Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Should you buy the domain on blogspot?

I recently purchased a new domain for my height increase blog versus an older clunkier domain name and I think it was a mistake.  First, Google Friend Connect and Google search stopped working properly.  And now Google Webmaster Tools and Google Adsense are messed up.

The reason I got the new domain for $10 was to simplify the domain name.  Blog and spot are not keywords and also you can now get to the site just by typing in http://heightquest.com.  I'm not sure if this was worth all that it messed up.  Google is supposed to automatically redirect but it seems to be as though the two sites are two separate entities which are fine if you bought the custom domain name in the beginning but if you bought it later...  Oh, I just checked and it is now correctly redirecting towards height quest.  It is still displaying The Quest for Height domain name in search results so I'm worried that some link juice may be lost. 

I also thought maybe I'd be able to get double link bonuses.  I could link to the blogspot domain from one c-class ip and then link to the regular dot com from that same c-class ip and get the same link juice bonus.

According to Scroogle dot Org I'm nowhere in the top 200 search results for height increase.  I do rank around number 17 for growth plates though and I'm number one for grow taller IGF-1 spots 1-4 so it could be other factors at play like me not using the keyword height increase enough on the home page(although I do have it in the external links).

Anyways, I think if you decide to buy the custom blogspot domain you should do it right away before you get any traffic to avoid confusion.  I'll do my best to adjust.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Traffic Stats Update

It's been a month since the last traffic stats update and I'm a getting a little over 400 visitors a day.  I'm getting most of my traffic for the keywords:

Peak height + Derivatives.  I ranked number one at one point even above the company.
Growth Plates.  I ranked usually at the bottom of page one, top of the second page.  This is a page where you have to compete against sites like Wikipedia but it seems easier to move up here then it does with keywords like height increase/grow taller.
How to get a Longer Torso.  Rank number three here.

Then I rank for a whole bunch of long tails that get one or two traffic hits a month and then I get traffic for branding keywords like LSJL and quest for height.  Then there's a lot of referral traffic.

In terms of proving that LSJL works there's been some traction recently with the forums but it'll still take some time to prove that LSJL works and get some good case studies.  In the meantime, I'd like to be making about $10 a day so I can focus more on proving LSJL rather than all these backlinking efforts in an attempt to build traffic to make money.

I estimate it'll take at least 3 months to prove LSJL is successful in increasing bone length and in helping people grow taller.  Then there' LIPUS and PEMF to work on as well.  I have the best luck with height increase articles anyways so just keep working on that and eventually some money will trickle in until the proof that it's possible to grow taller with LSJL.

Monday, November 15, 2010

I lept into Hubpages and it may partially replace this blog

For a while I had been avoiding hubpages due to the fact that it's no-follow until you get an author score of 75.  I'm so desperate to get backlinks that I finally just decided to take the plunge.  Author Score started out at 30!  I just started churning out hubs.  There seems to be a cap on how much hub karma and author score you can earn a day but now I am at an Author Rank of 83.  I'm curious as to whether I should just try to go all the way for an author score of 100.

One thing I've discovered from hubpages, is there responsiveness to internet marketing articles.  IM articles get a lot of hits and page views.  So, I'm thinking of writing all my IM articles over there where they get more views and have more built in hubpages link juice.  Where does that leave this blog?

Well, I can still provide updates on traffic from my Height Increase blog.  I can still do case studies for my Affiliate Friendly Article Directory.  I rank five for that term by the way.  I have one contributor who hasn't written any articles for it yet.  Just keep trying to publicize it and let it age.

This is a diary after all.  So I guess no more articles about SEO or Internet Marketing and just progress reports on my various projects.  If you look at various blogs across the net you can find tons of IM blogs that are infrequently updated. 

It just doesn't make sense when I have the potential to go for author score 100.  Revenue sharing for IM articles doesn't matter because there biggest benefit is as link bait so this blog will be limited and hubpages away!

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Finally Passed 300 people a day on my Height Increase Blog

Finally, hit the over 300 people a day milestone on my grow taller blog.  The majority of that is actually not due to search engines but rather due to referral traffic.  The highest number of visitors so far for me has been 313.  I've been pretty aggressive with linkbuilding lately and I've just started using hubpages.  All my links from there are still no-follow.  I'm working hard on changing that.  The new search engine blekko does not like my blog at all.  Google likes my blog the best.  I still rank mostly for one search a month long tails although I do rank for a couple of grow taller/height increase terms.

Blekko doesn't like Call to Action Articles either so it's probably not due to a bias against blogger blogs.  If you look at Blekko tools you don't see as many links counted as you would with Webmaster Tools.  Blekko is just really stingy about what links it will or won't count.  You can see this fact if you look at Blekko's link tools.  Blekko is designed to be anti-spam and really being anti-spam isn't that effective as sites like Wikipedia can be spam too by displaying incomplete sections of the site(under construction pages).  My site the Quest for Height is number two ranking in my search for quest for height in contrast to Google which has me at the number one and two spots plus the majority of the other spots all talking about my Quest for Height Blog.

The most important function for a search engine is how it deals with tech support queries not with spam.  I can afford to look around spam a little bit but I want a search engine that can crawl deeply into the search engine to find specific tech support questions.  People with computer problems are desperate and are willing to try new search engines to get the answer.  I queried in Blekko:  "What do I do if Windows explorer is not loading?"  First result was about ipods.  Ask got a great result from this query(Ask has been improving a lot lately):  And showed me results from the microsoft forums.  Bing got some good results too giving me seven or so forum threads to try.    Google was not as good as either ask or bing but at least 5 out of 10 were relevant to my query.  Yahoo got 10/10 right in terms of relevancy.

