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link juice from blog comments

Would you like to get more juice from your blog comments? I’m about to show you how simple that can be!

The greatest thing about blogs is that they’re interactive. You write posts, and people can leave comments and carry on a conversation right there on the same page. Blogs are like part web site, part forum. Sometimes the post comments are more interesting than the post itself! The first goal is to get comments in the first place, and I wrote a post about that long ago “Rock Star Comments in WordPress in 12 Steps. The more traffic you get the more comments you receive, and a lot of people ask me, “when will I start getting traffic on my blog?”. Well, my rule of thumb is usually most blogs go from obscurity to a steady flow of traffic at about the 6 month / 100 post mark. This is enough time to be through a google update or two, and with 100 posts indexed in the search engines, you’ve got 100 shots at getting found in online search. I believe every post you write is like a little deposit in the search engine bank.

So back to the original topic – “How do you get the most Juice from Blog Comments?”. Well, comments aren’t like a blog post – you don’t just approve them and leave them site there on your blog. Like your own posts, pages, and content – you can re-use comments in many convenient ways you may not have previously thought about.

• Use a Widget: This is probably the simplest thing you can do, add a “recent comments” widget to your sidebar. It shows your blog is active and people are leaving comments. Simple, yet effective.
• Create a page Listing Most Commented Pages: This is one you don’t see very often. Create a page on your web site and list the most commented and active page, like my Active Discussions page. This is pretty simple to do with the Active Discussions Plugin.
• Use Comments in a ‘Testimonials’ page: Everyone gets comments like “Thanks, exactly what I was looking for!”. If you have a product or service on your site turn your comments into Testimonials! Create a testimonials page and copy them there, then link back to the original comments (building internal links in your site at the same time!). How? Download the WP-Testimonials Plugin, that’s how!
• Reply to Comments: This is pretty much a no brainer – reply to your comments! Tell people thanks, answer their questions, and reply to their comments. Comments get indexed in search engines too you know, and the comments you add in reply to your comments the more content the search engines have to index from your site. Also – people like to know that you are reading their comments, and furthering the discussion(s) makes them want to come back. THIS is a GREAT way to build loyal readers!
• Reward Commenters: Use plugins like Comment Luv, Top Commentators, and DoFollow. Commenters will come back more often when they know their link juice “counts”. In addition, you get listed on sites that list blogs that have these plugins (building backlinks for you!). I get a lot of traffic from being listed on this list of commentluv blogs.
• Email Commenters: If you see someone commenting on your site relentlessly for weeks and months – connect with them! Send them a simple email and say “thanks – I see you’ve been commenting a lot, and I really appreciate it”. If you owned a brick and mortar store you’d be smart to treat your regular customers this way – why wouldn’t you do the same on your own blog?
• Challenge Commenters: Run a contest of some kind and challenge your commenters to become part in it!
• Recruit Affiliates: If you come out with a product or service, recruit the people already commenting on your web site to be part of your new affiliate army! They already know you and your content, and probably wouldn’t mind making a little extra cash as an affiliate of your products.
• Hire Guest Posters: This is a no brainer. I’ll never understand why more web sites don’t recruit guest posters. Authors build great back links back to their web site, and you get great traffic and content in return! In addition most authors always link the article they wrote for you (instant backlinks) – and what better way to find quality guest posters than from active commenters you already have on your blog? It’s like the flowers recruiting the honeybees and saying “hey, since you’re here anyway…”!

Like I said in one of those points, your blog is like your “storefront”. If you actually owned a store, and customers can and visited 24 hours a day you would do everything you could to market to those people and increase your sales. Most stores use direct and indirect ways of marketing to customers that are already there. TV screens at the checkout and throughout the store, ads plastered on the floor, ads in carts, coupons on the back of receipts, checkout coupons. All of these methods are trying to “engage” the customer in yet another way to influence his or her buying decisions.

Think of your blog comments as your checkout clerk. It’s the last thing the customer does before he leaves the store – he “checks out”. Why do you think most stores ask the clerk to do certain things while ringing up your goods? They say things like “did you find everything you needed?”, “would you like to apply for our credit card and get 10% off this purchase?”, “would you like to signup for our free catalog?”. In some stores the checkout clerk is the only actualy person a customer interacts with before leaving with their purchase. Comments are the checkout for your blog, are you getting everything you can from them at the one point they are engaged and connected with you?

