Archive for '2007'

I write a lot of in-depth articles with techniques to get you more traffic to your web site and better search engine rankings. I think sometimes I give so many tips in one article that a few may fall between the cracks, so every now and again I’ll try to give you a post about one specific thing to help you. Today’s focus will be “Secret Link Juice Keyword Techniques“. I was reminded of this when I saw the post The name game – Using keywords in URL filenames.

Keyword Basics for Newbies or Those Unfamiliar

If you’ve done a lot of SEO or keyword research work you can probably skip this section and move on to the next part. I include it because when I was a newbie or not that good at SEO I hated it when articles assumed I knew all the “obvious” techniques. This is not a new concept – I’ve written about it before. But if you read that article I just linked you’ll find that it may be more important than you previously thought. I their example they improved their ranking and moved up some 70-odd slots in SERP’s by doing this. It’s a pretty simple concept. As an example – if you want to sell usb flash drives, you should probably try to get the domain name “usbflashdrive.com” or some kind of variation on it. They use the keywords also in the article and page names which become URL’s. If you are completely brand new to SEO work and keyword research – I highly recommend you read this Keyword Primer. No string attached, just click and read.

That’s the simple part. Now I’m going to teach you how to go a bit farther. You “might think you are using the right keywords”, but are you really? Are you using the best keywords? The most searched keywords? Are you using keywords there is the most competition for, or the least? You should do some very simple keyword research to find out what keywords you should be targeting on your web site or blog. You might even do this research before you buy your domain name and purchase a URL with the most searched for keywords. This the basis for all SEO work on your web site or blog and training yourself to do it as if it were second nature. There are many, many free and pay-for keyword research tools. I would get started with the free ones, and eventually pickup some of the paid ones as you need them (and can afford them). We’ll tackle the paid keyword research tools in another post.

My top 5 Free Keyword Research Tools

Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool
WordTracker’s free keyword tracking tool is pretty good. Just enter the keywords you want to do research on and you get a list returned not only with best suggestions, but also with the amount of searches performed in the last month (the top 100 in fact).

Adwords Keyword Tool
While the Adwords Keyword tool doesn’t give you an actual number, you do get to see how much suggested keywords were used in the last month vs. overall as an average. The other thing that’s nice is that you get a snapshot of what the advertiser competition is like, so you know how many others may be competing for the same words.

Browse Keywords
This is a really cool tool because it visually shows the keyword suggestions. You don’t get any numbers on how many searches though.

Keyword Research Tool
For some reason, when using Webmaster Toolkit’s free Keyword Research tool you get some phrases that I haven’t seen in the other ones. Phrases that seem to be more niche and sales related, like “1gb memory drive”, “1gb memory stick”, and “1gb usb flash drive”. These are really handy variations that seem to be shopping type keyword searches people would perform. Again – no numbers on how many searches any of these receives.

Good Keywords is a software download program that you can install on your PC to do FREE keyword research. That’s right – the software and doing research within it is completely FREE, this is a Freeware keyword research tool. I highly recommend downloading and installing this software, it does not contain any additional programs or adware – this product is very well known by those doing SEO work.

Now that you have some ideas of great keywords, when you are writing content for your site you can use these over and over again. First you have the best keywords in your domain name. They you make sure that you use the keywords efficiently in your paths and URL’s. What this means is, if you are using WordPress for example and have Permalinks setup right, the title of your post(s) will become that URL, like a page or post titled “1GB Memory Stick Sale” would become usbflashdrive.com/1GB-Memory-Stick-Sale. So now the keywords that were in the title of your article (and will be the HTML title as well as the page content heading) will also be in the URL. That’s why a better title for this page might have been “1GB Memory Stick Sale and Cheap Deals”. See – now with the 2 additional keywords you are going to pick up even more oddball search keywords like “1GB cheap memory stick” or “deals memory stick sale” or something. Vary the keywords in your title, and also different ways in your article. Do it without being spammy or tricky, just try different variations. Again – this is very basic stuff, but now for the…

Secret Link Juice Keyword Techniques

OK – first off these aren’t really secret. But I feel like they are because I don’t see very many web sites or blogs taking advantage of them at all. I know they work, in fact they work well – and you should make them part of your daily posting routine every time you write content.

Secret Keyword Technique #1: Images
Now you’re probably pissed thinking “that’s not a secret at all!”. Hold on big fella, wait a minute – I do have some techniques I use that you may not be aware of. First and foremost – every blog and web site should have images. I am COMPLETELY guilty of NOT using images to my advantage on this blog. I’m an idiot for not doing it nearly at all the first 6 months this blog was online. In fact, the last few posts are the only ones on this entire site (so far) that use images at all.

WHY you should use images: The most common answer to this question is because it makes people more interested. They stay longer, read more, look at more pages, and it even boosts your trust factor a bit with your audience (it makes you look more professional). The REAL reason (for me) is because it is not only aesthetically pleasing, but it gives you one more way to use additional keywords on your page to get better search engine rankings!

WHAT to do with images: A 4 Step Process:

1. FIND a good image.
   • Use Google Images, Stock Xchng, or visit this comprehensive list of free stock photo sites.
2. NAME the image using the best keywords.
   • Instead of file97a.gif name it 1gb-usb-flash-drive.gif
3. PLACE the images in a nice keyword-named folder.
   • groups your images in folders named with keywords, like usbflashdrive.com/flashdrives
4. INSERT the image into your page or post.
   • you want to take full advantage of the alt tag for every image your insert. If you don’t know HTML, it’s time you learned about the image html tag. You’re going to add keywords and keyword phrases to the alt tag of the images you’re inserting like this (**see code snippet below)
     Try to form a loose sentence that makes halfway sense using keywords and keyword phrases (don’t repeat) for the alt tag of every image your insert.

**code snippet

img src=”/flashdrives/1gb-usb-flash-drive.gif” alt=”perfect deal on a usb flash memory stick cheap price”

You may have been using alt tags for years, and YES – that helps your SEO and SERP’s (search engine result pages). HOWEVER…history and lots of experience will show that using good keywords in multiple locations DRAMATICALLY INCREASES the results! Having the keywords in the filename, directory name, and HTML code tags really helps! In addition, there’s one more side-benefit I hadn’t even talked about yet: Google Images! That’s right, Google Images has it’s own web crawler that does nothing but look for images. Of course images named with keywords and placed in keyword-named directories are going to be more relevant, and come up higher in search results than tens of thousands of others. I have had many sites that ranked rather poorly in google search for certain keywords, but DOMINATED google image results! I have one site right now where over half the traffic comes from google images. My biggest blogging mistake on this site was not using images to their full advantage in every single post.

Secret Keyword Technique #2: Links
Now you probably really think I’m stupid. Yes – links are a secret keyword technique. WHY? Because of the “title” tag. That’s right – the title tag. First of all – I do this and it works. Don’t believe me? Some may feel that the jury is still out on this one, but I know for a fact when I started doing this to key important links it helped my sites a lot. The weight it carries is different with each search engine. But with the number of crawlers and social search blog news aggregator headline sucking link harvesting crawlers out there – why not take advantage of all the keywords you can at all times?

Again – you’re going to need to go into the HTML code, and you’re going to be adding a “title” attribute to your links, like in this example:

a href=”/cheap-flash-drive-sale-deals” title=”find a deal on a cheap usb flash memory drive 1GB and bigger”
img src=”/flashdrives/1gb-usb-flash-drive.gif” alt=”perfect deal on a usb flash memory stick cheap price”

See how that works? As far as it’s function in the browser, it just creates a tooltip with that text when you move your mouse over the link. But it makes the page that much more relevant for those keywords. Imagine all the words on a page and in the HTML code of a web page were people. Every word was one person, and they were all in the same room. The words around a link say “that page is about usb flash drives”. The link title words say “it sure is, they have a cheap price too”. The URL words say “this whole web site is about usb flash drives”, and the directory words say “well my folder has nothing but flash drive images”. The image words say “my picture is about a 1GB flash drive”, and the link around that images says “yeah, but if you click it you’ll find a cheap 1GB drive”.

