Self Built Empire

Wow what a surprised I noticed last night one of my blogger site was indexed by Google in 24 hours. Even before this site was indexed and this site has been live for around 5 days or so. Granted I really haven't done too much with this site yet, but I will soon. I just wanted to write more content for the site before I do some real work.

I did a couple of different things but I am not a 100% sure which one Google picked up on first, but the good thing is I will be telling you exactly what I did.



Things I did:

1. Submitted the site to, Google, Yahoo and Msn the top three search engines.
2. I added my website to Google Webmaster Tools, and Site Explore
3. Commented on Older Digg Posts which all had a pagerank
4. And Commented on older flickr images which all had pagerank
5. Included the RSS feed into my Google Reader
6. Added a note on Google Notes about my site
7. Also added the site onto my Google Profile



If i remember correctly that's about all I did. This was all on the first of November, the same day I created the website, which was created with blogger also. I'm not a 100% sure if any of the stuff I did helped or not, or if I just got lucky. I haven't had time to do this to my other blogs just yet, but I'll try it out and let you guys know how it goes. Until next time, good luck guys.

Couple Days ago I made a post about how to added Google Analytics to your blogger account. Today I will be talking about why it is important to keep stats for your website.

One of the most important reasons for keeping website stats is to simply determine how your website is performing at any point over a period of time. And lets face it who doesn't like to know how their website is performing.

The stats can answer a couple of very important questions you might have, and help you improve your website. Some of the questions stats can answer are:

Who is looking at my website?
Where is the traffic coming from?
Which pages people are leaving and entering the website?
and what search terms did the visitor use to find my website?

The answers to these simple questions can tell you a lot how your website is performing. And how you could improve the site.

Usually if you have your web page hosted with a web host and you have access to the cpanal there will be already a stats program keeping stats for you.

But if you are hosted on Blogger, Wordpress, or many other blog hosts you will have to have a third party website keeps stats for you. Some of the most popular ones I've seen are Google Analytics, Extreme tracking and Sitemeter.

Seeing if your website doing well will help you also stay motivated and show that your hard work hasn't gone completely to waist. It is also a good tool for goals, I have set up a goal to have at least 100 unique visitors per day to visit this site by the end of the year. Right now I am at barely 10 or so, so this will take time but is completely feasible.

Previously I talked about How I added Google Analytics to keep track of my stats, obviously this isn't the only way to keep stats, but I enjoy the Google Analytics interface and it works well for me.

In the beginning I had a little trouble figuring out how to add the code to my blogger site. So I decided to write up a little report on how to add Google Analytics to your blogger blog.



How to get the Site Tracker Code From Google Analytics

1. First things first, you'll need to signed up for an account. To do this go to google analytics.
2. Once you are logged into Google Analytics, click on Add Website Profile
3. Select Add a Profile for a New Domain.
4. Enter the URL of your blogger blog.
5. Select your time zone and country, and Click Finished.
6. Once you have done that Analytics provides you with a code block to add to your website. This can be seen below.
7. Highlight the code and copy it be right click on your mouse and selecting copy, or control C.

1. Log into to your blogger account, make sure you are in the dashboard view
2. Next Select the blog you want to add the tracking code to.
3. After which go to the Layout Tab, and then Edit HTML
4. Scroll all the way to the bottom on the html code.
5. Now paste the google analytics code into the bottom, make sure the code is between the body tag.
   
   
6. Click Save Changes

My blog has been alive for one day YAY!!! Not a lot of activity going on here, since I really haven't done anything at all to promote the website.

One reason I really didn't do much today was because I am a student and had a mid-term just around an hour ago, which i had to study for. But this will change from now on, my plan is to dedicate at least 2 hours each day helping me build my empire. It'll probably be way more then that, but it's a step toward the right direction.

But I one productive thing today, and bought a future domain name for myself SelfBuiltEmpire.com (thank you Mike for the advice), which cost me 8 dollars, hopefully I can make that back pretty soon. I've also been trying to figure out how I could use the domain name on this blog, and just use blogger as my host. But with sad news I haven't been able to figure it out. I guess I would of had to buy selfbuiltempire.com on one of their domain name partners. So the plan right now is to save all my earnings from my sites to pay for hosting or just transfer the domain name. Which shouldn't be too bad, costing me anywhere between 5 to 10 dollars.

One last thing, I also added google anaylytics which will help me keep track of all of my stats.

To start off I am no expert in SEO, I have limited knowledge of making any money online, only what I've read on different articles and posts. And this will be my journey into building an online empire.

Currently I am just the average college student in California: broke, no money in sight just the 20 dollars a week my parents support me with. Which is just enough for food, spaghetti, top ramin, potatoes, and a lot of chicken (hey at around a dollar a pound it can't be beaten). and just a tad left over for a couple of beers.

So a couple of weeks ago, my buddy and I started a website. Me knowing all of the technical stuff (for my senior project in high school I designed a website) I created and designed the site. I looked what was happening on the web and found Wordpress which a lot of people recommended. Got a free template modified it a bit and put it up. I also found free hosting with around 500 megs for hosting the site and 15GB bandwidth, not bad for free and no ads. I founded the free host through a forum, which I don't remember anymore I'll look it up later and include it here. All of this just cost me around $8 dollars which I split with my friend.

To my surprise, the site actually started doing pretty good for being live for such a short time. So that is what got me interested in the SEO aspect of a website, it's like a game figuring out how to get on the good side with Google. I loved it, so this is where I stand today.

The site my buddy and I created actually has made me some money already(around $5 through adsense and adbrite and $50 through a private advertiser after a month of being live), so I must be heading in the right direction right? Oh forgot to mention through the site I also found a little part time job, helping another webmaster with his work.

Anyway this blog will be my journey through all of this, and we'll see where I will be in 5, 10, or 15 years.