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BOOMER eZINE
The Online Entrepreneur Magazine |
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BOOMER eZINE
The Online Entrepreneur Magazine |
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For
those who would like to read this in HTML format, this
issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-zine.com/V1I34_120106.htm
and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com. Please pass Boomer eZine on to a friend. They will thank you for it. Table
of Contents for this
issue..... 1.
Authors
Comments 2.
Q
& A, Suggestions
and Comments 3.
Choosing
Your Web Host
for the Type of Website 4.
Placing
a Link on Your
eBay Auction Page Pointing to Your About Me Page (Video) Author's
Comments
Thanksgiving
was great and our stay at our friend’s lake house was relaxing.
I did not touch a computer for a couple of days.
It was like going through withdrawal. Allison,
our granddaughter turned one on November 28 and Susanna, our daughter,
turned 25 on November 29. Time
moves on. We
have some great info in this ezine.
Some great questions prompted the articles and the
expanded
Q&A section. My
thanks
to our readers for having questioning minds. Q & A, Suggestions and
Comments One
of our subscribers, Ana Young, is in the process of evaluating what web
host to use and she has given us permission to reprint this email
exchange in the Boomer eZine. This
is a question and answer item, but it is long enough to be an article.
This is based on an email dated November 19 in which
I answered
Ana’s questions. Ana
- I was just reading through some of your earlier articles
on SBI. You say you built your Retirement Jobs
site using them, but you used Front Page to build the
others? JH
– I am very impressed with SBI for the beginner.
It does many things automatically that the average
person does
not consider. I
learned a
lot from building the SBI site, and I will still use it for large
website projects where I want help with traffic promotion and SEO
evaluation. I did
not use it
for Boomer eZine because I had already started the site before I found
out about SBI. Ana
- I like the designs of your other sites, but Retirement Jobs,
while the content is superior, is the plainest. So
much white space. Did you not have much choice of design
with SBI? JH
– SBI has a basic beginning template.
You can choose from some very basic “look and feel”
selections. You can
make it
more complex as you learn more about it.
SBI concentrates on what you say in your content
more than sizzle
and flash. The
white space
is for future monetization ads, etc.
I have not monetized the site yet.
Go to www.pppretirementplans.com
and take a look. That
is an
SBI site with a wider text area and monetization. Ana
- Also, SBI only allows one site for that big annual fee.
And, if you want a blog to go with it, as I do for
mine, you have to go with Blogger.com. Again, your blog
is plainer than others I've seen. JH
- On the subject of white space, I used to create pages that were as
wide as the browser would accept, but If
you are referring to the boomer-ezine blog on blogger.com, it is a copy
of the ezine posted on the website.
This is to give Boomer eZine more exposure and get
it to the
Google search engine quicker than waiting for the Google spider to come
to the website. SBI
has the ability to have your own blog on your site.
There is also a blog on the retirement-jobs-online
site.
It is very easy to post and I enter a post each week
announcing
the posting of the Boomer eZine articles.
Go to http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/retirement-jobs-online-blog.html
and take a look at the site blog.
This
could serve your blogging needs. I
do not have time to use it to its full advantage, but I will after
retirement. Ana
- And, where are your ads? How does the site make money? JH
– I am not concentrating on making money now, but on building a
reputation. SBI
recommends
that you not try to monetize your site until you have over 20 unique
visitors per day. I
am well
past that number, but I have not bothered to go back and set up the
monetization. I am
enjoying
what I am doing and since I am not retired and do not need the
supplemental income, I feel that I will do better building traffic for
free right now. Ana
- I've gone back to evaluating SBI. I could use that kind
of support but it's very important for my site not
to appear like a "beginner's site." It's far more important
for my site to be beautiful, unique looking and
easy to use, as well as content-rich, than for this
beginner to "get started quickly." JH
– I understand your feelings, but “ Ana
- Then, you say you use Hostexcellence to host your sites
(or some of them). Do you prefer them or Site Build
It? JH
– I use Hostexcellence for the following reasons:
For Boomer-eZine and jhowe.com, they were started
before I found
out about SBI. Boomer-entrepreneur
has a forum using phpBB software and SBI does not support that.
Back Tracker is a small site of very limited, niche
market and I
use Google Adwords to direct traffic to it.
I cannot justify the SBI cost for the potential
return.
Boomer Guru is a site for downloading videos and it
is easier for
me to upload videos to it as a conventional site rather than as an SBI
site. For
a straight up, conventional content site, I recommend SBI.
Especially if you are not familiar with site
promotion, SEO
principles, etc. Editor’s
note: This is the
end of the
email from Ana. Thanks,
Ana,
for such great questions. I
am certain that other readers have some of the same questions. Welcome to a Special Subscriber I
want to welcome Linda as a new subscriber this week.
