Todays question comes from the teleseminar. Fell free to ask your questions either through the survey button at the top or by leaving a comment.
How do I put advertising images (such as 3d ebooks) and text on the page and/or sidebar?
This is relatively easy to do. You do need to understand basic HTML of making an image clickable. For this example I will change the < to [ so that it does not try to display an image. The basic banner code is as follows:
[a href="the url you are sending someone to"][img src="the url of the image you want displayed" border-"0"][/a]
If you are doing this in a post or a page that is all you will need to do. Caveat – If you are using the rich text editor (WYSIWYG) you will need to click on code button before adding the HTML. Otherwise you will have a mess .
Now for the sidebar I use a text widget for these items. That allows me to move them up or down on the sidebar by just dragging and dropping them where I want them to show up.
To do this follow these steps inside the dashboard. Click presentation – widgets. If you have a text widget available on the bottom bar you can just drag it up to the sidebar and drop. If you don’t there will be a drop box below that which will allow you to add more text widgets. Change the number in the drop box and update. You will now have more text widgets (up to 9) to add to the side bar.
Once you have the text widget on the sidebar click the box to the right. This will open a light box pop. In the top line you can add any title you want to display on the sidebar such as “Recommended”, then add the HTML into the bottom box. Click on the grayed area and click update.
Always check when adding items to the sidebar that you did not expand it and throw the theme out of whack. If you did just undo what you did. You may have to resize the image to use it in the sidebar.
As always, your questions and comments are welcomed.
Today’s question comes from the monthly blog call I do. The question is:
I have an existing website that is already indexed. It has text audio and some video content. Is there anyway I can merge it (or convert it) with a blog? is there any advandates? disadvantages?
This can be a tough choice because you can move the content to a blog. The problem is keeping the page names that are already indexed.
The real question is how much traffic you are currently getting from the indexing because doing this will cause those pages to no longer be available.
If you are getting any significant traffic the answer will be no. The other big question to consider is how well your website is constructed.
– Do you have a site map?
– How well are the pages linked?
If you have poor linking and no sitemap then you will take an intial hit but will probably re-emerge as a much stronger web presence using a blog in the future. (Assuming – I know a bad word – that you are properly formatting the blog).
So minimal traffic from the indexing and poor site design probably pays you to do it. Other wise you have another option.
Add a blog in a subdomain and use that to link to your current site. That will help to add content in a better way and still can be used to send people to the existing base you have already built.
Agree or disagree? Leave a comment. Have a question? Leave a comment. Just visiting? Leave a comment. Get the point *smile* leave a comment.
Today is Thanksgiving in the US. We spent a lot of time yesterday preparing for this. I was baking, the boss was getting the kielbasi and turkey ready. Later today family will arrive and we will have a chance to count our blessings.
Rather than do a question today I felt this would be a good time to take a few minutes and be thankful for some of my blesings.
A great family including the first granddaughter – (you can see her on her blog at www.madelynpaetzold.com and yes I am a doting grandfather )
The abiltity to connect with people around the world through the world wide web
All of the things this has allowed me to do (like work from home) while helping others.
and many more but….
I always talk about a blog being a conversation and would love to hear what you are thankful for. Stop being bashful and take the minute or two to get involved here by leaving your comments.
Next post I will be back to normal but today is a day for thought. Hope you and yours are enjoying this holiday if you are in the US. If you are outside the US I wish the best of the upcoming holiday season to you and yours.
Today’s question/s also come from comments left. Seems anchor text is confusing. Here are the questions:
what do you good anchor text? what i the best way to get blog ranked into google etc? very good blog very interesting
Mike, I like the idea of using good anchor text in your blog content. However, I notice that someone else has the same question I do, “What is good anchor text?”
Along the same lines, how many links should be added to a blog post? I see that on some of your blogs you only have one link at the end of the post. Is it best to only have one link about the subject of your post, or have many links as you write about the subject?
Okay first a quick definition of anchor text. Again I will be changing the < to [ so that it will be viewable. When you create a hyperlink it looks like this: [a href="yoururlhere"]Go here[/a]. Go here would be the anchor text. That is what will show on the page for that link.
Now why is it important? The search engines use that to help decide what that page is about. Here is a prime example. Do a Google for “click here”. The first result is the download page for Adobe Reader. That web page does not even have the term “click here” on it. There are 1000′s if not 1,000,000′s of pages on line that link to that page with that anchor.
Just about every download page for a pdf links to that site with “click here” to allow their users to get the free reader to read what they just downloaded so Google has that page as the #1 for that term.
Linking out using the keywords you would like to get that page ranked for can be very powerful. That is how you will often see a specific affiliate url ranked fairly high if that person has created a few blog posts and some article submissions linking with that specific anchor text for a particualr keyword. Often times higher than the actual site.
