SEO 2020 FORUM

[Charles Heflin]

SEO 20/20's mission is to provide a place where webmasters all over the world can come together and share ideas and strategies in a "hype-free" zone.

I am thrilled at the response to the launch of SEO 20/20 just 3 1/2 weeks ago (as of 6/5/2006). I started this site in response to my frustration with the current trend in "product hype building".

The Internet really is a wonderful place to provide a living for yourself. I have been doing it since 1994 (full time) when I quit my job at a copper tubing factory working 12 hour shifts for next to nothing.

I have been in computers since I was 8 years old. My first computer was a TRS 80 and I started programming in Basic at the age of 8. I built my first video game at the age of 9 and have been following computer technology ever since.

When I was 11 I created a bulletin board service (around 1984) when modems were a new thing and when you had to physically dial into another computer to gain access to it (the spawnig grounds for the Internet). Some of you may remember having to take the headset of your phone and plug it in to your modem. The movie "War Games" was my favorite at that time.

In 1991 I started following the development of "The Internet" and in 1993 - 1994 I created one of the first affiliate programs on the Internet selling a credit card matching service called "Credit for Security" which I eventually sold and is now known as freecardsearch.com.

I remember a time when meta tags were a way to get to the top almost over night. I remember when the word "affiliate" became a popular term. I remember when the word Google and Yahoo were just silly names.

I have been in the Internet marketing scene since the Internet began and I have watched the develpoment of products and porgrams geared to help people make money online for a long time.

I have watched Internet marketing gurus come and go. I have watched the waves of the Internet tide ebb and flow and one truth always remains constant.

Simplicity

Making money online is not complicated, it is a smooth flow of determination, knowledge and action.

Be determined... gain knowledge ... take action ... be determined ... gain knowledge ... take action ...

What upsets me is the fact that there are so many people teaching so many conflicting ways to make a living online that the "simplicity" factor is disturbed by conflicting ideas and misinforamtion in an effort to gain financially through the aspirations of others.

This issue has become very prominent lately. All you see now are product pre-launches followed by "important" conference calls followed by "you better buy this now because there are only 100 spots available" followed by, "by popular demand we are extending invitations to a few serious webmasters", followed by monthly subscriptions that you MUST join or you will miss out on massive online profits. I can't leave out the important "countdown" either.

You know the spill as do I. This is why I decided to create SEO 20/20. It is my wish to steer people in the right direction and de-bunk the hype. Everyone is tired of it. I am so sick of reading 5 page sales letters that I know from the beginning are trying to hype a product up to try and tear more dollars away from my wallet.

The Hype era is over and it is my wish to be a pioneer in the new "hype-free" era that is coming to pass very quickly. Simplicity always dominates in the end. I invite others to join me in this mission.

Making money online is simple provided that your mind isn't complicated.

There is good solid information out there and I intend to cover it here. There are many, many ways to make money online and I intend to cover them here.

I will make sure that free tutorials are provided and I will also provide information at a low cost for people that want everyhting in one place at one time.

I will show you good products to buy based on research and review in an effort to help you save time and enhance your business. I will never endorse a product because it "pays well". This is a direct violation of my principles.

The reason for this post is to ask you what you want covered. If it is a new product or "system" on the market, I want to cover it here. I will review and test software, ebooks and courses, at my expense, in an effort to de-hype them and present them in a way that is beneficial to you.

If the product will harm your efforts, I will let you know. If the product is good I will let you know why it is good and how to use it to enhance your business.

I want to know what you want to learn. This is the place to share it. I will do my best to cover all requests but be patient with me. I am only one man but my mission is clear...

I want to help everyone make money online and I want to do it because I am a sincere believer that by contributing to others that I, in return, will be able to provide for my and my family's well being. That is my simple goal and I simply want to help you to achieve yours.

To your success,

Charles Heflin

[Adrian]

From my own personal point of view I would like to see the very basics of everything. Unless one understands the basics the more advanced stuff will never come.

I have on my hard drive a large collection of items with resell rights. I understand that I can resell these products and keep 100% of the profits. Great! But how do I do it? How do I make this automated as it is supposed to be? How do I get enough traffic to those sites to make any money?


I have fallen for the hype so many times and paid only to find the same offer still going on way after the deadline. I can only assume that these people has so little faith in their products that they have to lie in order to get sales.


My ultimate goal is to provide a full time income from my online activites so that I can rid myself of the night job and provide a better life and education for the kids.


Anything that you can do to help would be greatly appreciated.


Regards,



Adrian

[Charles Heflin]

Hi Adrian,

Welcome to the forum.

As far as basics go... what specifically are you wanting to learn?

Thank you,

Charles

[ftanired]

Hi Charles,

Thanks for creating this thread. I believe this will come in very handy.
Like many others, I am super ultra impressed by THE PLAN.
Not only is it very well written, concise, and to the point, it is very simple as well!! (I wonder how high your IQ is....lol)
There are SO many weird things going on out there, and it's so disheartening to see how complicated things to be made. Kudos to your sincere attempt to help people!

The only person on the entire net with the same (pure, white hat) mind as you, would be Dr. Andy Williams of www.ezseonews.com , I believe.

Anyway, here are some suggestions which I think could be very worthwhile to include in THE PLAN.

