Example Of Monetizing WP Images

Very few people realize that the WordPress blog program has an excellent feature for making additional money through utilizing the images description. For years the top SEO advisers have been telling us to give our images an alt tag. This is critically important because your photo can get listed in the Goolge images when you add the alt tag.

Today, I want to take this a step further. Don’t just give your WordPress photos an alt tag. You need to fill in the title and take time to describe the image. The title should be a targeted keyword phrase that is not being focused on in the main article. Don’t over stuff your keywords in this area. Just use descriptive words that are not necessarily in your article.

You can monetize the image description area in two ways.

• Add a hyper link in the description that will take visitors to the website page where the image originated from. Yes, you can use the href HTML hyper link code in this area and it will create an active link that can be clicked on.
• Add an Adsense unit in the description. Yes, you can post the java script code in the WordPress image description area. Refer to this article explaining what is allowable by Google in relation to Adsense and Images being used together.

Here’s why filling in the description area is really important. If you only add an alt tag you will only have a chance at being found in the Google Images results. The moment you write a decent description of the photograph, you have just created a separate page in WordPress that has enough content on it to be listed in the search engine results pages. What happens is because the keyword density of the image description is so rich in relation to the amount of content used to describe the photo, Goolge will give you top placements in the SERPS.

This top ranking page may only be short-lived due to the amount of content used on the page, but it still gives you another opportunity to cash in on advertising dollars by monetizing the image page.

When a visitor to your main article clicks on the image to enlarge it, they will be taken to the page that has the description of the image on it. Your Adsense add or affiliate information will be right there waiting for them to click on it. This is so much better than displaying an image “only” when a visitors clicks on the photograph while reading the main article.

Can you see how this can increase your Adsense and affiliate revenue. Monetize your images in this way and you will make more money online with your WordPress blog.

In fact this video on What Not TO Do With Landing Pages is located on the Web Pro News site. Inside the content, the person who is sharing from an experts opinion says;

- “The attention span of website visitors is super short, equivalent to a lit match”

- “Paralysis through analysis”

-”You’re overwhelming people with choice”

-”Cut it down to two, three or four main choices”

Designing website pages above the fold correctly is critical to the success of our website. I am refereeing to keeping our visitors on the page once they get there. Getting traffic to an Intuit website is a completely different subject altogether.

The Youtube video below says volumes on this subject of having so much on your pages that the visitors get paralyzed and don’t know what to do next.

What Makes Good Web Design

Consider the following points that the author of the Youtube video makes about good web design:

1. With good web design-less is almost always more.
2. A common mistake is to try and WOW the user.
3. Better to focus on your central message, find quality images. One large quality image on the main page is worth more than two hundred bad images inside.
4. When you design a website, it’s not youwant to please; it’s your visitors you want to please.
5. You want to impress them with the product or service you offer, not your web design.
6. Good web design is clean, crisp, honest and sometimes a little unpredictable.
7. Form follows function. Start with the information that you want to convey to the public.
8. Write down your information, organize it and then design your website around those things, not the other way around.
9. The first page of your website is far more important than all the other pages because that’s the one your visitors will see first.

Think about what you are doing and study other website designs before building anything. Don’t push your visitors away by having so many choices, colors or images that they become paralyzed with confusion and click off of the landing page. Attention spans are short. We need to grab them and keep them through the use of simplicity, videos, images and excellent written content.

I had no technical knowledge at all other than how to left and right click the mouse. I had a beginners level ability when it came to checking my email. I remember, I needed to have my sixteen year old son teach me how to add an attachment in my Gmail account.

Things have sure changed since then.

In fact, I have told several people that I’ve been in Internet college for the past few years. The interesting part about that is that I am self-taught for the most part. Ninety five percent of what I have learned about developing Intuit websites, building WordPress blogs and getting top placements with search engines, was learned through researching FREE content online.

After I built my first Sitebuilder website and found out that I could put an HTML code on the page that would serve up a Google Adsense advertisement, I was totally hooked. I jumped in with both feet and built several Homestead websites around niches I was familiar with.