Now the question about the number of links is a bit tougher and really the answer is it depends. Most of the time I try to keep my blog posts very specific. There are a couple of reasons for this. By targeting them they are more likely to rank higher for that keyword and if I am preselling something I only want there to be one option. If you give people more than one choice they usally get confused and do nothing.
There are cases though where that changes and it depends on the post. On my marketing blog I do a week in review post each week. This will have multiple links going out to a variety of things that have entered my inbox that week.
It works well because that post is not trying to work for a specific topic (traffic comes primarily from my email list) and I am creating value for them in helping them sort the wheat from the chaff. Here it works because I am acting as an advisor and giving my opinion and usaully I am just a tipping point. They were inteerested in that particular product and have seen a lot of promos for it and my review tips them over to make a decision.
It would not work if it was tried on all the posts but in that format it can be powerful but only if the people arriving already know, like and trust you. Because this traffic comes from people that I have already built a reationship with it works. It would not work if they weren’t already on my list.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Todays question comes from a comment on the last post. Here it is:
How do you get your aweber code to show directly under your picture in the side bar? I have tried this many times without success. At what point in the source code of the side bar does the aweber code go?
The easiest way to add your Aweber form is to use a text widget. What usually causes problems is that the standard form is too wide for quite a few theme’s sidebars. It is actually very easy to adapt the size. There are a few things you usually need to change in the HTML form that they create.
The first thing that you need to change is where the name and text box are called in the HTML. The default is to have two cells in a table. Now I have changed the < to [ so that it will post properly.
Name:[td][/td][input type="text" name="name" value="" size="20"/] is the standard code and
Name:[br /][input type="text" name="name" value="" size="18"/]
is the changes I made.
By changing the cell tags to a break tag the name shows above the text box instead of along side of it. You will need the same change to be made on the email area.
The other change that is needed at least for this theme is to change the size from 20 to 18 as the text box size 20 wouldn’t fit without creating a problem. If your sidebar is a little bit larger than this theme you won’t need to do that.
You can move the text box to any point by dragging it within the dashboard. Just click dashboard, presentation, widgets and you can drag it into the proper positon.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed. Add a comment or use the survey link at the top.
Todays question comes from a comment left here. If you would like to have your question addresses feel free to leave it in a comment or use the survey button above.
I’m fairly new at this so please explain what add a links page means? I do have several links pointing to webpages in my main site on my blog. Do I create a link page pointing to them? I think I know how to do that. I just want to make sure this is what they want.
This has two possible answers. If you are looking to create a page for links to other sites that is specifically for that purpose you can create a page and call it something like Recommended Resources and create a page with the specific anchor text that you want. This can be great if you are swapping links with someone.
The other way to add links is through your blogroll although I will usually change the category name. On this blog I have called it My Sites and linked to various websites that I have. Now when you are doing this you get 3 lines to add your information. Name will be what shows on the sidebar, url is where anyone clicking it will be directed to. The third box is what will show on mouse over. You can use this as an ad or to let people know what they will get when they click through.
Both of these are good but the best link is one created with good anchor text in your actual content. That is the strongest link you can give someone or get on their site.
Any questions or comments please leave a comment. Your input is always welcomed.
Once again a question from the call this month. Today’s question is:
how do I get the rss feed chicklets on my blog pages like you have?
Well that is relatively easy. It is done with a plugin called Subscibe me. You will need to change the default settings once you upload and activate it.
There is only one set to show by default. Just check the others and make sure to add the subscribe me widget to your sidebar and you will have them showing. Personally, I prefer to use the dropdown but haven’t gone back and changed some of my older blogs but these questions are always a reminder to me too .
To summarize – Upload the plugin to the plugins folder. Go to dashboard and select plugins then activate it. Finally, just click on the options and change it to suit your needs.
Have a question or a comment? I always love to hear from my readers.
Back to questions today. One of the keys to business online is to reuse content. Because I don’t get enough questions regularly I will be using the questions from my monthly blog question and answer call. Recycling your content in various forms is very important. One of my favorite boooks “Small is the new big” by Seth Godin is nothing more than a collection of his blog posts. He just released a new book that is done the same way. Just an idea for you. Now to the question of the day.
How can we add the number of Text spots in the widget section mine shows nine avaiable..is that all ther is and can we stack them?
Yes nine to the best of my knowledge is all the text widgets you can add for your side bar. Personally, I think that is more than enough and probably too many.
Here is why I feel that way.
If you are using them for banners or buttons you can add more than one to the box. Also the sidebar can become very distracting if there is too much going on there.
A blog is best when you are having a conversation and this many distractions can have an adverse effect on the conversation. Each post should have some type of purpose. It can be a product review (presell), information you are teaching (hopefully what I do here), your opinion on a particular topic.
All of these are used to start a conversation and you can have too many things that busy up the look of your blog and it will distract from that conversation. When you can truly get that conversation going then your blog is working at its best.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed. Please comment and let me know what you think and if you do know of a way to add more than 9 text widgets this Old Bald Guy is always ready to learn.
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