GarysNotebook.com

I spent a lot of today researching various CMS technologies to accommodate some new strategies I am working on for some new and existing sites.

Found some really cool Joomla modules and also been working on tweaking the ping between my blog here at www.garysnotebook.com and Technorati. So as you may see in this blog I will have a few short messages that may or may not be related to the overall subject of this site just so I can test and make sure things are working ok.

I will discuss in the days to come things that I have learned. Well tomorrow I am heading out to play paintball with the kids..:_)

Ok I guess I better finish tweaking this new blog later because the wife is getting a little fussy and I need to go catch a bite to eat.

Until then....

See ya........... Gary

In This Guide

Planning Your Content

Sections and Categories, Static items, Blogs and Tables

One of the hardest parts of Joomla for those new to it to figure out is how content is organized. The relationship between sections, categories, blogs and tables can be very confusing.

To get a better idea of how a Joomla site can be organized, let’s make a sitemap for an imaginary site. This is a standard planning tool used by web designers and is critical for a Joomla web site. It’s usually shown as a tree diagram showing all the pages in the site. Here is our example.

Figure 4-1 A Website Sitemap

In this sitemap, each web page is represented by a box, the lines are links within the site. A sitemap represents viewer path through a site rather than content organization. It is still a useful planning tool for organizing the site however. Here there are seven pages, from an organizational point of view, it seems like there are four main areas of the site:

• About Us
• Widgets
• Contact Us
• Widget Blog

The first step in trying to understand how Joomla structures its content is to realize there are no pages!

OK, so what does that mean?

I talked about the idea of “placeholders” for the content in a CMS like Joomla. Remember, the content is stored in the database and needs to be placed onto the pages by Joomla. The CMS has spaces on its pages to place content and needs to know what content it should put there. Joomla only know what content should be used once you click on a link. Once the viewer has done this, Joomla now knows what page to generate, gets the content, and puts it into place.

Consider a very different example, a magazine. You turn to the index, look something up, get the page number and turn to that page. For that page to be filled with content, the magazine author/designer needed to have chosen the content and arranged it as they wanted on that page. So you turn to it and you see the content. This seems a daft example but it illustrates very well how pages are generated in a CMS. On a Joomla site, you click on a link (the magazine index) and then the content is generated and arranged on the page. So in the magazine case the pages exist before you go to it, but on a Joomla web site, the page only exists once you visit it. Strange but true.

The Least You Need to Know
Joomla generates a page the instant you go to visit it.

There are 4 main ways that Joomla generates content:

• Static content
• Dynamic content (organized in sections and categories)
• Components
• Modules

What Is Affiliate Niche Marketing?

Niche marketing is the trend of marketers to concentrate on very small and specific areas of a market or products and develop a loyal customer base by specializing in one or two specific areas of that market. The majority of affiliate niche marketing companies and websites realize that they cannot compete with large companies. Instead of trying to sell, for example, books in general, they concentrate on promoting books on a specific subject such as children's books, or books about dogs. By concentrating on a specific Niche Market they have a much greater chance of developing a level of success as a market leader for that niche.

{snippet 5} There are some vital and profitable areas that large companies and business owners have failed to establish themselves in as yet. Many affiliate niche marketing websites are aware of this fact. Most of the large markets with mass appeal are dominated by large companies. For a small affiliate niche market to break into such an area will be very challenging.

This means that if the affiliate niche marketing strategy is able to recognize areas of the market that have real demand and the chance to develop revenue, but that the larger companies have not yet dominated, then they can put their effort into becoming a leader in this niche. The key to success in affiliate niche marketing is getting to the market first.

Anyone who has been involved in affiliate niche marketing will tell you that being the first to arrive on a specific market and develop customer loyalty has a huge advantage. Niche markets have a strong habit of being widely accepted and small niches are always the next big thing. Once they become big, they are no longer a niche. This will attract larger companies who have a lot more to invest in capturing the market and will attempt to take over the market place. {snippet 6} If you manage to get to the market before the large companies, you stand a chance of competing with them and staying one step ahead before they come with their resources and promotion.

How to Write a Good Presale - 5 Steps to Boost Your Sales

Step 1 to a good presale

You must grab the client's attention. You want him to be hooked right at the beginning. To do so, you must start out by using a catchy title.

Here's an example: "Get those coldsores to leave you alone with little to no treatment!". I suggest using big fonts, with colors that contrast the rest of your website. Red is always a winner, so it is my favorite color to use. Yellow kind of hurts the reader's eyes, so don't go with that.

Step 2 to a good presale

Relate to your client. You want him to feel as though he can trust you. You want him to feel like he is on the same boat as you, and that you aren't trying to pass him a bad product. You could take some examples of what you have went through that associate with what you're selling. Make them feel you've had the same needs they have and didn't find the answer to your needs easily either.

Step 3 to a good presale

{snippet 2} Create a sense of urgency. Tell the client, that the current offer is for a limited time only. Tell him, only a certain number of people will get this product. In other terms, you want the client to buy now. If he takes a little time to think about it, it might be enough to convince himself/herself he doesn't need the product. Most of internet purchases are done on impulse, so you will get more sales if the client thinks he has to do it right away.

Step 4 to a good presale

Give some freebies! Throw in some low cost product, that might be associated to what you are selling. Free gifts are a good motivator for someone who wants to buy but isn't sure. The client will most certainly feel he is getting his money's worth. You want the client to be happy about what he has bought, so give him a little something extra so he/she can really feel like you value him/her.