Are you using squeezing every bit of juice out of your blog comments?

I just got an email from a guy through my contact form who said he saw two versions of one of my articles – one on another site, and one on this one. He gave me the URL. The other site isn’t mine, it’s a scraper site (not unusual). I guess the thing that made me maddest was the fact that he stole the entire article, stripped out my affiliate links and replaced them with a banner and his link, and he’s even linking to the images in my original blog post sucking down my bandwidth for his spam activities!

The post in question is my Artisteer review How to Create YourOwn WordPress Theme in Minutes. This was a post that took many hours to write. So, the first thing I did was find out where he was hosted (theplanet.com). First I should tell you what you have to do if you’re in this situation. Go to a site like Network Tools. Do an nslookup on the spammer’s site, as well as a traceroute, and last a “whois” query. Two out of the 3 didn’t tell me anything. The nslookup came back blank – because he’s a spammer and he turned it off. The whois query came back that he was regsitered through an anonymous web service, also no help. But the every trustworth “traceroute” can’t be turned off! And guess what – his site traces back to theplanet.com hosting on American soil! That little bastard is now worthy of a DMCA takedown to get his site offline ASAP! If you ever need to do this read my post: How to Submit a DMCA Takedown Notice

So, I realize that it may take a short bit of time for theplanet.com to respond to my request through their legal department – so since this little stupid spammer is sucking off of MY bandwidth using MY original images – I decided to fix his little red wagon once and for all. I could have just renamed all the images in the article and deleted the original ones. But I went one better than that. I renamed the images, and then I uploaded a nice version of the original for his viewers to read as soon as my article loads on his site:

Sorry spammers – this round you lose!

It’s kind of rare when I find something unique and different – WordPress wise.  Today in my inbox I found a link to the WordPress World Map!  Basically it’s a google map mashup that plots the location of WordPress people around the globe that have added their location:

Wordpress World Map

I think it’s very cool to see how many WordPress bloggers and business owners are close to your location! You can even see where Wordcamps are across the world. Log in and add your location! Are there lots of WordPress users near where you live?

**UPDATE Nov 2009**  This article was originally written 3/28/2008, and it was definitely time to update it.  Article Marketing is still alive and well, and it’s about time you took advantage of this little hidden gem that could help to put your blog on top of the search results!

Building Quality Backlinks is easy when you follow my diy tutorial guide on how to promote your blog or web site with article directories!

There are tons of ways to promote your web site and blog, and I outline quite a few of them in my Link Building Cheat Sheet. In this guide we’re going to focus on the art of “article marketing”, or submitting original content to article directories in exchange for promotion and free linkbuilding.

What is an Article Directory?

An article directory is a repository for people who write content. But it’s not a web site for “budding writers” per se. It’s for people who have something to promote. It’s a “quid quo pro” (this for that) arrangement. The owner of the article directory needs content to draw visitors. You need to build links across the web to get better search rankings so you can get traffic to your web site or blog. If you write quality content and follow their guidelines and rules, the article directories will let you publish there. And at the end of each article you can put a short bio as author, and include 3 or 4 links to landing pages of your choice. That’s the exchange. In addition, article directories allow anyone to “republish” the content as long as the title, body, and links are kept intact. So in addition to getting links in the article diretory in exchange for your content, you also get them across the web if many sites republish your articles as well.

Article Directory Rules and Guidelines

There are hundreds of article directories across the web that you can submit your articles to, and each one has it’s own rules and guidelines. I’m going to go over the most important things you should know about submitting articles to one of the more reputable and well known article directories EzineArticles.com.

