Image via CrunchBase

If you are in the business of  websites development, one of the easiest ways to make money by doing what you know is to flip them. In fact, you don’t necessarily need to know about the coding. If you are able to pick a theme and create a couple of good articles you could be flipping blogs without problem.

What’s a blog flipping?

Have you created a blog just to sell it? Well, that’s a flip. The price of a blog vary depending the quality of its theme and also, if the blog is established – with a couple of months, with loyal readers -  or not.

Things you need to consider

• Theme: you can either create your own theme, which will take you more effort, or you can pick a free/premium one. The second option will take you almost zero effort, but it has a difference: by taking a premium theme you could sell your site more expensive.
• Content: like the first point, you have two tracks here. If you are selling an established blog, I guess your content is original and unique. But if you are selling a non-established site – which means it is brand new, without loyal readers -  you could use re-purposed content that has been or may be reused on other sites. The kind of content also determines the price of the blog.
• Revenue: depending how much the blog you are selling makes a month, the price can be higher or lower.
• Traffic: this is kind of obvious but there’s people who ask how a blog can be sold for $60k. The higher the traffic a blog has, the higher the price. If your blog is not an established one, you cannot expect to receive thousands for it.

Try selecting a niche that converts when you are going to sell a blog. If you do not know how to recognize a good niche, so I invite you to check out this post and also, to stop by flippa’s marketplace so you can see what’s selling and what’s not.

If you think flipping sites is much trouble to you, so hire someone who makes the hard part. For example, you could hire an affordable copywriter to create 5 original articles at good forums such as DigitalPoint or Warrior. Also, you could hire someone to get an original logo.

Remember, the more is developed/customized a blog, the more you can ask for it. So you could hire someone to customize a theme so you could sell it for more. In fact, you could hire someone to make the whole work and then sell it for a higher amount so you can get a profit practically for free.

So, have you flipped websites? I’ve done it through Flippa and SiteDeal!

Naturally, everything follows a pattern. If you read about fractals, you will find that they appear on tree leaves, broccoli and so on.

As you can imagine, people’s behavior DOES follow a pattern too, and you can see this fact by analyzing a group of people… If you are a leader, you should know that usually the people you speak to tend to follow a kind of line, or at least most of them…

The thing become interesting when you find persons who stand out from the crowd! So then, by analyzing this kind of people – aka freaks – you can actually know more about what is happening in the environment and so then, improve it.

Have you seen bloggers changing their theme from time to time? may be the sidebar or the position of the links? Well, this is because they probably would be using heatmaps in order to study the behavior of the people who visit their blogs.

How a heatmap looks like?

A heatmap shows you where the visitors have been clicking on your website. With this awesome tool you can test the position of your ads, may be icon alternatives for subscribing to your blog etc etc… Use your imagination! This can be used when you need an input from your visitors, without letting them know.

One of the purposes I use heatmaps for is to analyze which landing page  “looks” – aka sells – better. Remember that your audience will probably think different than you, so don’t make any suppositions because you don’t know how they will react to certain graphic.

So as you can see, this is perfect for split tests among landing pages, which I will be talking about in future posts.

The Tool

To run heatmaps, I use the services of Crazy Egg. There should be lots of web services out there, but I like this one. So try it by yourself and tell me what do you think about it! It’s pretty easy to use, you just need to upload a script to your website and walah! – you will be catching every single click made on your website.

Input request - Are you using heatmaps? What for? Share what you know about this topic!

Every time we want to create a website, we think about the sources of traffic. In my case, the most of my traffic comes from other sites, such as blogs and social media networks. In the case of search engines, I have noticed that I received many visits through the keyword “canonical url” due to a post that I wrote many time ago.

No matter what, the fact is that getting indexed and raking high on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others, is a must if you want to get tons of traffic through them.

As you may know, this is very related with the Meta Tags you use, something that I have explained in other post but I will retook in this post.

Submitting your website on Search Engines

The only way you will make money with your website is attracting visitors to it! Understanding by website a blog, forum, social media or anything else. You won’t magically get money with your website if people don’t see what you are offering. Of course you can attract visitors with PPC, paid advertising or blog reviews, but in this post we will deal with search engines.

