OK - I've been around photography forums long enough to know that newbie questions are sometimes tolerated but most often ignored. I'm no newbie in photography (proof of that later), auto-gen'ng portal sites and milking splogs, but have decided to become a white-hatter and I'm a newbie in this respect. I also know that newbies normally get the usual "search the forums" replies, but this time, I want to make it a little different. I want to pay *you* to help me. Inspiration for this thread comes from the super replies to (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=66754), so thanks to all who replied there, especially the idea of starting a case study of sorts on the steps a new website should go through until it gets indexed in the seach engines. OK - here's the deal. I'm tired of paying good bucks for ebooks and private forums that don't help me much. I would like to tap into the collective wisdom of willing DP members for this project. For each tip and guidance, I will Paypal you $2 (how I wish this forum has the "Buy a Beer" icon ala warriorforum.com). I only have $100 to spare, so that's enough for 50 good, solid tips. I said I was a newbie, but I'm not THAT new, so tips on how to FTP files to the server won't get the $2 My top burning questions are listed below - solid answers to these will MOST DEFINITELY get my $2: Recommend a hosting service that isn't associated with spam or blackhat sites. I don't want to use any of my current hosts eg Hostgator, PowerVPS that I have my autogen'd sites on. If you can convince me that this does not matter, I'll give you $2 Linking and promotion strategy - which service to use, what to lookout for, blogs good enough? Who would be interested to link up to this site? Should I use Joomla? Or good ole Frontpage? Recommend some good people at Elance.com, etc whom you trust to write content and do programming for your sites I don't have a top-notch system in place to track stuff like this, so I'll use the good old Excel spreadsheet into which goes your paypal id, and the tip that you shared. I'll also put a link to your website or your post. The ongoing and final results will be posted on a page within my blog. OK, now - how can I get you to trust me that I want to be a bona-fide white hatter, and that I'll paypal you the promised $2? OK, do a Google search for David Chin - my pbase page will appear right at the top (or maybe it depends on which Google server serves your area?) - the Nikon D70 tips pages were what earned me my initial $5/day Adsense 1 year ago. Visit my photo gallery and browse around - ok, to answer your question, my twin daughters were born on Christmas Day, 2005 Now, look at my profile (darn DP rules prevent me from posting external links, but they're a good control) where you'll find a sub-page within my Pbase galleries welcoming all who've read this post - there's also details of the topic I wish to create a site for. You can do a copyscape or string search and you'll find no duplicates, simply because this Malaysian-made car is so uninspiring no one bothered to put up a site for it. That's it - post away! I'm looking forward to your contributions. Please understand that the elements of fun and learning are the major reasons why I'm running this experiment, so don't hold back your wisdom (if it's too sensitive, PM me). Blood, swear and tears are all important for online success, but if I can shorten the process, so much the better. My only request is that you make your replies reasonably detailed. Please PM me your paypal id so that I can make the payment. The decision on who to award $2 is final, but appeals can be raised . I'll be getting a new domain for this site, and will share every detail that went into the site's creation. Let's see where the site gets in the SE indexes - if it does, it's a success, and if it even earns $0.01, I'd declare it a super success. (Yahoo! me if you wanna chat on this)
david chin? were you featured in The Star sometime back? i distinctly remember that name....and the Nikon. are you sure you're willing to pay for this? it's all over the general marketing forum.
Devin - me in the star? Not that I know of. I just did a search, and there's an article on David Chin, the owner of Dave's Deli, and no, I'm not that David Chin As for paying for this information, yes, I'm willing to. Rationale is that I don't have the luxury of time to search through the threads. Also, money talks, no matter how small. In my case, I'm looking to solicit genuine assistance and to show my sincerity in this pursuit via the $2/tip. Even in a previous forum I was in, I enjoyed no success until I offered to pay this person a share of my Adsense earnings if only he would give me some valuable tips. He did, and didn't want any payment from me, and based on his tip, I grossed >8k a month later (the technique doesn't work anymore now). The amount of money is not an issue, it's but a mere token to get people to share their hard-earned knowledge, and it could prove cheaper and more effective than buying another ebook.
I don't need money, but I may take you up on the beer. I may be visiting KL in a few months. I recommend HostDrive. The owner is an SEO and a member here and he understands well the needs of SEO's. I believe that the best links are the ones that are made manually. Google is getting frighteningly good at filtering out spammy links. Find people with related web sites. E-mail them individual and personalized e-mails. PM me your URL and I will link to it if it's related to one of my web sites. Joomla or another professional-grade CMS -- definitely. Frontpage will end up costing you visitors because page bloat affects page load time. In addition, a good CMS will save you time and enable you to have reusable and maintainable code.