EzineArticles.com is one of the most well known aticle directories on the web. They have a google pagerank or 6 and an Alexa rating of 143. Not bad for an article directory to be in the top 200 web sites online! Any one can sign up for membership – it’s free. They get hundreds of thousands of visitor’s per day, and all the articles are read and approved by hand by living breathing editors. There is a list of very important things you need to know before submitting your first article:

• You must be 100% sole author of the content you submit
• You cannot use any direct affiliate links. You can direct readers to your site and give them an affiliate link there, but not directly in an article
• No public domain or “private label rights” content
• Must have proper English grammer, spelling, and punctuation
• Nothing obscene or adult can be used
• Cannot contain content that violates the law or is libelous in any way
• Cannot be a duplicate of content you already submitted
• Must not contain excessive bold keyword and phrases, bolding is limited to headings and subheadings
• Must be unique and share your expertise, like tips, strategies, techniques, analysis, opinions and commentary
• You cannot use more than 5 lines of quoted or sourced material

In addition to those basic rules (most of which are common sense) there are some “formatting” rules as well you need to know:

• You can’t use all caps in your article title
• You can’t use quotes in your title
• You can’t end your title with a period
• You can’t use excessive punctuation, you get one ! or ? at a time
• You can’t use your web site name or URL in a title
• Titles must be two unique words or more
• Your author name must be your actual name
• Articles must be at least 250 words, but less than 5,000 words
• Do not repeat your article title in the article body
• Copyrights must be at the bottom of the article
• The article body must deliver what is promised in the article title
• Too much blatant self promotion (in the body) and the article will be tossed
• The HTML tags you can use are pretty basic for formatting only: bold, italic, underline, pre, ol, ul, and li
• Everything else is not allowed, such as Javascript, images, font size colors and changes, H heading tags, or the HR horizontal rule

How to submit articles

The first time I submitted an article I made the mistake of using quotes in the title. It also had a bunch of URL’s in the body (I didn’t know you couldn’t do that). Then they made me remove the excessive bold and italics I had, and then I think finally it went through. The next article I submitted was rejected because it sounded to much “like a blog post”. I had to rewrite it and remove references eluding to other posts and parts of my blog. I got nailed once for inadvertantly using an affiliate link, and another time because I linked to my own blog in the body of the article when it should have been in the footer. I’ve had some articles only have one problem I need to revise before it was approved, and others have 6 different revisions. I seem to learn something every time I submit, and the last so many I’ve submitted have sailed right through.

My basic advice to you is to put a lot of thought into your articles. Make them keyword rich in both the titles and the body, and use good linkbait in the title and the first few sentences of the body. Write compelling, authoritative, detailed articles of at least 500-1,000+ words. I’ve read so many articles that were just utter crap. A good example was when I was looking for some good mobile or cell phone articles, and the only ones I seemed to find were trash that just reiterated the spec sheet of a phone and how hip and cool it was. There was no opinion, no real world experience, and absolutely nothing to lead me to believe that the author was an expert in much of anything.  These are articles with no real value.

EzineArticles has also been cracking down on what they call  “derivitave content”.  That’s where you rehash an article and turn it into many different versions just for the purpose of submitting to the directory.  You don’t want this, they have derivitave content filters in place now to find these articles and remove them from the directory.  In addition, they found that 90% of the derivitave content they found was only 300-400 words and poor quality.

I want to take this opportunity (once again) to remind you that you’re building a “brand”. You want someone to read your article and think “wow – they really know what the hell they’re talking about, I want to read more by them…”. Don’t think of article submission as an opportunity to just “build links”. It’s an entire online marketing mission to show people how strong your “brand” really is. You building a reputation as an author that will compell readers to want to read your byline and find out what else you have to offer. You have an opportunity to do this from both the Ezine Articles site, but also from all the sites that republish your content. And the better your content is – the more sites that will want to republish it.

It isn’t easy to make sure your article contains all the elements required for success. But, as usual – I will give you a checklist to consider:

Before submission your article should:

• Conform to the article directory guidelines
• Contain a keyword rich catchy (but not lengthy) title enticing readers to click and publishers to want to republish you
• Have a body that begins with a keyword rich 2-3 sentence synopsis of what the article is about and what makes it useful
• Be very detailed and compelling tip, tutorial, opinion, analysis, technique, or strategy outlining your expertise
• Be straighforward giving detailed action points readers can put into use
• Have a very subtle hook towards the end compelling people to read your bio (which could be as simple as “to see all the pictures/audio/video associated with the original version of this article click here)
• Contain a very well thought out bio with at least 3-4 keyword laden links leading to important landing pages you need to direct traffic to
• Contain enough keywords and linkbait (on a popular topic) to entice many site owners to republish your article