Based on this test I'd expect more people to use ask, bing, and yahoo in the future.  Hopefully not bing as bing seems to hate blogger.  So if I want to increase traffic to my website I should do more to try to target those three search engines(for bing how do I pretend not to be blogger?).

People seem to be digging my science stuff on hubpages and I've got some followers due to my hub about how I grew taller.  So for right now I'm going to be shooting for a 75 author score on hubpages, see if I can get 400 people a day on the Quest for Height blog, and see if I can get at least one person to use my Call to Action Articles directory.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Getting links from pages you can't link to or don't already have links are worthless

How does Google tell if a site is blackhat?  How does Google normally determine things for it's algorithm?  The number of links it has.  Is a directory full of spun articles likely to get a lot of backlinks?  No.  A person who submits their wordpress blog to free traffic system for 7% bonus backlinks is not likely to spend a lot of time building backlinks to it.  Is a person sending out 1,000's of spun articles with Unique Article Wizard building links to each and every article?  No.

If you articles don't have links pointing to them, they look blackhat.  People who own article directories like me are constantly building backlinks to those directories.  Ezine Articles has a system where each time content is syndicated it builds a link to the author profile page.  People who have directories on postrunner are building links to the articles in that directory so they can make money off those articles.

Article directories like Infobarrel have an affiliate program.  Each time an affiliate link is posted it creates a dofollow backlink to their site.

Perception equals reality.  And if a page has no links it's going to be assumed to be automated or some kind of blackhat system.  Unless someone knows a blackhat way to build backlinks to all those spun articles or the spun articles are on good sites.

Now with social bookmarking it's hard to build links to each individual social bookmark.  What you do is you keep posting social bookmarks which builds a link to your profile page that causes the search engine bots to crawl all your old bookmarks.  Then you build backlinks to your profile page.

If you want to be a white hate seo then you have to look like a white hat seo.  If you're posting an article then why aren't you linking to it?  Is it part of a link farm?  Do you have something to hide?  Is it plagerized content?  Why wouldn't you try to publicize your work?  White hate SEO's should try to link to everything they do(or at least once removed by the profile page).

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Call to Action Articles Case Study I: Part III

My Ezine Article which targets the keywords building deep links rapidly is up.  It already ranks number one for it's keywords building deep links rapidly.  If you remember in Part II of this case study, my article already achieved number one ranking for build deep links fast and was ranked number 16-18 or so for build deep links.

So, Ezine Articles viewed my 200 word article with a big honking affiliate link as an acceptable landing page.  That means you can use Call to Action Articles as your affiliate landing page too for absolutely free and it doesn't have the clutter of say a Squidoo.  As I get more money there will only be less clutter in the future(right now though the automated Wordpress Google Ads that you have to pay $30 to get rid of are intermittent and only at the bottom of the article).

The general concensus is that you can blast Ezine Articles with more backlinks than you can a normal article so I'm going to try to see how much I can do that to achieve a higher ranking.

Article Ranking Stats:

Build Deep Links Fast: #1
Building Deep Links Fast: #2
Building Deep Links Quickly: #6, Ezine Article: #1
Building Deep Links: #69 Ezine Article: #3
Build Deep Links: #19 Ezine Article: #5
Deep Links: The Abyss Ezine Article: #73

Several of the do-follow social bookmarking services I submitted too also got indexed and showed up.  They are effective.  You can strengthen your social bookmarking links in a non-spammy way by linking to your profile page.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Call to Action Articles Case Study I: Part II

So the goal was to rank my article for Build Deep Links Fast as stated in part I of the article ranking case study.  It is already ranking number one for Build Deep Links Fast and is on page two number 16 for Build Deep Links.  So my next goal is to get the article ranking number on for build deep links as build deep links fast has no search volume.  My Ezine Article hasn't even been approved yet so I can't focus on the whole landing page aspect.  I wrote about two articles including the previous part of this article and I used social bookmarking tools.  That was about all it took to get number one ranking in a couple of days for a four word length long tail keyword(not that it gets any search traffic but it still should have a good conversion rate for the referral program).

Best Reviewer can build 20 deep links at a time.  Nothing can beat that. Say what you will about the C-class ip restriction but you can use best-reviewer to link to your articles on other sites with more domain authority.  The C-class ip theory runs in contrast to PR theory but just only work for one link per domain per PAGE(not per domain).  If you get easy links run with them.  Then you have a whole new page that your article and bookmark is on that you can link to.  We will see what happens for the slightly more competitive keyword of "Build Deep Links".

My Ezine Article is using the anchor text of Building Deep Links but it might take a while to be approved since it's only 250 words.

There are two main internet marketing methods:

Adsense Critical Mass-Build so many pages that you eventually get ranked for so many long tails that you start to make money.
Targeted Affiliate Page-Build links to get targeted traffic to a page that leads to an affiliate program they are looking for.

In method one, you really want somewhere where you get 100% profit sharing eventually but you'll take traffic to the other sites.  You're not trying to rank for specific keywords you're just trying to build your network and you figure that you'll get enough traffic eventually.

In method two, you're funneling traffic to a specific page where you want them to do a specific action(Call to Action).  You don't want them to click on a Google Ad or a link to one of your other pages.  You want them to click on the affiliate link.  You're trying to build highly keyword targeted links to a specific page.

Call to Action Articles strives to meet method II and it'll prove it's power when I start getting conversions for Best Reviewer.  Most Article Directories go for Method I.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Call to Action Articles Case Study I: Part I

In order to showcase the incredible usefulness of my new article directory Call To Action Articles, I am going to do a case study for an article on site for the keywords Build Deep Links Fast.

