Greetings

[CJHund]

[Lynn Terry]

Welcome CJ

I remember doing that call - what a fun topic! I'm glad you enjoyed it, and that it lead you here. This is a great community, and you'll find everyone super helpful.

You have to be careful with some of those "all inclusive packages". There are a lot of "business in a box" type things out there, but it really does take an investment of time & energy (& creativity!) to set up a profitable online business.

What did you mean by RSA?

[CJHund]

[Lynn Terry]

Ahh. RSS

I cant recall what we discussed specifically, but the way things are done has changed a bit over the years (market trends & such) so that information may or may not be relevant anymore.

It is free to set up a blog on blogger.com, and every blog comes with its own RSS feed already built in. So you dont have to do anything special to have a feed. The feed makes it easier for your readers to subscribe to your blog.

If this is a long-term project that you plan to make money with, you'd be better off setting it up on your own domain name instead of on whatever.blogspot.com . See this link for details:

http://www.clicknewz.com/782/blogger-vs-wordpress/

But even if you stick with blogger.com, all you really need to do is post great content and get good links pointing into your site (blog). Both are necessary to get good search engine rankings so people can find your content easily when they are searching for it on Google or Yahoo, etc.

To learn SEO (search engine optimization) you can download this free guide by Dan Thies: http://www.SEOfaststart.com

[CJHund]

Ah, yes ... the jagged pieces are starting to come together for me now.

So, I already have a Wordpress blog attached to this affiliate site I purchased a while back. I'm in the process of learning how to work with the blog (Wordpress puts out some GREAT help docs ... which I'm sure you knew already). The objective here is to get folks to link to my site? If that's the case, I think I get it. I put out great content, and others will take notice. But how does my blog get put in front of people? I guess that's the part I still need to figure out. Is my blog automatically broadcast somewhere? Does RSS play into this somehow?

The Wordpress dashboard shows you who's linked to your site, but is there some way to broadcast OUT from my blog to other blogs? If I put out a great article on how to manicure my collie's toe nails, who's going to see it?

Perhaps the answer to that question lies in Dan's SEO book. I'm going to start reading that now.

Thanks Lynn!

[Lynn Terry]

Right. You write quality content on your topic. You can encourage people to sign up for your RSS feed, or for email updates. See my blog as an example: http://www.clicknewz.com I use Aweber's blog broadcast feature to have them automatically send out an email every Monday with all of the latest posts to people who subscribe.

Aweber is under $20/mo, but they have a free trial: http://sswt.aweber.com

I use FeedBurner to manage my RSS Feed and make it easier for people to subscribe. It also allows me to see stats for my feed. They are free: http://www.feedburner.com

Both of those are great once you have people ON your site. The goal there is to get them to subscribe and KEEP coming back.

To get traffic, you want to get each page of your site (or blog) ranking well for its own keyword phrase. For that, definitely read Dan's book (SEOfaststart.com).

Also see: http://www.clicknewz.com/634/keyword-placement/

(^^ good example of a relevant link to my blog )

[CJHund]

[Lynn Terry]

[CJHund]

[MommyEnterprises]

Hello C.J.

Welcome aboard!

[Lynn Terry]

C.J.,

Your website is identical to the one given to everyone else who signed up through them. See a1integritylending.com for example. These are referred to as "company replicated websites" - similar to the ones given to people in direct sales or MLM companies.

I'm pretty sure you wont be able to add Adsense to that site, since that would take business away from them - advertise their competitors - and the main objective of the site is for you to send them leads.

These types of sites dont do well in the major search engines. And there arent 500 search engines that matter - only 3: Google, Yahoo & MSN - with Google holding the largest market share of the three.

I didnt find your site in Google.

In order to get traffic to a site like that you'll have to use paid advertising, social networking, offline advertising, etc.

[CJHund]

Thank you for your input. I think the fact that so little of this site is under my control doesn't bode well for me.

I discovered that my boss in my normal j.o.b. is also an affiliate marketer, and he's worked with mortgages before. I had him take a look at the site this weekend. He had similar comments.

I probably flushed some $ on this deal, but it DID point me to a whole host of other programs and materials that I didn't know about before. In that sense, it could turn out to be worthwhile.

Thank you,
C.J.

[Lynn Terry]

[CJHund]

[Lynn Terry]

That's the hardest part - actually creating the website. All of the bullet points you listed are things you can easily add on or get code to insert once you have a website. I use Dreamweaver myself, but I started out in this years ago (90's) before there was much of anything else to use. I actually started out hand-coding and upgraded to Dreamweaver.

I am going to poll my blog readers this week on creating websites, since there are so many different options. Good timing for your question - I'll let you know when that link is live if you want to follow along.