Using anchor text is an SEO (Search engine optimization) tactic that is used to pinpoint keywords you want your pages to rank for. Using the correct anchor text allows search engines to mark your site as using these specific keywords. It also gives the user relevant descriptive and contextual information about the contents of the link’s destination.

An example of anchor text would be:
<a href=”http://www.seansupplee.com”>Affiliate Marketing</a>
The anchor text of this link would be Affiliate Marketing.

Using keywords such as this to link back to your site and pages that make up your site allows you to gear that content to a specific keyword you want to rank for. Since a search engines job is to provide relevant content to its searchers this anchor text is highly prized to them.

When finding the proper anchor text for your page consider doing keyword research. The basics that should get you started in the right direction would be to follow these steps…

Step 1: Create a seed keyword list of 5 keywords that deal with what your page is about.

Step 2: Visit Google’s keyword tool and input all 5 keywords you came up with

Step 3: Find a solid keyword that receives around 1,000 + searches monthly This should be your anchor text, consider using many of them.

Your about me page is important! It’s a way to connect with your visitors and give them a bit more information about you and what it is you do. It also shows them your intentions and goals for your site and what you are offering.

There are a few questions your visitors want to know in your about me page that you should address.

1. Who are you?
2. Your expertise and how it addresses to them
3. Their problem or goal
4. How they can contact you

A quick sample about me page would be like this…

Hi my name is Jane Doe and I am a work at home mother of 5 wonderful years. (Who you are)  I am the writer of JaneDoe’s Site which helps bring new moms into knowing nothing about internet marketing into a successful entrepreneur. (the reader’s problem or goal) I started JaneDoe’s blog in 2007 (shows Jane’s experience) to help other mothers where I struggled and had questions when starting my own online business while still managing to have time to take care of household things and be there for my family.(How Jane helps them overcome their problem or achieve their goal) Prior to starting my family I worked as a manager, team building trainer and motivational speaker (Jane’s experience as both a business person and a mom). To contact me please XXX (Email address,facebook,twitter or any other social networks you keep up with).

The most viewed page on any blog or even website more often then not is your about me page. When new readers come to your site for the first time they want to get to know you and get a feeling for who you are and why they should care to listen to what you have to say.

Why have an about me page?

There are many advantages to having an about me page that you should consider.

Engagement – The key to making money online is getting your face out there and getting people to remember you and associate you with success. Your about me page allows you to engage with people on a more personal level and allow them to get to know a bit more about you. This helps greatly when building a trusting relationship compared to a blogger that chooses to stay anonymous.

Point out your key posts – This is a perfect time to recommend to your new readers some of your most popular blog posts.

Key Points for your about me page

• Your photo
• Blog objectives – what your blog aims to teach its readers
• Introduction about yourself
• Your contact details – the most important you want to engage with your readers

Other Factors To Keep In Mind

• Privacy – If your running adsense this is a must but its always good to have it on any web sites. Try WP Policies to add this and other common pages to protect your investment.
• Keep It To The Point – Keep your about me page simple and to the point. Do not ramble on, point out key information only
• Make It Stand Out – Make sure your about me page is visible at all times along with your contact information. Don’t make your readers hunt for your information.

This is just a short guide to writing your about me page. While it may not cover everything it will get you started in the right direction. I would love to hear about how you structured your about me pages and what you include or don’t include. If your really proud of it please feel free to link to it.

Now that your feed is displaying its full content lets go over a few ways to increase your RSS subscribers.

Don’t display the feed count when its small - People are drawn to popular crowds, by displaying your feed count when its below 100 or even 1,000 people are often turned away and see no point in joining your rss feed. Its like when your at the mall and you see one store that has 50 people in it and right next to it a store with no one in it. Most if not everyone visiting that mall would be drawn to the store with 50 people in it and not bother with the one with no one in it.

Make sure your RSS feed is visible – Your RSS feed should be clear and above the fold. You can see an example of this right here on this blog in the top right corner of the page. You have two different options here: 1.Subscribe to the feed via email. This will send you one email per day with all the updates I have added to this blog.  2.You can click on the big RSS button to subscribe to it with your own web based service such as my yahoo,page flakes,feed demon and plenty of others.