1. More details on site/article submissions. (Somewhere along the line of......well, please visit http://www.ezseonews.com/blog and scroll down to newsletter #123. I like how Dr. Williams explained how he does article submissions, described in point #1 "One Month 2 Step Kick-Start Plan For a New Site")

Well yes, actually I am aware that you've covered site submission in quite a great detail on page 12 of THE PLAN. However, it would be nice also if you could include your plan for article submission (i.e: how many articles to be submitted per website, what to watch out for, pitfalls to avoid, etc.)

2. High paying keyword research! I think keyword research itself is already very important, and I think I know it quite well. However when it comes to researching HIGH PAYING ones, I still need some more practice, and would appreciate it if someone successful like you would share his own techniques of doing it.

There are a lot of controversies around the Internet regarding the best method to find keywords. Well I think there's no cold and hard rule, as it all truly depends on what we do.
For example, according to Dr. Williams, this is how he does his keyword research: http://ezseonews.com/Wordtracker-Tutorial.PDF , which is all about finding the "low hanging" keywords.
If you could share more step by step details about what you do when researching keywords, that would be great as well.

3. List of program(s) that you use to design your websites. I think it would be great if we could streamline all the website creations....perhaps sharing a few templates with us?
I know that HTML is not hard to learn at all, but I think following a certain blueprint would save a lot of time, instead of reinventing the wheel.

4. "Extra" things to increase traffic....perhaps a little tutorial on RSS? Using blogs to achieve maximum results?

5. What about where to get contents? Do you use any other service other than elance.com?
Here are some good ones:
http://www.justarticles.com/
http://article-writer.team-schuman.com/
http://bestarticles.net/articlealliance.html (best price at 4.5$ per 550-word article. Excellent customer service as well.)

6. This isn't really about site building, but I'm curious as to what you do to protect your Adsense account? I've heard about TONS of people who got their account terminated by Google even though they were innocent. I think click frauds are becoming worse and worse these days, and it's scary to see so many innocent people lose their account. Your feedback on this would be appreciated.
(By the way, I've read about somebody who owns up to 8 Adsense accounts. I wonder how in the world he managed to do that!)

I think that's all for now. I really hope the above things are useful!

[JoeCool]

Charles,

First off...

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You Very Much for starting SEO 2020! You are an oasis in a dessert of dried up gurus and what a refreshing community you have started here!

I plan on making this my new online home base, so please get some extra cots in here (hehehe) and if you need any kind of help here, please let me know.

Charles, I have read "The Plan" and am in the research phase of putting together several sites. What I would like to see us explore here is a comparison of building content sites with an html static site builder such as FrontPage or XSitePro versus custom themed WordPress blogs with a home page (and infrastructure) that has the look and feel of a traditional static site.

Do you think you could you do an adaptation of "The Plan" for building sites with WordPress blogs sometime in the near future? Not wanting to spend tons of money AND time on html site building software and then going through the steep learning curve of the various programs I feel would be beneficial to us all.

My feeling is, and has been, that as the internet and computers evolve, the task of site building itself will get easier and easier along with the software that will become available. WordPress looks like a move in that direction and being open source makes it even better... no board of directors with a focus on the bottom line to worry about! You've been around the internet a few more years than I have (10 years for me), so I would love to know what your thoughts are on the platform we should take for building our content sites... static sites or blogs that look like static sites?

And finally, taking this issue a step further... what do you see one to two years out with regards to video rich content sites... either with Google's VideoSense program being part of the monetization process and/or the website owner's own streaming content? Video is coming fast. As a matter of fact I saw a site today that is offering Private Label Rights memberships to niche topic videos! I think eBooks and podcasts are going to go the way of VCR tapes fairly soon.

I know you're just one man, so I'll keep my wish list short so you can enjoy time with your family and friends... that is what's most important here when we really get down to it.

Best Regards,
Vince
aka JoeCool
(What can I say? I like the Peanuts character, Snoopy (aka JoeCool) though my kids think I'm pretty cool too!)

[Ahri22]

[cooter12]

I want to learn about traffic.

How to build and keep traffic.

Without traffic it doesn't matter how high good of a website or high paying affiliates or clicks you have.

[steveg]

Hi Charles,

I am also very impressed with what you have created here. I found the plan last week and I've had my first site up for 4 days now and I'm very excited about it.

Why am I excited? Well for the last 6 months I've been working 24/7 building all kinds of web sites and getting absolutely nowhere. They seem to get indexed quickly then fade away completely from G's index so I end up back at square 1. I've been listening to all sorts of gurus and using all sorts of techniques, anything apart from doing it the right way.

The plan goes right back to basics and that's what I like. Intuitvely I know that it's the only way forward.

If there is something I would like to see covered in detail it's traffic, something that has been eluding me so far.

I've been developing software for 30 years now and when I was 11 I was teaching myself Algol using a computer at a university 60 miles away and programing by punch card and post lol.

Steve

[xlfutur1]

I would like to see specifics and steps to take to go about researching, building a site, and promoting a site for one specific affiliate product, using the principles of The Plan. Also, along those lines I would like to know more about exactly going about building a list based on that affiliate product or niche that the product is in.

[Charles Heflin]

Thank you for all the comments and suggestions so far. Keep them coming

All of your suggestions will help to make SEO 20/20 a more valuable resource for everyone.

All the best,

Charles