Rich Sage Traffic Update: Every Visitor Matters

I am just two weeks into my traffic building strategy and the results are outstanding. After many months of setting up the site and various other tests and trials, I finally got to work on traffic building.

So far (two weeks into it) I am seeing a 300% increase in traffic, and for the first time, I am confident that i’ll reach my 1,000+ visitor average before Christmas.

So, who do I tell about the Rich Sage? Everyone. I like the idea. I like what the Sage has to say. So, I tell everyone. Everyone at each Thanksgiving meal. Everyone that I meet. It seems like I have two discussions these days: Rich Sage & Dr. Ron Paul (2008 American Presidential candidate, Statesman). And I’ll stop before I sound like Dr. Seuss.

Does all this effort work? You bet. My next move is to pass out t-shirts and all kinds of stuff in the real world. Virtually, the contest that I’ve outlined.

The question that I ask myself is simple: At the end of the day, what do you do to build traffic? My answer is everything. So, I’ve built links, posted all kinds of articles, registered at every directory I could find… The list keeps going. Is it worth it? You bet.

What’s next? Just more of the same. I’ll keep going. The only thing that I am behind on are Google videos. Which I am doing now. I know that the results have not showed up on Alexa or the Google PR (PageRank) ranking. But, those take a while to update their databases. I am sure I’ll crack a top Alexa ranking and make a good Google PR.

Time will tell.

Rich Sage

Rich Sage Blog Adds Dedicated Contest Page

I’ve come to a conclusion that building traffic and popularity means that I’ll need to run a contest for much of the time I am a blogger. So, I’ve added a dedicated Rich Sage Contest page to display the latest contest details, prizes, etc. The actual page is here.

Now I’ll invite everyone that’s communicated with me in the past weeks and months with products to offer a place in my contest.

How can I enter the contest?
The contest winners will be drawn from the lists of:

• Members (free) — Press Here to become a  member >>. Members entering the contest get a 50 free bonus entries.
• Mailing List Subscribers (free) — Subscribe via Here. (See Update List Area)
• Those Who Post a Review (free) –See review directions here. Then you’ll need to let me know that you’ve made a review via this contact page.  Lastly, when you write a review, I’ll add many more chances for you to win, as I’ve described here.

This is what I’ll say to them & the benefit:

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Rich Sage 2008 Contest Note

The Rich Sage 2008 Make Money Online Contest is an excellent way for you to gain outstanding exposure for your product, services and/or online application.

The contest will be heavily promoted using pay-per-click advertising to articles and the traffic that’s been built through the search engines.

The prizes are substantial already and will continue to grow as I invite service providers such as you to participate. The prizes will given away in “Complimenting Packages” to winners that I draw from subscribers to my mailing list.

Not only will the link to your sales page, product page, website, etc. provide a one-way link, it will also funnel a great number of visitor who will be interested in your products or services.

Please get in touch with me via this URL and present your Prizes to the Rich Sage Readers.

Here is what I’ll need to know:

1. The Name of the Prize
2. The Name of the Site or Business Offering the Prize
3. The Description of the Prize & Retail Value
4. Lastly, the URL where the readers or contest participants can get more information

Please provide the above information via the support url (above) and I’ll post your prize in my list of Prize Contributors here.

Success,

Rich Sage

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ONE CONCLUDING NOTE: I’ll evaluate each prize that you offer to make sure that it has an intrinsic value to my readers and members. Please don’t try to list things that you’re giving away or worse. That will make me look bad and you look even worse. If the value is not clear, I may need more information or frankly, I’ll not think twice and delete your request. That would not be a good way to for you to work with “The Sage”.

Rich Sage

Rich Sage Contest Ideas & Administration

I spent a good part of the day getting ideas together for the RichSage first ever contest. Seems like contests are alive and well in the blog arena.  It appears that everyone is doing a few of them.

I think of it as the old “Drop a business card in a box” idea. Just about every restaurant had one of these in the 80’s in Columbus, Ohio, where you’d drop in your business card to win a cruise or business gift or a free something.

