Newbie Question(s) so dumb, you're afraid to even ask!

[Asad]

Hey lads I'm pretty fresh to the Online Marketing game and have some retarded basic questions...

I recently added SSL to my niche site and switched from http to https domain.
In my Google search console my website is added as http, I couldnt find an option to switch to https there so I just added my https as another site there... Is this okay? I now have 2 sites with different data for basically the same webpage in my Search Console. Is it possible to combine the 2 webpages in Search Console so that I can see all the data for my webpage?
Also the search results for my https are completly different in rankings, keywords, etc. in Search Console data than for my http domain...

You gotta add both http and https in your console. You should also have both www. and non-www in there as well. So in reality you will have 4 properties listed in your Search console for your domain

 

[JasonSc]

@easygame Also if you are running Google Analytics you will want to change it to the SSL version.
Admin -> Property Settings-> Default URL change to https:// in the drop down menu.

 

[Ryuzaki]

so I just added my https as another site there... Is this okay?

Yes, that's not only okay, but correct, and as @Asad pointed out, you should have all 4 variations in there. What you don't need to do is submit a "change of address." That's for moving to a new domain, not just a change of protocol. All you need to do is make sure your 301's are working correctly and then fetch and request a crawl on both versions of the site and they'll start picking up the change immediately. Also I'd submit a sitemap on the new https version, which will also help.

 

[easygame]

@easygame Also if you are running Google Analytics you will want to change it to the SSL version.
Admin -> Property Settings-> Default URL change to https:// in the drop down menu.

Yup thank you almost forgot about that.

Yes, that's not only okay, but correct, and as @Asad pointed out, you should have all 4 variations in there. What you don't need to do is submit a "change of address." That's for moving to a new domain, not just a change of protocol. All you need to do is make sure your 301's are working correctly and then fetch and request a crawl on both versions of the site and they'll start picking up the change immediately. Also I'd submit a sitemap on the new https version, which will also help.

Alright thank you!
Is there any way though to watch the data of all the 4 submitted pages in one single general view?

 

[gadsie]

Is the 'review site with affiliate links' model still viable? I just finished creating my website (no content yet), and am currently busy learning all the concepts such as backlinks etc. I'm sort of knowledgable in the 'vertical' that I chose, but definitely not knowledgable enough to compete, plus I don't have a talent for writing. So as far as I can think of, the only way to monetize would be to pay for some content, perhaps write a little bit myself, get social media presence, and get some review sales going.

Btw, sorry for being stupid (I could ask a question for every sentence in the guide lol), but regarding this:

Backlinks
In the early stages, your entire model is going to be match and exceed when it comes to backlinks. Match comes first. You can't match if you don't know what your opponents already have linking to them. Arm yourself by using the big three:

• Ahrefs
• Majestic
• Open Site Explorer

Each has weaknesses in their index. You'll need to compile data from each of them and strip them of duplicates. Then you can sort it by priority and type and get busy.

What does "weaknesses in their index" mean, as in what would be an example?

 

[Samwise89]

People make a ton of money with "review site with affiliate links". The New York Times recently bought TheWirecutter for around 30 million, and that's the kind of site it is.

"Weakness in their index" means that each of those sites and others like them do some things better than the others. Ahrefs crawls faster but also finds a lot of junk. Open site explorer is the slowest thing ever at finding links and gives too much credit to spam. Two examples. Using them all is good if you know how to get rid of duplicate entries (spreadsheet work)

 

[gadsie]

I feel like such a leech lol, but I have a couple new questions.

- I have decided to "rewrite some top performers" as mentioned in day 5 of the digital crash course. Should I upload each article on my website as soon as I finished writing it or should I wait with publishing until I'm ready to start massively promoting it on social media?

- On that same day, it mentions that you "pony up $100 and pay a non-competing page to publish and boost your post to all their fans." But isn't any page with even remotely the same style of content a competitor? Or should you promote on a cooking page when you're selling cars, for example.

- Regarding keywords, what do you actually do with these keywords? Is it the idea to use these keywords as many times as possible in your article, or are you supposed to use them in a google Adwords ad, like what do you do with a keyword once you found it?

- What does "matching backlinks" mean?

A lot of questions, but I appreciate it a lot if even one gets answered.

 

[CCarter]

Or should you promote on a cooking page when you're selling cars, for example.

If you are selling cars you should promote on a car parts website, car forum, if you are selling BMWs you can promote on Audi forum websites comparing Audis to BMWs. You can promote within car magazines. Anyone in the car industry is a potential partners, especially forums, magazines, and specialty operations they would love a car company advertising on their sites cause that = money.

