Petra-Weiss.com

Now, I actually posted this a couple of days ago, and straight after posting my sidebars lost a few of their widgets, so I had to delete the post and have my fantastically helpful hosting company re-build the site from before posting this post (Paula and Dan from D9Hosting are fabulous, whenever I have a problem they get back to me personally within hours!).

Never mind, I still want you to have this post, I might just try and leave out the screen shots I did – you will still be able to follow, trust me. So here it goes:

Have you ever wondered how to create a flash looking banner or button to advertise your website? I certainly did, and a little while ago I actually found out, from one of my fellow webmasters Maya, who runs a very successful blog for beach lovers called Completely Coastal. I came across her blog searching for possible sites for a link exchange to my beach site. And there it was, in her sidebar on the right hand side – a great button to advertise your site, even with a copy-and-paste html code for anybody to grab it and display it on their site! Of course I needed to know how she did it. And Maya was so nice to explain it to me.

One thing I changed in her instructions, though – she said she created the button with Paint.net, and I tried that, but I have to say I found the program too complicated for me, I just couldn’t work it out. (Blonde? )

The software I have been using to create my banner is called XHeader, and it is probably one of the best free website tools I have downloaded so far. It is absolutely free and so easy to use, it’s not funny.   In fact, all the header graphics for this site and for my site Healthy Diet Weight Loss have been created with XHeader. It really comes in handy for all sorts of graphics for your site.

So after Maya explained to me how to create a banner or button for my sites to advertise them, I played around with XHeader for a while to create a nice 125×125 graphic. If you have a look at my website Lighthouse Home Decor

(note: this is my Beach Decor website, and I am starting to build backlinks to some of the inner pages of it now to get the pages ranked in the search engines, too, not just the home page, that’s why I use another one of my keyword phrases “Lighthouse Home Decor”; this will over time give me more visitors to the site through my other keywords, too),

you will notice the new “button to grab” on the left hand sidebar towards the bottom. This is exactly what Maya has on her site, too, and that’s what I want to show you. You can create all sorts of sizes of banners or logos with XHeader.

When you create a button or banner for your site, I believe it is important that you keep it in line with the theme of your site, like colors, pictures, etc. What I have done for my Lighthouse Home Decor site is just grab a piece of the site graphics and incorporated it into the button (you find the crab and the thong at the bottom of the site )

So, here is what you do:

1. Download your free software XHeader and install it on your computer.
2. Have a good play with the software – you can’t do anything wrong! Here is what I usually do:

• Click on “new”

• Click “Create a blank header”

• Enter the size of your graphic. Now, the square little button is 125 x 125 pixels. But you could really make it any size you want.

And then just start having a go at creating a nice button! I usually start by importing an image, then adding text and transparency etc.

Once  you have created your masterpiece, just save it as .jpg in a location of your choice. (I always go for “superb” size).

Once you have done that, you need to upload the image to your website. I have a self-hosted WordPress blog, so I uploaded it (from the folder I had saved it to) via my free FTP program FileZilla to my website (wp-admin/images/YourImageTitle.jpg). You need to do that because you will need an URL for the image.

TIP: If you do not know much about file transfers via FTP, there is another solution: Photobucket, a free image hosting site. Just become a member of photobucket, and you can upload any number of pictures or graphics from your computer to your account in photobucket, and each of the photos will then have an URL for you to use.

So, once your image is uploaded to your website (or Photobucket) and you know the URL, here is the magic:

To display the button on your site, including the Text window with html code for other people to “grab it”, you need to use this code:

<img alt=”Your keywords for your site” src=”the URL of your Image“/><br>
<textarea style=”width: 125px; height: 125px” name=”textfield”><a href=”The URL of your Website” target=”_blank” title=”The Title of your website“><img border=”0″ src=”the URL of your Image“/></a></textarea>

The red colored text is what you will have to fill in with your details. Voila!!! Isn’t that cool??? I thought so.

…I am going to upload my new button for this site straight after doing this post, so check out my sidebar and let me know what you think!! And if you like, you can also grab my new button and put it on your site…

Thanks, Maya, for your very much appreciated help!

I would love to hear back from all of you who try this out, to see how you go. And of course, if you create a banner or button for your website or blog like I have done with this method, let me and my readers know and leave us a link to your site so we can check it out!