What to Expect from Article Directory Promotion

EzineArticle 3/2008 stats

All in all I have been very pleased with Article Directory promotion and what it’s done for me.   When I originally wrote this post over a year and a half ago – I’d only been using it for 6 weeks. The image to the left shows that for my 20 submitted articles to EzineArticles.com at the time over 2,500 people had read them. I had thought that was great since I’ve viewed many author profiles that have 4-5,000 views for 10 or less articles over the last 3-4 years. My 2,500+ views had been in less than 2 months. The stats say that 65 people have click my footer links back to one of my web sites, but more importantly my articles have been published 56 times. With at least 3 links in each footer, that means I built at least 150 backlinks to my sites – and that’s in addition to the original 60 backlinks in the footers right here on Ezine Articles. One time someone has emailed my article to a friend, and two people have “voted” for my articles (5 stars – w00t!).

EzineArticles 11/2009 stats

Now let’s see what the stats are 18 months later!  Wow!  My stats have really grown! 193 articles published, 90,000+ article views – I’d say this was a pretty good investment of my time!  And in my opinion, when you build these kinds of links they normally have a longer shelf-life than regular blog comments.

Now, a year and a half later – time has shown how effective of a tool that was.  The SERP’s for the links I built improved driving even more traffic to my site(s). I can give you a real world example of how it helped at least one of my sites right off the bat. On Feb 22nd, I submitted The Best Blonde Jokes as my 5th article to Ezine Articles. Under “Author Tools” in your profile, Ezine Articles provides some more detailed stats on everything you’ve published. It’s here where you can get numbers on the individual articles themselves. I checked for this article, and to date it’s been republished only 2 times. But those two times and the article here on Ezine Articles must’ve done something – because a very low activity web site I built the links for with this article came back to life from the grave. Check out these stats from my WordPress dashboard:

My site Top Jokes rarely got more than 100 views per day (usually 10-20) and about a week after publishing the blonde joke article it came alive again out of the blue. I have nothing to attribute this growth to except for that lone article submission. I can’t say that this will happen every time for every article you submit and build links for, but over time your bound to have more success than failure.

It’s Easier Than You Think

You’re probably thinking that writing completely original content just to submit to article directories is a very tedious and time consuming task!  You’re right!  However, you can use existing articles you’ve already written on your own blog or web site and submit them to Ezine Articles and other article directories.  I’ve done this personally for a very long time, and there have been detractors that have screamed “duplicate content!” from the highest hill – and yet it has not affected me one Iota.

If you don’t believe me, read these quotes from the last Ezine Articles newsletter I received from article directory owner Christopher M. Knight:

“Let me be clear:  You SHOULD submit existing articles and content from your web site or blog”

“Repackaging Existing Articles On Your Website Now and Submitting Them To EzineArticles Does NOT Trigger Our Derivative Content Filters”

“Find a New Audience by Submitting Your Existing Content AND Your Brand New, Original Articles to EzineArticles.com”

It couldn’t be any clearer than that – could it?

Where else can I submit Articles?

Well, I’m glad you asked. Personally I only submit articles to Ezine Articles, GoArticles.com, and ArticleBlast.com.  Actually, the last so many I’ve done I’ve gotten REALLY lazy with and only submitted to Ezine Articles, but I really should follow up and submit to the other 2 as well. GoArticles is really lax with their submissions, it’s almost a free for all, and articles are published immediately when you click “submit”. Article Blast has at least a few basic requirements, but it’s very easy to submit to as well.

Here’s a list of the top 20 article directories according to Alexa ranking and pagerank.  Of course, you want to stay away from any of the ones that are NF! or that nofollow your links in the author byline box (rendering them useless).  If you want the full list, visit the Top 50 list of article directories – that’s where I took this top 15 list from.

Automated Article Submission?