In my case the award is a grand prize of a Rich Sage Affiliate account that’s earning $5,000 per month for a year, to a third prize of an account earning $750 per month for a year.  It looks like I can gather a lot of other prizes as well, since the reader list continues to grow rapidly.

Some of the contest ideas:

• Open it up to third party prizes –all types of products that benefit online Entrepreneurs.
• Setup the rules, have a page with a list of prizes, which I am doing now.
• Award incentives or extra points to those who do more to win.
• Find an assistant to help administer the contest.
• Start the contest when the mailing list reaches 10,000 OR 02/04/2008 — an interesting event or date

Start of the setup phase will begin on the 3rd of December when I remove the button for the 50 Gifts on the blog and add the contest page with prizes and rules.

One of the most important aspects that I need to make clear is that there is *nothing* that someone needs to purchase to enter the contest.  Entry is as simple as a signup to a mailing list.

I’ll return in the coming days to the contest as things get ready to “going live”.

Rich Sage

Step by Step Approach to Business Building

It’s nearly the end of the year and to focus on the “Master Plan” I have for the Rich Sage, I need to outline a few ideas. My objective is to create a site that focuses on making money online, a membership that explains to people HOW to build a business online, and building a membership network. Included in the network is the small business membership, which is the main monetizing model.

I’ve already added a few other advertisers and recently updated the “Advertiser” tab with a few ad products. I put the ads at only 10% to 20% of the amount charged by a few competitors. I can increase those rates a few times a year as the traffic grows.

All this is fine while the VC money is going into Web2.0 operations. They will advertise. However, when the stock market takes a good correction (as it’s doing now) or trends to a recession and VC money dries up, the ad spending will go WAY DOWN. I don’t want to make the same mistake as AOL that bet the company on ad spending before Google days.

I’ll take a more conservative plan and have several monetizing channels.

I’ll now outline my plan:

• At this time I am link building in several places, including directories, article sites and blogs. These are one-way links coming back to the Rich Sage. These links bring visitors, and arouse the search engine to send more visitors.
• My next step is to create a contest -Next quarter or perhaps, by the end of the year. I’ll give away 4 websites that are connected to a Rich Sage Affiliate Program (Maxsimo Network) that produce an income from $750/month to $5,000/month. So, the grand ($5k/month), first ($2.5k/month), second ($1.5k/month) and third ($0.75k/month) prizes will be offered sometime starting in spring of 2008. I’ll award them over 4 months, when the mailing list is around 10,000 subscribers.
• Each subscriber will equal ONE entry. When I draw one of the prizes, I’ll extract the list, add bonus contest entries and pick the winner using a computer program or a simple Excel file.
• Everyone reviewing the Rich Sage Blog and/or Membership area or the NEXT Super Stock Site will get:

1. Blog: 100 Entries added
2. Member Area: 150 Entries added
3. NEXT Super Stock: 200 Entries added
4. All three: 500 Entries added

By doing #4 from above, a Contestant can have 500 more entries in the contest.

The above points are added when someone creates a review for the Rich Sage, as I’ve detailed here or NEXT Super Stock >>

2008 Rich Sage Make Money Online Contest

I’ve got the prizes lined up. I got an idea on how I’ll administer the contest and pick the winner. The element that is left is how I’ll promote it, and the Contest Rules, which are perhaps, the most important.

For the contest promotion, I’ll follow the same “game plan”…

• Articles
• Press Releases
• YouTube Video (soon!)
• A few forums (Dec.)
• Several Contest Site Ads (Jan. 08, thru the quarter)

I’ll discuss all these elements as I finish the finer details on the contest.

Getting back to my step by step business building theme…

My plan is to achieve the steps of getting from 1,000 to 10,000+ visitors per day. To reach those numbers, I have a series of STEPS that I’ll follow. The first of which was link exchanging and reviews, then the articles, which I am in the middle of doing now. When that is going nicely I’ll find others to do both tasks and focus on the next element: the contest. I’ll let you know how all of it goes!