Step 5 to a good presale

Tell the client what to do. Some clients will be ready to buy your product half way through your presale. Offer them the opportunity to buy it immediately and easily. For others, that need more convincing, you are going to have to offer a quick and easy way to get to the product at the bottom of the page also. {snippet 3} If you don't tell the client where to go and what to buy, he might just feel confused and leave. You want those sales, so tell him exactly how to get to them.

Submitting To A Website Directory

The internet has become one of the biggest ways to promote and sell products for a business. While the most popular way to get your website out there was originally a search engine submission, the big player out there today is the submission of websites to website directories to build incoming links and qualified traffic. {snippet 4}

Website directories get a good amount of traffic and due to your webpage being listed in the directory this makes an increased chance of more people going to your site. The more directories you submit to, the better chance you have of exposing your site to a wider audience.

There are thousands of different website directories on the internet. The best way to promote your website is to find website directories that target the subject of your website. If your website is medically based, finding a medically based website directory to submit your website to would be much better than to submit your website to a directory full of categories having nothing to do with your website. This in turn would help boost traffic to your site since the search topic is already narrowed down.

Submitting your website to smaller respected website directories is just a few steps away from getting in to more mainstream website directories like Yahoo, MSN and Google. Indexing your site in to as many website directories as possible gets your website exposure to as much internet traffic as possible while at the same time increasing the way your site is ranked in these major search engines. Generally, the more incoming links a search engine follows to your website, the higher it will rank your site in it's results.

{snippet 5} When submitting your site to a website directory there are many different things that you should know before doing so:

1. Try not to submit your site to hundreds of website directories in a single day.

2. Make sure your directory submissions are done by hand. Many websites will ban your site if they are done through an automated service.

3. Keep track of which website directories you submit your website to. This is helpful so that you don't accidentally submit your webpage to the same website directory more than once. This can also negatively effect whether your site is accepted or removed from a directory.

4. Make sure that when you submit your website to a website directory, you read the rules and or guidelines correctly so you can ensure a better and more productive experience.

5. Submit your website to the correct category that closely relates to your websites subject or it will not be accepted.

Using ClickBank To Find Winning Product Ideas Part 1

People want information and they want it fast (as in instantly) so ClickBank is serving a very rabid market that has money to spend and loves spending it.

The good thing about this is that you can find product ideas that are already successful and create one that’s similar. This means you can create product without any market research, any testing or without an chance of failure.

The product is already selling and selling well on ClickBank so you can ride that into your own highly successful product!

So how do we find products on ClickBank that we can use as ideas to create products without all the usual hassles that go with product research and development?

Simple…

First, go to the following webpage in your favorite web browser…

http://www.clickbank.com After the page loads, click the “Buy Products” tab at the top of the page.

{snippet 2} Now you want to select the type of product that you are looking to create from the Category drop down menu. There is also a sub-category drop down menu that may offer additional categories that are more closely defined to niche markets that may contain a category or subject that you are looking for so use this is you see something of interest.

If you have a more specific type of product in mind rather than the broad categories that they have you can also use the “Keyword” search box to enter a word or phrase that is more targeted to the product or offering that you have in mind.

Next click the “Go” button and you will be presented with a list of products that matches your criteria.

These listings are ranked in the order of how good they sell. So if you see a listing at the top of a page that means that is the number one selling product in the criteria that you selected.

If you find that you don’t get the type of product that you are looking for in those listings try scaling down the criteria that you have entered. For example if you enter “eBay money easy” in the keyword box, try scaling that down to just the word eBay because this will still bring you a bunch of eBay related books that may spark your interest.

Now that you have a listing of proven, best selling products that match or closely match the criteria that you are looking for, it’s time that you take that information and leverage it to your full advantage!

10 Ideas to Improve Web Site Traffic

<2> Your content must be fresh and relevant and useful. Add new content on a regular basis. Each new page should focus on another keyword so that over time your web site will include lots of pages, each targeted to on-topic material.

<3> Your image files should have appropriate keywords in their names. Many people use Google Images (images.google.com) to search for graphics. You can take advantage of this by carefully choosing the file names of each image. For example, if you are promoting 57 Chevys, "57-chevy.jpg" is better than "red57.jpg."

 <4> Effective keyword research is absolutely necessary if you want to improve web site traffic. You need to understand the exact phrases people are using in their searches. This will not only give you an idea of the demand for what you are supplying, but will also allow you to incorporate into your content the keywords people are utilizing. You should utilize long tail searches to target appropriate keywords.

<5> Type a phrase into the search box at Google and look at the titles of the top 10 sites returned on the first page. Some of them look like they should contain the info you were searching for. Some of them look like they were designed to trick the search engines. Some of them look like there was no thought put into them. You can view the titles of your won web site pages by searching for site:yoursite.com. This is what people see when your site is returned. You might improve web site traffic by making sure your page titles are written for both people and search engines.

<6> You can create high quality links to your web site and impress the search engines by submitting your {snippet 5} web site to the main directories (http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php). Carefully read the submission rules at each web site. Manually submitting your web site to each directory is a slow process but improves the odds of getting your web site listed.

<7> You can get links back to your web site and actually create traffic to your web site by submitting articles to article directories. Each article should be high quality and focused on one keyword. You can improve web site traffic by adding a link to your web site in the "About the Author" box at the end of each article. Make sure the article is well written and you give people an incentive to visit your web site.

<8> Reciprocal links are becoming less important in the optimization process. Topical theme vectoring is used by Google to analyze the relationship between linked sites. One of the warnings from Google is, "Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links are links to your site that develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links are links to your site placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines" (http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/). Google also advises, "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank."

<9> You can encourage visitors to keep coming back to your web site by publishing a mini-course structured around genuinely useful content. After sending several messages, give readers links to appropriate pages on your web site. Your pages might include informative content, AdSense ads, and affiliate links.