Earn Money Online with Brandon Hopkins » Reviews

Site Review: PictureFrameGuys.com

Brandon — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 23:17:18 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve done a site review so I thought I would dust off my site review worksheet and give the Picture Frame Guys some things to think about.

First Impressions

Without a doubt the first thing you notice about this picture frames website is the beautiful design. Most sites I review need a complete redesign, but if the PictureFrameGuys.com were my client, I wouldn’t change anything about the design. I love the layered look of the picture frames behind the flash header. I also like the mouseover effect on the 5 main sections below the header. Below that is some great search engine content.

Usability and Functionality

In my website design business, one of the most important thing for almost all of my customers is ease of use. They want their website visitors to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. This website has a variety of methods for accomplishing this goal. The first and most obvious are the 5 easy links below the flash header.

As you can see, these links make finding what you’re looking for very easy. Wood picture frames and metal picture frames are obviously the most commonly used and that’s why they’re featured on the left. As a design side note, the most important information should always be on the left. The English language reads from left to right so our eyes naturally start on the left side of the page. I am not even in the market for a picture frame right now, but I couldn’t help visiting the picture frame tips page. I love “Tips and Tricks” no matter what they’re about. I would probably read anything for 15 minutes if it was in a list or top 10 format. Keep that in mind when you’re designing a page to attract a variety of people. Short and sweet sells.

SEO Suggestions

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your website is if nobody knows about it. This is partially the case with PictureFrameGuys.com from a search engine standpoint. I did some research to see where PictureFrameGuys.com ranks for about 150 picture frame related keywords. Out of those keywords, PictureFrameGuys.com did not have any first page rankings, and only a couple top 30 rankings. Unfortunately this is totally unacceptable for a business of this caliber. The number of potential customers being missed is huge! The worst part about these poor rankings is that, like most businesses, they don’t know how far behind they are. They’re probably working on getting a few links from Facebook, friends, personal blogs, etc., but in reality that isn’t enough, and never will be enough. After analyzing some of their links, it looks like they might have hired a company to put a few links on some blogs, but that will never be enough (as indicated by the poor rankings). Take a look at the rankings in the picture below (click for full size).

Fortunately this is an easy problem to remedy. With a customized link building campaign I could have PictureFrameGuys.com (or your website!) in the top 10 for just about every major keyword and hundreds of minor keywords. The keyword “picture frames” has some very stiff competition, but nothing that couldn’t be beaten with some time and money.

What’s the next step?
After doing a review of the aesthetics, usability, and ranking factors of the PictureFrameGuys.com, I would say they are well on their way to having a profitable business no matter what the economy looks like. As you could guess, the one suggestion I have is to run to your phone and give me a call about search engine marketing, there are thousands (61,280 daily searches according to Market Samurai) of people every day searching for picture frame related keywords that you could be reaching. If you only reached 10% of those, you would have 6,000 new website visitors, convert 10% of those and you would have 600 additional sales per day. Even if you only converted 1%, could you use an extra 60 sales per day?

As I mentioned, I do provide a full range of SEO services including link building. Email me or call me (559-871-1613) anytime to discuss your needs.

Site Review: Ezilon.com

Brandon — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:49:09 +0000

Ezilon.com contacted me recently about a site review for their directory. Initially I didn’t want to do it because general web directories are overrated and boring. They sent me a link to their regional web directory and I checked it out. It is unique! Yes, a unique web directory.

What makes Ezilon Unique

Since Ezilon is a unique web directory I thought I would start with that. What initially makes Ezilon unique is the design. It isn’t just about template based directory script with a million crappy sites and DMOZ listings. It is a web directory that is designed to be used as a directory. Ezilon is ideal for finding a local business since the first way you’re presented with is a clickable world map that takes you to regional based directory listings. I was able to quickly and easily find backup providers in the US.