See the relevance? See how all the words, and links, and URL’s, and directory names, and image names, and link titles all become part of a relevant conversation? All the keywords in all the right places contribute as a whole to the end goal of bringing targeted traffic to the web site, and as much of it as possible. That’s the last thought I’ll leave you with. It doesn’t matter if you get 1,000 people per day to your “usbflashdrive.com” web site unless all 1,000 people are actually looking to buy or for information on a “usb flash drive”. In fact – I’d much rather have 100 people searching for usb flash drives than 1,000 people not! I have had no problem making $100 a month on a web site with only 100 visitors per day when the traffic was highly targeted. I have one web site that is now getting in excess of 10,000 visits per day, and I’m having trouble making $1 a day from it because they traffic is coming in from far too many keywords. Which leads me to the final…

Secret Keyword Technique #3: Laser Targeting
Like we just talked about – you want to make sure you’ve done your homework. Do some keyword research and find out how many people are looking for your product, service, or information. Don’t paint your web site with a wide stroke brush, laser target your keywords down to a very fine niche – so 90% of the time your visitors will be staring at exactly what they were looking for from the very first click. Your visitors will be greatful for saving them time, and you will be very happy because you can easily make much larger amounts of money from very small amounts of traffic!

Do you have secret keyword techniques that have worked for you? Be sure to comment now and share them with all of us!

So you want more RSS subscriptions? There are many ways on the web to get good backlinks and link love. The link juice you used to be able to get from link directories has just about dried up for good. What is now very popular is the social aspect of the web – the interactions, recommendations, reviews, clicks, and votes of people. One new thing I’ve seen spun a few different ways now is the “quid pro pro” game or “something for something”. Google hasn’t found a good way to fight this, and honestly I don’t know if they could (or should).

Basically you sign up at rsshugger.com, create a free account and add your blog. Then create a review on your site about rsshugger.com linking back. Enter your review URL in your profile – and you get a free page on rsshugger.com linking back to your site for 10 years! And not just any page, it’s an “RSS Page” which lists the links in your feed. What’s better than having a list of links to your site? In addition, they have a top 100 directory you can get listed in depending on how many views you get to your feed page. Unlike a lot of the little social link love projects this one doesn’t require much effort beyond the initial setup and review. Why not create an account and a review and get your free rss page today? Get more RSS subscribers (and a hug) today!

Oops….what I meant to say was “widgets like entrecard ‘suck my time’”. There I go with my fat fingers again! Hopefully the title will make for some good linkbait anyway. Check out Entrecard, which is what I call YAW or “Yet Another Widget”. You will see my Entrecard widget in my sidebar right now! Why is it there? Why is the blogrush widget back after I said goodbye to it over a month ago?

All good questions! The blogrush widget came back after I read ShoeMoney and others were doing alright with it. After all the initial “growing pains” it seems to be actually bringing traffic after all. I also first heard about Entrecard when Shoemoney wrote about it a few months back after he had seen their booth at a convention. I hadn’t thought much about it, and sometimes I am one of the last to jump on these “me too” widget bandwagons. I’ve always been a fan of “keeping it simple” on my site as much as possible. If you add a bunch of widgets and external calls to other web sites you can dramatically increase the load time of all your pages site wide. Then again, sometimes I forget that every little bit of promotion helps.

What is Entrecard? It sounds like one of those bad “Entertainment Books” full of restaurant coupons for $50 doesn’t it? I can explain it pretty simply – in a nutshell it’s just a rehashed modern day banner exchange system. Period. Create an account, upload a pic, add your code, show your pic on other people’s sites (with the code installed) based on the number of times they are served on your site. I guess the name makes sense, “Entrecard” sounds like “Introduce me Card” – like another site introducing yours with a little business card.

You’re probably wondering – what’s the twist, there has to be something that makes it different? Well there is. Entercard is just a bit “social” if you know what I mean. I told you earlier in very basic terms how it works, but neglected to give you the full low-down.

How Entrecard Works

• Signup for an account
• Upload your graphic (make a good linkbait style one)
• Click “Campaigns” and find other Entrecard sites. For every one you click “drop yours” you get one EC or EntreCredit
• Other sites will now find you in Campaigns, and when they “drop” their card at your site you get one EC
• When you “drop” a card your pic is displayed in the Inbox portion of that site’s Dashboard
• Once you get some EC’s you can ‘spend’ them to advertise for an entire day on another site in their widget

So the social aspect is the fact that you have to surf the Campaign directory a little bit to earn some credits. As soon as my account was created people were dropping their cards on me and I had some credits. I surfed about a dozen other sites in the directory and in about 5-8 minutes I had 20 credits. This widget was a no-brainer because I had an account created, added the widget to my blog, surfed the directory and was done in about 15 minutes. Now I can just go in there a few times per week and I should be able to advertise for a day on a few blogs using my credits in no time! I could spend some right now if I wanted to!

Now I’ll tell you what made me look at Entrecard today in the first place. I read a post on 45n5 about Why you should care about Entercard and it reminded me of a very basic principle: the idea is spreading. That’s right – you want in on this because the idea is ‘spreading’. It’s VIRAL! It’s hot. People are actively using it, and you can get the word out about your site by using it. Actually one of the reasons I’ve thought about getting rid of the myBlogLog widget is because it doesn’t seem to be hot anymore. Out of 3 dozen visitors a half dozen seem to be myBlogLog users. It’s completely ok to add and remove widgets, links, services, or basically anything based on current trends – if it benefits your blog or web site.

What was my blogging mistake this time? Not recognizing this early on as something that would virally catch on – I should have added the widget sooner! I would have started receiving traffic long ago! If you get an Entrecard widget, be sure to “drop yours” on my site! If you have a comment about Entrecard or widgets in general – comment now!

**UPDATE**
I wanted to talk a bit about the ‘social’ aspect of Entrecard. The cool thing about it is after you get your account people immediately start “dropping their card” on you. You’ll see their pics listed in your Dashboard. I figured out why people do this right away when you are basically “fresh meat”. It’s because you are new that they want to drop their card and signup for advertising with you, because your rates (the amount of credits they have to spend) for advertising are just 2 or 3 EC’s when you first signup until you have some activity. So you get a flurry of people wanting to get in on this action (cheap advertisement!). The more cards YOU drop, the ads you accept, and the amount of activity on your site drives the cost to advert on your site way up!

So people are dropping cards on you like mad! Every time this happens you are going to get an email and it’s going to have a URL to their site in it. Click the link, open their site, and “drop yours” on their entre widget. Every time you do you get 1 more EC. If you get a bunch of emails, this is a quick way to get more EC’s. You can do it once per day for every site as well! When I was looking at other sites under “Campaigns”, one of the things I was confused by at first was the “approved requests rejected” stat. I get it now, because if you approve a bunch of site adverts, and then the EC cost of your site goes way up, you can choose to “reject” sites waiting in line you already approved (who were approved at a lower EC cost), to get higher paying ones in their more quickly. So you can honor those committments, or piss off a bunch of people – the choice is yours.

You can also go to someone’s profile page and add a “recommendation” for their site. I’ve no idea what purpose this serves other than driving up the EC cost to advert on their site. I have to say though, beyond the advertising part of entrecard – the social part has been nice too. What I mean is, in order to get EC’s I was forced to visit a lot of blogs that I didn’t know existed. I actually did find some nice content and great articles that led me to other cool services and gave me future ideas as well. I found a few sites I’ve contacted as a result of this and have made some good blogging contacts. In addition, I have been getting some great traffic from it, and the CTR from the advert (for me) seems to be pretty good as well!