In order to start the ball rolling I'm going to try to rank for my own article for those key words.  Call to Action Articles is already indexed in google and is ranked number 2 for those keywords.  I chose build deep links fast as my keywords as the top ranking site in Google is a forum.  It is also easily optimized for the referral program I am choosing which is Best Reviewer which makes building 20 internal links at a time a cinch.

I also wrote an Ezine Article and I'm going to try to rank for that as well to show that you can use Call to Action Articles as a landing page for your affiliate links(Ezine Articles forbids direct affiliate links).  I'm also going to try to rank for that as well.

Also, I wanted to show that you can use affiliate programs to build backlinks.  In Best Reviewer, all your referrals build inbound links to your site for you.  I believe Free Traffic System has a link based referral system has well.

This page will serve as an example of how to use Call to Action Articles to build an effective landing page for Ezine Articles and other sites that forbid direct affiliate links and how to use Call to Action Articles as a direct portal for conversions.  You can use squidoo but Squidoo is cluttered.  CTA Articles is already less cluttered and I will be removing other things that clutter the site after I get the $15.00 for Custom Css.

Internal links will be minimized so people don't spam the directory with articles.  I want people submitting a few articles and then promoting those articles to make sales.  I want bum marketers to have a place where they can build landing pages for Ezine without a Squidoo lens.

So I'm going to be tracking my progress for the keywords and I'll post another entry once the Ezine Article is approved.  I've already backlinked the Article with social bookmarking sites and I'll track it's ranking for the term Build Deep Links Fast. As of right now, the post is indexed in Google but nowhere else.  This post links to that article so I will start backlinking this post and see if I can start boosting the articles rankings!

Saturday, October 23, 2010

How to use Call to Action Articles

Call to Action Articles is a new Article Directory I created which is optimized for Affiliate Bum Marketing.  I wanted to illustrate how powerful this article directory really is with a new post I made advertising She Told Me.  In the future, there will be a lot more features(need to buy No Ads+Custom CSS Upgrade for $45 then there are space and user upgrades as the need arises) but right now Call to Action Articles is very powerful for Affiliate Bum Marketing.  Once I get the CSS Upgrade, there will be fewer links on the page distraction the user from your text.

All you need to register is to shoot me an email and I will hook you up.  Let's compare Call to Action Articles to Squidoo there are a lot of other ads competing with your affiliate link.  The key to affiliate marketing is to not have any distractions from what you want the user to click on.

Let's go back to the She Told Me page I did.  I have an affiliate banner at the top and the bottom.  I have heavily promotional text convincing people of the power of She Told Me.  Can you get a page of that kind of Affiliate Marketing Power with traditional Bum(free) Marketing methods?  No.

You can do a Blogger blog but you won't get the juice from a dot com domain and you won't be able to get the template flexibility that you can with Wordpress.  Now Call to Action Articles doesn't have a lot of domain authority but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.  I even allow you to use duplicate content as long as it has a Call to Action and is in promotional speak.

So what you can do is build a page on Call to Action Articles and instead of having affiliate links on all your other pages divert the link juice to your Call to Action Articles page.  Then you get the link juice from those other sites and the benefit from the Template provided by Call to Action Articles.

Now even with the template advantage of Call to Action Articles you may still get more traffic and more click-thrus with your affiliate links on Ezine or Squidoo.  With Squidoo, you can keep the affiliate link on the site and still link to your Article with affiliate link or banner.  With Ezine Articles, you can do half and half, keep your affiliate link as one of the links and use the other to link to your article on CTA Articles.

I hope you realize the Bum Affiliate Marketing potential of Call to Action Articles and give it a try today.

A Bum Marketing Friendly Article Site

I'd like to present a new article directory called Call to Action Articles.  I reflected that although Ezine Articles was good for building backlinks it wasn't nearly optimized for Affiliate Bum Marketing.  What made Ezine Articles good for Bum Marketing was it's enabling of a strong call to action but there were a whole bunch of ads on the page.  Also the article can not be self promotional.

Call to Action Articles is in beta and as I get some Google checks I'll be able to add more features but the core is working now.  With Call to Action Articles you can post your affiliate link on the top with no competition from ads.  There will be no internal links on the page distracting the reader.  You get all the juice.  Post a big honking Amazon widget. 

Features to come include making the page even more spartan so there's nothing distracting readers from you and your affiliate links.  You can use Call to Action Articles to build links as long as you have a good Call to Action but it's primary purpose is for affiliate links.  Why should you build links to Ezine Articles where a lot of the traffic clicks out to the Google Ads on the page?

You will need to build backlinks to your articles as there are no internal links and I have provided some instructions under tips. 

Why you should use Call to Action Articles:
  • Call to Action Articles is self hosted so benefit from the search engine juice from a dot com domain.
  • No ads competing with your link.
  • Self promotion is allowed.
  • Duplicate content is permitted as long as it follows the rules.
  • Call to Action Articles is free!
Email me at TDavisRADLab@hotmail.com to sign up for Call to Action Articles Today!

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Page 360 site review

Page360 is another do-follow social bookmarking site with revenue sharing.  It's not as good as She Told Me.  The interface is not as good and I couldn't see the Google Adsense blocks.  You only have to write 100 words rather than 250.