Submitting Your Site

Ezilon is a paid web directory. Generally I don’t pay for web directories, but this one made me give it a second thought. The reason is the high authority and high PR inner pages. For example if you sell baseball gear, here is a page with 4 outgoing links that is a PR3 and a steady PR 3….not a spammed quickly fading PR 3.

Baseball gear isn’t the only high deep linked PR page. Here are a couple others I found with only a couple outbound links.

osCommerce

Preschool Programs

Dating

Projector

Those type links are not only hard to find with strong PR and limited outbound links, but this site is loved by Google. I don’t know their stats, but I would imagine they get nearly 100k Google referred visitors per month. I see over 260,000 indexed pages, most of them cached. Did I mention the homepage is a PR6?

Subdomain Crazy!

One of the first things I noticed about Ezilon.com was their prolific use of subdomains. I counted about 20 subdomains ranging from country listings to an answer service like Yahoo Answers. Unless you’re site is really large, you shouldn’t need 20 subdomains, one situation in which you could use subdomains is for different languages like Ezilon.com does. Google often treats subdomains as different websites so a subdomain that is for a different language is truly a different website targeting different people.

Ideas and Suggestions

After spending considerable time browsing all aspects of Ezilon.com (and the various subdomains), I noticed a considerable lack of advertising. While this is definitely not a bad thing, it isn’t the best business practice, unless you’re running a pro-bono site. The advertising that I did see was mainly Adsense ads. When you have good page rank and good page views, you should have no trouble selling advertising.

I would suggest targeting specific markets and selling advertising on those pages of the site. Ezilon could sell Miami Beach real estate listings and web directory listings to that market. They could create a process and duplicate their process across the US and the entire world. With Ezilon there are a million different possibilities for upselling and cross selling including homepage advertising and featured category listings.

In addition to the different types of direct selling, they could promote their paid web directory and give out coupons to specific target markets they want to break into. When you give out a coupon to “Company A”, and they sign up, it’s easier to sell the product or service to “Company B”. The sales call would be easy, “I wanted to let you know that Company A is advertising on our website. If you’re interested in advertising as well, I can list you as a featured site and you’re website will display above theirs!” Fear and competition can sell advertising. Company B thinks that if Company A has paid for advertising, I should to. I can be featured above them? Great!

Ezilon has so many PR 6 and PR 5 links, they could easily be selling $2-5,000 worth of text links per month. On this Help Desk page alone (PR6), they could sell a link to any number of help desk companies looking to increase their rankings.

I would suggest starting with an inventory of assets. These assets are mainly high trafficked pages and high PR pages. Once the list is created, start selling!

In addition to the high value assets, there are a lot of other medium quality assets that can be monetized including the Article Submission section. Article Submission services are a great source of passive income.

Another medium value section is the Job Board. It’s a PR 3 with only one untargeted banner advertisement. Even just an affiliate program from Monster or Snag A Job would be better than no monetization.

Now You See…

Ezilon isn’t just another basic web directory with a bunch of junk listings. Their site provides value in a variety of ways and has huge untapped potential! Check out Ezilon Regional Web Directory today!

Where To Buy Clean Links

Brandon — Mon, 05 May 2008 05:47:41 +0000

Buying links has long been debated, especially when Google slapped so many blogs in the last year. Personally I haven’t had many issues with Google, but many people had. With that disclaimer, be careful where you buy your links. Most places that sell links have a “footprint”, or an easy way to track which websites are selling links. For example of a footprint, search for “powered by WordPress” in Google. It’s an easy way to find a lot of blogs that are running WordPress. That’s just a simple footprint, but there is a footprint to just about everything.

One place that I’ve found that sells quality links and doesn’t leave a trail is LinkWorth. If you haven’t bought many links then this won’t matter to you, but if you’re in the game to make money, links are vitally important. LinkWorth has some really big blogs on their network for driving traffic, then they have a lot of 2nd and 3rd tier blogs that are great for just snagging a link.

Personally, I like to get one link and go. I think a single link on one domain is just as beneficial as a site-wide link, and possibly even better. Depending on the quality of where the link is posted, you can see beneficial traffic from links that you’ve earned naturally or purchased.