There are 4 main search engines that you should submit your website on:

• Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2
• dmoz: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

I will tell you the truth, the only search engine which you should submit your site on is dmoz. If you use the form to apply for the other 3 ones you will be wasting your time. Why? Because everybody submits its websites through that forms and there are big lists of websites waiting months to be indexed. There are other way to get indexed by those search engines without using its forms .

For example, getting backlinks from websites that are already indexed can help you a lot, because all these search engines are constantly sending their spiders to scan every website they have indexed. So when they scan a website which is not listed in their databases, they have a mechanism that put you in automatically. So if you think to launch a new blog for example, try to get some backlinks from sites related with yours and this way, you will get indexed very fast. When I launch this blog, I applied the technique that I’m sharing with you know and I get indexed in less than 24 hours .

Build a Search Engine-Friendly site

The main difference of ranking among the millions of websites listed by search engines is because ones are more friendly than others to search engines. What do I mean by? Everything in your website has an impact on your ranking. Websites with many images and few text are terrible for SEO, how they pretend to be analyzed by search engines? I know they have complex algorithms but it’s not so advanced! In the other hand, websites with less dynamic structures and more rich text are easily indexed by search engines, websites with headers, the footers, xml feeds, alt tags on images, titles on their links and that kind of things.

Keep in mind that search engines cannot red the following information:

• Multimedia files like Flash or words within images.
• Content in frames.
• Content on dynamic pages.

The last point has changed a little with the passing of time, because if you think about the case of the blogs, unless you force them to create a static page, your content will be created on dynamic pages. Nevertheless, using static or dynamic pages your content will be read and recognized by search engines without problems.

In the case of images and links, remember to add an alt tag and a title, search engines register that kind of things when they send their spiders, also know as crawlers or robots.

Optimizing your website for Google

As we know, Google is constantly changing its algorithm to determine the rank of a website, and reason of that is simple. Among other reasons, they do this basically to prevent big sites from dominating results permanently. So as you can imagine, optimizing your website for Google could be a hard task because they are shaking the things constantly.

Google bases its algorithm starting from keywords. So I recommend you to check my preview post Finding Good Keywords For Your Website in order to know more about this topic. The fact is that PageRank equation is a big mystery, no one knows with exactitude which are the components which help you to have a higher rank, but there are some hints which appear to have an extra value on the formula:

• Inbound  Links from related sites with high PR.
• Inbound  Links from blogs.
• Inbound Links from .edu, .gov or .org.
• Outbound Links to high-ranked relevant websites.
• The size and quantity of information on your site.
• A Google Sitemap. You can generate one for WordPress by using this plugin, or by visiting this site.
• Updated content.
• Visible Title and Alt Tags.
• Using keywords on your Heading tags, bold and italicized words.
• Site traffic.

Optimizing your website for other search engines, such as Yahoo! or MSN

As you could see in the preview part of the post, Google focuses its attention mainly on inbound links, or links that point back to your site. In the case of Yahoo!, MSN or other search engines, they seem to emphasize on Meta Tags.

Meta Tags appear at the beginning of the source code of your website, in the <head> section. They provide information about your site to the browser and search engines, and the most important of them are:

• The Title
• Page Description
• Keywords

The Title can be set by using the HTML code <title> and it sets the title of your website, being this the text which the browser will display when someone visits your site.

The Page Description can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“description” content=“Your site description here” /> and basically this is the text that search engines will show when someone find your site through they.