My Tier pyramid will now look like this:

1) Height Increase blog
2) This Blog
3) Infobarrel
4) Ezine Articles
5) Best Reviewer
6) She Told Me
7) Page360

Page 360 is at the bottom because you always have to write more pages for the lower tiers than the higher tiers and only requiring 100 words making content for page 360 is pretty fast.  The highest vote level is 12 whereas the highest vote level for She Told Me is at 18 and Digg is at 400 or something.  So I assume the site is pretty new.  Also, there are not a lot of reviews of it.

Page360 also has more ads than She Told Me making it less likely for people to click on your ad.  Unlike with She Told Me though you do get an internal link when you post a comment.  I have started bookmarking my She Told Me Scoops with Page360 which is pretty zany.

Page360 has potential and you can always use more backlinks and you might make 0.0001 cents from it.

I wonder if more do-follow social bookmarking sites with revenue sharing are in store.  None of the do-follow/sb/revenue sharing sites aside from karma linx are on social marker.  There is also Xomba which has social bookmarking as well.

She Told Me is better than Page360 but because Page360 provides quick links do you have to use it?  I wonder how many more bookmarking sites we'll see.

How to fight Made for Adsense sites like Wisegeek

A Made for Adsense site is rarely a yes or no endeavor.  Usually there are degrees to how much exactly a site is Made for Adsense.  There is a spectrum to how much a site is designed for the user experience and how much a site is designed to make money from Google.  Wisegeek is a site way on the spectrum of making money from Google(they don't deserve a link, even a no-follow one).

Wisegeek's page is almost completely filled with adsense ads.  They have adsense ads that look like menus.  You click on anything and you get nothing but ads.  There is content hidden off to the side and bottom of the page.  The layout is so bad it's almost painful to try to read the content.  I can't believe it was a Yahoo pick and received a reccommendation from Encyclopedia Britanica.

Wisegeek makes Google a lot of money as they have a premium adsense account so obviously fighting them through Google is not the way to go.

Why should you fight Made for Adsense sites?  They cost other publishers money by giving advertisers less value per click(more likely to have accidental clicks which Google cannot keep track of all of).  Also, people may click just because they hate the layout of the site and click out which also hurts advertisers.  They also may click on something thinking that it's a menu button resulting in more accidental clicks.  It also hurts the quality of the internet which further harms publishers.

So, who do we go to to fight Made for Adsense sites like WiseGeek?  The advertisers.  In the adwords tool there's a way, there's a way to forbid your ads from appearing on certain properties or webpages.  What we have to do is get the advertisers to use this tool to stop ads from appearing on sites like Wisegeek.

Advertising is all about getting the most profit from your money.  There is so much clutter on wisegeek that people may just start clicking on ads not knowing what they're looking for.   I find it hard to believe that advertisers are getting the most bang for their back on a site like that.

When do advertisers get the most benefit from the ad?  When they are the only ad on the page.  With Graphics to differentiate itself from the content(sometimes results in off-topic ads, the smaller the ad block usually the more on topic they are with the theme of the site).  The lower down on the content the better(advertisers get better click thru-rates on when you scroll through the different pages on the ad block page 2 ads on the ad block get high click thru rates); these ad blocks are only available lower on the page) as then the searcher is done with the page and is looking for a new site to focus their attention on.  If they click on an ad at the top of the page, they may hit the back button if the ad doesn't give what they were looking for.

Why shouldn't advertisers just use adsense for search and give up on adsense for content altogether?  Some niches are not suited for adsense for content like specific buying keywords.  Adsense for content allows you to target verticals.  Someone on a muscle building page may be interested in a fat lass product too.

Adsense for Search leaves you open to people who are just clicking on your link to get keywords to build pages to target (i.e. your product + scam or +review).  Search ads get people whom are less desperate as adsense for search are the first links they see on their quest for knowledge.  However, they also haven't had a chance to read negative reviews about certain products...

People who click on search ads who haven't used google before may not know it's a product ad and may just be looking for information.  Some people may use certain sites as portals for information and may not even use search engines.  There are also a lot of ads on the Google search results page and they may just start clicking until they find what they are looking for.

Google Adwords for Content on Google Adsense publishers gives advertisers the best value(except in buying niches and niches with bad reviews) by bringing more attention to the ad and more targeted traffic leading to a higher conversion rate(surfers may confuse Google search ads with actual results).  Made for Adsense sites like Wisegeek hurt the publishers by costing advertisers money that could be used on higher bids.  We need to inform advertisers that they can exclude their ads from being shown on Wisegeek and thereby get more value for their money.

Monday, October 18, 2010

How to Improve Bing

Previously, I wrote an article about How to Improve Google.  I also wrote about how to build a search engine to compete with Google.  I had a number of criticisms of Google but as I read somewhere "Google may let people stuff the ballot boxes but at least it allows people to vote" and "Bing is a decision engine but it decides for you."

Bing is not a better search engine than Google because it isn't trying to be.  It's trying to compete with Google only in money making traffic.  Using Facebook likes to help determine search results isn't a step in the right direction.

Bing is horrible at indexing new websites.  If you want to find your friends website, use Google.  If you want to shop use bing.  If you look at Bing and look right over next to the web tab, you can see a shopping tab.  Google hides it's shopping tab better.

Bing is not a search engine.  It's not designed to find sites.  If you're looking for obscure information, Bing won't help you find it.  What Bing is good at is helping people to shop online and find the best prices.  Bing is a shopping engine.

The first way to improve Bing is to improve it's marketing.  Decision Engine still implied that it was a search engine and could you find what you were looking for.  Bing is good for mainstream and pop culture stuff.  Naming it as a pop culture engine would be good for marketing as that would imply shopping as well.

