Yeah yeah…. Break it down… Oh! Alright, I can’t rap!

Anyway,  check out this 3 mins rap by the SEO rapper about good site design… Cool!

Popularity: 57% [?]

Just last month, I’ve the opportunity to sign up and be one of the 1,000 lucky guy in The Black Ink Project. Here is a snippet on what the project is all about:

The Black Ink Project is an affiliate success course designed to help new affiliates bridge the gap between Jeremy Palmer’s e-book, High Performance Affiliate Marketing and making a profit. Some find that the book and forum support is all they need to succeed, but others need a little more hands-on training to connect all the dots.  

The project basically focuses on four main key areas:

• Setting realistic goals, based on your time and budget.
• Researching prospective opportunities.
• Learning the software, scripts, and tools to help you create your site.
• Develop and launch a campaign from start to finish.

Before you even sign up to be in this project, Jeremy Palmer tells you straight in the face that it’s not going to be easy making money online and to be in this free course… Yes! Its FREE! All he expect from you is your commitment and to pay it forward by helping other people. 

Just few days after launch, all 1,000 slots were taken up. However, he recently releases another 2,000 slots with the support from the webinar company. So, if you’re still loosing the game of Internet Marketing, this could be a break for you. But please do so with commitment and conviction to succeed, else you may be back to square one.

The first lesson starts on the 5th of May, 3pm PST. So what are you waiting for!

Register Free for The Black Ink Project now!

Popularity: 48% [?]

Just last week, I did one amazingly simple thing that within few days, got my blog ranked from out of no where, into the first 4 pages of the search engine results for the competitive keyphrase ”Make Money Online”, which currently has over 32,000,000 compeitiors based on the broad search. In the midst of things, I discovered something interesting…

Although there’s nothing to brag about and I’ve yet to further optimize and put up more quality content into my blog to achieve first page ranking, which will take quite some time, I want to share with you first hand on my findings and thoughts below:

First Track Your Search Engine Ranking

Before we can know whether the techniques and strategies we’re implementing on our sites are giving results, we need to track them. This is the same for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which we generally want to see our sites ranked well for certain keywords that we’re optimizing our site content for. However, I’m sure most of the marketers do not know where they’re positioned in the search engine. One reason could be that it is simply too tedious to track the ranking, especially if the site is not ranked in the first few pages. 

A free software you can be using to track your ranking is Rank Tracker, which I’ve used to give me the result I’m showing you in a while.

Download your free copy of Rank Tracker here

Small Change In Title, Big Changes In Ranking

Initially, my blog was titled ”Vern Lai’s Secrets To Online Business Success” ( Make a guess what my targeted keyphrase is). And by using Rank Tracker, I found my blog for the broad search keyphrase “Online Business Success” to rank 19th in Google.com and  rank 2nd in Google.com.sg.

I’m not ranked in the top 100 for the keyphrases “Make Money Online” and “Work From Home”.

After I made some simple changes to my blog title, you can see that my blog started ranking for “Make Money Online” in Google.com.sg and rose in ranking from 33 to 8 for competiting sites from Singapore.

If you’re still wondering what I did to my blog title? I simply optimized it to “Work From Home And Make Money Online With VernLai.com | Secrets To Online Business Success Revealed”. I’m being greedy here, but don’t over-do it yourself.

Yes, I’m still not ranked in the main search engine, that is because there is too much competition in there for me to break in at this time. However, it is interesting to know that ranking differs for different countries. For example, although my keyphrase “Online Business Success” ranks 18th in the main U.S. search engine Google.com, it however ranks 55th in Canada,  32nd in Indonesia, and even 21st in Australia. Thus, this somehow shows that data center for different country would have different set of competitions and formula, therefore not being able to rank in the U.S. search engine doesn’t necessary mean you won’t get ranked in other countries’.

Blog Posting = Blog Description?

After doing some searches myself, I notice that the description of my blog not necessary is the one I’ve set in the back-end configuration. Based on the broad search for the keyphrases, description can be a snippet of my blog postings that contains the keywords or combinations of my blog description and posting. This basically shows that optimizing your blog content does help in your SEO, and it would be interesting to find out if having permanent content such as optimized featured post or introduction in the main page would further aid in your blog ranking. 