The year 2007 was pretty busy for me web site and blog wise. I expect 2008 to be even busier. If I have learned anything this year, it’s that in 2008 I need to learn to stay focused, work toward goals, and build on existing projects. The problem for me isn’t that I don’t have enough content to post. It’s that I don’t have nearly enough time to write it all up and monetize it to its fullest potential. I have way too many web sites and projects to do any of them to their fullest potential. But I’m too greedy to let most of them go for fear that the one(s) I drop will be the ones that would have worked. I have resolved over the last few months to rid myself of many that were never started and keep only the ones that I feel very strongly about. I am letting go all alternate domains like .net, .biz, and .info where I own the dot com, and getting rid of all domains not developed in at least one year. I think I own 50 domains and I may just weed that down to 25-30.

One of the things that came to mind recently is the amount of work I do on web sites vs. the expertise I share throughout my network of web sites. I think that 95% of web sites and blogs fail. I mean that they fail at meeting their goals. Whether it’s a goal of making money, becoming a “pro-blogger”, or getting 1,000 visitors a day – nearly all web sites “FAIL“. I can carelessly make this statement since it’s probably true. Alexa alone should show that the bulk of activity on the web worldwide comes from the top 5-10% of sites. Why is this? It’s just about the same as the law of wealth itself. Those willing to put in the time reap the rewards. Those that consistently work at it achieve results. Slow and steady wins the race, fast and sporadic loses at an uneven pace.

In 2008 I will sell and promote the hell out of 3 eBooks. These eBooks will show, in step by step minute detail, how to become successful creating, managing, and monetizing web sites. The first eBook will detail “how to become successful with a niche site“. The second eBook will show you “how to explode web site activity, growth, and backlinks by using social media“. The third and final eBook will teach you “how to become successful promoting and selling your own expertise“. I WILL BECOME VERY SUCCESSFUL SELLING THESE eBooks. I also predict that 95% of the people that will buy my eBooks will utterly fail and only 5% will realize any degree of success.

Why would I say this? It’s the law of the land: Survival of the Fittest! They most certainly won’t fail because they didn’t get quality materials from me. I will give the specific detailed steps and formulas including pictures and checklists to make them as successful as they “want to be”. The keywords are “want to be”. How many will take action? How many will get off their ass and do the work? Who will completely follow my directions and put in the required time to become successful? Success in any line of work or business is a full time job. If you expect to become successful online and only to “part time work“, the prospect of you becoming successful is only about as great as winning the lottery! It will only happen either by luck or completely by accident.

In 2008 I will concentrate on monetizing my expertise. I think that my biggest blogging mistake to date – was trying to become successful on adsense and affiliate revenue alone. I have gained lots of expertise and knowledge over the last 10-15 years that is worth ten times more than an monthly revenue stream I could generate. Stay tuned and subscribe to this blog if you haven’t already – and in the coming months I will teach you to do the same!

December Adsense pays more per click, learn how to PREPARE TO MAKE MORE MONEY during this time of year than all the other months combined!

Why is December so important? Because it’s the most profitable month of the year! Think about it – it all has to do with supply and demand. In December more people are shopping online than any other time of the year. There are hundreds of thousands of web sites competing for those online shoppers, and many will pay top dollar to get them! You can earn more money per click now than at any time of year!

Online Holiday Advertising Trends

I have had web sites and blogs online for the last 10 years. I am always amazed by this time of year. I am also amazed how it mirrors the brick and mortar retail store world.

• More Traffic: Your site should get more traffic this month than any time of year, regardless of niche – simply because more people are searching.
• More Clicks: Your site should be getting more clicks on ads this month than any other of the year since so many are searching for something (most to buy)
• More Money Per Click: Whether you’re using Adsense, AdCenter, or Yahoo you should be seeing a much higher rate paid per click. Personally, many of my sites are going from 3-8 cents per click to 35-50 cents per click.
• Higher Total Orders: If you’re using Commission Junction, Amazon, or LinkShare you should be seeing higher per order commissions this month due to the holiday ordering season.
• More Searches and Recommendations: You will probably see more weird searches on your site this month than any other. In addition to that, make sure your site or blog has some “recommended” items or articles at the end of each content block – because people will follow those more so this month than any other

What YOU should be doing to take advantage

Do you have a blog? It doesn’t matter what kind of web site you have to take advantage of the holiday buying season. If you have a straight blog monetized with adsense, just post more frequently to get more traffic this month. POST EVERY DAY! More traffic means more page views, which means more money in your pocket this month! If you don’t advertise in other ways, consider monetizing in some other way, like Amazon or Commission Junction. That way you could directly recommend and review products and / or gift ideas all month long – no matter what you niche!

Do you have a forum? Start a thread or topic “What do you want for Christmas” or “My Holiday Wish List”. If you monetize with adsense gift ads should show up quickly – or you can monetize with other ads. An eBay search box would even be good!

Do you have an online store? Start a “wish list” feature, recommend products, have an “email to friend” feature, have the ability to save the shopping cart for long periods of time, review new products each day, feature products, have a list of “hottest items” – take advantage of every opportunity you have to show more products and features! Whether your’re writing about your grand kids, how to train a dog, or how to earn money online – you need to be well aware of how advertising trends and seasonal changes will affect activity to your web site.

In closing, I will remind you that the holiday buying season DOES NOT END on December 25th! It usually continues right up until January 15th or so as many people receive cash and gift certificates and many don’t return to work or school until the first week of January. You can expect the high level of activity to taper off about mid-January for a winter lull until about mid-February or Valentine’s day. I have made the blogging mistake of not taking advantage of this time of year in the past – don’t you do it too! Do you have a comment on trends? Please – comment now below!

Today I’m going to show you how to take those grey-hat web sites that have been profiting off your back in the search engine results and make their listings drive traffic to YOU! Blogging Mistake: Not paying attention to my SERP’s more closely!

It seems it’s always difficult to write in the morning for me sometimes. I don’t know why, but no matter how much sleep I get – I never seem to wake up until around 10am or so. Well, in order to jump start things today I went to get a large diet pop and that big shot of caffeine is definitely helping. Alright, I won’t lie – I got a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit to go with it, and the greasy hash browns too. So now, with my belly full of really bad food I shouldn’t be eating, and all hopped up on caffeine I’m ready to go. I don’t have a lot of time before this food makes me sleep and want a nap, so let’s get started, today’s lesson is pretty simple and you probably hadn’t thought of this before.

There are numerous factors used in the search engines determining how you rank in the result pages, and where you appear in those pages determines how much traffic you will gain from them. The rankings of course, are determined by backlinks, popularity, authority, etc. So then, are you surprised at times which pages rank towards to the top? I find it very interesting who ranks and who doesn’t on the first few pages, and even though I can change my own ranking, sometimes I can’t do anything about other sites who I feel are ranking well because of me.

Directories used to be a great source of backlinks. Some still are, although the top web directories are probably the only ones worth your time nowadays, and many of those charge a fee for listing – they may as well be ‘selling links’. With the advent of RSS, I’ve found that a few smart grey-hats have started their own ‘directories’ using several methods that I think of as quasi-questionable.