Simply ask – Ask your readers to subscribe to the content at the bottom of each of your blog posts or within the content itself.

Now some issues that may arise here are that your RSS readers never visit your blog. This is because they are getting the full content of your blog already via your RSS feed. However there are many ways to draw your new RSS readers to visit your blog.

Turn on Feedburner FeedFlare – This simple function in Feedburner allows the RSS subscriber to see how many people have commented on the blog post they are reading. If they wish to read the comments they are going to have to visit your blog by clicking on the link. This draws in some RSS subscribers to see what all the talk is about.

Link to old posts – I often times try and do this when I have a few blog posts. I link over to an older article of mine which explains in more detail of the topic I am currently writing about. The RSS reader will have to click on the link and visit your blog in order to read your older post. This also helps with SEO, helping search engines to crawl your older posts and find them easier.

This post gives you everything you need to start building up your RSS subscribers. Be sure to keep up to date with my blog by subscribing to it.

On my blog for the last few months I thought it would be a good idea like most new bloggers to only summarize my feed. My thinking on this was to create some type of teaser for each blog post and make the RSS reader click on the link to visit my blog to read the rest of it. While this sounds like a good idea on paper it actually has the opposite effect and here is why.

When you summarize your feed many places you submit your feed end up tossing it out of their directory as they only want full RSS feeds. This already limits you on the amount of exposure you are going to receive. On top of that many people who use RSS feeds to read and organize content also will not add your feed because it does not give them the entire feed further reducing your exposure.

Since I figured this information out I wanted to change my feed on Feedburner to show my entire feed. However within feedburner I could not find the option anywhere. After about 3 hours of research and frustration which I am sure many of you have been though as well I found my answer and wanted to share it with you. Just follow these simple steps…

1. Login to your feedburner account
2.  Click on the feed you want to change
3.  On this new page where you have tabs such as Analyze, Optimize, Publicize etc. Click on the top link that says Edit Feed Details
4.  Your original feed is what is causing the issue, your feed url may look something like this http://www.yourdomain.com/feed/rss  simply add a 2 on the end of it so it looks like http://www.yourdomain.com/feed/rss2 give it some time to update or create a new post on your blog and submit it. Feedburner will then instantly update the feed so it displays the full feed.

I often get hit with this questions “What is the fastest and easiest way to install wordpress for my site?”

While installing wordpress is easy with its 5 minute install guide it does still require you to know a bit about FTP and the creation of a database. To make things even easier Fantastico is now a feature found on many hosting provider servers.

To install it is rather straight forward.

Simply select the domain you want to install wordpress on and the optional directory. For example if you already have a site built such as a business on your main domain name of www.your-domaim.com you can put the optional directory as /blog so your blog would be found at www.your-domain.com/blog

After adding in your information click on install wordpress. The script will then run and within a matter of seconds will have created your database, install wordpress and set up your admin login details.

If you ever need to upgrade your wordpress you can now do so within your wordpress admin area with a single click.

I love getting comments on my blog because it’s a great way for me to connect with you and share ideas. I added a new feature to the site which updates each day on who has made the most comments. Comments are moderated so of course spam comments do not count. You can view this new addition to the blog on the right hand side under Top Commentators. It will even link back to your website as a DoFollow link helping in your SEO rankings as a quality back link. This is just one more way of me saying thank you to those of you who take an active part in this blogs growth.

There are many ways  to promote you and your business. Often overlooked is using video as a source to gain exposure and drive traffic to your sites. Another part of video marketing that is overlooked is only using one video website to place your videos on. While YouTube is the most popular video site out there, there are plenty of others which you can upload your videos to and gain additional exposure for a few seconds more of work.

A popular site which allows you to quickly upload and manage all of your videos is tubemogul. This site allows you to upload your video to over 10 other popular video web sites. It also has the ability to track and manage all of your videos from this one central point giving you view stats and a pie chart so you can see what sites are producing the most views.

Some businesses do not have video at all to advertise  themselves because they are not sure how to go about creating a video that would work well with their business. A simple fix to this would be to take articles you are using in your blog or in article directories (which I go over in the article marketing section of this blog) and create a video out of these simple articles with pictures and text. The quickest and most simple way to do this is a program called Article Video Robot and for being a reader of my blog I have the unique ability to offer you a 20% discount when you order though the following link. Order Article Video Robot Click Here Use this discount code “seansupplee”

Article Video Robot is a powerful platform in which you can take your article and within a few minutes have an awesome video up and running which you can submit to many video websites directly from the software program.

