Since we launched LeadsLeap widget, I’ve received several questions asking how to add widget to wordpress blog.

Instead of answering these questions in private, I think it’s easier for me to post the answer in our blog, so that I can use screenshots to explain.

First, if you are using a hosted blog on Wordpress.com, you can’t add a javascript Widget like LeadsLeap Widget.

In this article, we are talking about self-hosted Wordpress blog, one that you install on your own server.

Clear on that? Ok, let’s start.

There are two ways to add a widget.

1) By editing the Theme’s html code
2) By using a plugin

1) By editing the Theme’s html code

If you understand some basic html, you can go to your Wordpress Theme or template and add the widget code manually.

Here’s how to do it:

- Login to your server via your preferred FTP client, select the directory where you install your wordpress files and go to wp-content > themes > (your current theme).

- Look for a file named sidebar.php and open it. (Some themes may call it another name. Go through all the files in the folder. You should be able to figure out which is the correct one.)

- Study the html code and see where you want the widget to appear. Then, simply copy and paste the widget into the code.

Another way is to edit the html code directly from your Wordpress admin. Just go to Presentation > Theme Editor and choose sidebar.php to edit.

The problem with this alternative method is that you have to set the permission of sidebar.php to 766 before you can save the changes. But by default, the permission is set to 644.

If the above method sounds ‘rocket science’ to you, your last chance is to use a plugin.

2) By using a plugin

Using a plugin is an easier way to manage not one but all your widgets. It’s excellent for those who knows nothing about html.

The plugin I’m talking about is Fuzzy Widget Plugin. You can download it here.

Installing the plugin is pretty straight forward. Just follow the given instruction. If you’ve installed a plugin before, the method is about the same.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, login to you Wordpress admin, go to Presentation > Widgets.

The screenshot below is for your reference. (Note: Your admin area may look slightly different because my Wordpress version is not the most update one.)

From the screenshot above, you can see a “Sidebar 1″ and “Available Widgets”. You can drag widgets from Available Widgets to Sidebar 1 and arrange the position of the widgets in Sidebar 1 in any way you like.

Just play with it. You’ll understand what I mean. It’s very easy.

Now, LeadsLeap Widget is not one of the standard widgets available. So you have to manually add it in.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Drag an empty widget (both Text 1 and Text 2 are empty widgets) from Available Widget to Sidebar 1

Step 2: Click on the configure button. You will see a popup form as shown below.

- Leave the first field empty. Copy and paste your LeadsLeap widget code into the second field as shown and then close it by clicking the ‘x’ sign.

Step 3: Save the changes.

Done.

Go to your blog and you should see LeadsLeap widget in the sidebar of your blog.

There are other standard widgets such as Recent Posts, Calendar and Recent Comments that you can play around with in Fuzzy Widget Plugin. Also, you can easily adjust the position of different widgets by simply “drag n drop”.

Note: For maximum clickthrough, try to position LeadsLeap widget at the top.

Have fun playing with this plugin.

Latest announcement: As requested by some members, LeadsLeap widget now comes in 3 widths: 160 pixels, 173 pixels and 250 pixels. There should be one size that can fit your sidebar. Check out the new setup page now!

“I would like to ask a question about SEO. How do you write proper title, keyword, description tag for a website. Can you provide some examples of how to write a proper one?” - Kelvin Tan

Hi Kelvin,

There are two considerations in writing those tags. The first one is the SEO aspect and the second one is the marketing aspect. I’ll cover both of them in this reply.

1) The technical aspect of writing SEO friendly title, keyword and description tags

For the beginners, let me show you where to find the title, keyword and description tags in a typical html code.

Title tag - <title>….</title>
Keyword tag - <meta name=”keywords” content=”….”>
Description tag - <meta name=”description” content=”….”>

Search engines now place little importance to keyword and description tag. But as a good practice, it’s always good to include the keyword phrase in the keyword and description tags.

For example, if I’m trying to optimize a page for “debt reduction strategies”, my keyword and description tags will be as follow:

Keyword tag - <meta name=”keywords” content=”debt reduction strategies”>
Description tag - <meta name=”description” content=”blar blar…. debt reduction strategies.. blar blar”>

Technically speaking, you can put any ‘meat’ to fill the rest of the description tag. For me, I simply use the first sentence of my article as the description tag, since the first sentence of my article will always consist of the keyword phrase (another good SEO practice).