The other day I was browsing through my ever overflowing email inbox, and I came across one of good ‘ol Travis from the Bum Marketing Method (remember, he is one of the one’s who’s list I kept subscribed to – thanks, Travis!! ) which compelled me to have a quick look (his subject line read just “AWESOME”).

Here is what he passed on to his loyal subscribers, and I enjoyed watching this so much that I had to pass it on to you, too. It is a short 9 minute video, but it is so jam packed with great life lessons that it leaves you feeling like everything is possible.

We, as Internet Marketers especially, get often so much negative feedback from our loved ones around us (especially when we haven’t quite gotten to earning a real living online yet), and we often suffer so many set backs and hurdles along the way that we all need strong stamina and tenacity, and belief in our ultimate goal. It is so easy to lose focus and be discouraged, and at times it takes a lot of strength to keep going and keep faithful of the outcome.

This video will pick you up, and give you that special “shiver” down the spine that will make you keep going and keep at it. Because that’s one of the most important things in Internet Marketing – to keep going, and never give up. Believe and you WILL get there.

And there is so much more in that video, it’s just brilliant.

Enough said, here it is!!! Enjoy! – P.S. Please re-tweet freely, many people would probably love to listen to it…

Happy New Year!

I wish you all a great start into a very Happy New Year! May it be happy, healthy and prosperous for all of you, and may it bring you the success in Internet Marketing that you all deserve!

Here is a recipe of an “out of this world” fabulous dip to be had with bread/chips/vegetables – it is absolutely fantastic and I wanted to share it with you here. It is called “Jack-O-Lantern” dip but it can be used for any occasion. Bon Appetit!

Jack-O-Lantern Dip

Busy Building Niche Websites

Well, it’s been a couple of months or so since I decided that building niche websites will be what I will do to create an income online for myself.  since I have put my new niche website about Mens Wrist Watches Online, and I am very slowly building backlinks to it to improve its rankings. I think it is important to take the time to do you SEO properly as it will pay back over time.

Here is what I have been doing and will continue to do to get the word out about my site and to get it bumped up to a better search engine rank:

(At present it is nowhere near page #1  (to be honest I haven’t seen it in the first 20 pages of Google yet, so I have some work cut out for me), so the traffic I am getting is extremely low.  I have seen though through StatCounter – you will see the little counter on the bottom right hand side of Mens Wrist Watches Online – that for some keywords which I haven’t even considered it did show up on page #1, and that’s good!)

• Continue to add new pages to the site – this is important as it shows that the site is expanding and “alive”, not stale. And we all know that the more quality and relevant content you have on your site the more the search engines will love you!
  • As I have a big problem with coming up with content for a wrist watch site I did outsource this task on Elance and got 11 content pages for mens wrist watches for $75, and I am very happy with it. It would have taken me months to do this and I would have really struggled. I still have to add some of the pages to my site, and will do so slowly over time.
• Keep commenting on other related blogs or internet marketing blogs and leaving a link to my site, preferably with one of my keywords as anchor text. These blogs should preferably have keywordluv enabled and be dofollow.
• Writing and submitting articles to Ezine Articles – these articles are purely there to provide backlinks to my site in the resources box. The articles are not optimized for any of my keywords that I have for my site, as I don’t want them to compete with my site. I just want great and valid backlinks to Mens Wrist Watches Online. The articles are related to anything that has relevance to watches, like accessories, watches (!), time management etc.
  • Here, as with creating content for my pages, I outsourced the writing of the articles on Elance and got 10 beautiful articles back within a week for $50. Again, I am prepared to pay this amount of money as the website will give me that money back and a lot more over time. Paying for the outsourcing of content and articles is the only money I have spent and will spend for this site. My other niche website about Beach Decor is making me a consistent $150/month from several sources, and I am confident that it will be the same with Mens Wrist Watches online. And I haven’t even started with optimizing for the keywords for all of my other pages, I have only been building backlinks for the main site! So there is a lot more to be gained still, on both sites.

So, there you have it. Building Niche Websites is really the optimal way to earn some money online for me, as I have found in the past that I am not good with keeping up with updating blogs, or writing emails to a list, or anything that requires a lot of time and creation of content on my part.

Mens Wrist Watches Online has already earned me a tiny little bit of money through ebay, so I am confident that it will grow, given time. I can only recommend to anybody with little time who wants to break into making money online to start doing the same as I do – building niche websites! Read my previous post on it, and act. I am sure you won’t be disappointed – I am not!

