2011 SEO Tips, Get On Google Front Page

Get On Google Front Page has just been released for 2011. This is my 5th book, and I’m really excited as it has potential to help a lot of people.
It’s been a long road learning the business of ebooks and self publishing. At first this was something that had to be done for my novels, but then the whole endeavor became something valuable to share with others. Hence the last three books have been all about learning how to make and sell ebooks, how to make your own free website, and now this topic of rising in search engine rankings with White hat, free, organic SEO methods.
What’s fantastic about the search engines is that they keep space available at the top for ordinary people with no money to spend on advertising. That means any website can make it to the first page of search results or even to the very top spot. All that matters (in Google’s eyes) is that the website is extremely relevant to the terms of a given search. By having relevance to the subject and by using smart methods of helping the spiders see that relevance, anyone can do this.
The book talks at length on how to discover the keywords that will work best for a given website. Your very best keywords are relevant to your site, are being searched by lots of people and (hopefully) don’t have high competition from other advertisers. The book discusses in-depth how to use the Keyword Tool External program to really hone in on those best choices and then how to implement.
It’s just come out as an ebook for Amazon Kindle, so new the description isn’t currently listed yet (that takes up to 4 days though I can’t understand why). It’s also available as a pdf and epub formatted ebook at http://getongooglefrontpage.webs.com/, and also at Smashwords which will get it into Apple iBookstore and many other retailers. The paperback won’t be available for a few weeks, so watch for an update if that’s what you’d prefer.
For great 2011 SEO tips on keywords, meta data, direct submissions, alternative text, social media, creating thousands of back-links, building platform and visibility plus much more… this is a great guide. Please check out Get On Google Front Page if rising in search engine rankings is something you’d like to know more about.
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New Age: The Free Lunch

Article first published as The New Age: Free Lunch on Technorati.
Remember the old saying, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” or “You have to spend money to make money?” The lunch saying began when saloon owners gave away “free” food to anyone purchasing drinks, an effective marketing ploy that was noticeably not without cost to customers. Spending, or investing, to make money was demonstrated beautifully by George Steinbrenner though the recently deceased Yankees owner was merely quoting a traditional adage.
To me, these phrases go hand in hand. The concepts are that nothing is without cost, and those who want more money must use some money wisely to make it happen. While it appears these dogmas are ingrained in the American psyche, the fact is these beliefs contradict the American Dream; opportunity exists for anyone with ability and effort regardless of their means. Thankfully, these outdated concepts are also changing before our eyes.
The internet is the true champion of all things free. I’m continually amazed at the plethora of free online resources and how much they’ve impacted my life. To name just a smidgen, how valuable are Google, Facebook and Twitter? Hard to put a price tag on what those services would be worth if I had to pay for them.
Here’s a fun headline that you’ll read someday soon (or maybe already have); Homeless Person Creates Empire with Free Tools at Library. Imagine a homeless guy; let’s call him Hal, visiting the public library daily to use the computers. Hal makes a website at a free web design venue with hosting included. He writes articles and uses public domain images to bring attention to the homeless in his city. He asks for donations. Personal checks and PayPal clicks start coming Hal’s way. He adds video and interviews to better demonstrate the plight of his friends. The website booms. Months later he’s the CEO of an upstart company that assists the poverty stricken in his city. Years later Hal’s company has gone worldwide. He raises billions and aids countless people from a venture that began with absolutely nothing invested and services available for free.
I just imagined this scenario, but there’s probably an example of Hal already in action. The naysayers clinging to tradition might argue, “Our tax dollars paid for the library, the computer, the internet connection and the electricity.” Well, sure, that’s right. Naysayers are good at that.
Do they recognize what’s happening to the price of music or video rental? Do they see the possibility of a virtual MBA from Harvard professors at the lower class home of a student in the near future?
The naysayers can stick with whatever money mantra that makes them feel secure. I firmly believe we’ve entered a new age that’s being ushered in by the internet. The Free Lunch is the latest chapter of the American Dream. Will it be prosperous for everyone like it is for Hal? Probably not, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.

Thoughts or comments?
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Feeling Stuck in the Tangled SEO Web?