In SEO, what is more important is the title tag.

Technically, your title tag should try to meet the following requirements:

i) Your title tag must have the ‘exact’ keyword phrase in it.

I don’t have to explain this one, do I?

ii) Your title tag should preferably be as short as possible.

There is such a thing called keyword dilution in SEO. It means if there are too many words in your title, the importance of your main keyword phrase will be ‘diluted’ in the eyes of the search engines. So try to keep your title short.

To illustrate, if my keyword phrase is “debt reduction strategies”, some examples of a good title include

- Debt Reduction Strategies
- 7 Debt Reduction Strategies
- Pitfalls and Traps of Debt Reduction Strategies
- Creative Debt Reduction Strategies

I didn’t think of these titles. These are the top 4 titles returned by Google search.

2) The marketing aspect of writing the title tag

Your title tag is very important, not only for SEO but also for human.

Why?

Because when someone does a search, he/she will first see the title in the search result.

Therefore, when writing a title, besides making sure that it fulfills the SEO requirements, you also have to do your best to write something that can entice people to click.

This is the marketing aspect of writing a good title tag, something that is hard to teach my freelance writers.

Notes On Description Tag

Search engines will show your description tag as the description in the search result. (Thanks to our member Proson for pointing this out.)

This means if you want to perfect a page, you should try to write something enticing in your description tag as well.

For me, I usually don’t bother. I only make sure that the exact keyword phrase is present in the description tag. That will be enough for SEO purpose.

One of the most common suggestions we’ve received from our members is to create a widget that members can put on their websites and earn credits from.

The most typical suggestion was to display PRO members’ ads in the widget and when visitors on your blog/website click on the ads, you earn credits.

The idea is similar to the “once-popular” BlogRush widget shown on the right.

PRO members get more traffic. You earn more credits to show your ad.

Sounds good?

I don’t think so.

My main concern is, who is going to click those ads?

My Experience From Adsense Marketing

In Adsense, any experienced marketer will advice you to remove the frame from your Adsense ad and make your ad blend-in with the rest of the contents. That’s the least you need to do to improve the click-through.

If you want a sample of what I mean, take a look at all the LeadsLeap contextual ads in this blog, yes, the blog you’re reading now. You don’t see me putting a frame around the ads, do you?

If we were to create an ad widget similar to BlogRush widget, I can imagine the click-through will be low!

If the click-through is low, you don’t earn much credit. It defeats the purpose of putting a widget on your website.

A Good Suggestion From A Member

While I was still cracking my mind for a solution, I received another suggestion from our member, Marty L. (Marty, a big thank you to you!)

Here’s what he wrote to me:

“Perhaps a widget linking to the viral blog. The member who posts the widget on their site connects to their LeadsLeap blog.”

That is a great idea.

As you know, LeadsLeap blog is a viral blog. You can earn credits, build leads and make money simply by sending people to the blog. It makes sense to have a widget that enhances this feature.

Can’t wait to see how your LeadsLeap widget will look like? Here’s a working sample:

When your visitors see your LeadsLeap widget, they know that you are recommending them to a blog post. They will be more willing to click through your widget and read the post.

As they click, you earn credits.

As they click and join LeadsLeap, you build your network.

As they click and buy any of our product, you make money.

As they click and subsequently click on other members’ ads, you earn more credits.

Last but not least, as they click and read our blog post, they will benefit from the contents and thank you for recommending the post to them.

With LeadsLeap widget, you can now earn credits without having to click on ads.

LeadsLeap widget is now ready. It comes in 9 different colors. Click here to get your customized widget now (login needed).

“I just read your article on VRE and the idea sounds interesting to me. How do I identify the niches that I can build my VRE in. You also said traffic is from search engines, what about marketing in free ad sites?” - Austin

Hi Austin,

I’ll answer your question in 2 parts: 1) How to identify VRE niches; 2) Can you market VRE sites in free ad posting sites?

1) How to identify VRE niches?

For those who don’t know what VRE is, VRE stands for Virtual Real Estate. The idea is to create many content websites and monetize them, typically through Google Adsense.