If you have read my previous post, you know that my good blogger friend hospitalera took part in a special SEO contest. The contest finished a few days ago and I am sad to say that she did not make it in the first 3 spots, but ended up on rank #21 – which is still quite good but didn’t earn her any Christmas spending money!

Hospitalera has written about the contest results on her blog, and I can only urge you to have a read about what she has learned from the competition regarding SEO and how to (or not to) optimize your blogs or websites for SEO. It is an interesting read and I have certainly learned a few new things from it.

SEO is a very fluid theme at best of times, but there are certain key factors in SEO that every blog/site owner should know and follow when building their sites. Things like picking the right domain name, or writing most of your posts with a keyword in mind. Or like linking within your site, with the right keywords as anchor text.  Or backlink building the right way.

Fact is that most site owners (the ones that do not do Internet Marketing) don’t have a clue about all this, and they will struggle to get their site seen because of missing SEO Optimization. Getting your site optimized for the search engines will give you a lot better chance of appearing on page #1 of Google. So whenever you can, learn about SEO! – I might actually write a post about it soon

…..and that’s exactly why I am doing this today.

My online blogger friend from the blog hospitalera.com has joined a contest, and because I believe that she is a nice person and bloggers should help each other, I am posting a link for her right here.

Oes tsetnoc

Now, you might be wondering what this is about, and why I am doing this. Instead of me explaining it to you, why don’t you head over to her blog and have a quick read, – who knows, you might be a nice blogger too and lend her a helping hand…?

Many Comments

I have to say since my PR increased to 3 the amount of comments I get here on the blog has gone up quite a bit. So clearly my commentators want to take advantage of my DoFollow, CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and Top Commentator “offerings”! Which is great, that’s exactly what they are here for.

The only down side – for me – at this point is that I cannot keep up with replying to some of the comments. Not all require me to answer or reply to them, but there are always quite a few that I would like to reply to. But because of the sheer amount of comments and because I still do have a life apart from blogging (yes, I do!!! ), this has become a very time consuming and nearly impossible task.

I want to let you all know that even if I don’t reply to your comments, please don’t take it personally, I do read them and I do still hand approve all of them, I just cannot put all my time into responding any more. I will if there is anything really pressing, or I think I really need to answer or reply to a comment, but other than that I hope you will understand if your comment might not get a reply.

I have also looked into threaded (or “nested”) comments – this is when my reply to any comment appears straight after the comment and you do not have to scroll down any more to find the reply (have a look how it works on my Healthy Diet Weight Loss blog) -, but for some reason, even though I have the option ticked in my discussion settings, it does not change on my blog. I have to try and figure out why that is. Because some of my posts are getting so many comments, and it gets quite confusing to find the comments and replies that belong together.

Anyway, enough rambling.

If you are an avid blogger and you encourage your readers to interact with you on your blog, be prepared that keeping up with replying to the comments might take more and more time out of  your day. I love the interest all of you show in my blog posts, but please be understanding that I cannot reply all the time any more. Deal?

Just wanted to apologize to all of you who have been commenting on a regular basis – I am still manually approving all the comments, and as I had computer problems lately I had days at a time when I could not access any of my data or log in to my sites. The rebuilding process is still taking place, but we (my laptop and I) are getting stronger all the time, so hopefully everything will be restored to normal soon and I will be able to approve the comments on a much more regular basis.

Please keep commenting, but I have to say now that any comments that just say “nice post” or “thanks for sharing” or something similar along those lines will be ruthlessly deleted, as this seems to take over at times and it will become quite boring for my readers to read through the comments on particular posts if I approve these empty comments.

I hope we have a deal here. Thanks!

…. and I have lived to tell the tale!

What would be one of the worst things to happen to an Internet Marketer addicted to the Internet? Who’s holy grail is the computer/laptop? – A COMPUTER CRASH! That’s right! Complete and utter non-functioning of vital systems and tools. So there is nothing else to do any more but Continue reading →

A while back I wrote a couple of posts on DoFollow, CommentLuv and KeywordLuv to let you all know that I had installed these plugins to “share the link love” and give back to my avid readers and commentators. I also wrote an earlier post about proper commenting to get backlinks to your site by commenting on the right blogs – the ones with DoFollow, CommentLuv and KeywordLuv. Continue reading →