Then people will know that you have to bend over backwards to get indexed with Bing and if you're looking for information about your buddy's latest blog post you should use google.  If Bing was marketed as a pop culture engine then people would know that they should use it to find Access Hollywoods page on Katie Perry but they shouldn't expect to find Joe Nobodies(sucks for us Joe Nobodies though)...

Bing is very bad for smaller publishers but very good for internet noobs who don't want to see spam(an advantage of not indexing anything).  Bing isn't the ideal website that internet publishers would like to see to compete with Google(one with less reliance on backlinks and more on content) but it's one way to target a particular branch of Google's market.

Bing should only try to compete with Google in one area: buying traffic.  Integrating facebook likes doesn't help with that.  Buying traffic is swayed by ads and product placement.  The best way to improve the Bing search engine for this kind of traffic is to provide the best deals and to show the most shopping options.

If Bing goes after all the shopping traffic then it'll force Google to improve it's algorithm for information traffic.  Probably a good thing for us publishers.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Is Ezine Articles a Made For Adsense site?

Ezine Articles is clearly designed to make lots of money with adsense but there are degrees to how much a site is a made for adsense site.  I'm going to go through all the criteria and see how much Ezine Articles fits of being a MFA site.  Note:  No matter what Ezine Articles will always receive new articles as each article you submit gets a fresh backlink to your profile page reminding search engines of all the other articles you submitted.

1) Site layout is designed to make the maximum amount of money on adsense.

Take a look at my grow taller article hosted on ezine articles(shameless backlink).  First, notice how ugly the site is.  Most MFA's have an ugly site to increase click through rate.  Notice the Google search button right at the top then a google ad and then another google ad.  Then there's one more google ad at the side and one more tiny google ad under all the adsense menu options.  The layout of the site is not designed to improve the user experience but rather to make money with adsense.

Layout wise Ezine Articles is a Made For Adsense site.  Even the minimum content length of 250 words is designed to make money from adsense as this allows a higher ad density versus content.

2)  Site is only designed to make money from adsense(no other monetization methods) and nobody uses the site for other purposes.

People use the site for backlinks and affiliate sales.  Some quality sites do syndicate Ezine Articles content.  People also use Ezine Articles for Niche research.  If people only used Ezine Articles for backlinks then it would definitely be a Made for Adsense site as then no one would write article for readers but rather for SEO purposes.

Ezine Articles does have several bonuses for affiliate sales.  The call to action at the bottom of the article.  The status as expert author to build trust with the reader to make them more likely to buy.  There are also several tutorials on the site on how to use Ezine Articles for sales.  The alternative monetization method of getting a Premium subscription is also geared for affiliate sales.  I can't imagine why backlink borgers would want to have premium status.  The ability to save signatures and to schedule release of content favor affiliate sellers.

Some changes like not allowing direct affiliate links and requiring a landing page hurt Ezines status for affiliate marketers.  Although marketers can always sell their own products and people get around the restriction.

The more Ezine Articles moves away from servicing affiliate marketers, the more it becomes a Made for Adsense site.

3)  Content rules match Googles guidelines.

A true MFA site would only use Google's content rules to decide which content to allow for it's site as that would allow it to host more articles and get more clicks.  This is one criteria that Ezine Articles definitely doesn't fulfill.  EA has all kinds of silly criteria like not allowing the mention of EA in an article, a keyword density limit, and all kinds of silly nonsensical rules.

Ezine Articles is very close to being a MFA site but is saved by it's weird editors and affiliate marketers.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

New Google Webmaster Tools illuminates ranking criteria

One of the best ways to find out how Google ranks sites is to look it's own tools like Google Advanced Search.  I haven't used Yahoo Site Explorer in a while but I'll have to so I can use She Told Me Scoops to build backlinks to things that are linking to my site.  Unfortunately, it's a pain to see links built to individual pages with Yahoo Site Explorer leaving an opening for a good paid tool(Hoping for free).

Anyways, Webmaster Tools shows the number of domains and the number of pages each domain is linking too.  This sort of validates my theory about The Power of Content and the importance of building the size of your site.  Each new page gives a new opportunity to link to a new page from the same domain increasing the metrics of your site.  So, it would seem that it's not a C-class IP penalty but top level domain penalty.

Webmaster Tools also lists your top ranked pages and how many individual domains are linking to each page.  Of course Google also lists the anchor text that's linking to your site in Webmaster Tools.

So to maximize ranking using the new Google Webmaster Tools data:

One link per domain for each page using your anchor text.  I don't think anchor text variation will save you and allow you to link to one page from the same domain anymore(I don't have that thought I mean, I'm not saying that that was true and now isn't).  You need to vary the domain and the page linked to as well.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Tech Savvy Traffic Builds More Backlinks

The spammers get the same tools in every niche.  Article Marketing Automation works as well in the yo-yo niche or the internet marketing niche.  The social tools that white hate bloggers or webmasters get is not the same in every niche, there's sub 10 people in the height increase niche that have websites but I'd guess there's over 1,000 in the Make Money Online Niche.  My scientific post on Indian hedgehog proteins isn't likely to generate a lot of natural back links.

So what do I do?  I build an SEO blog to tech advantage of the tech savvy potential of this niche.  Then I link to my normal blog and channel the tech savvy linkage to my main blog.  This niche has some awesome writers like Ben, Grizz, Allyn Hane, Frank Carr, and Splork.  I'm not likely to be able to compete with any of them(except as a source of do-follow back links).  I can try sucking up to them and see if I can get a few reciprocal links that way(that's what the Splork video was for).  I'd love to be a support blog for Grizz even if I just got a little bitty extra strength for my own personal links.