Some key points about your new video marketing…

1. Be sure to include a link back to your site in the description of the video
2. Use videos and articles that deal within your target niche. The video does not directly have to tell about your product or service just relate to it in some way
3. Keyword target your video title and description for maximum exposure

It’s often times hard and time consuming to try and figure out what to blog about. In fact I have been stuck myself countless times. This is why I created this blog post to give you ideas where to look when your feeling stuck not knowing what to write about.

A popular choice is to visit Google trends which you can view at Google Trends. Here you will find a list of the top ten hottest topics for today in the USA and top searches for today. Scan through these popular topics and try to find one which you can incorporate into your blog. You will also want to look for topics that are not just one hit wonders, meaning they are going to stay on the hot searches or topics for a few weeks at best.

When blogging about this new topic be sure to input the keyword which was found on Google trends. This will maximize your chances to be ranked for this popular search term gaining you a high amount of traffic. The more topics you can find that relate to your niche the more traffic you can expect.

After creating your post there are a few things you will want to do with your new blog post which you can find on this blog at How to ping my blog.

Top Searches For Today…

1. Gulf of Mexico – You’d expect the disaster in the Gulf to be covered by blogs on environmentalism, marine biology, perhaps even business and politics, but PopEatermanaged to find a way to bring this ecological story into the realm of pop culture in “An Interview With the Guy Skewering BP on Twitter.”
2. World Cup – The Next Web’s “World Cup fever? Here are 5 apps to keep you on top of things” took what would traditionally be a sports story and moved it into the technology space by focusing on related apps rather than the event itself.
3. Steve Jobs – Jobs’s highly anticipated World Wide Developers Conference talk unveiled the iPhone 4 and was covered widely by technology blogs but Star Trek blog TrekMovie.com was able to make the event relevant to their readers by focusing on the Star Trek references in the talk and technology from the show and movie in “Steve Jobs Invokes Star Trek (Again) While Unveiling 4th Gen iPhone.”
4. Helen Thomas – While political bloggers obsessed over Thomas’s offensive comments, women’s blog Jezebel covered the story by discussing what Thomas’s undignified fall meant for a woman who had been an icon and inspiration to women everywhere in its post “Helen Thomas: When An Icon Disappoints [Iconography].”
5. MTV Movie Awards – Rather than approaching this star-studded event from the usual entertainment blogger’s perspective, gay blog AutoStraddle’s “MTV Movie Awards 2010 Celebrate Lesbian Innuendo, Swearing, Twilight” made the awards more relevant to their readers by honing in on the “10 most homosexual moments of the MTV Movie Awards 2010.”
6. Rue McClanahan – While many television and entertainment bloggers focused on McClanahan’s television and theater legacy, Ecorazzi’s “RIP: Actress And Longtime Animal-Advocate Rue McClanahan Dies At 76” brought the story to their ecologically conscious demographic by focusing on the actor’s animal rights work.
7. Lady Gaga – On a week when Lady Gaga’s latest music video was on everyone’s lips, Social Psychology Eye’s post “Facing illness, belief helps” skillfully worked the pop icon into the blog by discussing the psychological implications of Gaga’s recent revelation that she had been tested for lupus, undoubtedly earning them quite a few more readers than they would’ve gotten on a straightforward academic post on illness perception.
8. Rush Limbaugh – Rather than obsessing about the details of Limbaugh’s wedding, as many entertainment bloggers did, The Daily Beast’s “Celebrity Wedding Singers” took Elton John’s unexpected role as Limbaugh’s wedding singer and created a list post that broadened the appeal of the story.
9. Israel – Music bloggers aren’t the most expected source of news from Israel, but several, including Drowned in Sound with its post “Bands cancel shows following Israel’s flotilla raid” covered what is essentially a political and international affairs story in a way that created value for their music-obsessed readers.
10. Harry Potter – While film bloggers were busy dissecting the latest Harry Potter trailer, travel blog Gadling put its own spin on the popular character with “London mayor rails against Wizarding World of Harry Potter’s Florida location.”