Either way, LinkWorth doesn’t seem to leave any footprints which means it is nearly impossible to find out if the links are natural or paid.

Site Review: SoundCapitalInvestments.com

Brandon — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:21:51 +0000

I was recently contacted by Sound Capital Investments because they were looking to better their online presence.

Who is Sound Capital Investments

Sound Capital Investments is a Real Estate Agent in Houston, TX and also a Mortgage Investment Lender in Houston. Sound Capital Investments offers a variety of loan programs with a focus on the end result and helping you get the best deal possible.

Website Observations

With regard to the Sound Capital website, there is a lot that can be improved. When looking at the code of the website, you’ll first notice that the meta tags and titles are appropriately targeted for keywords. Excellent!

Each page, however, has the exact same title. Each page should be given it’s own title. The title of the page should include a keyword or two, but not duplicated across the entire site. This could be a problem of the coding (php includes) or it could have been an oversight.

However, after the meta tags the site begins to fall apart. After the meta tags you’ll find approximately 97 lines of Javascript. While I’m no Javascript expert, I do know that search engines don’t index javascript and therefore it should be used as little as possible. The javascript powers the loan calculator and dynamic mortgage rates. I would recommend moving the calculator off the main page since it already has it’s own mortgage calculator page. I don’t see the need for so much code especially when the calculator is duplicated on an internal page.

Further down the code are tables, yuck! Since the site uses CSS styling, the tables should be dropped and additional CSS added to keep the same layout. For any mediocre developer this is easy work and should take less than 10 hours. Great developers should be able to do this layout in about 3-5 hours.

The header logo has the following alt code, “alt=”Real Estate Agent for Loans Financing In Houston”“. I would like to see that similar to the main keywords of the site. Something like, “Houston Texas Real Estate Agent”. That keeps the keyword theme of the page consistent while not abusing they keywords. Changing the order a little keeps search engine bots in the right arena for keywords without using them exactly all the way down. Other than that alt tag, most of the others are perfect.

Something else I don’t recommend is using comment tags to hide code. Instead, just remove the code and clean up the HTML. That will also increase the text to code ratio, which is currently at 11.26%. For a site like this I would like to see the text to code ratio closer to 40-50%. That is very achievable especially considering the removal of the table and adding of CSS.

Another issue that I foresee with this site is duplicate content issues. Currently the index page is /index.asp. By using the “Home” button on the site you go to the index.asp. Correct linking should take you back to the root domain, http://www.soundcapitalinvestments.com not http://www.soundcapitalinvestments.com/index.asp. This could also be accomplished with a .htaccess file or even a robots.txt. Speaking of robots.txt, the site is missing one. Instead of not having one, the site should have one that instructs robots to index the entire site.

From what I can tell, the site is fully indexed in Google. In order to make sure it stays that way, I would recommend a sitemap (sitemap.xml). Since the site is fully indexed and it’s a static site, this isn’t 100% necessary right now.

All of those issues can be fixed with a talented developer. My main concern is the affiliate banners for “Ty Coughlin’s Reverse Funnel System”. I don’t know how this spammy looking affiliate site is related to Sound Capital Investments, but is really is turning visitors off to the site. Instead of a professional looking website designed with a goal (real estate loans and sales) in mind, the site now has a second purpose of turning potential prospects away from lending and real estate and into this website that is very ambiguous at best. I would highly recommend removing the advertisements and letting the purpose of the site remain real estate.

Search Engine Observations

While unfortunate, I didn’t expect the site to rank for very many keywords. The site has a Google Pagerank of 0 and very few backlinks. Mainly backlinks from sites that have scraped Sound Capital Investments text. With those stats in mind, I wasn’t able to find the site ranking for any keywords including long tail. That doesn’t mean the site doesn’t actually rank for any, just none that I could find. One of the first keywords the site should rank for is the domain name and company name. It ranks for neither.