Article first published as Feeling Stuck in the Tangled SEO Web? on Technorati. As a relative latecomer to most things internet, I still don’t manage the firmest grasp on the subject of SEO (search engine optimization). Yes, everyone knows it has to do with how website owners can assist the search engines like Google/Yahoo/Bing to find their sites, and yes, SEO is important for driving traffic. So it seems this would be a pretty clear-cut thing to do, like making sure the phone book lists your business in both the white and yellow pages.
Being a DIY type, I do what everyone does and input search terms to study the subject. Turns out the more I research SEO; the more I realize this entity is not so clear-cut. There are many variables that go into how the search engines work and what factors of your website they determine to be important. In no particular order, a partial list of the factors search engines look for are: keywords and metatag info, quality and quantity of links that point to your site, page content and that of neighboring pages, size in data of your site, duration in months/years that the site has been around, and much more. In fact, Google claims to use over 200 variables in their page ranking algorithm. (Reminds me of how the NFL quarterback rating is determined, and even though nobody claims to understand it completely, we all know that a 107% rating is a lot better than 83%.)
Fortunately there are simple things everyone can do to make their sites more revealing to the indexing spiders who work incessantly for the search engines. Namely metatag data can be added to web pages, and URL’s can be directly submitted to Google, Yahoo and Bing since the largest three internet search engines should be the best places to start. Click on those hyperlinks to go directly to their departments for submitting sites. For submitting metatag details, either check with your site designer or follow the tutorials for places like WordPress, Blogger and with site-building programs like Dreamweaver and FrontPage.
Additionally one may find dozens of alternative search engines and index companies that promise assistance with this SEO enigma. Because many of these companies charge money or require email address with no reassuring privacy policy, I’d rather not use them. I did find one company that’s been around since 1996 and seems to have an excellent free program as well as paid services for those that want to maximize results. Check out ScrubTheWeb for their free SEO test. It’s a lot of fun to see how they rank your website on a scale from 1 to 100, and if they find glaring errors that aren’t in your favor (e.g., the title has more than 60 characters) they’ll let you know.
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Want International Readers? Use Translation Widgets

Article first published as Expand Your International Blog Readership with Translation Widgets on Technorati.
If you want people from all over the world enjoying your blog or getting the most from your website, it makes sense to add a translation widget for those who don’t prefer reading in English. Seems pretty obvious so why did I just recently stumble onto this concept? I’d like to appeal to people who speak Chinese or Spanish as much as possible, not to mention Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, etc.
It’s true that English is both a common first language and the most popular second language with an estimated 600 million people that know it even though it’s not their native tongue. However, there are several billion people that don’t speak, let alone read, English. Why not enable your website and blog to additionally cater to the preferences of several billion people?
Yeah, I’m a bit slow to most things internet. It’s great to discover the amazing world of technology has nifty widgets one can add to any site to handle this translation gap. Google Translate is one that I’ve just added to my sites, and it currently works for 53 languages. 53, huh? That should cover the needs for most of those several billion people. This HTML code can easily be placed in either the sidebar area or main body of any site (see example). Free WordPress.com bloggers can’t use JavaScript so their implementation needs a “walkaround” which I found here and was happily surprised to see it work at my WordPress.com blog.
There are plenty of other translation tools. Since some of them cost money and others are free, I chose to list those from the later group. A partial list of venues for free translation widgets includes: Microsoft Translator Widget,  Convey This, Kwintessential, Free Website Translation and Virtual Language. I still haven’t tried most of these so maybe others can comment on pros and cons.
So get your sites and blogs multilingual and network with several billion new people.

39.328200 -120.182200

Tagged with: publishing, sell ebooks, self publishing, marketing, online marketing, ebooks, writing, writers, google translate, english translation, translation tool, translation widget, language translation

What are your thoughts on this? Leave a comment.
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Future of Web-designers, Extinction or Evolution?

Article first published as Future of Web-designers: Extinction or Evolution?; on Technorati.