In the beginning it was ten cents here and there, but I began to experience the possibility of limitless income. Now my efforts are pulling in well over one thousand dollars a month with just Adsense alone.

Then, I heard the term affiliate programs and wondered what that was all about. I soon discovered CJ, Clickbank and Linkshare. As I pursued building more websites and adding these companies products to them, I began to enjoy more income from those various types of income producing streams.

Then there was learning about email marketing with my Intuit website. This is a never ending learning curve that seems to change with the rapid movement of the Internet world. It didn’t take me long to learn that what all the gurus were telling me was true, the money was in the list.

I was forced to sign-up with Aweber when my email lists with Intuit were too big for them to handle on a daily basis.

Last year we sent out over 1,650,500 emails. These were all sent to people who wanted to receive emails from us on a daily basis. It boggles my mind how many peoples lives we can touch from our computer desks.

After I built my first Intuit Homestead website, I went full speed ahead. I have since created and published hundreds of Youtube videos. I’ve also created several niche membership sites that have instructional videos on them. I had to learn how to use a screen recorder, how to compress videos and how to edit them using Windows XP Professional’s movie maker program.

My most recent product was developing a downlaodable set of thirty six audio lessons that solve a common problem that most people in life have to deal with at some point or another. This idea caused me to learn how to use Free recording software.

The product was such a great hit that I learned how to create a CD and it is now available through a drop shipment company and people are buying the product.

Within two weeks of  launching the product, I had eleven email list subscribers. Out of those eleven, four of them made purchases totaling $110 plus…

Article marketing, ebook creation, photo editing software, article spinners, mass video distribution, directory submission software, outsourcing and what is know as content syndication are now common words in my vocabulary.

If someone had told me that after I built my first Intuit website that I would soon go from full-time cabinet maker to full-time Internet marketer, I would have laughed at them. I literally knew nothing about Internet marketing or had I had any formal training in the field. I didn’t even know what HTML or Javascript was.

To this day, I equate my success on the Internet to one simple moment in time, the day I told God, “I hate building cabinets…please do something.” Not long after that prayer I built my first Intuit website and the rest is history.

The truth is that you cannot have a REAL blog in the Homestead Sitebuilder program.

Even the new feature that the Intuit company added in recent months does not allow for search engines to read the content in the posts.

This is an issue I’ve previously addressed in videos and several articles. The RSS features in the web builder are coded using Java Script. Search engines DO NOT read Java Script.

Therefore, all of the content that you write will not be visible to Google, Yahoo and Bing. With this in mind, it becomes a waste of time, content publishing and effort to use the built-in features- unless search engine appeal is not necessarily an important part of your goals.

The visitors to your website will benefit from your content once they find your site, but they will never find you through a content post that you published using the built-in blog feature in the Sitebuilder. Not through the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

How do you get a blog, then?

You will have to go elsewhere to a different company to get hosting.

I use Godaddy www.GoDaddy.com for all of mine. Hosting costs less than seven dollars ($7) per month. It doesn’t cost extra to get a domain name set up with a WordPress blog.

Follow These Steps to Set-Up A WordPress Blog (WP):

• Sign-up for hosting with Godaddy www.GoDaddy.com
• Purchase a domain name
• Call tech support at Godaddy
• Request that they help you set up WordPress with your domain
• Get this book: WordPress Starter Guide

They will kindly walk you through configuring the new site.
Wait a few hours and go to http://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin
Once inside your blog-administration panel, start learning how it works.

I’d recommend interacting with Godaddy mostly on the phone. Their website is set up to keep trying to sell you more and more stuff. It gets a little frustrating trying to wade through cluttered pages. If you get a tech-support person on the phone, they can get your account set up, your domain name purchased and configure your WordPress blog in the hosting control center with much less aggravation.

There are hundreds of pre-made templates to choose from in WP. If you stick with the standard designs- everything will go fine. It’s when you try to customize themes that things get a little difficult…  that is unless you are good at CSS, PHP and HTML codes.

You will be introduced to two terms: “Widgets” and “Plugins”.

