link). The actual number of links you need to get on the front page will vary depending on the competitiveness of the term. For a non-competitive term you may only need 1 link. For something like home mortgages you might need several thousand links. Also, if you have a prominent link to your site from the top site for any search term, you can probably count on a significant percentage of that pages traffic from that term.
Why can’t I just Hope for a Number 1 listing because my site deserves it?
Wouldn’t it be great if we could all get number 1 listings in the search engines for our desired keywords. Well, we can’t. Only one site can be number one, only 10 sites can be on the front page, and the search engines have to decide on these sites algorithmically (no person ever looks at any of the sites). Unfortunately, Google and Yahoo also have aging delays (called a sandbox) of some sort these days, so unless you can get some major links in to your site pretty quickly, expect to wait around for a while for any ranking at all. Just for arguments sake, let’s say, for John of John’s Scuba Diving in Kona, he puts his site up and has a number 1 on Google and Yahoo within weeks for his desired search term, scuba diving Kona. Remember how many people we said were probably searching on that and closely related terms a day? Between 5 and 15 I think I surmised. That’s not much traffic for John.
Any one page on your site is not going to list high for more than one or two search terms. Home pages especially are notoriously hard to get to rank for hardly anything other than company name and maybe one other term.
- Contact webmasters and ask for one
If you are a Hawaii site, or a parenting site, or a business how-to site, or anything that could possible relate to any of these start with me. As long as I don’t think your site is spammy, and it looks like a complete site, and it’s interesting or unique in some way I may link to it. For Hawaii sites I probably will link to it. I may even ask you if you want to do an interview and get a pretty prominent link.I normally link to most people that ask, if I have a spot for their link and their site is a quality site. Find good sites in your niche and, if they are not your direct competition, ask them for a link.
- Smart reciprocal links
You have to be careful with this one. A few years ago an active reciprocal linking campaign could practically guarantee you a jump in rank. Then the search engines started to get upset they were being manipulated so easily and started to crack down. These days, willy-nilly reciprocal linking with anyone who asks could get you a ban in Yahoo and a penalty in Google. Don’t do it.The smartest way to do reciprocal links today is to not even have a links page. If you want to trade links with someone, make sure it is a site that is on the same topic as yours. If you are a Hawaii scuba dive boat operator, link to a hawaii beach site, but not a California limo company. Link to that beach site on one of your pages about Hawaii beaches, that way not only is it on topic, it’s useful to your visitors. Everybody wins.
- Write Articles
This is what’s hot right now (2006). The way many people do it is they write an article complete with an author box that has a link to their site, submit it to one of the article directories, like Ezine Articles, and wait for other people to come and find the article and put it on their site. I don’t like this method for 3 reasons:- Sometimes the people who put your article on their site leave off the link or don’t make it clickable.
- Most sites that use free articles from article banks are low-quality, making the link to your site a low-quality link.
- In my opinion, it’s just a matter of time before the search engines completely devalue these types of article links, just like they did reciprocal links.
The smart ways to get links from article writing:
- Write a quality article and submit it to one quality, high PR site like bootsnall with a link back to your site.
- Write a quality article and contact a few webmasters of smaller sites in your niche and ask for a link back in exchange for them using your content.
- Pay for links
Be very careful about this. Whatever you do, do not use a text link broker. Google has publicly said they look down on the practice of buying of text links for the sake of raising PR or rankings. Many websites, however, have found success buying links from sites within their niche for the traffic it brings. - Submit within your niche
Look for sites that are NOT full-fledged (many topics) directory sites, but which list and talk about sites like yours. For example, John’s Scuba Diving in Kona would look for sites that list scuba diving sites in Hawaii, or in the Nation, or in the Pacific, or in the world.For example, I type in scuba diving websites in Google and the first result is this page: scubasuperpower.com — I click on destinations and see that this webmaster doesn’t even have a Hawaii destination listed, but if you look at some of the other destinations you’ll see that each is a little description of diving in that place, provided by a website that the webmaster links to at the end of the article! Perfect! I now would email this webmaster and ask him if he wants a Hawaii article in exchange for a link to my site. You also could try terms like suggest a site scuba diving, suggest a URL scuba diving, cool sites scuba diving.
- Authority posts or pictures
This is a hard, time-consuming, takes a long time to see results, method, but probably the best one. You pick a subject and write the absolute best page on the web about it. For example, you could write a page about Diving Spots on the Big Island. You include over 50 such spots. You tell which are the best and why. You include pictures and personal experiences at each spot. You then try to get people to see this page (maybe put a link on your home page, in your email messages, on your forum signatures) and wait for the links to roll in. An over-the-top excellent page on any subject people talk about on the Internet will get tons and tons of natural links, over time. Years probably, but it will be a fantastic link draw to your site. Make a few of them! - Local Affiliations
If you are a Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau member you are entitled to a link from their site. A chamber of commerce may offer the same. Check with any organization your business is a member of. Some non-profit organizations will link to your site for a donation. Your alma mater may offer alumni links or webpages. - Directories
A few years ago mass directory submits were another way to get lots of links and hence higher rankings. These days, the search engines seem to have devalued most directory links. I still like to submit to some blog directories for my blogs I have attached to all my sites, but other than that I don’t bother submitting to free directories. However, a yahoo directory link ($299 a year)(!) and a dmoz link (free but takes forever) supposedly offer rankings boosts because a real person reviews your site. - Social Networking
Attach your website address to all of your emails. Participate in some forums related to your topic, and put your website address in your signature. - New technologies
If your site doesn’t already consist of a blog, start a blog on it so you can take advantage of automatic tags and rss technologies. Tag your posts so they show up at del.icio.us , furl , technorati.com. Make it easy for your RSS feeds to be subscribed to.