Often times I wonder, is the future of web-designers extinction or evolution? Extinction is probably a harsh word. After all, we don't hold web-designers in the same boat with accident attorneys, IRS collection employees or oil and pharmaceutical executives. Evolution is really a better term for web-designers, as in they'll likely need to evolve to stay afloat. I say this because their services are similar to others that are destined to be obsolete in the near future, like video rental warehouses and brick and mortar bookstores. You might ask, however, why is the future uncertain for web-design? Well, because it's incredibly easy for anyone to build their own website and to do it for free. Part of this is really my own much needed therapy; it's a rant of pent up energy after spending several thousand dollars on four different web-designers over the past few years, especially after learning, to my painful amusement, that I could have built the sites myself for free. Now that so many web and blog hosting services offer both the space at their venues and the site-building software included, absolutely anyone can make his/her own website and edit it to hearts content for no cost. Don't believe me? Check out these dot coms: webs, yola, wordpress, blogger, weebly, wetpaint, webstarts, viviti, forummotion and so many others. Most of these companies didn't exist when I first hired out for a site, and you can bet on it that many more are popping up all the time. The competition will only increase to give users more flexibility, bandwidth, applications and ease of use when it comes to making their websites. Oh, and of course it will absolutely have to be free of cost. Yes, a pure dot com domain still costs a bit, about $10 per year, but does it really matter anymore if your domain name ends with the extra suffix as in example.webs.com? Hardly anyone manually types in a URL these days; they click on links to go everywhere. Wouldn't surprise me if you could get the pure dot com for free pretty soon. That would be a nice feature for a fledgling free web-hosting company. I can see it soon, custom domain names included for free! So what are these $120/hr web-designers going to do in the not so distant future? My guess is they'll either work for the rich and lazy or specialize in increasingly complex sites. Today the average Joe has plenty of options for getting a name, business and online identity happening at absolutely no cost. Read more: http://technorati.com/blogging/article/future-of-web-designers-extinction-or/#ixzz10Cr2rKU3
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New Ebook, How to Make Your Own Free Website: And Your Free Blog Too

This ebook is brand new and scheduled for Amazon Kindle release on Sept 21st. If you want to learn how to make your own free website, then look no further. Especially designed for those without knowledge of HTML coding, the guide highlights free web hosting and blogging sites that come with easy to use site building software. See examples at http://your-own-free-website.webs.com/ and http://yourownfreewebsite.yolasite.com/.

Easy to follow and packed with no cost methods, tips and online programs that will help anyone make a free website. It's written by Jason Matthews, author of The Little Universe, Jim's Life and How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free.
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CreateSpace and the $39 Pro Plan

I get occasional emails from readers of my ebook with questions on CreateSpace like “Does this cost money?,” “Where's the $39 Pro Plan” and so on. per the free question; it all depends on you. It can be 100% free if you can do it yourself. Can you format a document to fill pages of a book? If so, then you can do it. You can also make a book cover with a graphics software like Gimp or Inkscape or use one of their custom templates. I opted to do it myself. and had major and minor hurdles with Microsoft Word for the interior files and Inkscape for the cover design, but I did get past them. I've done three books this way and now feel much more familiar and efficient with the process.
If anyone's interested, this is what I said to a friend recently about it;
CreateSpace is Amazon’s print on demand company. They offer a range of services for writers to make books in print. It can be a totally do-it-yourself and 100% free experience, or it can also be catered to your needs with a lot of bells and whistles (and far from free). I chose the free version and have done 3 books this way. But when it came time to actually order a proof copy (something required by them before your book goes live and usually costs me between $6 and $9 and includes shipping), I also chose the $39 Pro Plan which allows me a significant reduction on cost per books that I buy and a better royalty payment when others buy the paperback through Amazon or CreateSpace. But you won’t get prompted (or have any need) for the $39 Pro Plan until you’re at that stage of ordering your proof copy. This will only be necessary after you have filled in all the pertinent information about your book and after you have uploaded both the interior files and the cover file and submitted it for publishing (which is a review by them) and it has been accepted and a proof needs to be ordered. Then it makes sense to get the Pro Plan which they will give you prompts for.
First go to https://www.createspace.com/. Click on the link for Authors – Make your books available. Under Book, click Create One (or Learn More if you want to read it from them).
It will then ask you to either sign in with an existing Amazon account or to create one.
Afterward there will be a series of prompts and items to fill in which should be self-explanatory.
They also have an excellent community support forum that can do an even better job with instructions, and in some cases you’ll find detailed answers for the exact same questions that have been asked by others in the past. Here’s the link for the community support forum https://www.createspace.com/en/community/index.jspa
For much more information and advice on free methods to sell ebooks, please check out How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free. You can also contact me by email without any of the following spaces, jason @ the little universe (dot) com

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You Can Make Free Websites and Sell Ebooks Anywhere

I'm continually amazed how easy it is for anyone to sell ebooks these days. You can sell ebooks in so many ways: from your own sites with PayPal buttons, from online ebook stores like Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Barnes&Noble and more. You can also sell ebooks via eBay and other auctioneers.