We’re going to start at Google and do a search for one of my first web sites, The Smorgasbord. I just did a simple search for the domain. The first result is my site’s homepage, which is good. I’d be worried if I wasn’t first. And the next few results are places linking back to me. But take a look at result #5, which comes from millionrss dot com. It looks like a scraper site doesn’t it? It has my title and description (an older version), and their url contains both my site name and description. So when you click on it you are taken to a page that seems be ‘about’ my site. You see my site name and title, then some ads, then a small screenshot, my blog and feed url, description, and some code I can add to ‘bump’ my blog higher in their listings. Then you have some more ads. Then you have a bunch of ways to subscribe to my site feed using various services, and then the latest headlines from my rss feed are listed and linked.

How do I feel about this site? Well, they say under their logo that millionrss is a project to “organise and collect over 1,000,000 RSS feeds”. While I’m sure that’s their ultimate goal, the underlying factor is to organize and gather a million feeds to draw intense traffic from google and make tens of thousands of dollars per month from their advertising revenue. It’s a grey-hat splog type site – plain and simple. Not really a scraper site since they don’t steal your content, but they do use your name and description, in addition to titles of your latest feed items to gain their SERP’s.

What can you do about this? Probably not much. It’s not like google is going to remove their SERP listings. And I’m sure even if you contacted them it would be very difficult to remove your listings. Even though I don’t like this site or agree with their tactics, if the site grows and gains in popularity it could be a valuable backlink. Your choices are limited at this site, but you can use the contact link to ask them to update your listing if it contains inaccurate information. You can also click on “add feed” and manually add your own listing in if you want to add other sites. There aren’t a lot of options here, use the ones you have available.

Now let’s look at the sixth result from megite.com. Wow, this is a different kind of site that bills itself as a “social news aggregator”. This site is grabbing titles and URL’s of pages and clustering them together on pages by keyword. The result we followed from the google results page to this one is a page of links all about “ffmpeg”. I got listed on this page because I have a tutorial page on converting video using ffmpeg. While not nearly as annoying as millionrss, this site also contains google adsense ads on every page. I’m sure with some good listings in SERP pages they make hundreds if not thousands of dollars every day.

What can you do here? Well, for starters you can get a bookmark account on this site – do that first. Then add some bookmarks to web sites you own. Then go back to the ‘Discovery Engine’ homepage and start doing searches for the root URL’s for site’s you own. One not yet listed will display a submission form and you can enter and tag them. Then do searches for various keywords related to your site and see if you come up. You can bookmark those pages as well. When you bookmark you can add keyword descriptions as well. If this site is going to index and ride off of your web pages and links, add, tag, and describe as many of them as you can and take advantage of their SERP sucking ways – and use them to your advantage. If you add enough related items on your bookmark page, you can even give that it’s own PR over time. I can attest to the fact that pages I bookmarked were being found (in megite.com bookmark pages) by the googlebot within 48 hours. I have a google alert set that told me as soon as they showed up.

As you go through search results, you have to decide for yourself which of these ‘grey-hat’ sites you will participate in. Some are just entirely waaaay to spammy or ad laden for me to even deal with, like the crap listed over at start aid dot com. But there are some places that might just be worth you spending many hours setting up custom pages. One would be Squidoo.com, where you can setup a custom “lens” or web page with content related to a particular topic you might be an expert in. Think of it as an article directory, but even more since you can control and updated the content and layout of your “lens” or page, but you can even add lots of links back to your and other site(s), including affilitate links. Since Squidoo gets lots of traffic, you can really benefit from becoming one of their “experts” in terms of both money and traffic. They, in turn, also get more traffic, another very focused ‘expert’ page of content, and they serve ads on those pages as well.

A site that I recently noticed that is kind of a combination of Squidoo and some of my earlier examples is AboutUs.org. I actually didn’t find this one in the SERP’s for my site, but in my web site statistics under the ‘referrers’ section. People were coming from this site to mine – they were already sending me traffic. Unlike the previous two examples I showed you, this type of ‘grey-hat directory’ is a little less grey and a little more white. What I mean is, the ads are a lot less intrusive, and what they allow and let you customize on your “page” is absolutely awesome!

Check this out, here’s a listing of one of my web sites www.cellphonehowto.com. So aboutus.org has a crawler that trolls the web and gathers various bits of information about it. They grab your title and description, language, related domains (combination of sites linked and hosted on the same box), and links to alexa and whois information. Aboutus.org is a “wiki”, which means that all the pages are completely editable – just like Wikipedia. This means that you COMPLETELY control the page for your web site. Take full advantage of this – and edit your title, and description, add all kinds of information in the ‘additional information’ section, change the related links – and by adding all kinds of keyword rich and relevant content to this page it can become a really effective doorway to more traffic for you!

Since the site is a “wiki” – it means that anyone can edit a page (including your competition). I strongly suggest that you check the box to be notified of changes, so if anyone else decides to leave unsavory comments about you – you can change them back. If you have repeated problems, you can report the IP address they were coming from. Chances are everything will be fine. The page you end up building, which is a mini-description of your site, is like I said in the title of this article – it can end up “like gold” for you. Don’t you wish you had this much control over you listing in every web directory your site had an entry in?

This just goes to show how important it is to manage your online profiles, contacts, and basically your ‘reputation’ throughout different sites anyway. You may not want to participate in (very many of) these grey-hat sites that steal your basic information and toss it into a ‘listing engine’ or directory just to gain SERP listings and make money from ads. BUT…how far removed is their basic principle from reputable sites liked Technorati, Digg, or YouTube? All three profit from other people’s content as well, and 2 out of the three don’t host anything. I’m just saying, make the most of all your avenues and abilities to setup a ‘profile’ or description page.

3 Actions You Should Take Right Now

1. Check your SERP pages for www.yoursite.com and find other sites using your information to get top listings
2. Modify every listing the best you can to take full advantage of those SERP placements
3. Modify all your current online profiles in social network sites to try and gain better SERP placements so you can eventually replace those more unsavory listings with your own
4. To do this, make sure you have an account (if you don’t already) in all the following places
   • Linked In
   • MySpace
   • YouTube
   • StumbleUpon
   • iGoogle
   • Yahoo 360
   • Technorati
   • MSN Spaces
   • Del.icio.us
   • Newsvine
   • MyBlogLog

You would be surprised if you work those profiles constantly how you can dominate the first 3 pages of SERP’s with yoru own listings. I have been surprised as I’ve watched results for other sites. Work that list, and spend a little time each day doing something in at least one or more of those accounts. Have I completed my profile in all these places? No. Will I? Yes. I can honestly say as well, that the work I’ve done so far in both StumbleUpon and Technorati has resulted in some serious traffic to several of my sites. Some of the other sites are contributing as well. I have an account at dozens and dozens of other social sites – but these are the ones I will focus on right now. Also, in regards to the ‘grey-hat’ sites in my SERP listings – I have modified a few, but I will definitely spend a great deal of time working within aboutus.org – because it seems to have the most flexibility and potential to give both good backlinks as well as refer traffic.

Do you have directory, service, or profile sites that have greatly benefited you in SERP’s? Please comment now and let everyone know!

*Update*
I’m working on this one myself, and last night I completed my Linked In Profile.

Will you take action?

This article shows how to make money as an eBay affiliate on your WordPress blog or web site using the BayRSS “eBay affiliate plugin” to list auctions directly in your blog posts! If you’ve heard about the PHPBay Pro WordPress plugin I’ll discuss that as well. Even if you don’t use WordPress – read this entire post and learn how to put eBay auctions on ANY type of web site, and I’ll even explain how to build your own ebay “niche store” as well!

***UPDATE October 4th, 2009***

I DO NOT RECOMMEND BAYRSS ANYMORE.

Actually, because of all the poor support and problems with BayRSS and it’s creator, it’s has forced me to partner with Fredrik Ahlen and create my own eBay WordPress affiliate plugin WP EASYBAY™. Read about the WP EASYBAY™ Product Launch here.