Of course, what I’ve shared here are just the tip of an ice berg, there’re more to learn in SEO and much more to implement and test out.  

If you want to learn more about SEO, one good e-book I highly recommend is called “The SEO Mindset” by Brad Callen. This 127 pages, steb-by-step e-book, contains all that you need to know about SEO and how to optimize your site for better search engine ranking. It is both easy to read and insightful. Of course, it is better if you have a site to try it on in the first place. Enjoy!

Download “The SEO Mindset” e-book here

Popularity: 37% [?]

This post is few weeks late (Rayner is 10 months old on the 15th this month) but I would still like to share it with you…

Being a work from home daddy although gives me the flexibility of time, however without proper time management, it will kill whatever ventures I’m in…

On normal days, I have the luxury of my mother help taking care of Rayner while I work in front of my laptop. However, with my parents off to China for the week, I’m tasked to be alone with my 9 months old baby for 5 days from 7am till 7pm when my wife comes back from work. No help from anyone at all.

Just to clarify that I do take care of my baby on normal days as well

During this 5 days period, Rayner and I got closer. Every day, I carried him out for morning and afternoon walks right before I patted him down for his naps, fed him bottled milk and porridge, changed his diaper, played with him and so on…

Here are some of my personal experiences with Rayner that I would like to share with you as a work from home dad:

• Take care of your the back. Carrying a 10kg baby is no joke, especially when you need to pick up or put him down frequently
• Leaverage on baby’s yawning to know when it’s time for him to take a nap
• Make sure the baby is fully asleep before putting him down, else you will have to re-do the routine of getting him to sleep (My baby is a light-sleeper in the day time).
• Don’t get frustrated when the baby cries, there is always a reason. Hungry? Poo-poo? Over-tired?
• Work or rest in between when baby is sleeping

There are more to parenting and I’m still learning as a first time parent. One very important thing I picked up is patience and not get frustrated with the baby, as they will pick up the negative energy and probably cry, worst situation is when it submerges into their subconsicous mind, resulting in negative behavior in the future.

Even after the 5 days challenge, I still enjoy carrying Rayner out for my morning and afternoon walk, sing to him and explore the world with him. 

If you’re a parent yourself, I would love to hear how you take care of your baby. Simply leave your comment below.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Phew! It was pretty exciting for day 1 of the “Build-A-Biz” challenge, considering that Derek Gehl, CEO of Internet Marketing Center, almost fumble and fail to the challenge sparked by his angry subscriber.

In this 4 days challenge, Derek Gehl will demonstrate live on camera, how he create a niche website and generate sales all by his own effort from scratch; no web designer, no programmer and no copywriter. You can click here to read all about it.

The video for Day 1 lasted slighly over 53 minutes with over 12 hours of effort in a day compressed. The content is about doing keyword research, finding the niche market to enter. This is the most important step to begin an online business. It also has to be non-Internet marketing related since he is already well known in the industry, and it is competitive anyway. Thus, Derek has to find a new niche market to start from scratch.

Basically, Derek started with a list of his interest / hobbies, mainly golf, mountain biking, travel, video games and dog. The steps he took goes something like this:

• Step 1: List down your interest / hobbies
• Step 2: List down synonyms/keywords related to Step 1
• Step 3: List action keywords and combine it with Step 2 to create long tail keywords
• Step 4: Categorize the keywords in Step 3 into problem statements and filter them
• Step 5: Find the cost to bid on keywords via google adwords
• Step 6: Analyse competition via organic search engine e.g. free competitions, direct competitions and indirect competitions

He started analyzing the golf marketing, and after few hours of research, found it to be too competitive. There are also tons of free information readily available. Although he can enter the market, but it will take longer time to see profits, and it will also cost more to bid for keywords. On top of that, the expectation on the quality of product will also be much higher. Thus, GOLF is OUT!

Few more hours were spent analyzing the video games and the dog market. Both are out!

Finally! After 3 cups of star buck coffee and a bag of chips, Derek managed to get something in the mountain biking niche. I’ll leave it for you to watch exactly the steps he took to discover the niche keywords and what exactly he found.

Click here to watch Day 1 of the video

By the way, to be fair, keywork research takes a long time, and being able to find a niche keyword in 12 hours I guess is considered quite a good job. Well done Derek!

Popularity: 42% [?]