By the way, the second one is the result showed by Yahoo! and It seems that it’s not updated…

The Keywords tag can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“keywords” content=“keyword1, keyword2, keyword 3…” /> and it lists the relevant terms for a website. Remember that it is really important to set only relevant keywords or you could get slapped by search engines! Also, I recommend you the following things in order to optimize your website for any search engine:

• Try to keep your keyword list under 20 elements. I know it could be hard, in fact I’m using like 40 now, but once you see which keywords are converting are which not, you should eliminate them from the list.
• Long Tail Keywords or keyword phrases are more useful that a single word. Basically this is because the competition and the macro-view, the more specific you are with your keywords the higher will be your rank.
• Do not include articles or prepositions ( a, an, the, on, from, by…). They are not necessary.
• Use lowercase in your keywords. If you capitalize them, capitalization will be required for match.
• Plural words include the singular ones when they are in the same root. For example, the keyword roots includes root, but companies does not include company.
• Phrases include the same words without spaces, i.e. make money online includes makemoneyonline but not vice versa.

Remember that when you use phrases, search engines try to match your keywords with the search manipulating your keyword, i.e. inverting it, mixing it…

What about dmoz?

This is The Open Directory Project from directory.mozilla.org, and it is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. It uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

It also feeds its results to Google, AOL and other directories of the web, spreading your website through many sites if you are listed there.

Once your submitted your site to dmoz it will be study. They don’t accept all the sites, you need to cover some requirements and possibly you will be rejected at the first time. Just remember to add your URL in the right category, this is a really important factor which helps you to get in, because if you are a little away from your path, you will be rejected automatically.

To Conclude

It is vital for a website to be indexed by search engines in order to get targeted traffic and attract new readers or customers. I encourage you to check my other post related with keywords and SEO in order to complement the extensive information provided in this post. I hope you like the tips! if you have any special thing that you want to share feel free to leave a comment!

Whenever we read or speak, we are thinking on keywords. Sometimes we forget an idea while we are speaking and then we remember it because of a word related with it. As you can imagine, keywords are everywhere, specially on Internet. Every blog, forum, social community or any other website has keywords which characterize it.

So what are keywords and how can I choose the correct ones?

Well my friend, keywords are basically that words with special significance, in particular any word used to reference something else. They link to other words or other information.

The term keyword in reference to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) usually refers to a word or keyword phrase (combination of words, such as ‘best paid advertising’) used to find relevant and useful web pages. Ok now you know what are the keywords, but how could you know which ones are the proper for your website?

Well first of all, you need to have in mind something. Internet is a big virtual world, and many people are competing at the same time for specific keywords, specially the short ones, i.e. diets, money, finance, music, etc…

I suggest you to have in mind the following 2 things when you are going to select your keywords:

1. The keywords should drive traffic: This means that they should be search on search engines in order to drive traffic. If you select keywords which nobody looks for you will be wasting your time.
2. The keywords should not be too targeted: This is a little obvious for someone who knows how this works, but it couldn’t be for a newbie. If you select highly-targeted keywords, it would be very difficult for you to rank for them.

Once you learned that you may have many questions, for example, how do you know when a keyword is highly-targeted? Everything will be asnwered in this post my friend, so be quiet and keep reading. Now, let’s review the procedure of selecting good keywords.

Selecting The Keywords

To start, make a list with the most basics things you have in your mind. What? Are you telling me that you don’t have anything in mind? Don’t worry, I’m going to help you with that. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my site about?
• What will I offer there?
• What kind of people will visit my blog?
• What are the keywords of my competitors?

Once you thought in those questions, you will have many keywords in mind. Write them in a paper or in a blank document because now we are going to explode and optimize them with some web tools.

Wordtracker GTrends

GTrends is a free tool which you can generate 100 keywords by entering just one, and get the estimate of search volume as well as the competition on Google. Let’s see how it looks:

Then you need to enter a keyword very related with your website and click on Hit Me.

I searched for “affiliate marketing” and I got 100 potential related keywords, the most searched on Google. At the left you will see the searches, and if you click in the icon of the right, you will see the competition of the selected keyword in Google.

It is recommendable to take keywords with a competition less than 50K. If you take one with more than 50,000 it will be hard for you to rank for it. Also if you get a keyword with less than 20K, you will probably rank in the first places of Google.