• Widgets get added to the sidebar area of the page
• Plugins customize your blogs functions

You will find many tutorials on the Internet to help you learn how to get the new WP site going. YouTube has hundreds of tutorials on using WP.

One site that has helped me tremendously is Website Babble. This is an interactive forum community where there are several people who know the WP blog program very well.

The owner of the site is an expert in working with WordPress blogs. She developed this book to help beginners: WP Starter Guide

The intuit web builder is all “point, click, drag and drop”. Learning how to design using a blog will be different than using a Homestead Sitebuilder set-up. With a little patience and time, you will be able to successfully achieve your goals.

Search engines tend to like the inner workings of blogs much better than normal static websites. What you will find is that your pages will get indexed in Google’s results pages within seconds. With an Intuit/Homestead site it can take days to weeks for a page to get put in the search engine results pages.

Although, I love building sites using the Sitebuilder, I’ve started using WordPress for most of my content publishing on the Internet.

On this blog you will find Intuit website tutorials that can be watched by simply scrolling through the video’s category located on the menu bar. Link building, adding Adsense, embedding a Google calendar and advanced keyword research are just a small portion of the lessons we have provided on this blog. This particular site is just one location where we provide information, tools and tips for working with the Site Builder.

The largest collection of tutorials for a Homestead website owner to learn from are the ones we provide in the Marketing Center. In the collection of lessons- there are blog posts, videos, audios, e-books and links to top sites on the Internet that you can learn from quickly. A wealth of knowledge can be instantly available to you that will greatly increase the speed at which you learn and also decrease the time you have to invest in mastering the Site Builder.

Videos are the best tutorials for learning the Intuit Sitebuilder content. That’s why we continue to publish new tutorials regularly. They are much easier to follow and understand than any other method of learning. The reasons are obvious. You get audio and visual- which make learning easier than trying to sift through understanding what someone is trying to explain in a text document. Even if an e-book or article has image graphics, it’s much quicker and easier to comprehend by learning from a tutorial video lesson.

All of our Homestead Sitebuilder tutorials give accurate, detailed information. In fact, we have never had anyone ever demand that a refund be issued due to receiving poor information. The tools, tips or techniques we provide in the tutorial lessons are beneficial in many ways.

Here are a few Youtube tutorials offering Intuit/Homestead website help.

* Beginners link building
* Fast way of promoting your website
* Advanced keyword research
* Adding Adsense
* Deleting a website in Sitebuilder
* What is the Alt Text feature?
* Adding a favicon
* How to set up Google Analytics
* Easy way to create a banner
* Blurry images
* Creating a PDF e-book
* How to add Kontera
* Adding Youtube videos
* Deleting or eliminating web pages
* Working with multiple elements

There are many other tutorials for learning about building a Homestead website located on our Sitebuilder Expert Youtube channel. Of all the tutorials we have created for you, the most important place for you to begin is in learning how to do SEO on a Intuit website. Optimization techniques are vitally important for you to learn first before you even think about creating web pages. If you don’t learn how to optimize your pages properly- your site will not be a success.

A couple of years ago she began building the site and decided to use one of Homestead’s templates. After she made a few changes here and there to try and customize things the functions of the template would not allow her to do what she wanted to do. Basically she is now stuck with a template that has a totally different color scheme than she wants.

This is just one reason that it’s important to study web design and content optimization before you start building. What happens is that most beginners just jump in and start designing their sites and later they become frustrated because they must make changes.

Web Development Plan for Intuit/Homestead Website

1. What is the primary purpose of the site?
- What services or products do you provide
- Profit or non-profit

2. What are the secondary goals?
- Is search engine ranking an important factor to be considered?
- Do you desire repeat visitors?
- Will you require membership or email addresses?
- Will you have a newsletter?

3. Who are you trying to reach?
- How will they find you?
- What phrases would they use if they were searching online for your site?

4. Website design
- Is there a design you have in mind?
- Do you have a logo?
- What color theme? Three to five colors is good.
- Do you need printable pages?
- What photos will be included?
- Will you have video and audio sections?
- Credit card purchases or Papal services?
- Will there be photos of you or company employees on the site?
- Do any of your vendors have information to be included?
- Do you want your navigation on the side or at the top of the
pages?
- What types of forms will be need to gather information?
- Will you need email boxes set up?
- Do you have a short phrase which describes your company?
- Do you have existing promotional materials?
- Text content should be no less than 250 words of rich text.

