Archive for June, 2009

Day 10: Content, Adsense (yay!), and WordPress tags (boo!) – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment


(Tuesday June, 30th)

I watched lesson 4 today. It’s all about creating content for your sites. So, I picked the site with the highest potential income and started generating content for it. It was a little boring because I honestly have no interest in the subject, but it amused me that The Keyword Academy course is right: you really don’t have to care about a subject at all to write a few articles about it. I’ve only completed the first one out of five, so we’ll see if I still feel the same way after the other 4.

After that, I decided to reward myself by working on something that I actually do care about: Adsense. I don’t know if this was smart or not, but I skipped ahead a few lessons (2 about link building, 1 about a wizard of some kind, and another about a stat counter) and watched the one about Adsense. I already had an Adsense account up and working, so I finished with this pretty quick. As always, the video was very helpful and step-by-step. As I am sure you noticed, I got Adsense working on this site as well.

However, while I was critiquing the look of my ads, I noticed something… something bad. There is no listing of tags in the sidebar on my sites.

First, let me explain why this is bad. Without going into too much detail, the Keyword Academy course teaches you that using tag pages to your advantage is a very important part of ranking well in search engine results, and thus is very important to making money. However, even if you add tags to your articles, if Google can’t find them, they don’t help you a bit! And since the themes I am using don’t have tag links in the sidebar, or on the post pages, or anywhere else I could find, Google hasn’t got the smallest chance of finding them.

This made me a little upset. After all, I downloaded and am using the themes recommended by the Keyword Academy course. So if the course teaches that tags are so important, why would they not make them show up in all their themes? This seems like a pretty bad oversight to me.

Then I remembered that:
1.I am a total WordPress newbie, and I could have just missed something,
2.Someone else must have run into this already.
So, I headed to the forums. I found a post by a guy named “strathy” who had pretty much the same question as me. The question had personally been answered by Mark and Court, and it linked to a video they had made, explaining how to add tags to a theme. Great! Or so I thought…

The video tells you how to add a tag cloud using widgets. Unfortunately, as brought out by strathy in the very next reply, this only works for themes that are compatible with widgets (or “widgitized”). Even more unfortunately, only a handful of the Keyword Academy recommended themes are widgitized. Most unfortunately of all, that is pretty much where the thread ended. Great…

Left with no other option, I went to the WordPress online manual (http://codex.wordpress.org/) and started reading. I never really found a way to properly put the tags in the sidebar. I could get the tag cloud to show up, but with no “Tags:” title above it, so it just looks like WordPress pooped some jumbled words onto your homepage. Grrr…

I finally found a very simple alternative. All you have to do is paste one line of code:
<p><?php the_tags(); ?></p>
into the “single post” template. This will make the tags for each post show up on that posts page. I think that’ll do the trick for getting them indexed by Google. I posted this info in the Keyword Academy forums and called it a day.

Now I know I sound like a big whiny baby. Boohoo, I had to read up on WordPress a little, the Keyword Academy didn’t hand me the answer on a plate, boohoo. But when I said I am a WordPress newbie, I am serious. I hadn’t ever even seen a wp-admin page before this week. I know ZERO about it. Thankfully, I’m a total computer nerd and I used to work for a software company so I have a rudimentary understanding of the way code is structured (I was tech support, not a programmer) . If I hadn’t had that to fall back on, I’d probably still be dinking around in the template pages.

My point is, if you are going to make something an integral part of your system, it needs to be easy. If you want to have some “extra credit” type things that take a little more work, fine. But don’t leave a complete newbie on their own to figure things out. That’s what we’re paying you for!

I can’t help but think of the people who aren’t computer nerds who made it to that point. Did they just give up? Did they even notice, or are they out there, getting nowhere with there sites and can’t figure out why? Who knows.

I can honestly say this is the first thing in the Keyword Academy system that has disappointed me. I know that the system (any system) is a work in progress and that bugs have to be worked out. I just hope this one gets worked out sooner rather than later.

Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 4 hours

The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 28.5 hours @ $8.40 = $239.40
Revenue:
Google  Adsense – $0.00

GRAND TOTAL:
-($432.16)


Day 9: Picking Themes – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment


(Monday June, 29th)

Today me and my wife picked out themes for all our sites. She’s the one with all the fashion sense, so I let her do most of the choosing. This was really quick and easy.

After we had the themes picked out, I uploaded them all to the server (with only a few minimal timeout problems this time. Thanks again Clearwire. :-( ).

After they are uploaded applying them is quick and easy as well.

Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 1 hour

The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 25.5 hours @ $8.40 = $214.20
Revenue:
Google  Adsense – $0.00

GRAND TOTAL:
- ($406.96)


Day 8: Configuring WordPress – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment


Alright, it’s time for lesson 3, which is about how to configure WordPress (a website building tool) and that SEO plugin we installed for it. I once again lured my lovely wife into helping me, with promises of being able to work from home if this pans out.

These steps are, as usual, pretty straight forward and easy to follow. The only “tough” part (and I use that word loosely) was thinking up a description for each site. Me and my wife split the 20 sites, fifty-fifty and went to work. We once again made this a bit of a friendly competition and saw who could make up the most witty and trendy sounding descriptions. She was able to finish her half of the list a full half an hour before I got through mine. Man, she is one smart cookie!

After we finished, we browse through WordPress themes for about 10 minutes, just trying to decide which ones would best match the themes of the different sites, but we didn’t really settle on many.

At this point we had some family obligations to attend to so we quit for the day.

Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 3.5 hours

The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 23.5 hours @ $8.40 = $197.4
Revenue:
Google  Adsense – $0.00

GRAND TOTAL:
- ($390.16)