Alright, so I've decided that entrepreneurship is infinitely more fascinating to me than sports betting and poker and I wanna turn this into a long term plan. The internet is obviously the starting point. I know photoshop and HTML but not much else but I don't know if I should be worried as I'm pretty damn good at both copyrighting and design and I'm a very quick learner.

I wanna start a site or two just to get some practice down. One thing I might wanna do is a food site, which I already purchased a domain for just to be on the safe side. It is a new domain that I was really surprised it was available - www.truegourmet.net. I don't really know what to fill it with yet but I figure there's no rush in monetizing it yet. Some input on the domain name would be appreciated. Any problems with it?

I have some ideas, one of which is creating a dropship store for gourmet products. There's probably some stiff competition there so that plan is probably much too grand? I figure the demographic is packed with purchasing power though, and the stores I've seen are pretty ****** imo. Might be a worthwhile endeavor once I've gotten some experience? As I said, I'm in no rush there.

In any case, I'm thinking of starting with a food page of some sort since I'm gonna treat is as a learning experience and I might aswell start with something that I enjoy. Just want to get the basics down of attracting traffic, finding optimal ad placements and stuff like that. Is this a decent idea or would it be more educational to start with less competitive key words? How about a subniche, like "home made tomato ketchup" or "all things garlic"? Those are just random examples obviously.

Will I need to waste countless hours begging for backlinks from stuck-up foodies or should I go black hat? Are there white hat alternatives to wasting time pretending that I'm interested in other peoples stupid blogs?

Pretty long winded and lots of questions, sorry. I'm very grateful for all the help so far.

Anyobdy run Google Adwords TV campaigns? aka bought and run television media buys using google ad words?

Everything I've read about dropshipping reads that it's a total nightmare.

Outsource articles for backlinks. It's the easiest way for them. You can also do link exchanges with other webmasters (easier to do once your site is more developed).

CDS,

I think FoxwoodsFiend did that once for his personal blog as a joke on Oxygen or something. Search for it.

If you write something really good, people will want to link to you. Lots of people succeed in doing this. Heck, people got their links on major sites like Drudge, Aol front page, because they had something new or interesting to say. But if you write another dozen articles that doesn't say much of anything interesting or new, you probably won't get linked by anyone worthwhile, if you get linked at all.

also: would it be a viable option to try to get your page as one of the sources of the relevant wiki entry?

YES!

From an SEO standpoint, no. Wiki is no-follow because of people trying to put their links in there. You'd get direct traffic though, at least for the 5m before they deleted it.

looking to spend 5k or more on a website, need everyone to holler when they see a good buy!

fwiw guids has been really helpful getting some website setup stuff done. He helped me a bunch & set up a server & made it really easy to setup wordpress sites.

I've just started out & it seems incredibly time consuming to set up a website. I set up a sailing website about circumnavigating & a blog which is getting some traffic but not getting anyone to click on anything. If anyone has any ideas on improving it decaptain.com I'd appreciate your thoughts

Your site is not optimized for search terms which would lead to clicks. Your title bar is not optimized for ANY keywords. Change it to something like "Circumnavigating Tips" or something to let Google/users know what your sites about. You don't have any links pointing to your site. Your ads are far below the fold. You want them up above, that way when people go to click out of your site they do it with an ad. WordPress is easy when you get the hang of it. You need to go into either header.php or index.php and insert your AdSense code for a horizontal banner in there so it shows up immediately when they first land on your pages. You also need to change your permalinks to an SEO-friendly structure. My favorite is the custom which shows yoursite.com/the-post-title-for-easy-seo-ranking. Go to Permalinks and click custom and paste this: /%postname%

If I were you I would do a keyword search for tons of travel/sailing keywords and then find ones with low competition and then write posts about them. And then you'll get targeted traffic which will click ads. I don't know enough about sailing or whatever your prime sailing subtopic is to know about which ads show up and how your niche's users react to those ads, so I'm not sure the best way to optimize your site is. But I really doubt Amazon is it. What are people going to buy? A sailboat? I think AdSense is the best and if you actually are an expert on your subject and people have lots of questions about it, I think writing an eBook could be a profitable venture.

Hope this helps.

If you want to add adsense to a Wordpress blog, the easiest way is to grab one of the Adsense plugins. You just give it your Adsense id, tell it where you want the ads, and it takes care of it all for you. No file editing required

Those often aren't customized enough for certain themes. It really does take two seconds to fiddle with the code and find the right placements. Also, some of those plugins will take a % of your earnings without telling you (there's usually a hidden checkbox) and some of them insert their own code too. Just a heads up if you decide to use one of those!

Also your ads are more targeted if you insert your code manually into each post with target tags.

thanks for the advice guys. I'm working on it but still have a lot of work. I did find that when I tried 1 of those adsense plugins that i had trouble because i want the layout to be different on different pages & they stick the ad in the same spot regardless.