Darren Rowse uses problogger as a support site to his digital photography school.  Some of his posts consist of nothing but links to Digital Photography School(the legendary sneeze pages).  His DPS may make more money and he may be more passionate about it but Problogger brings in the links.

And I will never count on Google or the other search engines to fight Black Hatters.  The Black Hatters can just scrape and spin other people's quality content and rank number one with that.  So, I'll probably be making some various fan videos of popular bloggers to see if I can get back links from their blogs.

Now the black hatters like Grizz and Ben don't funnel back links from their SEO blogs to their passion sites(because they don't want to give Google a paper trail to their money sites) but Darren Rowse does.  And one of the advantages of being white hat is that you get to put everything out there on the table.  Use the white arts and hope to god that a Bear practitioner of the black arts casts a powerful link juice spell on you.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

My Splork Fan Video

I made a fan video of Splork from lost ball in high weeds:

Postrunner Review

Previously, the Postrunner system was mentioned as discouraging people from posting on their own blog as they can always just post on another blog in the postrunner system to get Article backlinks to their site.  Posting on an article directory results in a loss of the title bonus but as illustrated by Ezine Articles it is possible to make up for it with enough authority.  Splork recently wrote a post about The Keyword Academy and how it ensures he never has to write content again.

He submits his wordpress blog(10$ a month for hosting) and waits for the articles to come in.  Then he pays other people to write articles to build backlinks to the articles other people wrote.  Then he spins those articles and uses fast backlinking methods to get juice to his site...

So not only is there no need to post on your own blog, there is also no need to write your own articles.  The work involved is using Micro Niche Finder or other keyword tools to find "green" keywords that make profit greater than expenditure.  I prefer to just churn out articles until I churn out enough to make a profit...

The internet is becoming rather like The Stock Market where you make predictions on which domains will be valuable in the future and buying and selling domain names for profit.  IMO, social traffic would be good to determine which sites determine Exact Matching Domain.  People typing in Forbes in the search engine will be looking for Forbes.com and the site will have a high click-thru rate and a very low bounce rate.  People typing in Where Can I Buy Acai Berry? will not be looking for WherecanIbuyAcaiBerry.com and the site will have a lower click-thru rate and a lower bounce rate.

I tried Postrunner's 30 day trial and I got some okay backlinks.  Will I try it again when I have money for the 33$ a month and can submit my own wordpress site?  Maybe.  Then I can move Ezine Articles lower on my Tier chart and I can also see what other people are doing and read other peoples content.  I think it would be great fun.  I don't think Postrunner is worth it without your own Article Directory though, I would much rather just submit to the same sites and build up internal linkage.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Will She Told Me be Google Slapped?

Many things that have been exploited by Internet Marketers have been Google slapped such as Hubpages and Squidoo, will the same fate be suffered by She Told Me and Best Reviewer?  Those sites were a part of something called bum marketing, where you tried to rank for long tails using the authority of Squidoo and Hubpages.  Then you would make money using affiliate programs or google adsense.

You can churn out a lot of content really fast on She Told Me and take advantage of the instant indexing to make money off some long tails.  You can get automatic approval on infobarrel but it's a lot faster to write a paragraph then 325+ words.  You can even develop some king of recursive system between She Told Me and Best Reviewer.  Top 3 Scoops and then you submit your Top to She Told Me.  Then make a top of three of your tops and submit that top as a scoop.  Then make a top of three of your tops and submit that as another scoop.  And then do another top based on your top 3 scoops and so on.

I just tested it right now and it's possible to make a top of three scoops.  But Best Reviewer is still growing and there's new features being added all the time...  So I don't know if Best Reviewer has potential for abuses other than making Google bots explode :)  And I made a top of three tops.

But anyways the instant indexing on She Told Me means that you can get traffic right away and make money right away for keywords.  Eventually you can achieve instant indexing on your own site but then you can't rank with a paragraph.

What you can do is rank for very obscure terms like "Does Kelly Clarkson have a mole on her left toe?"  Then get traffic and make money off those very obscure one searches per year kind of terms.  Then make money off trickle traffic.

It's extremely powerful and extremely easy to make 100s and 100s of tops and scoops very quickly.  There has to be some potential for abuse and I think eventually there will be a Google smackdown.

How to use She Told Me and Best Reviewer

Earlier I gave rave reviews to She Told Me and Best Reviewer, now I want to explain how to use these sites for your internet marketing endeavors.

All sites on lower tier have links to all the sites on higher tier.

Tier I-Your Site
Tier 1.5-Your Support Sites(Have to be this high to get needed authority)
Tier II-Infobarrel
Tier III-Ezine Articles(Maybe lower as no profit sharing, but I'm not sure how they would handle links to scoops and tops!)
Tier IV-Best Reviewer
Tier V-She Told Me

Of course there are forum links as part of this but you can only chose to send your profile and sig links to one site.  Also, there are blog directories as well.  Digg would make a good Tier VI but it frowns upon self promotion.  You can make scoops of your tops from Best Reviewer.

You really want to try to make good search engine content for your scoops and tops.  At the time of this posting, one of my scoops ranks number 3 for She Told Me review.  So you can get your Scoops and Tops ranked!  You can rank them for cousin keywords and various long tails.  I've mentioned that She Told Me has mostly internet marketing traffic well you could get search engine traffic too!  I'm not sure how targeted the ads will be however but every little bit counts.

I'm having a hard time coming up with a good Tier VI to help the She Told Me and Best Reviewer Tops Rank.  But remember you can get your tops and scoops ranked for things and by doing that not only can you build your link network, you can get a little extra money too!