**UPDATE March 2009**
It appears that when you buy BayRSS now the version you get for download (2.5) doesn’t work for some reason. The version I use everyday on all my sites (2.3b) works perfectly with no problems at all.

It appears that the BayRSS plugin author (Azlan) is not active any longer and ignoring all support requests and not even updating the current version to be workable. I no longer recommend purchasing BayRSS only because of this support problem and the 2.5 version issue. If you purchased a non-working version contact me and I will furnish you with a working 2.3b version – no problems at all.

My Personal Alternative to BayRSS:

 

WP EASYBAY™

 

The original BayRSS below is here for informational purposes ONLY – DO NOT PURCHASE BayRSS – it’s NO LONGER a reputable product

 

I have used “affiliate programs” for several years to monetize my blogs and web sites and make money online. But a good eBay affiliate WordPress plugin has always escaped me. I’ve tried many cheesy little scripts, a few I paid for and some were free. None did exactly what I wanted. First, let me talk to you a little bit about why a “WordPress eBay plugin” is so important to me…

A lot of people keep really detailed tracking stats on what’s making money in their sites. I don’t often have time for that – so I try all kinds of things and re-do things that seem to be consistently working. Besides this blog about blogging, I have all different kinds of web sites. Some are just fun, like my web site about jokes. Some are techie and gadget releated, and some are pop culture. I’ve monetized using Amazon, eBay, Commission Junction, LinkShare, Adsense, Kontera, AdBrite, Text Link Ads, MaxBounty, and all kinds of others. In a future post I’ll in greater detail about my experiences with each one. Suffice to say – the most consistent money I’ve made has been made being an eBay Affiliate.

Being an eBay affiliate is nice because I believe it’s simply what I call the “long tail of monetization”. I’ve added links for CJ (Commission Junction) before, say for a cell phone accessory vendor, and the products over time either aren’t available, or the vendor can quit their affiliation with Commission Junction altogether. Then the links are invalid – and you have to revisit EVERY post you ever put them on to remove them and add more. This isn’t to say I don’t use CJ links – I do…but let’s say I have a post about a RAZR cell phone. I may post a link to buy the phone new on Amazon, some accessories from a CJ vendor, and last I’ll put a link to some eBay auctions. Even when the cell phone is 2-3 years old and the CJ links are bad, the eBay link should STILL be bringing up the phone used in auctions for sale (for many years). And people always go for what they think is cheapest, and sometimes they choose to view the auctions rather than the other links to see if they can get a deal. Also, if someone clicks on your auction, goes to eBay to check it out – and then BUYS SOMETING ELSE, you STILL get commission on the sale! I can’t tell you how many times someone started out on one of my sites looking for cell phones but bought an iPod charger or a book instead.

Let’s talk about how you make money on eBay auctions. You get 50% commission on the eBay fees. So if something cost $100 on eBay the insertion fee would be say $2.40. If the person added a picture (50 cents), made the ad bold ($1), made it Buy it Now (25 cents), and set a reserve price ($1.50) – the auction could be say $10.15 in eBay fees once it completes. Your profit on the sale would be $5.07 (half of the eBay fees)! That’s for one sale! Imagine the commissions you could make if the items you listed were $200-$300? The only place you can find items with that high commissions are on clickbank, and they don’t give you any advertising or promotion tools at all – and eBay is probably the single most trusted and well know shopping web site in the world, other than Amazon. Nearly everyone I know has bought or sold something on eBay.

I have a web page on one of my sites that gives tips and tricks on the first cell phone I ever bought. It was (and still is) a very long page. This cell phone was one of the first to have a memory card slot. It was also one of the first to play video and work like an mp3 player. I think it’s like 3 years old now. I put a link to a CJ vendor that sold these cards (with picture), and to some accessories. At first I sold all kinds of memory cards, it seemed like every day. Over time this tapered off, and I placed some eBay auctions on the bottom of the page for used and new ones. This was the first eBay affiliate link I ever placed. I now know that was the smartest monetization link I ever placed. That web page still exists – if you want to look at it for reference, view my A920 Cell Phone Guide Here.

To be an eBay affiliate, you have to sign up with Commission Junction. They collect the money and pay you. At the eBay Affiliate Web Site you have access to tools to build auction listings for placement on your site.

**UPDATE** April 2008: I struck out the previous paragraph because eBay announced in March that it would be leaving Commission Junction to start their own “in house” affiliate program called the eBay Partner Network. The same tools (and more) are available to use the eBay affiliate program, but now your affiliate ID (and your check) comes directly from eBay.

My favorite ebay affiliate tool is the “Editor Kit”, where you input some keywords, pick some style, and it gives you the code for a nice block of live auctions. I love to put these on my pages, but going back to the eBay Affiliate Site every time is such a pain and so very time consuming. That’s why I am so happy to have found the “BayRSS WordPress eBay Plugin”.

Let me tell you why I think that placing eBay links is some of the “smartest monetization” you can make…

The cell phone web page I talked about has been up a few years now. I have watched the same registered users over time revisit that page again and again, and some have even emailed me with questions. What I’ve found is they are revisiting my page to view the eBay auctions!. Many repeatedly, because the auctions are live. So (to my astonishment) – an ad on my web site (the auctions) is actually DRIVING traffic to my site! On that particular page I really don’t sell any memory cards or accessories anymore, but people are STILL buying used cell phones from those auctions (I saw one commission on one just earlier this week). I’ve had many ideas for sites that would thrive with auction listings and good content like some kind of niche collectibles, concert or sports tickets, niche electronics, jewelry, even flat screen tv’s. But who wants to go back to the eBay affiliate site every time I want to list another auction?

Enter the BayRSS WordPress plugin for listing eBay auctions on your web site!! Install this plugin and you will be able to add a little tag into your post with some keywords and how many auctions you want displayed and BLAM! you have live eBay auctions in your posts and pages. It’s sooooo easy to use! You can also choose to only show auctions with so many bids or a certain dollar amount, share the revenue with other authors within your blog, and more!

I use BayRSS to list eBay auctions in my blog(s) every day. BayRSS is a premium WordPress plugin and it costs $39. It’s only competitor at that price is the WP EASYBAY™ WordPress plugin. As far as I can tell from online screenshots and examples BayRSS and WP EASYBAY™ are identical except for the fact EASYBAY has 16+ more features than BAYRSS. In addition, even though the layout of auctions on your page from each plugin is the same – BayRSS “cloaks” (redirects) the links. That’s so you don’t have tons of external “affiliate links” on your posts and pages that google might find excessive and give you a penalty for. I don’t know for sure if PHPBay Pro has this feature or not, but none of their online example sites was cloaking their links if it was (big mistake!). I do have another use for PHPBay though – which I’ll explain later in this article.

Going back to BayRSS – you get free updates for life and support. These are both things worth paying for. Free wordpress plugins are great, but if you have a problem sometimes getting technical support can take a few days. Also you might wait 6 months for the lastest version of WordPress to be supported. Since I purchased and started using the BayRSS eBay plugin I’ve gotten updates quickly and fast email response to support questions. Azlan Kasim – who is the creator of BayRSS has always been quick to answer all my questions and emails. He has released a brand new update to BayRSS to be compatible with the new eBay Partner Network, so BayRSS is now ready to use EPN ID’s switching from Commission Junction.