Another part that I mentioned that should be repeated is the title tags. They’re all identical as shown by Google in the following screenshot.

Well there you have it. Sound Capital Investments is off to a good start, but definitely needs some work if they want to compete in such a strong market like Houston Texas Real Estate.

Build a Niche Store (eBay Affiliate Store)

Brandon — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:22:55 +0000

While products like the Build a Niche Store (BANS) are usually not on my list of things to try, I thought I would solicit some reviews about the product. If you’re not familiar with BANS, the premise is simple, you pick the niche and the script delivers products in that niche through the Commission Junction eBay affiliate program.

Sounds confusing, but you’re basically an eBay affiliate through Commission Junction. The part that entices me is that I know a few niches that aren’t horribly flooded with similar sites. Since I also own a few extra domains with crappy content, it could be a perfect match. Build a Niche Store claims to be easy to install and if a newbie can do it, so can I.

The price is $97 which is irrelevant because the eBay affiliate program is pretty easy to make money with. If someone signs up for eBay through your link, you get $25. If someone clicks your link and buys ANY product on eBay in the next 7 days, you get 50% of the revenue (not total sale price). By just selling a few items and a few signups you’ve easily made your money back.

I’ve never actually used the Build a Niche Store software but am curious to hear from actual users.

What did you like? What don’t you like?

eBay “Website for Sale” Scammers

Brandon — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:30:22 +0000

Alright, I always see these sites that are “established” with “income” listed for sale. Normally they don’t sell, but I always see them.

You know, the text says stuff like, “Have you ever wanted to run your own online business from the comfort of your own home with the potential to make over $100k per year but did,nt know where to start.If so then you have come to the right place.This is your chance to bid on a popular proven real ecommerce website business and not an amateur maybe it might make you money website that is found on so many auction.”

Here is one such scammy, scummy, site for sale. What I don’t like about them can be found in the following picture:

Now “scam” might be a strong word, but Merriam-Webster says scam is defined as, “a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation”.

So saying that the appriasal for this website is $22,400 is definintely deceptive. The website is worth $10 (domain) plus maybe $30 for an ugly template that has been used on at least 5 other identical websites.

So here is me, calling you scammers out. If your websites are really worth anything, lets have a contest. You vs. Me, Head to Head, One on One.

If your websites can make $100,000 per year like you say they can, I want to see a check!

$15k Challenge – I lost

Brandon — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:33:31 +0000

When the $15k Challenge blog first launched (August 2006), I signed up and followed along. The goal was for this guy Dan to make $15k, in one month. The catch was that he only had $200 to spend on anything he wanted. He couldn’t use any of his existing resources (contacts, websites, newsletters, email lists, etc).

I decided that I would give it a shot as well. He was going for a viral lauch and was promoting a craft membership site, and I followed along, just with a different niche. Each month this craft site was going to give away free books and patterns, etc. Stuff that interested people involved in craft…stuff.

I decided my niche would be scrapbooking and created this site for Scrappy Jackie (my alter ego…she needed to be female). I didn’t spend anything beyond the cost of the domain (and JackieWinton.com my alter ego’s full name) so less than $20 total.

I created an account at scrapbooking.com and a few of the larger forums. I created personal pages, and went full steam ahead. Over the course of a week, I posted about 200 posts in 6 different forums.Â A few days later I got some signups to my email form, but in a weeks time I had about 30 people signed up.

When Dan made his list he had over 6,500 people sign up.Â That told me that I either missed a part of the process or he was cheating!

Thankfully I didn’t spend any money promoting this site because it would have all been for nothing.Â Anyways, I learned my lesson, stay away from email marketing.Â I’ve never been able to get anyone to sign up for anything email related anways.

I guess that doesn’t really have to do with an idea for a way to “make money online”, but it does tell you how to not lose money online!

p.s. If the Jackie Winton is out there, I have a few websites for you!