In the brick and mortar world, if you own multiple real estates, you know that you can earn passive income from rentals.

In the internet world, if you own multiple “virtual” real estates (which refer quality content websites), you too can earn passive income from Google Adsense or other monetization methods.

The best part is it costs you a lot lesser to build a VRE than buying a rental property.

Ok, back to the question - How to identify VRE niches?

The standard “by the book” answer is go for niches with low competition and good demand. But that’s not what I want to discuss today.

If you are really interested, I suggest that you start building websites in the health niche, especially those that require a CURE.

Let’s say you create a website about yeast infection and you put some Adsense ad to it. There is no surprise that most of the ads will be related to yeast infection cure.

Now, when people visit your website, what are they looking for? A CURE!!

Whether they can or cannot find the answer in your website, they will want to find more CURE. What would they do? Of course, they will click on your Adsense ad that promises another cure for yeast infection.

Here is a good list of health related niche that you can work on.

2) Can you market VRE sites in free ad sites?

Technically you can market your VRE sites through any means. As I’ve always said, the key is to advertise to targeted prospects.

Personally I don’t promote my VRE sites in free ad sites, i.e. websites like classified and free ad forum. Here are my reasons:

- The traffic is short-lived. To get consistent traffic, I need to keep posting ads and that’s crazy. VRE is all about growing lazy passive income.

- I doubt the traffic from free ad sites are targeted enough. But I may be wrong, since I’ve not tried it.

To me, free ad sites are only useful for backlink building so as to boost my search engine rankings.

If you somehow hate SEO, yet you want to build VRE niches, the only traffic alternative I know is article marketing. Built VRE niches and keep submitting articles to directories. You will see consistent traffic to your website over time.

I’ve shared many strategies to increase website traffic in this blog and here is another easy strategy that you can implement in less than 30 minutes from now.

The strategy is to publish your existing website in different languages and increase your website traffic from the search engines.

This is not a new strategy, but I kind of forgotten about it until one member asked about website translation in our Tuesday With Kenneth Q&A session. (See, when you help people, you help yourself!)

To give this strategy a test, I translated 5 of my niche sites in December 2008 and then I simply waited……

> I was waiting for the Search spiders to digest the new contents.

> I was also waiting for the month of January to pass so that I can report my 1 month result to you.

It’s February now and I’m ready to show you the result from my test.

Here’s a screenshot of the traffic stats from one of the websites in the test:

Look at the highlighted stats. These are the traffic to the translated pages. Pretty impressive isn’t it?

What I’m showing you is just the top results. There are hundreds of other translated pages receiving small amount of website traffic like 5 to 10 visits. Never underestimate such traffic because they easily add up to a few thousands extra traffic to your website every month!

How To Translate Your Entire Website In Less Than 30 Minutes?

I translated the website above into 34 different languages and it took me less than 30 minutes. (I can do it in 5 minutes now!)

Obviously, I didn’t rewrite the articles. I simply uploaded a script to my website and added some codes to the homepage. That’s all!

The script automatically converted my entire website into 34 different languages.

The powerful part is the converted pages are search engine friendly. That’s why I’m getting thousands of extra website traffic to these pages, all from the search engines.

I told you that I tested this traffic strategy on 5 websites. What about the other 4? Do they all experience increase in website traffic?

Yes, they did.

Every one of them recorded significant increase in website traffic. Adsense earnings from these 5 sites also soared by 17%.

This is definitely one of the easiest strategies I’ve used to increase website traffic. Go ahead and try it. You won’t regret.

Today, we’re going to discuss about identifying scam programs and making money through Pay Per Click marketing. It’s in reply to a members question.

Here’s his question:

“There is a lot of money making program out there, how to know it is not scam? I am thinking of Pay per click, how to start with it?” - Alvin Leow

Hi Alvin,

Frankly, there aren’t that many scams out there on the internet. The only thing you should really avoid is Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme is one that typically makes money from newcomers and use that money to pay the existing members.

There are quite a few Ponzi schemes out there, but it’s very easy to identify them.

When choosing money making programs, don’t look at the income potential. Instead, study the business model and ask yourself whether the model is sustainable. If it’s not sustainable, or you have doubt about the model, don’t join!