Since I started this blog I have gone into finding what is the best way to both provide valuable information to my readers and at the same time make money. In the months of searching I ran into a huge diversity of methods to make money from your blogging.

As always I recommend any bloggers or anyone looking to make money online to build multiple streams of income. If something where to happen to one of the streams your others could pick up the weight of the lost stream until you can fix it and get it producing income for you once again.

Here are the methods I have found and also use to generate different streams of income from blogging.

Advertising Programs – Perhaps the most popular and most seen method for generating income from a blog is the placement of Adsense from Google. More recent additions have  been successful to the blogging world that work just like Adsense such as , Bidvertiser, AdBrite and Clicksor.

RSS Advertising – This has become very popular over the last year. Adsense now allows you to run Adsense ads inside of your RSS feed. I currently do so with Feedburner. While not much is made from ads on RSS feeds it still acts as an additional revenue source if you wish it.

Sponsorships – Are when companies or other product owners come to you and ask you to write up a review of their product or service after you have tried it out. This is called a post by post sponsorship where you are giving your expert opinion.

Affiliate Programs – This is where I spend much of my time on this blog. That is affiliate marketing from programs such as Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank , Commission Junction and PayDotCom.

Digital Assets – This is a new tactic that many bloggers are catching on to. By creating ebooks, courses and tele-seminars that are run by the blog owners and sold for money.

Blog Network Opportunities – This is where you get hired to post blog posts on others blogs. While it might be hard to get such a gig at a high end blog there are plenty of smaller blogs seeking and looking for active bloggers to come and leave some posts on their blog. It is a good idea to join these blog networks and write a number of unique posts on it as most will already be established with plenty of traffic coming to them. Within a few months here at Sean Supplee I will be offering other bloggers the chance to come in and submit their own articles and create a profile for themselves.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities – Like to write but want to do it for someone else? This just might be for you Bloggers for Hire is a company that connects blog owners to writers. Many larger companies have an internal structure of people that run and manage their blogs as it is an ever increasing part of their business. This is your chance to cash in on it.

Donations and Wish Lists – When you post quality some people like to go out of their way to thank you for helping them out. You can either add a Paypal donate button (I don’t recommend this to often) or instead create a wish list on Amazon of books and things you want. More often then not people will buy you an item off your wish list and send it to you.  Check out my wish list at – Sean Supplee’s wish list

Flipping Blogs – This takes a bit of time, it is the practice of buying blogs that are not doing so well and reselling them for a profit once traffic starts flowing to them. I recommend using a site called Flippa to do this.

Merchandising – Cafepress offers the ability to place any logo you wish on great products. This is the easiest way to merchandise your brand on physical items such as shirts, mugs, bags, Flip Mino’s, clocks and so much more. You can visit my blogs Cafepress site and pick yourself up some great looking products at: Sean Supplee’s CafePress

Consulting and Speaking – Blogging has brought up a new generation of people, those who knew little about a niche they blogged about are now experts. Because of this many bloggers speak at events for a price because of the reputation their blogs has made them. They also bring in people they consult on their niche charging upwards of $200 per hour! I will soon be putting my experience on sale via the tab above “Coaching”

Take Action Affiliate launches today as a great resource for picking up quality information for free! Many of these opt in pages will be a 5 part training email series that will go in depth into each specific topic. Topics include website traffic, SEO, affiliate marketing, making money online, adwords, membership sites, forex and adsense.

Thanks to Affiliate Silver Bullet I was able to create this website within a matter of a few hours. Each only taking 10 minutes to set up and get running. These silver bullets work well with the Aweber auto responder. Affiliate Silver Bullet releases a new silver bullet plan to you every week which only takes about 10 minutes to set up on your own domain. But you can also use it as is from the main ASB website requiring you not set up work what so ever.

What you get with each silver bullet is an amazing looking squeeze page but also a second copy used for Google. With a little bit of work these pages will rank on search engines providing you with even more traffic and leads. They also come with a pre-built quality auto responder series which you can use to build your own list or leave it up on the Affiliate Silver Bullet team to manage and promote for you.

Here is a quick video I created that shows you the back office of Affiliate Silver Bullet.