It's all about making more money, how can you convince the person that by going with your car promotion on their website they'll make more money - hint by giving them money or money making opportunities like an affiliate program or even doing a swap to cross promote to each other's audiences so they make money off your audience as you make money off theirs.

 

[Ryuzaki]

- Regarding keywords, what do you actually do with these keywords?

- What does "matching backlinks" mean?

You'll learn about these in Day 8's On-Page SEO and Day 11's Off-Page SEO talk. I'd recommend giving the entire course a skim first, then going back for a deeper dive, and then finally a 3rd round when you're really ready to start. The reason is that you can't possibly put together a puzzle with pieces you can't identify and ones you don't realize exist yet.

What I mean is you can get a fast bird's eye view of all of the various pieces with a quicker skim, so when all of these references happen to topics that aren't covered yet, you'll at least have context for them.

But to answer your questions, which are both SEO questions, keywords are phrases that you optimize your content around so that you'll be considered for ranking for those phrases. You have to use them correctly to send the right signals to Google that shows your content is related to the keywords. And no, using them a bunch is one of the worst things you can do nowadays. That's called "keyword stuffing" and used to work well about a decade ago, and obscenely well before that. But now you'll be disqualified from ranking for whatever keyword you're stuffing. You'll learn about all that in Day 8.

'Matching backlinks' refers to investigating the backlink profile of a competing page and/or site and attempting to earn each of those backlinks for your own site. "Match & Exceed" is a good way to look at things. You don't want to be equal, you want to be better than the other pages so you're more likely to rank above them. It's rarely possible to match someone's backlink profile, but you want to get what you can, because those links are obviously supporting a top ranking page's ranking.

 

[gadsie]

How do you get a Wordpress website in your specific colour? The themes are very untweakable. I managed to change most things to my color (green) by messing with the code, but now all my links are also green instead of the preferred blue.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

How do you get a Wordpress website in your specific colour? The themes are very untweakable. I managed to change most things to my color (green) by messing with the code, but now all my links are also green instead of the preferred blue.

The best bet if you aren't able to code up the CSS yourself to fully customize a theme is to go for a theme that's more designed for customization. I like Divi by Elegant Themes but there are many more with builders/complete customization build in that I haven't tested as much but still come with great reviews (X etc). The investment is usually pretty small <$100 pretty much across the board.

 

[stymie]

What up all. Got an idea for an app. Any recommendations for a trustworthy business or individual to work with?

 

[Potatoe]

What up all. Got an idea for an app. Any recommendations for a trustworthy business or individual to work with?

What do you need from them? What are you looking for help with?

 

[gadsie]

Currently I am doubting what direction to take my blog in. I have health/skin care blog (set it up like 2 weeks ago), it has 4 blog posts now, averaging about a 1000 words. I'm pretty knowledgable on the subject. But I don't know if I should continue with writing quality blog posts or I should start posting things like "Kill Diabetes By Eating These 5 Foods". At the end of the day I only care about making money, and I feel like a legit blog might take years to get some traffic going. Not to mention that I can't post very frequently when writing knowledgeable blogposts.

 

[Andrewkar]

I have website in fitness/health/lifestyle niche, it looks more like magazine site, but with blog main characteristic mixed in, which is this personal interaction with users. I'm trying to post regularly but crafting quality content takes time, and by quality I mean 2000 + words. So on a daily basis I'm publishing 1-3 short articles, anything between 400-700 words is good, weekly or biweekly I'm publishing quality article 2000+ words long. First 20 high quality articles were geared twords what I call "show off", but in a positive way. To show brand in a good light. Articles are loaded with information and just information where main CTAs are mailing list signup via contextual forms. Also at this stage I have created different mailing lists so I have users segregated according to their interests. People who landed on a page about eating healthy are on separate list, people who landed on a page about running are on their list, and so on. Those articles are touching on basics be it fitness, health, lifestyle etc. and are meant to introduce website to the readers and make good first impression. No money at this stage. Now, money making articles are also mostly the long ones (but not always, I'm testing short ones also), but CTAs implemented there are meant to send readers to aff offers etc. Short articles are kind of news, meant to keep people "in the loop" and make Google happy with fresh content published daily. So you might want to consider this kind of setup, and also before you go for the money you might want to publish at least 20 articles of high quality so people have something to read and ideally share via social networks. Once you have those 20 articles in place, start social media promotion, that way you won't burn first traffic by putting people off thanks to thin content. I would recommend you read all from @Tavin and @CCarter about traffic leaks and branding. And if you have good knowledge of the subject as you've said, you will be able to create content much faster, just give it some personal angle by being yourself and you are good to go.