5. What will be the titles for your pages?
- Home
- Contact us
- Portfolio
- Testimonials

6. Preparation for search engine optimization
- What terms will people use when searching for your services or products?
- What websites would be good to try to link with?
- What are the most important keywords for you site?

7. Website maintenance
-Will you need training to manage your site once it is built?
- Will you be hiring us to make changes?
- What future additions or alterations will be necessary and how often?

The work that I did on her site involved adding special codes for the search engines to find her pages and also a little on page optimization. You see, when I checked with Google, only two of her five pages were indexed. Her Homestead website has been this way for a couple of years now.

Had she taken the time to study more about web design or purchased one of my products developed to help homestead website users, perhaps she could have had a lot more business over the past two years.

So, learn about designing web sites by reading articles, purchasing products and looking at nice designs. Make sure that you know what colors that you are using and how to work with photos and the correct way to optimize Homestead web pages.

Take time to plan out exactly how you want your website to be. You are going to be investing many hours in making all this work; you don’t want to have to spend a lot of time redoing things in the future. Try to do it right the first time by learning the proper way to build web pages.

I wrestled with the question of how you make one of these templates bigger until I finally decided to stop using them altogether. Here’s what I did to overcome my frustrations. I invested time in learning how to do Homestead website photo editing using the Gimp editing software. Once I learned how to work with images and special text, I was able to start creating my own personalized designs.

Once you understand how to work with images and creative text patterns, you can basically create your own template designs for your Intuit website too. Because there are so many websites to model on the Internet, it’s rather easy to find something that works.

Perhaps this is not a good suggestion for the person who just wants to quickly get a business or hobby site published onto the World Wide Web. If you are interested in continuing to build websites, then it’s a good idea to learn how to alter photographs.

Some of Homestead’s free built-in templates will work just fine because the page layouts are large enough to accommodate plenty of photos and content. I recently had a friend of mine choose a layout that would not allow enough room for me to even add a five hundred word article to his site. It didn’t take me long to call him and ask if I could just design a custom theme for him.

I any event, if you are really set on trying to expand the template of your Homestead website to suit your needs, you are going to need to learn how to alter images. Many of the Sitebuilder layouts are put together using a series of images. There’s really no way of getting around taking the puzzle parts out and trying to replace them with different sized pieces. .

In this article, I’m going to explain how to get images and different shapes, like an inserted rectangle element to move forward or backward when you are designing your pages with several items stacked on top of one another.

When you load or add a new element to your SiteBuilder page, oftentimes you will want to create layers. In this article, you will learn the steps on how to move things frontward and backward in Intuit’s SiteBuilder.

By learning how to utilize this web page design function within the Intuit program, you can really customize your websites look and feel with personal images.

One of the things I like to do is use the rectangle element and add rounded corners. Then, I develop another one, but make it a little small. I place the small layer on top of the bigger one. This makes for a nice layout for content to be placed in or even images, depending upon how large the area is you are working with.

How do you move layers in the Intuit/Homestead Site Builder?

Refer to the image above as you review these steps.

1) Left click on the image or text that is already inserted onto the SiteBuilder page you are working on. It should then change to having a thin blue line around it.

2) Next right click on the photo, rectangle, circle, square or text that you want to move forward or backward.

3) A small grey window will appear on the screen giving you several options.

4) If you click on one of the top two choices, this will either send the element all the way back or bring it entirely to the front of the web page parts that you want to layer or stack.

5) The bottom two selections will only move the item you have highlight frontward or backward, one layer at a time. This allows you to stack and merge many layers together in order to create your own unique design with the Intuit program.

When you are working with several items at once and trying to design your own banners or logo, be careful to not position a layer in such a way that you cannot click on it to move it. It might take a little while to make a conscious effort to not let this happen. With me, I always get so involved in trying to design the layers and arrange them that I forget about the positioning of the element. When I do this sometimes I will click on the option to send an object all the way back and it will disappear behind everything else. The only way to get it back is to move the items that are covering the layer.