How much do you think this has to cost you? Zip, it's all 100% totally free. And if you want to sell physical print books, you can do that for free too with CreateSpace from Amazon. And the best part is this, you can now sell ebooks and make a name for yourself and hopefully make lots of money. You know the old saying, "you have to spend money to make money?" Well, it's just not true in this case.

Now is the best time ever to be an independent, self-published author. If you'd like to sell ebooks and do it with no cost methods, just contact me or read my ebook on selling ebooks, How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free.

What do you think? Comments?

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Google Alerts, an Invaluable Online Tool

 I seriously love this program and use it everyday.
 Google Alerts are simply wonderful. If you want to know about anything online that has to do with you, like your name, ebook, URL for a download page or something else, Google will tell you as soon as it’s online. It happens within a day of any posting. That goes for a blog entry, comment at some obscure forum, a written article or a page on somebody's site. It’s great tool and free of cost.
Here’s an alert I just got, and I was happy to know that someone posted this.
Or if there's an illegal sharing of my ebooks or download page, I can find out about that too.
To be aware of anyone online who could be talking about you or something you care about, Google Alerts are the way to find out about it.
For those who intend to sell ebooks, Google Alerts is a mandatory tool.
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Such a Thing as Too Many Websites?

How many websites does one really need? I’ve somehow become a website-aholic when just a few years ago I had none. Surprisingly I have 10 sites: 7 active, 1 inactive and 2 domain names with goof-around pages just in case I ever actually work on them. 10 sites? Whoa, how did that happen?
3 sites are examples of my ebook on how to sell ebooks: How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks – All for FREE. There’s ebooksuccess4free.webs.com, ebooksuccess4free.viviti.com and ebooksuccess4free.wordpress.com.
Then there are 2 sites to sell ebooks and soon regular books of the novels, The Little Universe and Jim’s Life. Those are thelittleuniverse.com and thelittleuniverse.webs.com (that free one was built by moi for shits and giggles while waiting as the pros built the other.)
Then there’s the original site for the novels, cosmicforceproductions.com and the first blog site, thebigbangauthor.com before the novel had a name change.
Then there’s vote4mystory.com which was slated to be a promotional tool for writers but became a gigantic hole in the ground for dollars (mine) and is currently out of order and awaiting a massive overhaul. (Imagine the joy of spending ten grand on something that doesn’t work. Fun.)
Then we have helpingidea.com and thebigbangbook.com which have not yet helped anybody or really been built but just fiddled with when I was learning how to use Kompozer site-building software. Both domains may have been purchased under the influence of a few too many margaritas. Actually much of my life reflects certain similar influences and lapses in judgment.
The good news is that only 3 of these actually cost monthly money and not much. But I’m wondering, is there a word for “addicted to creating websites?” And if so, looks like I can chalk up another addiction.
How abnormal is this?

Vistaprint, I'm addicted.

Vistaprint, I'm completely addicted to your services. I made my own business cards and magnets in less than an hour, and they're so cool and high quality and WAY cheaper than the last time I ordered cards from a printing company. Plus, one can make coffee mugs, t-shirts, pens, websites, you name it. I literally had to pull myself away due to the risk of going overboard with ordering products. Anyone who wants to promote their work or just create awesome items for memorabilia, like homemade calenders, Vistaprint is an absolute must see! Vistaprint.com

Check out these business cards I just made. They took me under an hour and the program was amazingly user friendly. I went ahead and ordered matching magnets with little calenders, couldn't help myself. As soon as they arrive, which should be Feb. 10th, I'll be giving some magnets away at my website, thelittleuniverse.webs.com along with a bunch of other free stuff.

Finally I'm addicted to a good thing. If you haven't been to Vistaprint, do yourself a favor and check it out.
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Vote4mystory.com - the best short story contest ever

Vote4mystory has a couple of new things going for it.

The first, is that the featured writers page now posts links for every author's story and website (if they have one). It's a great and inexpensive way to cross-link, increase webtraffic and move higher in search rankings.

The second, is that there's 9 great categories to choose from. Tales From Traveling, Action/Adventure, Fiction, Mystery/Suspense, Romance, Children's Stories, Humor, Pet Tales/Animal Stories, and Life's Moments.

So visit the new Vote4mystory.com and let the world read your work.