Use that list wisely. Whatever you do, don’t get sucked into one of these hairbrained schemes (software or service) that spams your article to hundreds (or god-forbid thousands!) of directories at once. Look – you’re practically spamming your content if you do that and just plain devalueing it as well. Don’t write your own google penalty. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, stick to submitting what you can manage and and handle by hand – don’t go automated.

How Many Articles Should I Submit?

This is the one well most people fall flat – and I have to admint that I haven’t taken advantage of article marketing nearly as much as I should have in the last year and a half.  I only have 38 articles listed in EzineArticles , and I should have a minimum of 150.  That’s about 2 a week.  Let me illustrate the difference between success and mediocrity with article marketing.  I read a post a few months back about the most successful diet program on Clickbank which had paid more than 12 million in commissions in a single calendar year.  Out of 2,600 affiliates the top 30 earned nearly all the commissions for that year.  When asked about their promotional methods, every single one had utilized article marketing and all had published from 150-500+ articles each.  That’s a lot of work, but that’s also a lot of commission!  It’s the difference between success and failure, and why usually only a small percentage of affiliates in any program or network make the bulk of the commissions.

If you have success promoting your web site or blog because of my “Guide to Article Marketing” – I’d like to hear about it. Have a question? Same thing – please comment now below!

Have you ever needed to reset your admin account password in WordPress?

wp_users table

Maybe you have one too many blogs, or one of your friends or clients locked themselves out of their WP blog and they need to have the password reset?  I myself, have had many instances where upgrading a wordpress site or moving from one domain or web host to another left my admin account not able to login.  In any event, no matter what the problem I’m going to show y ou how to reset the password on any account in a WordPress web site.  The process is very simple and painless, even if you’re non-technical you should be able to follow the images to do this.

To be able to get this done you need to have access to your web control panel for your hosting account and the ability to access the MySQL datbase tool “PhpMyAdmin”.  So login to your web control panel, and find the PhpMyAdmin link and click on it.  On the left hand side click on your wordpress database (or select it from a dropdown) and a list of tables should appear in the left sidebar.  Go all the way to the botom and click on the “wp_users” table.

In the screen that appears in the right frame it will default to “structure”.  You need to click on the tab to the left of that “browse”

phpmyadmin default table view

Once you click on browse you’ll get a listing of the wordpress accounts for your blog.  Just click the pencil (edit) button beside the account you want to reset or change the password for:

Edit user account WordPress

Next the screen that comes up will show you the details of that account.  Notice in the image below that the password fields is scrambled characters:

Wordpress reset admin password

All you have to do is clear out the scrambled characters in the user_pass field, and then click on the dropdown field to the left and select “MD5″ for encryption.

How to reset wordpress password

Once you do this, just click “go” in the bottom right corner and voila!  You’ve updated the password manually for a WordPress account!   If you have multiple accounts to rest passwords for, go back and repeat the process.

Have you ever wanted to change your WordPress web site or blog URL to an IP address, subdirectory, or new domain name? Why would you want to do this? Well, maybe you want to move to a new domain name. Maybe you want to setup a test or development version of WordPress in a subdirectory, another server on an IP address, or a different URL while you test and make changes. How do you do this?

It’s pretty easy, in fact so easy – you might kick yourself. All you have to is add these 2 lines to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_HOME','http://example.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.com');

That worked for me! There are other fixes (like going into the database), but if the easy one works – why do something that requires more work? If that doesn’t work for you – check out these other options in the WP Codex.

Since I first wrote about the FTP blogging rules for endorsements, I’ve read some interesting posts on other blogs about it. Shoemoney held a “town hall chat” with John Chow and other bloggers, and he talks about it in his post What you don’t know about the new FTC rules on Disclosure. He basically thinks that the fake news sites and obvious guru bad guys (lying about income and results to make sales) will be made a into a scapegoat – one way or ther other. Those of us using affiliate links and being honest probably won’t be affect at all.

It’s interesting to see Matt Cutts’ put up a page about disclosure too. His basically says that he’s a google employee, he owns google stock, he doesn’t take any free gifts or money (even travel expenses to conferences). I guess you have to say that if you’re an employee blogger. It’s kind of the reverse of someone disclosing they make money or how the endorse something.