Rich Sage

Check Your Site Position on Google by Key Word or Phrase

Today I ran into the Google Position Tool which checks your web sites’ position on Google by key word or phrase.  There’s not much to tell about it. Just follow this link and see for yourself where you rank.

Of course, I then checked the status of “Rich Sage” and that came up one.  I  hope it’ll stay there as my business model/plan is to keep advertising & business building offline.  Interestingly, people who learn about Rich Sage in the real world don’t just enter “www.richsage.com” into the browser.  Most often they’ll go to Google and search the name.

Then I used the Ventio tool to search two competitors –I searched Shoemoney and JohnChow, who are basically working with a similar business plan.  To my surprise, the major key words they are using don’t even put them in the TOP 100 of any of the results.  Well, with one exception –for make money online, I think John Chow’s quarry returned a “60″ at Ventio.

Then I searched my site for the term “making money online” and it came in at “278″ and “make money online” came in at “400″ something.

Obviously, the two other blogs that I follow –Shoemoney and JohnChow don’t really worrry about this ranking.  Shoemoney didn’t even show up in several searches.

I know that both of these bloggers don’t worry about how much traffic the search engines are sending their way to the blog site because they have so many links that generate traffic.  People linking back to the two sites have taken a viral nature, and that keeps fueling their visitors.

At this time, my work is to get to that point.  Some of the elements I’ll complete this weekend to make much of that happen.  I think one of the most important will be to create a contest.  I started writing about one. However, now it’s time to “release” the contest and start working on promoting it.

Success, Rich Sage

The Three Most Important Trends

During the month of November, I’ve taken what was basically little or no traffic, and started growing that by leaps and bounds… Can it continue?  You bet. Why? Because I’ll keep doing more and more of what got me to this point.

As I build the Rich Sage brand, there are three concerns that I have:

• Traffic
• Content
• Sustainablility

I need to be able to build the traffic to the thousands that I need to build the entire network.

I need to make sure the content is the best it can be: helping everyone build their own online business.

Lastly, I need to make sure that I can keep that trend going for several years.

Rich Sage

Rich Sage Lessons: Search Engine Optimization Benefits of Using Wordpress

Wordpress is an Content Management System that makes the running of a website very easy. Additionally, Wordpress does a wonderful job managing the search engine optimization actions that are time-consuming and routine.

It does all this in such an elegant manner, that even a novice can take care of their own website without knowing HTML or programming methods. What’s even more powerful is that Wordpress will manage many of the promotional needs of a web site with the use of plugins that manage search engine optimization actions to a host of actions that would take thousands of pages to describe.

Once you start running Wordpress, you’ll begin to wonder how you managed without it. I run Wordpress for the Rich Sage and it does wonders to manage content. It also goes one step further and interacts in several ways with search engines to inform that I’ve updated the site with new content and “come back to record that new content”, which the search engines ‘spiders’ do promptly.

I’ll give you these examples of how Wordpress does wonders for me:

As the Rich Sage, I don’t worry about search engine optimization. Wordpress plugin called Google Sitemaps XML creates an “xml” file on my site and informs Google that I’ve created an update. Google promptly records my update. This plugin is so powerful that it now updates Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com that I’ve added content. All this is done in the background, and I’ve only setup the software via the Wordpress administration area.

Another feature in the search engine arena that Wordpress automates is the use of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) Feeds to generate traffic. At the Rich Sage site I was amazed last month how RSS feeds generated traffic. With the use of Wordpress and Feedburner (another plugin that installs in seconds) each post the Rich Sage makes is broad cast to subscribers in seconds.

Wordpress benefits are vast. They simply don’t encompass just tools and services to make things better –they also include minute details that we may miss.

Everything from the titles of the posts to the categories is optimized for the readers and search engines. The simple display of the title of a post in a descriptive manner to the management of those posts within the categories are things that I don’t need to worry about. Wordpress takes care of it.