I'd go for dreamweaver 8 any day of the week, the code is much cleaner. try to submit your sites to lots of directories for 'one way links' much more valuable than reciprical links. 2 tips, go buy yourself a Kenny rogers roast chicken meal
ah. i thought that was you. fair enough. i've been here long enough, so i can give you some in depth tips on links. am a newbie in the other two areas though. 1) find related sites and request for a link exchange. personalise your email, mention something about their site and then breifly exlpain the benefit of linking. then ask for a recip link. keep track of who you asked. 2) to help you find those sites, you can go to a competitor's site and see who links to them. just use the 'link' operator in SEs. find a few of those sites and ask them to link to you. 3) look for links in the Buy Trade Sell forum, you can get some nice bargains there. 4) unrelated links may not help much, but it doesn't hurt. every link counts. join a service like Pyramind Linking (non-affiliate URL) to get some extra one-way backlinks. 5) Link exchange services i use are linkmetro and linkmarket. i get alot of unrelated links requests, but beneath all those mud are some ore. be selective. 6) write a press release about your site. submit it to several PR websites. there're fees though, but it's good. the exposure you get can help. 7) submit your sites to directories. you can pay someone to do this for you, or you can spend time to do it yourself. i submitted manually to 200+ directories, and traffic from directories alone is about 80 per day. if you do it yourself i recommend you get roboform to help you automate form filling. most directories asks for the same details anyway, so it saves alot of time. 8) write knowledgable articles and submit it to article directories. again, you can pay someone to do it for you or you can do it yourself. if you pay someone, you can use www.isnare.com services or DP member mad4. article helps more in getting backlink. 9) offline advertising. this is equally important. one thing you can do is to submit the press release you wrote to local papers. if you article appear in StarTwo, you can get lots of traffics. 10) tell friends, family, etc. 11) distribute flyers in your areas. you can sometimes get a printing company to print flyers or posters for RM0.40 per page. this method is not really effective though. people tend to throw flyers away. or better, get a mailing service, where you pay a company to mail letters to residential areas. 12) get others to advertise for you. like me, i get friends from other colleges to put up a poster in their college noticeboards, advertising my sig site. 13) do a nice looking car sticker and stick it onto your car. if you like, you can pay others to stick the sticker on their cars. 14) a blog is good. use the blog to write reviews and provide occassional tips. people like to write new stuffs. don't be philosophical though. you want repeat visitors. 15) if you have the time, create a photography forum once your site gets enough traffic. don't get a forum too soon, you need to have enough traffic first. once you have, start promoting your forum. however this is not easy to accomplish. that's 15 that i can think of now.
Deano, I'd rather paypal you some money - if you could provide a list of link directories that *actually work* and are credible. I don't want Google to penalise me for getting links from bad territory. Worth $2 here Dreamweaver is out of the question as I don't have the software. No $2 for this
Devin, PM me your Paypal ID - I'm gonna filter thru the 15 tips to see which one(s) to pay you for I'm also curious to know why you didn't recommend alivedirectory for linking to my new site?
I've just updated my list of requirements at post#1, specifically, I'd like for you to recommend good content writers and programmers at elance.com, etc - this'll come in handy if I want to consider outsourcing the work
you didn't ask. if i did i could recommend you alot of other directories. alive web directory is not mine anyway. but really there's a heck lot of directories on the net to submit to. the 220 that i submit is just a small part. this thread has a whole list of directories and article sites: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=62009 all good sites.
i forgot one more. PPC advertising. it helps in getting traffic. if you want i can recommend someone to help you in your PPC campaign (fees applicable of course. as in fees for that person's services). another one: submit your site to G sitemap. since you have a big site it helps you get indexed quickly. yet another: join the DP Coop Network.
Guess that devin beat me to a list of directories, so now you'll definately have to do withou a 'kenny rogers' few good directories from members of this forum are Alive Directory Site Sift Axeq The last directory is having a few problems at the moment as Jim got stitched by a Dodgy host, but it will be back soon. Please do not send me any money, save it for someone else
Deano, this is truly appreciated. Your tips and the rest that make it to the shortlist gets updated on my blog.
Hosting Services: you can try Media Temple. They seem rather professional and all. CMS: Joomla, Mambo, Alfresco
I would recommend http://www.articlesandcontent.com/ Emma and John do a great job and normally a quick turn-around. They have writen a wide range of articles for different topics and styles of writing. I Also don't need or want the money.