I want to show you why I’m so enthusiastic about BayRSS. Before I show you how I use it in my blogs (and the kinds of sales I make) – let me sum up the BayRSS feature set again:

• Free Upgrades for Life
• Revenue Sharing, so you can share with guest authors
• Can be used to list both Amazon items and eBay
• No Visible Outgoing Links to eBay (cloaking) – so you don’t worry about “nofollowing”
• Specify Minimum Bid and Price for auctions
• Ability to place localized auctions by zip code
• Unlimited license, use on as many sites or blogs as you want
• 100% full satisfaction 60 day guarantee
• Works with new eBay Partner Network

I think that eBay auctions are a good fit for bloggers. In my post Personal Profits with eBay and YouTube I talk about how you can “personally monetize” by writing about something you either know about or are passionate about – and connect related products to it. If I write a post or review about “wireless hard drives” (follow that link for an example page) all I have to do is place one line of code at the end of the post like this:

This tag gives the parameters for the BayRSS plugin to do it’s work. The first section are the actual keywords that will bring back the auctions from ebay – just like you typed them in a web browser. You can put nearly any search query here, including ones with advanced parameters. I often “subtract” items that I don’t displayed. For the query “sata hard drive” I might modify the search terms to be “sata hard drive -enclosure -adapter” to make sure that the auctions are for hard drives only and not ones selling hard drive enclosures or hard drive adapter cards. The next number is how many auctions will be displayed on the page. I recommend you keep this to 10 or less, because the listings come live from eBay’s RSS feed search function (nothing is stored in your WordPress database).

Only the first 2 parameters are mandatory, the rest are optional (but useful). The third parameter is the minimum number of bids to show, like if you wanted to show only auctions with at least 1 bid. I choose zero always so I can see everything. The fourth parameter is the minimum price for bid, so if you wanted to show all hard drives with a cost more than $50, just enter 50 there. The last parameter is your “SID” or tracking code. When someone bids on an auction and wins from your site, when you see your commission in Commission Junction, the “SID” will be listed at the end of that line so you know which blog and post it came from (if you use good descriptions).

Here’s an image of from one of my blogs with what the auctions actually look like:

The auctions look really nice, but the thing that makes BayRSS auctions stand out from any free eBay affiliate plugins (yes there are a few free ones I’ve found and tried – which weren’t very good) are the SEO benefits it provides. You may not be aware of this, but when you monetize a web site with affiliate links – if you have too many you may incur the wrath of google and obtain a “google penalty”. Your search rankings could suffer as a result. Google would like you to place a “rel=nofollow” link on your affiliate links so they aren’t counted when your page is indexed. BayRSS goes one better, and rather than placing direct links to eBay in the auctions (which could hurt your SEO), when you click on “Bid Now” or “Add to Watch List” the clicks go to the file “bidnow.php” which comes with the BayRSS eBay plugin. That file in turn redirects you to eBay. Because the auctions are setup in this way, the search crawler doesn’t see eBay auctions – it instead see content on your site (protecting your search rankings).

If you’d like to see some more auctions in action – live examples of posts I placed auctions on with BayRSS that have paid me cash money in eBay affiliate commissions:

Digital Notepad Review
Coach Purse Optic
Agile Guitar New and Used Review

So, I’ve told you how to use BayRSS and shown you live examples of how I use it – isn’t it time that bought it to monetize your web site with eBay auctions? If all I’ve said hasn’t enticed you, let me say (other than the fact I use BayRSS everyday myself) it comes with a 60 day money back guarantee and free updates for life! If you’re not happy you get a 100% refund. But the main reason I bought BayRSS in the first place was the fact that you can use it on an unlimited number of web sites you own! That’s right – there’s no restriction. If you you own 100 blogs or web sites, you can use it on each and every one for only $37!

Maybe you’re still not convinced. I’ve explained to you how BayRSS works, why I like it, and that I use it nearly every day. Let me give you some example commissions:

This first example is of some eBay affiliate commissions on April 7th, 2008:

You can see that I get exactly half the of the eBay fees. It didn’t all fit in that pic, but most of those commissions are from a Bluetooth Headset Review I did just a couple weeks back. Here, let me show you the rest of that screen:

You can see in the rest of the rest of that pic that the first 7 commissions were made selling jabra 8040 headsets. The commissions weren’t that much because the auctions were probably <$50. Any sale is good, but then look at the last 2 auctions where I sold 2 designer handbags. I sold one Bottega Veneta, which was probably another low dollar sale, but then I sold a Coach Beekman purse and earned $16.41 from one item. That's a designer laptop bag that can sell from $150-$400. The seller probably listed the auction in "gallery" with a high reserve price, which resulted in higher eBay fees - that I got 50% of in the end as an affiliate.

In this next example I’ll show you what happens when someone creates a new eBay account:

It’s true that nearly everyone you know probably already has an eBay account. But believe it or not there are still people out there that don’t. Think about it – someone turns 18 every day, so there will always be someone that needs a new eBay account that didn’t already have one. If one of your visitor’s clicks on an auction from your site and once they get to eBay signs up for a new account you get $25 for each “advanced lead”! You can see my $25 commission for a new user in the example pic above. Now let’s look at where these auctions come from too…

In this example pic you can see I on this day (April 5th) I sold a digital notepad, some IP Cameras, and again some designer purses in addition to the new user commission. The very last commission doesn’t have any description, but it came from my handbag web site. That means they didn’t buy what they clicked on, but found something else on eBay – and since the transaction originated from my web site I earned commission on it anyway. I hope viewing these commission examples puts it in to perspective a bit more for you and you understand that what I’m saying is true, and that you can really make decent money placing relevant eBay auctions on your blog and web pages.

People who know me will tell you that I’m a “web scrooge” and I will spend dozens of hours trying to get something open source to work just to avoid paying $20 for a product that does the job well. I couldn’t find anything free to place eBay auctions on web sites that worked well at all, and I found BayRSS to be a complete bargain for what it gave me. It paid for itself within 3 days of installing it. The links on this page to BayRSS are affiliate links, and if you click on one and buy the WordPress plugin I will get a small commission for my efforts of putting this article together for you. But unlike a lot of what you read on “make money” blogs I actually use this product (*a lot*), and I’ve shown you plenty of example pages on live sites I have running right now, and I’ve shown commissions from those pages and sites so you know it actually works. I can and will work for you no matter how great or little your traffic is. All my pages tend to have the “views” listed on them – go back to those examples pages I gave you and look again. You’ll see the ones making me money aren’t very high traffic pages at all.

If you’re interested in a piece of software that automatically builds and populates an entire web site with eBay auctions, please read my series: “Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch! I use “Build a Niche Store” PHP software scripts to build an entire eBay affiliate auction filled web site in very little time.

*UPDATE*
One thing that I get asked a lot in email and through my contact form is “How do I place an eBay auction on a regular web site”? What they mean is, they’re not using WordPress and they want to put auctions on their site too to get affiliate commissions. I have a way that you can place eBay auctions on any site, and it’s a method that you can use whether you’re using static web pages, Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, Xoops, Geeklog, Blogger, or even a web forum – it doesn’t matter! Anywhere you have the ability to place PHP code you can use PHPBay Pro’s API! Remember the PHPBay Pro WordPress plugin I talked about earlier? They also have a PHPBay Pro API that you can buy and intall on ANY web site you can use PHP code with. When you get to the web site just click on “API”. The PHPBay Pro API is just $49. If you don’t use WordPress, or have another non-Worpress or static web site, PHPBay Pro API is the only way I know of to just copy and paste PHP code to display eBay auctions on any kind of web site.

Still have questions or comments? You can comment below, or Contact Me anytime!