In the spirit of things, I’ve created my own disclosure page. Check it out. If you review or endorse anything online (or make money online and blog about it), AND you live in the U.S. – you should probably create your own disclosure page.

Do you have a contact form installed on your web site? Some do, some don’t. I find many people don’t have one, or it’s in the wrong place, it’s hard to find, hard to use, or hard to read. First of all – let me tell you a little story. I maintain, fix, and create WordPress web sites for a living. I own about 25 WordPress web sites of my own, and I work on about a dozen+ client WordPress web sites per week. Some are blogs, some niche and affiliate stores, many are for small business and corporate use.

If you have a WordPress powered web site probably the most important page on your web site is your contact page. I’m a WordPress consultant – and sometimes even I forget this. Case and point, I have one web site that gets 25,000 pageviews per day. Two days ago I got a post comment that said “I want to advertise on your site and have no way to contact you – please get ahold of me at this email”. doh! It was also a blog I’m not in every day and the comment was 3 WEEKS OLD! I was just lucky he was still interested when I contacted him, and it was a $400 advertising sale! Not having a contact form almost lost me a sale!

On another web site I had a contact form, but it was on my about page. I wanted to get approval to get my product on that web site listed on Clickbank – so I applied. They said I had to have a page called “Contact”, and I had to link to it from both my sales and features page. I did that, but I did one better – I placed the contact form in my sidebar as well. Guess what, within 48 hours I got 3 emails asking questions about the plugin (before they purchased). All 3 people that asked questions bought the product. Who knows how many other sales I lost by not having a contact form that was easy to find and use!

You have no idea how many people might want to contact you – or what for. Sometimes people want to trade or exchange links, some want to hire you, others want reviews, some want to buy advertising, some people just have a question. You never know, maybe some big corporation wants to buy you out (if your site is really popular). You NEED a contact form on your web site, and not having one (or having one that’s hard to find) is like not having a mailbox on the front of your house!

If a future post I’ll go over my favorite contact plugins details in depth, but for now here’s 2 links:

Contact Form 7: This contact form is lightweight, easy to use, and updated frequently. Many people are very happy with it, and it is popular.

Cforms II: Hands down – this is the best contact form plugin I’ve ever used. But it has TONS of features. If all you want is a single form with a name, email, and comment field – go back and use Contact Form 7. With Cforms II you can build anything from small forms to big surveys. It has a dozen+ styled forms (including one for the sidebar). It has a refer a friend feature, it can save form submissions in the database for review on a reports page later either in place of – or in addition to getting form results in email (which can fail). You can even have this plugin handle all the comments on your web site! It’s my favorite, but it’s a heavy duty plugin for heavy duty work!

Do you have a contact form on your web site?

Does Google Hate Datafeedr? Seems like kind of a weird question doesn’t it? For some reason believe it or not – that exact search phrase was in my top 10 results yesterday. There seems to be a lot of people googling for information related to that – probably because there’s been a lot of google penalties and de-indexing going around regarding datafeedr WordPress affiliate stores.

I wrote a series late last year called “How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress“. In that series, if you read all the articles – I was very specific about both creating original content AND how if you didn’t you would run the risk of a google penalty.

What is a google Penalty?

If you have a web site, it’s ranked in google on a ‘pagerank’ scale of 1-10. The higher your number, the greater your authority, the more searches you come up for, the more traffic you get, the more money you make. Google likes web sites and blogs with original content. Google likes stores with original content that sell their own products. Google hates affiliates that get a datafeed or some links and build an online store with no content and scraped or copied content just for the purpose of making affiliate commissions. To google you’re no better than a scalper or spammer. Google doesn’t mind if you have a site with original content where you link to, review, or suggest products – AS LONG AS your products DON’T OVERWHELM your content. If it does google calls you a “thin affiliate” site – heavy on affiliate links, and light on content.