 

[stymie]

What do you need from them? What are you looking for help with?

Without going into too much detail, the idea borrows a little bit from Uber in terms of the location aspect, but I would need it to track people instead of vehicles. Would also need to have the ability to place an order through the app as well, which would actually be similar to Uber Eats.

 

[Calamari]

Currently I am doubting what direction to take my blog in. I have health/skin care blog (set it up like 2 weeks ago), it has 4 blog posts now, averaging about a 1000 words. I'm pretty knowledgable on the subject. But I don't know if I should continue with writing quality blog posts or I should start posting things like "Kill Diabetes By Eating These 5 Foods". At the end of the day I only care about making money, and I feel like a legit blog might take years to get some traffic going. Not to mention that I can't post very frequently when writing knowledgeable blogposts.

I'd dive way deeper into skin care. Go an inch wide and a mile deep before you go to two inches wide.

 

[Sin]

This question has been on my mind for a while. I think multiple persons; I included could get some valuable insights from the answers that will follow.

I am not a native English person and it feels like I have a disadvantage competing in the USA market. But, as a native American. Is there anything you perceive as an opportunity for people who live outside the USA and speak a different language and you find yourself disregarding the opportunity since you don't know the population/language enough?

Outside of big English cities, you will find fewer affiliate opportunities, Amazon sales are drastically lower. Google searches volume tend to be a fraction of what you can find in American cities. But, competition tends to be lower too.

I ask the question because I've been building and optimizing/Adwords local websites for businesses for a while now and I feel like I won't grow as I would like unless I hire employees and enter the cash in cash out agency fallacy. (I'd like to pursue something that I control the backend of the business instead of only the client flow.)

I hope the discussion that follows could help me think outside of my internal perception.

 

[gadsie]

This question has been on my mind for a while. I think multiple persons; I included could get some valuable insights from the answers that will follow.

I am not a native English person and it feels like I have a disadvantage competing in the USA market. But, as a native American. Is there anything you perceive as an opportunity for people who live outside the USA and speak a different language and you find yourself disregarding the opportunity since you don't know the population/language enough?

Outside of big English cities, you will find fewer affiliate opportunities, Amazon sales are drastically lower. Google searches volume tend to be a fraction of what you can find in American cities. But, competition tends to be lower too.

I ask the question because I've been building and optimizing/Adwords local websites for businesses for a while now and I feel like I won't grow as I would like unless I hire employees and enter the cash in cash out agency fallacy. (I'd like to pursue something that I control the backend of the business instead of only the client flow.)

I hope the discussion that follows could help me think outside of my internal perception.

Personally I wouldn't worry about your english skill. Most blogs have pretty simple language and yours seems fine. But I'm just a newb so I'll let the experts here give you a good answer.

Does anyone have good blog post outsource recommendations? I heard about textbroker but I don't like how they want a picture of your face and passport..

 

[Ryuzaki]

Does anyone have good blog post outsource recommendations?

• Word Agents
• Upwork

Those two can cover all of your needs. If you feel you can't afford them, you're going to end up dissatisfied trying to find cheaper, high-quality, consistent work. If you're looking for a one-off or just a handful, you can hunt around /r/redditforhire and Fiverr or even deal with Textbroker, but it's really not worth your time. That's not to say you can't find an inexpensive diamond in the rough, but again, it's not worth your time when time is money.

 

[Sin]

I used word agents and they did a great job.

 

[bernard]

How are people doing with Amazon affiliates these days? I've never used them as they weren't in my country, but I hear they might be coming to town next year.

 

[animalstyle]

How are people doing with Amazon affiliates these days? I've never used them as they weren't in my country, but I hear they might be coming to town next year.

It would probably be worth your time to get ahead of the curve here and be established early once the amazon ship lands.

 

[Sisu]

How are people doing with Amazon affiliates these days? I've never used them as they weren't in my country, but I hear they might be coming to town next year.

I've gone through ups and downs with them, but I've made more money in every month of the last 3 years and counting from AA than my day job; as you can imagine, that's made a significant difference in our family's finances and the amounts we've felt comfortable giving to charity.

 

[konnektor]

I joined this site because it seemed like people getting after it. But I still don't know what it is. There is no "about" page, or "watch this first" page.

What is Builder Society and who is it for?

OK - just found the mission statement on the "rules" page: "Builder Society (or BuSo) is a forum for discussing digital strategy and online marketing that focuses on bringing together ambitious self-starters to network, to share strategies, and to inspire."

Then I am in the right place...