If you have not seen our Youtube video on moving multiple page elements in the SiteBuilder, I would recommend that you watch it. It can be found at the Homestead Expert Youtube channel. The tutorial will help you when you are working with different elements and trying to arrange them on top of each other.

We also have created a video tutorial that teaches how to make a banner using the Site Builder program. This video too demonstrates the value of learning how to work with layers, by moving them forward or backward inside of the Intuit software program.

Basically what you will need to do is purchase a separate domain name, then on your Homestead web site add a link pointing to the forum.

One of the things I found extremely helpful when I started the process of setting up the Homestead connection to the forum was the tech support at Godaddy. They walked me through all of the necessary steps for getting the forum active in a matter of minutes. Once I had it set up, learning how to work with the program was not a difficult task. As long as you do not try to customize things you will be OK.

Before You Make the Connection

Traffic is Important
I would like to offer one suggestion though. If you are considering having one of these, you should already have an established website with loads of traffic coming to it. Just having a forum link on your Homestead site will not be enough. People will not participate if there is not a community of people making a connection on a daily basis.

Be Aware of Spammers
Every forum owner I have interacted with has said that spammers always make a connection with a forum. It is a constant battle keeping things in order. This is going to be a daily task in addition to managing your main Homestead website connection. Not one day can slip by without checking the posts. Spammers have a way of posting obscene things in an overabundant amount once they get in. If you leave the forum for too long, without checking it and they have been in there for a couple of days, you may never get the mess cleaned up. I used to keep a daily connection with what was happening with the forums I managed.

Check Out Other Forums
It’s always a good idea to check out the competition to make sure that there are not already several established communities in your niche of choice. If you already have a ton of traffic coming to your regular Homestead site, then it’s OK to launch a forum connection.

Taking a Homestead site and making a connection with a forum is challenging and a lot of fun. Learning a new website builder program for adding a forum is not going to take as much time as you may think. It’s really pretty simple. Just remember to keep things simple by using the default designs offered with the forum. It’s actually easier than building a Homestead website. The difficulty comes in when you try to customize logos and stuff. Now check out www.GoDaddy.com for making your Homstead connection with a forum.

Here are the steps for creating a do-it-yourself template to build your SiteBuilder website with.

Step 1
You will need to decide on all of the page names. Write them on a piece of paper.

Step 2
As previously mentioned, a header is going to be required. Watch the Youtube Homestead Expert video for tips. You can also review the article on this site about editing images for a Homestead website.

Step 3
Study other website designs and come up with a few good ideas as to how you want the site to look.

Step 4
Build one page exactly how you want it to look. Do this without adding any text at all. Only use the logo you designed, choose the page color and place shading blocks wherever you want to add design accents to the page. This is the design stage where you will drag and drop everything that will be on the each page of the site. Save the page name as Template.

Step 5
Once the template is finished, while it is open in the Sitebuilder, click on “file” at the top left of the page, then “save as.” Your first page should be named “index.” The index page is the home page of your site.

Step 6
Click on the header image and link it to the “index” page. This is the do-it-yourself  method that will link every individual page that you will be creating to the home page.

Step 7
Add any text to the index page that will be displayed on every page of your website. If you are planning on using the built-in navigation feature now is the time to add it to the page. If you are going to include your name, address or contact information on every page, this is where you should drag and drop into position on your, do-it-yourself, Homestead website template design.

Step 8
With the “index” page now ready to duplicate, while it is open in the SiteBuilder, once again click on “file” at the top left of the page, click on “save as” and name the next page using the list that you previously made for your page names.  If you are using the built-in navigation menu, don’t forget to add it to the page. Continue this process until you have created all of the pages for your Homestead website.

That’s all there is to making a  do-it-yourself  design for your Homestead website SiteBuilder program. Now you are ready to point, click, drag and drop all of the other elements that you need to complete your website.  Remember to take time to study other websites and model yours around site that you really like.