IF Google finds you (and some sites go years without getting caught for some reason) to be a ‘thin affiliate’, any number of things could happen:

1. You could get banned from adsense (if you use it on that site), or at least get your ads pulled from displaying on that site
2. You could lose pagerank
3. You could become “unranked” or pagerank zero
4. You could remain ranked, but not show up in search results
5. You could be unranked, appear in search results, but get no traffic
6. You could could be temporarily (or permanently) removed from google search results altogether (deindexed)
7. You could receive any of the above for 30, 60, 90, or 120 days – or even up to one year

I have received EVERY SINGLE ONE of the above penalties over the last 2 years on one of my web sites, and ALL OF THEM are now back on the google index and in good standing.

How do I keep My datafeedr affiliate store (or any site) from getting a google penalty?

If you have a datafeedr affiliate store in WordPress my advice to you is this. In your robots.txt file set your store URL to disallow indexing. Nofollow all links to your store. In your google XML Sitemap plugin setup enter your store URL to NOT be included in your sitemap. If you have been deindexed in google – request reinclusion and state that you have an affiliate store and set it up not to be indexed – only your original content (and you should get back in).

Don’t try and cheat google – and you won’t get the shaft, plain and simple. DO NOT RELY on a piss poor product store to get organic results and traffic in google to make you money. Rather – create a GREAT site with AWESOME original content and let IT DRAW the traffic, which will naturally visit your store (and make you money).

Why has MY datafeedr store FAILED?

I get this every now and again. 99% of the time a datafeedr store fails because a site or blog is centered around it. I have had clients in the past ask me to setup a datafeedr store, and then THEY DO NOTHING WITH IT, and wonder why they made no money. This is ONLY ok when you’re going to send paid traffic or do Adwords PPC to the datafeedr store. If you want to be indexed in google – you have to do all the normal things you would have to do for any site to be promoted online. Write content. Gain subscribers. Build Links. Get Authority. Get traffic. Make Money.

If you’re just looking to throw up a store and wait for the buckets of money to roll in…sorry. That doesn’t work in the real world – why the hell would it work online?

Did I ever tell you that I have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)? I can’t focus very well on just one thing for a long period of time, and I tend to jump from thing, to thing, to thing. That’s why being a freelance consultant, blogger, and affiliate marketer works well for me – I’m not under some big bosses thumb, and I don’t have to meet any crazy deadlines set by someone else.

On the other hand, the only one in charge of me is “me”, and sometimes I do more of what I like to do, and less of what I “need” to do. The Internet is one of the greatest sources of information (and ways to make money), but (unfortunately for me) it’s one of the greatest sources of distraction as well. I think I’ve tried everything I can to be as organized as possible to stay on track with my existing projects. I’ve tried sticky notes, time tracking software, a big dry erase board over my computer, web applications – all kinds of crazy things.

I’m also a big “list maker” (my wife hates this). I create endless lists of things to get done. Lists for the store, lists of things to do around the house, lists for the holidays, lists for long and short term projects, lists for my dry erase board, lists of things I need to pay, etc. Sometimes they work, and other days I only get a few things done out of the entire list. At least I ‘tried’ to stay on track.

I am not perfect. I waste a lot of time (every day) – but I’m getting better. In a couple hours it will be the end of the normal work day (here in Eastern time), and the end of the work week.

I want you to ask yourself one question: “What did I do to make money today?“

Ask yourself that question every day – and then write down the answer in a notepad somewhere (now I’ve got you making lists! lol). If you are having trouble making the kind of money you want online, maybe you aren’t doing enough daily to make money! Maybe you’re not spending enough time writing content, building links, article marketing, writing ebooks, and guest posting. Maybe you’re distracted by “shiny objects”, like google, twitter, facebook, trying new wordpress plugins, and so on…

What Do I Do?

Set goals, both long and short term – and work on them daily. But don’t create a list of 10-20 tasks that are impossible to do at once. Instead limit yourself to 3-5 tasks per day and leave an hour or so to do something new or unplanned. Turn off twitter, email, IM, facebook, and other distractions for a few hours while you complete a task or two. Then (and ONLY then) reward yourself with a little distraction time. LIMIT it to 30 minutes or less (before time slips away again), and move on to a new task.

At the end of the day you’ll thank yourself, because you will have accomplished something that directly relates to making money. Do this on a daily basis – and eventually you WILL be making money online, because every task is little putting a little deposit in the bank.

What did YOU do to make money today? I wrote this post…it was one of my tasks!