*Update* Nov 1st, 2007
Well, after several annoying emails from BlogRush touting their new “2.0 change” I logged into my dashboard and found that I had significant credits. I also checked my blog stats and some blogrush referrals were coming in. So, against my better judgement, I have re-enabled (the thinner) blogrush widget on my blog again to see how it goes. My main complaint is that it just has too much ‘style’ and not enough substance (per blog post). I’d prefer a simple header with some headlines, but you get what you get I guess. We’ll give this a few weeks, and then I’ll post again how it’s going with this thing

end update…

---

Well, like nearly half the blogosphere – I tried Blogrush since the day it came out until today (about a month?) I have to say, I was not impressed with it at all. I put it in my sidebar because I thought it would bring me some traffic. Here’s a list of reasons why I don’t like Blogrush – and why I removed it today:

• It doesn’t count right: My account says less than 100 credits, and I’ve had of more than 100 pageviews many times in the last month
• It’s unappealing: I like to put things on my blog that “I” would use. I never clicked on a single story. The widget is cumbersome…nice looking, but too much flare and not enough meat. I would prefer a smaller border, less graphics, and more headlines (and more words in each headline). I can’t imagine why it would ‘entice’ anyone to click at all
• I’ve received NO traffic from it at all. Not only do I have way less credits that I should, I don’t have a single referral in my stats from Blogrush at all – not one.

Goodbye blogrush – I will not miss you. It looks like I’m not the only one out there who is ditching it, look at these links:

The Blogrush is on and isn’t degrading gracefully

Anyone Still excited about Blogrush?

This one is great, because it actually gives some numbers on the big guys. ProBlogger only got 50 clicks from 70,000 impressions, and John Chow only got 91 clicks from 27,000 impressions.

Yet Another Blogrush Update

The “I’ve Tried That” blog says they’ve only received 4 clicks for 7,500 impressions.

[tags]blogrush, web promotion, traffic, widgets[/tags]

This will be the first in a series of articles where I will review other blogs and point out improvements, and mistakes that I have made (and improved upon). By no means does this mean I’m “picking apart” other bloggers – or that I’m superior to them, or even that I’m earning more money online. It’s meant merely as constructive criticism, and hopefull some of the things I point may help them. They may or may not take my advice. Doing this will serve several goals, one of which is to reach out to other bloggers, network, and build more community. Another will be to provide my blog with a unique and regular feature, a “selling point” to bring readers back if you will. Last – it will keep my on my toes (in regards to my blog), and keep me from getting any kinds of writer’s block. This should definitely spark some friendly debate as well. I claim only to be an expert in blogging mistakes – because I have made so many of my own (for years now…=)).

I believe every site should have a theme, a niche, a meme, a ‘gimmick’ if you will. When I first started this site I just called it “JTPRATT.com – learning everything about blogging the hard way”. After some time went by, I felt that this didn’t tell anyone in search results, Technorati, or my feed anything (or enough) about my site. So I renamed it “JTPRATT’s Blogging Mistakes”. Now I have a keyword phrase that I use constantly. I’ve done a lot of marketing in my life, and I’ve learned that you always do better with some kind of memorable ‘catch phrase’, and I think that does both. I also changed my WordPress tagline to “Earn Money Online Blogging Beginner to Expert Learning From My Mistakes”. I used keywords that I felt described my blog, and now my home page listing in google and the search engines not only gets more hits, but it gets more “clicks” because it tell people more about my site.

One last item, about how I came up with this idea. You should constantly be reading and learning from other bloggers, in and out of your niche. It’s very popular to review blogs, so much that it’s almost becoming less review and more “I’ll review you, you review me and we’ll get more links and traffic!”. Read How to Review a Blog for more info and tips on doing reviews. Daily Blogging Tips do a great job on their twist to the “blog review”, which is to interview two bloggers and pit their answers one against the other, like this one: Darren ‘Problogger’ Rowse vs. Jeremy ‘Shoemoney’ Shoemaker. They call it the “Bloggers Face Off”. Every time a new one of these come out I just have to read it. I also like the landing page makeovers and reviews at CopyBlogger.

So my new feature and twist on “blog reviews” will be a “blogging mistakes review” – where I will point out mistakes I myself have made on my site(s), that I find in other blogs. Here we go!

Blogging Mistakes – Review #1: MarcoRichter.net

Marco was so kind to include in his Viral Recommendation Carousel, and I promised to return the favor (like three weeks ago) – so his site MarcoRichter.net will be my very first blogging mistakes review.

Marcho Richter has a blog about linkbuilding, seo, blogging tips and resources, and even some WordPress Help.

SEO Blogging Mistakes

• Marco makes an SEO blogging mistake that I mentioned earlier in this article – the title and tagline of his blog are not descriptive enough. His title is “MarcoRichter.net” and his tagline is “The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Tycoon”. Looking at the html title tag in source code, and the title in the top browser bar, it doesn’t even include his tagline, it’s even worse saying “MarcoRichter.net – by Marco Richter”. This is probably why a search for his own domain in google doesn’t list his homepage first (and it should).
  Recommendation: Change your blog title to something more descriptive (Marco Richter’s Blog Tycoon), and use a descriptive tagline with keywords that people search for (Blogging Help, SEO, and Linkbuilding Techniques to build a better blog), and use the tagline in the HTML title with the blog name for better indexing.
• Possibly too many outbound links. SEO and inbound and outbound linking is always up for debate, but I’m starting to see more and more information about too many outbound links hurting a site’s performance in the search engines. Read this ProBlogger article on Do outbound links matter for seo. My concern would be with pages like RSS Subscriptions – The Ultimate Resource List. I believe I also read that the number of links is weighted against the amount of text on the page, and this is clearly overwhelmingly more links than content. People bookmark lists like this, but it can hurt you in the SE’s. If you’re going to have a very large list or links in a resource page, I think something like Smashing Magazine does for this WordPress Plugin and Tutorial page is a big better, because around each link they have descriptive text (it’s not just a list of links).
  Recommendation: Update your large ‘resource’ pages with more descriptive text for better seo.
• Use Keyword Rich Descriptive Post Titles. Doing a google search for all pages index for MarcoRichter.com you’ll see what I mean right away. I expected to see pages like “Contact” and “Sitemap” have one word titles. But I didn’t expect to see posts entitled “How To”, “Tips & Tricks”, and “Some Little Tweaks”. Some of the other Post Titles could use a little beefing up too.
  Recommendation: There’s a little known plugin (that even I don’t use yet) I just found called Title Optimization that allows you to mix keywords in your title tag as well as adding a sub-title that would help a lot. Also, some good reads would be Traffic Driving Blog Titles, and How to Write Magnetic Blog Titles.

Post Blogging Mistakes

• Not having recommended posts. This one is any easy fix, and a great way to keep people on your blog for longer periods of time.
  Recommendation: Install a plugin to display recommended posts at the end of each post.
• Not taking advantage of Feedburner FeedFlare. This one is not really a mistake because it’s personal preference, but since the RSS feed is already managed through Feedburner, their “FeedFlare” service is available. You can place a little code in your theme to call Feedburner in your “loop”, and automatically add all kinds of things after each post. The one “I” think is most useful is the “Email this” option. I also like the links to Technorati and saves to Del.icioi.us ones as well, but you can choose anything you want! Why not give people as many options as you can!
  Recommendation: Try using some Feedburner FeedFlare by adding the code to your theme and templates.

RSS Feed Blogging Mistakes

• No Email RSS Subscription Form. Marco’s using the Feedburner service already, and they have an option you can “turn on” and people can subscribe to your rss feed via email. Subscribers only get one mail per day with any new posts for that day, and all you have to do is put the form on your site and tell people to signup.
  Recommendation: Turn on the Email sub option in feedburner andn add the form to your blog.