Alternatively, you can avoid all these get rich quick programs all together and simply focus on the mainstreams of internet marketing, which are things like affiliate marketing, Adsense marketing, Ebay marketing and providing online services.

You mentioned about Pay Per Click marketing. The idea of Pay Per Click marketing sounds like an easy way to make money online. But it isn’t.

Let me explain……

Many people associate Pay Per Click with affiliate marketing. The idea is this: “Pick a Clickbank product, post a PPC ad, get instant traffic and make sales”.

That sounds easy. But the truth is even the best Pay Per Click marketing expert needs to spend a couple of hundreds to test their ads before they can strike gold.

Pay Per Click marketing has evolved so much that it is getting harder for newbies to get involved.

Why?

Because there are many spying tools that can help Pay Per Click marketers to spy on other people’s ads and find out which keywords and ad phrases are profitable. As a newbie, without such tools, you are searching for gold in the dark and that can be quite costly.

I don’t mean to discourage you but it’s the fact.

The good thing about Pay Per Click marketing is that once you hit some ads that are profitable, they can be your cash cow for quite a while.

My advice is if you want to make money through Pay Per Click marketing, make sure that you follow the right guide and run different campaigns in at least 5 different niches. If you simply want to run an ad and test the water, you need to be superbly lucky to hit the jackpot.

I said in my previous blog post that the most effective online advertising is one that gets the most targeted traffic to your website. But how do you get targeted website traffic? Where do you find all the targeted prospects who may be interested in buying what you have to offer?

Apparently there are many ways to find targeted website traffic.

For example, almost for any niche, you can use Pay Per Click advertising to get targeted traffic to your website. But Pay Per Click can be costly if you do not have a good sales process.

There is another easy way to get targeted website traffic without spending much money. But many people are not using it.

The method is to get the targeted traffic from other people’s list - also known as joint venture. But it’s not what you think.

You see, the internet has developed into a stage where almost every active online user is on someone’s list, depending on what their interests are.

A dog lover is on the list of some dog training gurus, an opportunity seeker is on the list of some internet marketing gurus and so on.

So if you want to penetrate into any market niche, your job really is to think of a JV proposal that is mutually beneficial and get your targeted traffic directly from the list owners in your niche.

If you can rinse and repeat this single technique, you will be the next guru in your own niche in no time.

Many years back, a 24-year-old newbie online marketer went round asking other newbie marketers to contribute a chapter to his new ebook, on the agreement that each of them will promote the free ebook to their lists. This newbie marketer did this trick a few times with different internet marketers and soon became one of the renowned gurus in the IM industry.

Can you see how simple this idea is? It’s a win-win-win situation. The organizer and contributors win by getting more exposure and thus building their lists. The people in their lists win by getting great tips for free. But the organizer wins the most, since he gets the most exposure by being the organizer.

I’m sure you can do something like this too, can’t you?

Today, this simple tactic has evolved into something more complicated and powerful. Instead of contributing just one chapter, hundreds of marketers now group together to giveaway free ebooks, MP3s, videos and software.

This is what we call a giveaway event.

Have you seen those giveaway events where you can join and download tons of products for free?

The idea is similar, except that a giveaway event involves more preparation and it can build you a much larger list in a shorter time, especially if you are the organizer.

In any giveaway event, the person who benefit the most is always the organizer. It’s fair since the organizer puts in the time and effort to run the event.

Regardless of which niche you are in, you can always run a giveaway event and instantly build a huge list in that niche.

Caution: If you want to run a giveaway event in the IM niche, you will need to add some innovative elements into it. Else, it may be hard for you to get experienced marketers onboard.

If you want to learn how to run a successful giveaway event, I suggest that you read this ebook that I’ve just read.

It covers everything you need to know, from how to find contributors for your event to solving the technical issues such as server, bandwidth and mass mailing problems.

You will also get a chance to buy a giveaway script at a BIG discount. (A good giveaway script is usually sold for more than $200, but you can get a big cut in the price.)

Note: You need to hurry if you want to get this ebook because I’ve been informed that the price will increase on 10th Feb.

If you want to jump start your online business, there is no need to be the Jack of all trades in traffic generation. If you can master one effective strategy to get targeted website traffic, it’s enough to get you onto the fast track.