Friday, October 8, 2010

She Told Me-Site Review

In the last entry, I reviewed She Told Me's sister site Best Reviewer.  I gave the site rave reviews and said that it was a good way to make up to 20 deep links at a time and a way to make a couple of extra pennies on the side.

She Told Me is a do-follow bookmarking site and it also features profit sharing.  Again the profits will be on the penny level but the monetize aspect does offer some interesting incentives.  Unlike Best Reviewer, comments don't link to your profile so there is no incentive to comment for internal link juice.  But, what the profit aspect does is that it encourages you to submit other sites that might get a lot of votes.  Not only does submitting good sites get you votes but each time you submit a site you get a link back to your website.  This is in stark contrast to a site like Digg where you only want to submit your own content.

There are some other features that Best Reviewer has that She Told Me doesn't like Best Reviewer lets you put the anchor text for your site link and Best Reviewer posts your referral link on your tops.  This enables you to perhaps luck out and get a few free referrals and perhaps a little extra money.  The big difference as mentioned earlier is the inability to build internal links to your scoops with comments this means you have to work on your own to get your links indexed.  There is a top 10 commenters plugin so if you leave enough comments you get an internal link to your profile on all your pages.

If you look at one of the comments on this site you can see that I got some referral traffic from She Told Me but I'm not sure if the traffic is from people other than other Internet Marketers.  Hence why I'm going to be playing up the Do-follow aspect of this blog.  The traffic does not seem high on the site as the scoop with the most votes at the time of writing is 12.  Since the site targets internet marketers so heavily it's unlikely for it to ever be able to contract the mainstream public that advertisers covet.

Buying traffic wants to read stories about celebrities and beauty secrets.  Unfortunately, there's no incentive for the Internet Marketing traffic to really participate and vote on other scoops unless you want to find new active do-follow blogs or check out what niches other people are writing.  But, the good news is that She Told Me is not one of the sites available on Social Marker so there is an incentive for people to actually visit the site and not just bots.

She Told Me is a great site that needs to implement some of Best Reviewer's features and needs to find a way to encourage people to vote on stories and visit them.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Best Reviewier-Site Review

I found a genius idea for a site called Best Reviewer.  The site is awesome.  You put together Top Lists.  Like I did a list of Top 17 Height Increase Methods.  All 17 of the links(*gasp*)you guessed it, linked to my site.  Normally social bookmarking is a pain.  This method allows you to churn out 20 deep links really quickly.  You just have to write a main description for your top.

There's also profit sharing.  You get 100% of the profits for one ad block.  This will probably earn you a couple pennies but it can add up!  If you refer someone you get profit for an adsense block.  The revenue sharing offers a good incentive to make a really good top as the more impressions you get the more money you make!  And your referral link is at the bottom of all your tops so you can make money if someone just clicks on your top. Also for all your referrals you get an anchor text backlink on all of their tops. The site even lets you chose the anchor text of the link making the links extra strong.

The monetary incentive allows you to make money by not just spamming your link(which is easy to do as you can spam 20 links at a time) but by posting quality tops and making good top 20 lists.  You can make money if your page goes viral.  There's also a good incentive to leave comments as each comment you give builds an internal link to your profile page building up link juice to your old tops.

The navigation of the site is very confusing but the site seems like it is under construction so that will improve with time.

For the referral system, you will have to either get social traffic or build targeted articles to try to convert people.  They do post your referral link on your site so you may happen to get Best Reviewer referrals that way.

Monday, October 4, 2010

How important is the syndicated content of Ezine Articles?

Ezine Articles is the number one article directory because the rich article directories just get richer.  Infobarrel is gradually catching up due to it's profit sharing.  The main feature that Ezine Articles has over Infobarrel is the syndicated content(I do like some elements of the Ezine Articles editor more than Infobarrel but Infobarrel makes it easier to insert links).

When we studied Google ranking factors using advanced search we found that the hardest criteria to meet was to meet the title.  Google was flexible on keywords in domain, post, and links but not on title.  It wouldn't even count the title of the post it had to be the title of the site.

That's where the syndicated content of ezine articles comes into play.  No matter how much Google loves Ezine Articles the title of the site will always be Ezine Articles.  Whereas if your post gets syndicated it could be syndicated on a site that has your keywords as a title.  Usually, the sites that syndicate the content don't have search engine friendly titles like my content has been syndicated on movie matic(Movie is a good keyword) and people's health portal(people and health could be good keywords but not for most health terms).

By Ezine Articles syndicated content your content may be syndicated on an article site that has a better title for your keyword.  Now how good this title is depends on how broad your keywords are(like Movies and Health).  Otherwise, you might as well post on infobarrel(and then use ezine articles to link to infobarrel as tier three or below of the link pyramid).  I think it would be easier to blast backlinks to a site with a good title that corresponds to your keywords then it would be to ezine articles despite their domain authority(unless your site keywords are ezine and articles; but hey maybe your site keywords are info and barrels).

There's also the advantage that you can self syndicate the ezine article to other article sites but me personally I would rather just use infobarrel.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Sample Flakelet article

Got an invitation to attend flakelet.  Couldn't join with my height increase blog as there were articles I could tie in but they promised that they'd promote the post on 2000 of their sites.  So, since this is my "test" blog, I decided to post one of the articles and see how well it helped promote this site.  If it works well, I'll keep checking back for new articles to use on my main site.