Layout Blogging Mistakes

• List more posts on the home page. I know that lots of sites have waaaaay too many full posts on their home page (that scroooooool forever). I learned that the hard way myself. But having only 3 posts per page you don’t get that many options, and you have to use “previous posts” to see more (and usually you would just get 3 more). I like to give people options, as many as possible up front. Maybe you could have just one posts full available on your home page, and display 9 more excerpts? First time impression is everything with millions of blogs online, you want to have as many catch titles in front of them as possible. When I write this, every time I used “previous entries” I got a blank error page.
  Recommendation: Make your first post full on the homepage and the rest excerpts, or teasers, or titles using something like the HomePage Excerpt WP Plugin.
• Having things people more frequently want to read in the footer. I realize that to change this you would need to either modify your theme, or get a new theme. But I believe that it’s really poor design to put things people want most often in a footer. If you use something like Crazy Egg, or a similar service you’ll find that in a ‘heat map’, the things that get the most clicks are “above the fold”, and the top nav, top left, and top right parts of the page. Traditionally (in web design) the footer is the part of the page that gets the least attention and the fewest clicks. If you ever setup adsense on your page with an adblock at the top, side, and bottom of a post, the one at the bottom always gets significantly less clicks (like 15-20% of or less) than the leading ads. So….if you want people to prominently see (and view, and click) your recent articles and comments – put them in your sidebar (or a two column sidebar).
  Recommendation: Experiment with putting recent posts and comments in your sidebar

Alright – there you have it, the first Blogging Mistakes Review! It’s not like Marco is making a ton of mistakes – he’s got a great blog, and he’s doing TONS of things right. I love his sitemap, his blog is clean and friendly, and there are great articles on blogging, linkbuilding, and SEO. By implementing some of my recommendations, he would have better SEO and search indexing, more rss subscribers, visitors would stay longer and read more, and he should even get more visitors via organic search results.

Do you want YOUR site reviewed for Blogging Mistakes? Contact JTPRATT

Web Worker Daily has a nice article How to Get Attention for Your Web Site. Give it a read – it will give you some good ideas. Often I read things on Web Worker Daily that are great ideas, and I always seem to wish their post had more meat to it. I’m dig a little deeper and give you real action points to drive real targeted traffic to your web site or blog and make it stronger than ever!

They touch on seven points:

1. “Invent a meme, then write a book on that meme.”
2. “Becoming famous for something is going to be your answer,”
3. Target women.
4. “Community is integral.”
5. “Be accurate.”
6. Provide information people can’t find easily on Yahoo or Google.
7. Get locked into a person’s “ritual.”

I’m going to tackle these one by one – so pay attention! I call this “7 Steps to a Waterfall of Traffic” because I think of it as a fire hydrant on the corner and you have the wrench. It’s your job to slowly use that wrench to turn on the water. It would be a lot of work – but with consistent effort you could probably turn that thing on little by little, and water would come out….a little at first, then a little more, then quite a bit, and eventually you’d have a river flowing in the street. These seven steps – when followed consistently and worked well, WILL turn your fire hydrant on and then on a river of traffic for you!

1. “Invent a meme, then write a book on that meme.” Ok this may seem redundant, but for those that don’t know here is a definition of a meme: “unit of imitation, catch phrase, fashion, ways of doing something, etc.”. “You might be a redneck if…” jokes are a PERFECT example of a meme. So are the recent wave of Chuck Norris jokes the last few years, and that’s a great example of actually taking a meme and doing something with it. Having a meme no one looks at as the same as a site with no traffic. If you invent a meme, it’s sole purpose should be to virally put your site on the map! Another way I think this should be described is to make sure your site has as targeted theme. Let me revise that – a highly targeted theme. And within that theme or niche – develop a meme.

You still may be confused. The meme is NOT your site theme or niche (usually, although it could be). To me, normally your site is on a topic and your meme is something that makes it unique (repeately). My best example is I Can Has Cheezburger. This site is HUGELY popular now and has been featured on many national television programs. The site posts funny animal pictures, and the meme is the funny mispelled captions. You could have a travel site with a section where people submit their “vacation gone wrong” pics, or a bunch of blogging sites could all collectively post “top 5 web sites I read every day”. Use a meme….imitation – repeatable…make it viral, turn it into traffic!

2. “Becoming famous for something is going to be your answer”. Basically this is the old “do one thing and do it well” rule. Many people have become incredibly wealthy by doing this online. Like the 17 year old girl who makes $70,000 per month, along with many others. When I listen to the radio I hear guys call in that own DVD Review or Music Review sites sometimes that they’ve built in their basement that have become their full time job. They focused on one thing and worked and worked and worked until it paid off. Look at Jump the Shark, which was another site “made in the basement” by one man for several years, and then TV Guide bought it from him for several million dollars.

3. Target women.. I think this point is wrong. It should say “target a specific demographic”. Don’t get me wrong – targeting women is a great idea. There are so many areas you could break into, from accessories, to jewelry, social issues, salary, jobs, kids, family, sex, relationships, and on and on and on. But the same could be said if you targeted teens, seniors, asians, Oklahomans, or NFL fans. A specific demographic will probably be visiting your site – find out who they are and cater to them.

4. “Community is integral.” This point is one of the most important, and the one most overlooked. Are you building a community in your web site or blog? How? First your site at least needs to be interactive and allow comments. You also need a contact form. Do you allow voting on posts? Do you reward people in any way for commenting? Do your run polls or contests? Do you allow guest posting? Do you have forums? Do you network with site owners that have the same types of content? Community is building reasons for people to come back other than your content. Someone with enough passion to answers strangers questions in your forum. Someone who want to comment, and then come back to see the replies. Someone who wants to write a guest post for you and then tell others about it. Other sites that will exchange links with your or review your site for the same in return. People who want to see if they won your contest or check out new submissions. Content is KING, but that KING has to live in a Community!.

5. “Be accurate.” You can’t overlook this one. When your writing content – verify and check your facts (twice). Think about this this a restaurant. If you have good service and good food – you might tell a few friends or family. But if you had bad service or bad foor your gonna tell everyone you can think of, and then some. As a matter of fact you might go on about it for a week – or months! If you write a great post with great details many will read, and you have a slight chance of having it picked up by digg or reddit or stumbleupon or something. But – if you write a bad post with glaringly wrong details – people are 5x-10x more likely to complain and forward it on. Who wants create a “negative buzz” and have people saying “can you believe what this idiot said”? For your own sake, get it right the first time.

6. Provide information people can’t find easily on Yahoo or Google. This a great idea, but maybe it could be stated differently. Think of it this way…did you ever need to figure out how to do something and you had to search, and search, and search on google to figure it out? You should immediantly write a great post or article about it so YOU become the expert on it, and then people searching for it (if you do the right SEO) will find you and not waste hours (like you did). You could also hone in on searches where people have to gather lots of into from various places. Make a “roundup post” chock full of all the info you could find on something. About.com has become very successful doing just this very thing on a zillion topics. You may have recently seen posts on WordPress topics over at Mashable.com, like this one: 50 WordPress plugins for Multimedia. I would have to spend a couple hours on google to get that targeted info, so that mashable pages gets VERY HIGH RATES of bookmarks and social site referrals. If you provide information that saves people time – you will not only get lots of bookmarks and social traffic, but if you stucture your post properly you will also dominate the search result pages.

7. Get locked into a person’s “ritual.” This one takes a little thinking, and actually is kind of part of some of the previous points. You want to have your site content in some way become part of a person’s online daily routine. For example, every day I visit bloglines.com. Everyday I visit eBay and my local daily newspaper’s online site. Have some kind of content that keeps people not only coming back, but often and routinely. That could be a contest, a “top 10 list” updated daily, “deal of the day”, “free code of the day”, “joke of the day”…you get it. Now if you can this into your community building efforts, make it a meme, AND something people can’t find on good – well, all the better!

I hope this helps you bring more people to your site and make it stronger than ever! Please if you have ideas that would help others, or want to add something to one of these points – please let us all know and leave your comment now!