Also, there are other web services which you can use to fetch keywords, and they are the following ones:

• Traffic Travis: This is a good tool which you can take your market research, search engine optimization and PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this suite of tools. This software is available for windows, and it has 2 versions, a free -which let you fetch just 200 keywords- and a paid one, which let you fetch more than that.
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestion: This is a web based application of the DigitalPoint’s team.
• Google Keyword SandBox: You can also find this tool in your Adsense account under Tools > Keyword Tool. ith this you can generate a big list of keywords by giving a couple of them. It explores and gives you synonyms of the entered keywords.
• Google Sets: Another great tool of Google. You need to type some words and you will get a list of related keywords.
• Good Keywords: This is a simple and good Windows software to find the right keywords for your web pages.

Using Google Keyword Tool

By entering some keywords you will get hundreds of them by using synonyms. You can fetch keywords by Descriptive words/phrases or by Website content (this last one works to “steal” other people’s keywords).

Then you will get a list of 100 keywords or more, with detailed information such as competition, search volume and others. In the last screenshot you can see how these result looks like, the green bars are the competitions which as you can see, there are keywords more targeted than others…

What next? Export all the keywords to a .txt file and then go to the tool called Traffic Estimator. Then, open the .txt and copy-paste all the keywords into the box. It is very important to set the maximum CPC for ever keyword, which is $100. By doing this you will get the highest priority for the keywords that you are looking for.

Then you need to process that and export them the results as .cvs. Then, I invite you to check this video made by John Cow to learn how to use a program called KeywordCorral, which is free and will help you to choose the right keywords for your website. The video of Cow is oriented to Blog Titles, but it is perfectly applicable to website keywords.

Recommendations

Short keywords are really hard to rank for, and you should look for another alternatives. I suggest you to use Long Tail keywords, which are those ones formed by two or more words, i.e. lose weight fast, bes affiliate networks, climbing everest mountain, etc… Nowadays, these kind of keywords are much better for everything, because they are more specific and they have less competition.

Note: Remember to get keywords with less than 50k competitors.

In the creation of any kind of website (i.e. blogs, forums…) one of the most important aspects that you need to consider when you are going to design it is related to the interface between the final user and your website. That interface could be more or less amiable depending of the color scheme or palette that you have.

I know that is not possible to everyone to design its own website, so many times the people let their designer to make that choice. If that is the case, you suppose that your designer know about the website colors’ theory, or not? In this post I will give you the necessary tips to help you with the choice of a color pallete for your website.

Color Meanings

Do you know that colors have different meanings? Yes! Depending of the color your website will look adapted according to its niche. But what the colors mean? Let’s check it out:

Red: This color symbolizes energy, action, strength, leadership, courage. This color stimulates people to make quick decisions, is inherently exciting and the more color red the more the level of energy perceived. It draws attention and it is specially used on Marketing to focus the people attention on a particular element. That’s the reason why many people use this colors on landing pages.

Pink: This color symbolizes love, friendship, beauty. This color is a mix of a kind of red and a passive blue, that’s the reason why it represents passiveness, calming the mind and nerves. Also, it denotes feminine qualities, which make it one of the preferred colors of adolescent girls.

Brown: This color symbolizes stability, simplicity, health, reliability. It is the color of earth and people associate it with nature.

Orange: This color symbolizes happiness,  creativity, determination, stimulation. It is quite similar to red and many people use to misinterpret it, but think well about it. This color shares some properties with the red, but if you want to attract the people attention you should definitively use red.

 

Gold: This one symbolizes wisdom and wealth. This is the color of riches, and you could use it if you want to create feelings of success, good health, relaxation or personal power.

 

 

Yellow: Yellow represents optimism, enlightenment and happiness, stimulating metal and physical activity. Like red, this one is also good to attract attention, so this is why you can find landing pages with yellow and red squares.

 

 

Green: Green symbolizes life, growth, health, fertility, endurance. Like brown, this color is associated to nature.

 

 

Blue: This color represents peace, youth, spirituality, trust. This is the most favorite color among people due to it is the color of sky and the ocean, being perceived as a constant in our lives. It is perfect to inspire calming, cooling, depth and stability.

 

 

Gray: This is a monotonic color which represents security, formality, maturity. It is great because it can be mix with any color, but it should be mix with a vivid color if you don’t want to inspire sadness or depression.