In conclusion, what you’ll experience with Wordpress is that it will mange just about all aspects of the Search Engine Optimization “jungle” that you’ve got to navigate as a web site owner. It does all this management –everything from the timely updates to the notifications that updates are available –it does all that running in the background. That frees up a lot of time to get your daily tasks done.

If you are looking for an excellent deployment of Wordpress, take a look at the Rich Sage blog. If you want to learn a lot more about what you can do with Wordpress, just search the term on the Rich Sage site. Lastly, I am working on a training series for the Rich Sage Lessons, which again is free from the site.

Rich Sage

Rich Sage Focus on Articles

As part of my 30-day work marathon to reach 1,000+ daily visitors, I’ve focused heavily on articles. Today, I went back to the system that is publishing my articles on a few hundred articles sites. I’ve consistently posted 2 articles per day for a few days.  I am now expanding to do the following:

• Posting on digg (http://www.digg.com)
• Posting to my own article directory, ArticleMINT (http://www.articlemint.com)
• Creating different versions of each article to post to my TOP 10 LIST of Article sites
• Lastly, I am adding the same content to  4 high PR sites.

So, my objective is not only a good number of visitors but also a high PR rank, quickly.

Rich Sage.

Web Site Management Benefits by Using Wordpress

Wordpress is an Content Management System that make the running of a website very easy.  Even a novice can take care of their own website without knowing HTML or programming methods.

What’s even more powerful is that Wordpress will manage many of the promotional needs of a web site with the use of plugins that manage search engine optimization actions to a host of actions that would take thousands of pages to discribe.

Wordpress manage content.  It can run any type of web site.  Originally developed to run a blog site, Wordpress can now run any type of site.  The installation process takes only minutes –the most time consuming part is the upload of the files to the server and then the setup of the MySQL database.

Accomplishing both of those tasks are easy and if you have a problem with a file upload or setup of a MySQL database, just search each of the terms on YouTube and you’ll find a wealth of how to information.

Once both of those are done, Wordpress is installed after answering a few questions.  There are installation directions at Wordpress called the famous “5 Minute Installation”.  It’s easy as that to install it.

Once you start running Wordpress, you’ll begin to wonder how you managed without it.  I run Wordpress for the Rich Sage and it does wonders to manage content.  I’ll give you these examples:

• As the Rich Sage, I don’t worry about search engine optimization.  Sure, I’ve done many things to make sure the search engines take me seriously.  However, those were done within the Wordpress admin area where I just had to type and setup things.  No need to know programming or html.  Wordpress does it.
• Everything from the titles of the posts to the categories are optimized for the readers and search engines.  That is all done by the theme that I am using on the site. I’ve discussed more about that below.
• As the Rich Sage, I’ve got to manage everything from comments posted by readers to the several posts that I make per day.  All this is again handled by Wordpress.  It even has excellent comment spam system called Akismet built into it.  Imagine having to read dozens of comments?  Imagine having to weed out the spam from the real comments?  All this is not easy and takes time.  However, with the built in spam guard system, it’s very easy for anyone to manage the communication within a web site and it’s readers.
• Lastly, one of the beautiful benefits of Wordpress is that it allows for us “programming challenged” users to manage the communications with the outside world.  Take for example RSS –Real Simple Syndication –which broadcasts each post to the site within minutes of “going live”.  Taking my Rich Sage site as an example, RSS feeds are sent out by Feefburner.  My site will even connect to a host of Web 2.0 sites to syndicate RSS feeds  and this feature is so popular that 25% of my visitors come from RSS feeds.

In the end Wordpress is a hero to anyone who wants to make money online.  It allows us to focus on our content while helping us manage the tasks of running a very popular website

Rich Sage

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone reading from the USA! And to everyone who will “stuff their belly with turkey”, regardless of where you are! Well, one has to do so at least once a year.

Rich Sage