A really great accolade for Weebly for the end of the year. Time Magazine put Weebly #4 on it's Top 50 Websites list. I think this is an important list to be on if you are a new player, because it will generate som juice with the broader base of surfers.
Here's an interesting paragraph! Hey Weebly, now that you are top 50, maybe we can get blockquotes??
Weebly doesn't charge anything to host your site, and there's no limit to the number of pages or amount of material you put up. What's the catch? Founder David Rusenko insists there is none (Weebly will someday go vertical to make money, he says) and we couldn't find one. Users are not obligated to put ads on their pages, Rusenko adds, but they can if they want to by adding an "AdBrite ads" element to their pages. AdBrite delivers the display ads automatically (and makes sure they are relevant to the subject matter of your site) and turns over 100% of any revenue.
I assume in this context going vertical means a Weebly Pro package eventually, but I suppose it could mean something like email hosting. It will be interesting to see how that develops.
I was looking around for a time killing distraction for one of my pages, and I noticed there were a lot of requests for games on the official weebly blog. But, then I did the thing that nobody does..I checked the support area. And of course, the Weebly Wizards had anticipated my needs.
Adding Games to Your Weebly Site
My first rule of discussing Weebly, is to make sure you understand that its still very much in development. As a result I'm going to focus much more on what DOES work than what doesn't work. The reason for that is that these blog posts stay around forever, but Weebly is going to be improving and adding more functioonality.
The eBay Affiliate Program can be a big moneymaker. Personally, I have never done that well with it, but most of my commercial activity is concentrated on people who already have eBay accounts, at least that's been my excuse and thats where the real money is made, signing up new eBay accounts. The good thing about eBay is that you can target almost any niche with relelvant eBay auctions, and eBay has really improved its ability to target a keyword or a niche with their new eBay To Go System,
To Use Ebay To Go you have to jump through 2 little hoops.
I guess I'm a little slow because I find eBay's affiliate program very confusing. They use CJ to manage it but all the Good Stuff is on eBay itself, including eBay To Go
You will need to know your ebay PID (which you can find in CJ (check in Account -> Website Settings but you can make nifty ads like this!
This Nintendo Wii Finder page is actually the page that led me to my discovery of Weebly. I ran across this guy quietly posting in some affiliate marketing forums about how great Weebly is, and also seeking feedback on his Wii page.
I think its a great landing page. The page puts the info most relevant to the intended market front and center - with the eBay and Amazon links to buying the Wii. It emphasizes the scarcity of alternatives with the several sold out links below it. This is a skillful and stealthy call to action that should create a sense of urgency in the buyer motivated to purchase.
One of the things I really like about Weebly is that instead of making a landing page, you can do what the big PPC networks really want you to do which is create a landing site. And you can do it quite rapidly. The developer of Nintendo Wii Finder does this and creates 2 other pages: 1 strictly informational ("Wii Tips and Tricks") as well as a page that targets a narrower group of customers with a higher margin product ("Dance Revolution")
I think that effectively, a project like Wii Finder is a short term product because eventually Wiis are not going to be scarce - but I like short term projects. They are a good way to learn what works and what doesn't. They are also a good way to create effective backlinks to your next project.
You can put an "Add this Blog to Technorati Favorites" button on the sidebar very easily because the code for the button is straight HTML. Drag a Custom HTML Field down to your sidebar, and then check over here for why to use Technorati (and how to), as well as how to. With Technorati's post claim you have to put some custom html in but its just a link and it works just pasting it into a blog post.
Don;t forget to add this blog to your technorati favorites!
Things You Should Understand About Weebly. What do the terms and conditions tell you?
1. Weebly is in Beta
There are existing software bugs, and Weebly is not exactly well-behaved in my browser. I have submitted a ticket on some Weebly browser issues, and I will post more about that when I get an answer. Anyway, you should understand that bad things can happen when a development tool is in beta, up to and including the complete destruction of your site. Luckily, Weebly has enabled backups. I have already begun backing up all my Weebly sites, including this one.
2. Content Ownership
Weebly does not own what you put up on Weebly's site. This is a common enough practice and as long as your account is valid, you can maintain possession of the site, but Weebly is quite clear that they will revoke accounts that violate the T&C.
Weebly does not allow vulgar or obscene content.
Weebly does not allow you to use a weebly page as method of forwarding traffic to another site.
These two steps will help manage the proliferation of junky, search engine spam sites, which plague free blog hosts, something Weebly will have to stay vigilant against. This will be hard because Weebly is a great boon to commercial site development, and the difference between spammer and marketer is really just the color of the hat. Mine's blue.
