Boomer eZine - The Boomer Entrepreneur Magazine

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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 Tim Knox recommended that I use 700 pixels as a column limit. The average surfer does not like to read wide pages since most web pages are scanned and not read. This will leave white space on the page, but it will be more accepted by the reader. Compare the boomer ezine issues before issue 27 with those after 27 and see the difference.

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 “ Rome was not built in a day” and a great site usually is not either. You have to learn and grow. I do not know if you are aware of the tremendous support community there is within the SBI user group. Follow my link http://buildit.sitesell.com/boomer.html to SBI. At the top of the page, click Affiliates and sign up as a member of the 5 Pillar Affiliate Program. This will give you access to view the forums. You will not be able to post until you are a paid SBI member. By browsing or searching the forums, you can see how SBI members support each other from the beginner to the most advanced. I am not aware of any web host that has such a powerful tool available. From the forums, you can see the site names for the users and you can study them to see if some of them match with what you envision your future site to look like.

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

www.jhowe.com

www.boomer-ezine.com

www.back-tracker.com

www.boomer-entrepreneur.com

www.boomer-guru.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">AboutMe</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

www.boomer-ezine.com

www.boomer-guru.com

www.boomer-entrepreneur.com

www.boomer-marketplace.com

eBay Boomer Retirement Store

(http:/stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE)

Boomer’s Amazon Store

(http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Amazon_Page.htm)

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