 

 

Black: This color can be interpreted by many things, but basically it represents seriousness, conventionalism, Mystery. Black is authoritative and powerful but you should mix it with light colors if you don’t want to inspire death, emptyness, fear or evil.

 

 

Well those are the most basic color meanings, of course I’m not a proffesional on the topic but however you can guide yourself with this article. So once you know the color that you are going to implement on your site, what do you need to do next? How do you know which colors are mixable with it? Well, check out the following resources & tools that I collected for you:

• The Color Wizard 3.0 : The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors. It generates a pallete of colors which look good among them.
• ColorToy 2.0: This is is a Flash based color scheme generator and picker. It generates complementary color schemes based on your inputted color values or randomly, which is much more fun.
• COLOURlovers: COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. It gives the people who use color – whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification – a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

With the information provided here and with the help of the resources mentioned above, you should be able to choose the colors that combine with your site personality/niche.

Nowadays, many of the good domain names are already taken on Internet. Many people buy domains just for reselling and not for personal use, people who make shorter the list of good available domains.

I remember when the .me was launched, I wanted to buy some names to work with in the future. The problem was that many of those good names were already bought, and remembering a specific case, I found a good domain which I decided to buy and just then I press the button to buy it -after entering all my information related with my credit card- I got owned, someone bought that domain seconds before me.

But why that kind of competition? First of all, to understand the reason of these competition for the good names, you need to know what is considered a good domain name.

What is the first thing you notice when you type an url in the browser? In effect, the very first thing you notice (may be unconsciously) when you do that, is the length of that url. If the url is too large (20 characters or more) the people can forget it because of its complexity. Even a string of 15 characters are considered as long by me. So the best thing you can try to find is very short domains, strings which less than 15 characters would be fine. In my case, I have just 6 characters on my domain name, but what’s the advantage of having a short web domain?

People tend to remember catchy and short words faster than long ones. If you think about it, you will remember faster a word with 2 3 or up to 4 syllables  than a word with more than 4 syllables. But besides having a short name, you should also look for simplicity. What if you choose a string of 6 characters but all of them are random letters? i.e. jahsdjsjdg.com, khaslkdh.net…. Could you remember that? So lesson two, you should use a simple domain name, something that you can spell and remember without problems.

Many people tend to include keywords in the domain, which is not bad. In fact, it is a very good way to rank higher on search engines but sometimes, it’s not possible. For example, if you try to include “forex” or “diet” in a domain name, you will see that there is only one way to have it included, and this is choosing a very long and complex domain name, at least in english, the more common language on Internet.

Have you noticed that in the present time, many of the new web services have strange domain names? As example we have flickr, plurk, tumblr and others… The reason of that is due to the supersaturation of the internet, forcing the people to acquire strange, but short and easy to remember domain names.

Where to buy?

You can acquire and register low cost domain names at GoDaddy. GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar and is the flagship company of The Go Daddy Group, Inc. Go Daddy is widely recognized for its success, having been ranked #8 on the 2004 Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing privately held companies; #20 on the 2005 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 (growing 8,274 percent!); and having won the CNET Editor’s Choice award in 2001, the Name Intelligence Largest Net Gain Award in 2002, 2003 and 2005; the Name Intelligence Users’ Choice Award in 2005 as well as the #1 Best Overall Registrar in 2003. Go Daddy also won the Arizona Corporate Excellence Award for fastest growing privately-held company in 2003 and Most Innovative Large Company in 2004.

Things you should consider before buying a domain

Before buying a domain, I recommend you to make a big list of possible names. Remember that possibly, many of that names could be already taken by someone else, so try to have a wide list. Also, you should ask to yourself the following questions:

• Is it catchy, is it easy to remember?
• Is it easy to spell/pronounce?
• How long/short is it?
• Is it complex or simple?
• And may be the most important, match this name with my website/service/product?

Then, it’s time to go to GoDaddy and look for what you have listed. If you are lucky, you could find a shot and catchy website domain name . Good luck with that!