No illegal or harmful content, no email spam, no using Weebly to harass anyone - another thing that they need to be particularly vigilant about.
I'll quote this one:
(l) promote or provide instructional information about illegal activities, promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual, or promote any act of cruelty to animals. This may include, without limitation, providing instructions on how to assemble bombs, grenades and other weapons or incendiary devices;
Don't offer illegal products and don't make automated use of the system. This will also discourage spammers.
But, you can monetize your site with ads!
Why am I going to the trouble of discussing the Terms and Conditions?
Because, unlike Squidoo or MySpace, the spammers don't get to run around unfettered here. If you want to make commercial sites but you don't want the unfortunate association with spammy pages that lower the credibility of your own site, then Weebly is a great direction to focus on your site development.
Once you've logged in to Weebly, you will see your home page for sitebuilding.
Just click on 'Create a Site', and add a title to the supplied pop-up and you are in business. The title really doesn't matter at this point, so if you want to give it a catchy title, go ahead, you can go back and change this.
I chose "Articles For Your Blog," because it is a niche that I have some familiarity with, I have bought articles from copywriters, and written original articles for years. It is a product with relatively high demand within a targeted audience (people looking to improve the content of their web site but for whatever reason, don't want to write the articles themselves). Plus, since we are going to monetize this site with relevant links and advertising, it is important to pick a niche with successful affiliate programs to serve that niche. There are a whole lot of partner programs that involve the sale or creation of articles. A lot of bad ones, but also a lot of good ones too. The other thing that is important to me, because I'm using Weebly to build this site is flexible methods of creating links to the affiliate products. The large amount of affiliate programs in this niche, means that there will be some good ways of presenting this content to visitors using Weebly. If Weebly didn't allow you to add custom HTML elements to the pages this would be a much bigger problem. But, they do, so let's go!
Above, you can see the default template and layout when you create the site. It's an excellent template for a blog. But the title area doesn't give me enough space for my site's current title. Can we change that?
It's too easy!
1. Sign up with Weebly! Like all sites I love, it has a very simple signup form.
After signup, you will be able to create a site right away. This is your first chance to try out Weebly's site builder. You can make standalone web sites or blogs, like this one. I'm going to show you how to make a simple site, choose a design, create additional pages, add images, and add some of the other tools available with Weebly. I'm excited!
I'm an SEO by trade. Search engine optimization is a goofy profession that sprung up as a set of techniques designed to make your site appear more prominently in search engines. SEO has been going on for 10 years or so, I have been practicing SEO since 2001. In the working world SEOs have to interact with business owners, programmers, web designers and marketing departments. That sounds more terrible than it is :) but nonetheless, the SEO often finds themselves in the position where they must dictate to other nore established professions. This is sometimes a problem, because there is a high business case for SEO but a much smaller awareness of their existence, their techniques and their credibility.
I'm pretty strongly motivated to develop my own sites, because that way I can reduce my need to balance my expertise against the equally valid interests of all these other professionals. The part that has always tripped me up is web design. It takes me a long time, I have to cobble lots of stuff together and look at lots of source code. Wordpress was a real godsend for me when I discovered it, but lately my content strategy has called for a lot of smaller handwritten sites, and wordpress is too resource heavy to make dozens of one-page sites economically.
Enter Weebly
With Weebly I have the ability to quickly make websites with targeted content, like my first creation, a wholesale web site made entirely with Weebly.
I made those two pages in an evening and I'm very pleased with the results especially for my first attempt! I was able to insert a monetized XML feed (not too many of those out there unfortunately), I was able to insert eBay's fantastic new Ebay to Go ads (which I really love). I'm currently working on a poster site that I'm excited about and also this blog. With weebly, I can focus more attention on the quick production of quality content.
I'm going to develop my sites, and tell you about them and tell you about the techniues I use. Does that sound intereting? Let me know in the comments!
Hi, I've been working with Weebly since Thursday. SO I AM AN EXPERT! :) but Weebly is exactly the tool I have needed to suit my life, my skills and my business - so I am throwing in on this for now - I have no idea, this thing may shut down for all I know -- I am not an insider, but I'm going to explore Weebly's resources as thoroughly as I can, because this is a great potential platform for web site construction. I've been working with Wordpress for several years, so I'm going to try and adapt my Wordpress site development techniques to this platform. Weebly is surprisingly advanced but without the broadly extended of Wordpress as of yet. However it has excellent fundamental concepts for making a good community of web sites. For instance, right now it looks like it would not interest the worst of the spammers, which is a good thing, yet I think it will be possible to make appealing, clean commercial sites, with Weebly's very appealng Ajax site development tools.
RSS Feed