1. when you say change the title bar, what exactly do you mean? do you mean change the name of the site in the header from De Captain's Sailing?

2. How do I get links pointing to my site? not really clear on this concept unless its supposed to be other sites linking to mine? If so, how do I get them to link to me?

3. I added some ads at the top of the page, is that better? Is there any site that you think " wow, thats laid out really well" that you recommend i look at for tips?

Also I want to advertise & make $, but I want it to be a nice site that I'm proud of being associated with, not something spammy that people just show up & then leave.

4. I tried modifying the permalinks as you recommended, but it didn't work. I got this message:

"If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all."

Is there an easy fix? this is all pretty new for me & trial & error.

5. Optimizing for seo; I added the "all in one seo pack" & filled in the fields for each page. Is there more to do?

6. I know these are really newb questions & appreciate the help. how exactly do i do keyword searches?

7. I don't expect I'll make much from amazon but it was one of the easier things to set up starting out & i can always change as i learn. They do however sell lots of great sailing books & lots of good equipment for sailors. I've added some commission junction ads & adsense. If there are any other recommendations I'd appreciate it.

8. I have considered writing a book of the stories from our circumnavigation. I am pretty sure I have enough info & stories for a short book. My question is if I write a book does anyone have an idea of whether it would be better to market it directly as an ebook or to publish it through amazon as a kindle book? From my research it costs nothing to publish on kindle, they accept pretty much any thing decent & offer 70% royalties.

Thanks again for all the help.

1. Yes.

2. The best way is to write certain articles and post them on other sites which include a link back to yours. Or ask other webmasters with similar sites to link to yours.

3. That's much better. Just any site with the content made clear and the ads in place, but not obstructing the users experience.

4. I have no idea what's wrong with your WordPress theme.

5. Yes. SEO has more facets than I can care to write about right now. All-In-One SEO is a great tool, but it only makes your on-site SEO optimized in the easiest way for you.

6. You can use programs you pay for, but the easiest for a beginner is Google's keyword search tool.

7. I think putting a link to some good Amazon books in your sidebar would be great. Post reviews of them or something too.

8. I am not well versed enough on eBooks or Kindle sales to give you a qualified answer. I know about SEO and a decent idea of marketing/selling things online. I suggested an eBook because people buy them and you are apparently very knowledgeable in your field.

thanks, much appreciated.

Does anyone know what affects if any poker affiliate links/banners have on Google seo.

For example a poker blog that garnered decent traffic but was previously not ad supported suddenly added 3 Pokerstars links in or around each of his posts. Will this affect Google ranking? How about affiliate banners in general?

No, that shouldn't mess with SEO at all. The only way I can see that is if the ads are in really bad placements and it gets a manual review or complained about. I don't think you can run AdSense on poker sites though, so be careful with that. Affiliate ads will be fine though.

What about out going links in general? I have a directory site that has hundreds of outgoing links. I know a bunch of outgoing links hurts page rank but would it help to nofollow each outgoing link?

It doesn't hurt YOUR rankings to have outgoing links. It gives less link juice to each link if there are tons of them on the same page though. Meaning if you link 100 pages on a single page, those 100 pages don't receive the same amount of juice that a single linked page would. Nofollowing would just **** them up and give them less link juice as well, it doesn't benefit you. I'm assuming your directory site is a scraper site with duplicate content so it probably doesn't matter anyway.

I linked to one site from my PR3 site.

Almost immediately, the new site had PR3. And presumably, since the new site isn't linked from much of anywhere, if I take the original link off it will drop back to PR0-1.

But it shows you the power of a backlink for PR purposes.

Hey guys, I just created my own website too and it's a really fun and interesting experience. I haven't been fully indexed with Google yet, but I would imagine that would help. Are there any more tips that you could would suggest on getting other sites to backlink or increase SEO? Here's my site, if you guys have any criticism thanks again!

Neat Tee

I haven't really looked too hard at this, but I figured one of you might be interested.
https://flippa.com/auctions/124670/E...Since-April-10

This isn't an endorsement.

Hey Guys,

I posted in this thread a couple pages back about my site: Poke rGameR atings

I've listened to your thoughts and made quite a few modifications - added a google map (although I haven't marked the casinos on it yet), added some video content, etc.

I'm looking for more comments or suggestions, before I launch the site.

Anything you can think of that could help?


Thanks.

anyone here with any insight into the gambling affiliate business? i'd like to know which ad network our site should get and what we should expect to pay, both for CPC and CPM. gunggo.com costs $.75 cpm and $0.50 cpc. any better/cheaper sites out there?

What do you mean pay? Are you trying to advertise YOUR gambling site or get paid for putting ads up?