Challenge: Make $100/month with Clickbank

Make Money Online by Writing for KnowMoreMedia

Brandon — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:33:30 +0000

For a few months I wrote for a company called KnowMoreMedia (KMM). They were a good company to work with, and I made a few online friends. I wrote for BizToolBelt.com and PayPerClickIQ.com. PPCIQ hasn’t had a writer since me, but BTB has progressed nicely, but slowed down this last month.

In 7 months I made about $1500 ($1492.89 exactly) through KMM including one month that was over $700. They paid based on the amount of posts you made, comments made, and traffic. I don’t think they pay for comments any longer, but they still pay for posts and traffic from what I understand.

Making money by writing for a network is an easy way to get a check (or PayPal deposit), but is time consuming. You don’t however need much knowledge or skills in building websites, marketing, building links, etc. KMM has put together a great starter kit for someone knew to writing online. If you take the time to learn Typepad, you’ll go a long way with KMM.

I stopped writing from KMM when they dropped the prices they paid for each post and started focusing more on traffic. I never really cared about my KMM traffic because I was getting paid per post, and traffic and monetization was their worry. When that became my worry, the posting wasn’t as important because I needed to focus on marketing this website I didn’t even own. That was pretty difficult. I couldn’t see the value in building links and traffic for something I didn’t own. That is about the time I quit and began focusing on my own websites. If the money would have stayed the same, I would still be blogging for KMM.

If you are interested in writing for KMM you can view a list of blogs that currently don’t have writers here, but also look on the far right side for blogs with an asterik (*). That means they don’t have a writer, but are looking for one. I don’t know how selective they are, I’m sure it depends on the blog, and how many applications they receive.

When I first started writing for KMM, they were brand new. I was fearful that I would do all of this writing then never get paid. They were consistent with their PayPal deposits and never missed one. KMM has a strong leadership team and they are always adding features to their blogs. They have an authors only back end site where the authors can hang out and talk about their blogs.

I would give KMM a high recommendation and hope you find a blog that fits your area of expertise. When you apply, let them know that Brandon Hopkins sent you.

This review is completely unbiased. I’m not getting paid or receiving anything by writing it. I just wanted to show you one of the ways that I have made money in the past.

SEO Authority Contest – Free Entry!

Brandon — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 03:20:59 +0000

It’s time for my first ever contest. I don’t have much to offer except a free site review ($150 value) and the knowledge that Technorati thinks you’re blog is a great SEO Authority.

Here’s how this will work. Within the next week, make a post that links to my blog (homepage is best, but that’s up to you). I’ll check Technorati’s Authority page for this blog and whoever is listed above Jim Boykin’s wonderful post will get a free site review. This means we could have up to 10 winners!

No purchase necessary, anyone can enter. You will have to claim your winnings. I’ll try to email, but no guarantee I’ll be able to get a hold of anyone.Â Currently there is one site ranking above Jim’s post, and if they want to claim a free site review, they’ll get it!

So get your entry in, and help me give out some free site reviews!

Honeymoon to Florida

Brandon — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 03:02:01 +0000

Thought I would post about my honeymoon to Florida. It was over 3 years ago but…as they say…better late than never.

We first flew from California through St. Louis to Orlando. Took a shuttle to Cocoa Beach and stayed on the water for about 3 days. Cocoa Beach, Florida was very relaxing, reminded me of Avila Beach. There wasn’t much to do since neither of us (my wife and I) were 25 so we couldn’t rent a car.

We decided one day that we would walk to where most of the shopping was about 1 mile away. As we were getting close, my wife got a blister on her foot from her sandals. We slowed down and finished the walk after a short break. When we got to the shops she bought sandals that she thought might be easier on her feet and we started the walk back after shopping for an hour.

About 5 minutes into the walk her feet were hurting too much so we flagged down a taxi and rode ($25 taxi ride) a mile and half back to our hotel.

The beach was awesome and the hotel was beautiful. We were there in February but the weather was perfect.

We went back to Orlando, went to Disneyworld then headed back to California.

We plan to go back for an anniversary one day.

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