In the eighth grade, she was the girl behind whom I
sat and
played with her pigtails. She
did not appreciate that and I am surprised that I am still alive after
she got through with me. She
is a scholar, and I am certainly under pressure to perform.
We both had the same great English teacher which
makes us
“grammar police”. Welcome,
Linda! If
you have anything for this section or you have a suggestion for a topic
for an article, please go to http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm
and give us your input. With
your input, we can improve the Boomer Video eZine. Choosing Your Web Host for the
Type of Website I
checked the suggestions database and from one of the comments, I
apparently caused confusion because I did not fully explain why we use
three different web hosts for our websites. Let
me clear up this confusion. We
use the following hosts for the named websites. Site
Build It (SBI) – www.retirement-jobs-online.com Hostexcellence.com
Hostmonster.com
- 30 websites which are one page sites that point to similar named
sites. The free
domain site www.quail-hunter.com
which is my “play” site has a few pages and pictures, but it is not
intended to be a high traffic site and Hostmonster.com is OK for that. Now
why do we do this? There
is no one web host that is all things to all people.
The SBI site is a content site and SBI provides site
promotion
and SEO support that the other hosts do not.
Some of our other websites do not need this so we do
not pay for
it. The
explanation in the Q&A explained why we have the various sites
with
Hostexcellence.com. Our
hosting account with Hostexcellence.com will allow us to host up to
eight websites with them. The
sites that are hosted on Hostmonster.com are either “defensive”
domain names or domain names that we feel might be good to develop in
the future. Defensive
names
are names that are similar to our main site names so we reserve them so
no one can buy them. We
have
30 domains registered here since Hostmonster.com will allow unlimited
add on domains. Since
we are paying for the service of unlimited websites, we create one page
sites with links to our main sites.
This gives us 30 additional links pointing to the
main sites.
These 30 additional in-pointing links will improve
our search
engine ranking. In
summary, we chose the web host based on the intent of the website.
Shop around for the web host that will provide the
service that
compliments your specific site (or sites). Placing a Link on Your Auction
Page Pointing to Your About Me Page Sue
asked how to place a link on your eBay auction page that points to your
eBay About Me page. We will need some HTML tags to do this. In order to show the HTML tags as text and not have the browser execute them, I will use the XMP tag to start. Browsers are supposed to ignore HTML tags in the XMP tag range and not execute them. Unfortunately, not all browsers handle the XMP tag in the same way. I do not know how it will display on your browser so if you see XMP, that is the reason. You
place the link to your About Me Page in the Description box that you
create when you post a sale on eBay.
The eBay Description box has tabs in the top left
that allow you
to switch back and forth between Standard and HTML when you are
creating
it. Start writing
your
description in Standard mode until you get to the place where you want
to insert the link to your About Me page.
Here you click on HTML and the box will change to
accept HTML
code. You will also
see the
HTML for what you have already entered. Position
your cursor where you want to insert the link and copy and paste the
following HTML code. This
will create the multicolor blue and red eBay icon for the About Me and
link it to your own page. Replace the “Your-eBay-Name” with your own eBay name. <XMP>
<a
href="http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/Your-eBay-Name"><font
face="Arial"
color="#0000ff"><b>About</b></font><b><font
color="#0000ff">M</font><font
color="#ff0000">e</font></b></a> </XMP> Now
switch back to Standard mode and you should see the red and blue About
Me icon. Go ahead
and finish
writing your description. When
you finish, click the Preview link at the bottom left of the
Description
box and a new window will open to show you how the auction listing will
look. If you need
to put
spaces around the link, you can add the spaces in the Standard mode. Good
luck. I hope you
get a ton
of traffic to your About Me page and that you convert all of it. I
have posted a short video about how to do this at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Videos/V1I34Video/Click-to-Play.html That wraps up our
issue for this week. Until
next week, stay tuned. John and Linda
Howe (http:/stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE) (http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Amazon_Page.htm)
Administrative
Details ……………. If you are changing email addresses in the future, put a note on your calendar to send us a blank email after you have changed your address. Send the blank email to: boomerezine001@aweber.com. We want you to remain a subscriber to our newsletter! It
is OK to go ahead and join our
subscriber list with more than one email address. You never
know when an
email will be blocked these days. The SPAM filters are
getting tighter and
tighter and are blocking many legitimate emails. Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc. |
Copyright 2010 John Howe, Inc.
Please visit the other Boomer sites
| www.frugal-senior.com | www.retirement-jobs-online.com |
| www.best-retirement-calculators.com | www.the-best-GPS.com |
| www.the-best-web-host.com | www.the-best-HDTV.com |
