moderndaypeasants.com

Ready to Give Up on Your Dream?

Yep…I know the story all to well.

You’ve been working your butt off and trying to pay special attention to details simply because you know that in order to succeed it has to be done right….. and yet you’re still getting your teeth kicked in.

Kind of feel like your just spinning your wheels?

I’ve been there too but you can’t give in.

I don’t care if you’re an Internet marketer like me, a singer or even somebody who has an idea to offer the world the best kites they’ve ever flown!

You must not allow yourself to believe that you can’t have your dream.

Your dream is sacred!

Even if you’ve shared it with others…it’s still sacred.

A singer/songwriter will not become a great musician without first writing 30 ok songs.

As the saying goes….you really do have to get back up on the horse.

Believe me, I think I’ve made every mistake possible.

……..and as far as money goes.

When I first started this website and blog it earned only pennies per month.

It’s presently earning hundreds per month and one day when more of my visitors feel that I have earned their trust it will make thousands per month. Possibly even tens of thousands per month.

There have been many days I was ready to throw in the towel and just give up!

…But every time I began to lose my confidence I would always force myself to look back month per month and see what I have accomplished. Even though the monetary gains seemed small each month, the progress kept becoming more substantial. Success was taking form in ways other than just money. The site has continuously gained in regular readers and visitors, more people began switching over from just visitors to registered members, my writing skills have increased, I’m much less of an introvert now days, a new service has been added to the site, PageRank increased and so on.

When I looked at it in that light with the knowledge that the pay is still increasing it suddenly felt like I was succeeding and that gave me new hope to go on.

Keep your grand idea close to your heart and real in your mind!

When you feel like you’ve had enough and you’re ready to give up on your dream just look back and measure what you’ve accomplished.

We humans need to see and feel accomplishment in order to continue driving forward.

Don’t step on the brakes…..press on the accelerator.

Learn more….dig deeper.

How to Know What to Improve on Your Website

If you’re like most good webmasters you’re always searching for new ways to improve your website.

This can sometimes be difficult to do without knowing what needs improvement.

One way to find out is by getting opinions from family and friends. Have them look at your site and give you an honest opinion about the navigation, color schemes, fonts, etc. They might not operate a website like you , however, it’s entirely possible that you have a biased opinion of your webmaster skills. Outside viewers may be able to clue you in on something you’re missing in the overall layout.

You can also check out some of the other articles on this blog to help with your site. I’ve written quite a bit and I try to write articles related to the problems I have experienced and overcome.

Another excellent way to improve your website is to check your website grade at Website Grader.

Their site has been around for quite some time. They’ve graded and helped to improve over 2 million websites. It’s free to use their service and after you enter your URL you will learn a multitude of different tasks necessary to compete with the best ranking websites in the world. The program grades your site on things such as inbound links, interior page analysis, imaging, headings, meta-data, domain age, readability level and much more. The finished report will also offer well needed tips for improvement.

When I first started using their grader my site scored a 39. It now has a grade of 93 and I owe most of that to the information I learned from Website Grader.

Thanks to their awesome tool I have dramatically improved my website allowing it to compete with some of the best sites in the world.

If you haven’t checked them out I would highly recommend you do so.

I’m not affiliated with them….I’m just really happy I found them.

Even if you’ve been building sites for years you may still find a few good ways to improve your website.

How to Check for Broken Website Links

Broken website links can cause a severe loss of traffic to your site.

You can do all the SEO in the world and easily fall right out of the search engine charts due to broken internal or external links on your site.

Understand that different sites which you have linked to or sites that link to you can sometimes move without using proper redirects. Most of the time the links go down because the website owner no longer maintains the site or just doesn’t re-purchase the domain. Either way…this can cause a broken link on your end.

If your site contains broken links you are basically doing two very bad things.

(A) You’re telling your visitors that you don’t care about your site or their ability to navigate it. Thus, they probably won’t come back after the first visit.

and more importantly:

(B) The major search engines will gradually move your site and pages lower on the rankings or de-list your site all together causing a massive loss of organic traffic.

Needless to say, it’s a good idea to regularly check for broken links on your website and blog.

I do this with a few different free programs.

Download Xenu’s Link Sleuth. A free software developed by a very smart man in Germany named Tilman Huasherr. Works great for static websites but seems to timeout when checking blog links. I’m sure there is a work around for the blog links timing out. I probably just haven’t found it yet. It’s truly an awesome tool.

In addition, I use the free version of Web CEO. You can download it at this link. It does a wonderful job of identifying broken links and errors on your website not to mention the added help with other SEO techniques. Once you’ve downloaded it just click on the icon to bring up the Quick Launch Panel. Next you’ll enter your site where it says “add new site.” Once your site is added you can click on “control site quality” under the heading “Maintain Your Site.”

Finally….for my blog, I use Broken Link Checker by Janis Elsts. This plugin is absolutely a must for a WordPress blog. All you have to do is click on the plugin in settings once it’s downloaded and it will find and list any broken links in your site. It also gives you the opportunity to de-link or fix the links on the spot saving you a lot of time and aggravation from trying to find the broken links on your own.

The above free tools should give you an arsenal of great weapons to help you track down and repair broken links on your site.

To sum things up…..broken website links will cost you a loss of visitors and in the long run they will cost you a lot money if left undone. Don’t wait around….find them and fix them.