6 Helpful Tips for Writing Effective SEO Content


If you want to write effective SEO content, you should write a draft without any of the technicalities in mind, make sure your content is relevant, strategically use keywords on your content, use lists in your article, integrate links seamlessly into the content, and proofread your work.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)is the method of creating web pages in such a way that they rank higher in a search engine's search results. Websites that want to promote their products and services through article marketing provide content with SEO in mind. An effective article writer and jacksonville seo expert can create content with the goal of targeting prospects and drawing in potential clients. Here are some tips so you can write effective SEO content.

{Talk about not seamlessly integrating links, it would be seamless if it was minus the jacksonville}

Write a draft without any of the technicalities in mind

Remember that you are writing something that will represent you and your company and that it is important that your content not seem stiff and stilted. It is advisable that you first make a draft or outline of the content you are writing without being overly focused on the keyword density and other technical points. It will be easier for you to integrate SEO tactics in the content later on while maintaining spontaneity and coherence.
Make sure your content is relevant
Some writers purposely mislead people and trick search engines by posting interesting leads or topics unrelated to the actual content. By doing this you are running the risk of losing rank or even getting banned. You should avoid this practice and write content that is actually relevant to what you are trying to promote or sell.

{Search engines have no way of telling exactly what's relevant or not; everything is relevant to each other; if you use adwords then yeah this might be a bad idea as that could be seen as encouraging un-natural clicks}

Strategically use keywords in your content

Keywords help bring in the traffic. The more a particular keyword or phrase is used in the article content, the better that website will rank in search results related to that keyword or phrase. Keywords should thus be used strategically. This is done by increasing keyword density at the first part of the article. You can write conclusions or a comprehensive summary of your content at the beginning of your article using your actual keywords. Your keyword should also be present in the title and first line of your content. But remember to avoid too much keyword density as these might end up getting classified as spam. You can start using synonyms and use other terms in the following paragraphs to avoid redundancy.

{Hmmm....I didn't know keyword density helped.  Title and first line of content are good though.  Synonyms I don't know how smart search engines are.  I think search engines may only care about basic things like past vs. present tense}

Use lists in your article

Lists make it easier for you to write your content and use your keywords more liberally without being redundant. Lists also help make your content more comprehensive and easy to read through.

Integrate links seamlessly into the content

If you are going to link into an external page or website avoid using phrases like ‘click here’. Instead, you should integrate links into the keyword or phrase and use them as if they are actual parts of the content.

Proofread your work

Technicalities aside, SEO writing still applies all the basic rules of grammar and spelling. Proofread and double check your work. Remember that the quality of your work affects how readers and audiences will perceive you and your website. Mistakes and errors will most likely turn off your audience and make you seem unprofessional.

{There were no spelling errors in this article I believe}

SEO is becoming an effective marketing tool for websites and online firms. But you should also remember that the quality of your output should not be sacrificed.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

The Art of Predictive SEO

Many SEO Gurus recommend looking at the the Google Keyword Tool to find out what keywords you should be targeting(or they recommend some other method of seeing how many searches a keyword gets).  The keyword you target should always be something of value even if it's just a Do-follow blog for fellow marketers to get backlinks.

If it's not a topic you're interested in you'll find it harder to write about the topic so you should always be interested in the topic level somewhat.  If you get sick of writing about a topic, perhaps your interest will allow you to keep reading about it which will allow you to write just one more article.

The problem with analyzing keywords by looking at search numbers is that that is what all the other marketers are doing!  What people feel to realize is that keyword search numbers can change over time based on news stories and Oprah...

If you pick a keyword ahead of the rest of the game you can be faster in aging and acquiring backlinks.  You can get the optimal url.  Internet Marketing is a numbers game so just keep trying to pick your futuristic keywords and eventually you might find some winners.

Space cars, hoverboards, transports, etc. all might be keywords that are more popular in the future.  Look at products in development(a technique of website flippers) or think of good future movie titles.  If you make a website for every movie eventually another movie will come out using that title.

Don't just look at the keyword tool, look inside your mind for keywords as well.  That is the art of predictive SEO.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The Ultimalte PLR mad lib!

Feel Free to use this article template as a PLR!

Once Upon a Time, there was a World of Warcraft Gold Guide that everyone wanted.  It was a method of gaining Penis' and building cellphones in Nigeria.  Work-at-Home Mom desperately wanted the World of Warcraft Gold Guide.  She needed it to cure her families man boobs.  Her job as a Medical Biller gave her a lot of tools to use in the quest for this artifact.  They problem is that she was afflicted with acne and that caused her to have a great fear of dog training.

She decided to use her Iraqi Weapon's of Mass Destruction to hunt down the evil Hypnotherapist.  She would then tame that beast and ride it to achieve her Weight Loss goal.  Upon arriving in the cave of the evil Hypnotherapist, she surprisingly found it empty and instead found a Credit Card.  This Credit Card had the ultimate power of Payday Loans. 

Work-at-Home Mom couldn't believe her luck!  She easy-wealthily made her way to the cave that contained the World of Warcraft Gold Guide.  Unfortunately, the Credit Card did not hold the power needed to retrieve the World of Warcraft Gold Guide, as she needed to submit a free email address to acquire the free e-book.  She refused to contribute to the evil American Idol's plan to build the ultimate list.

In the end, her family all died of man boobs.

The Internet Marketer is the author of a height increase blog.  There are absolutely no entries about Affiliate Programs but there are entries about Calcium.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Cheap way to boost relevancy for links using tags

One recent feature added to Google Webmaster tools was the concept of keyword variance.  This new feature shows how weak Google's Latent Semantic Indexing probably is.  The most variance I've seen for a keyword is past versus present tense.  I've never seen Google give credit for a synonym.

In the field of science lots of things are related.  How is Google supposed to give credit for something being related or not when so many things have the potential for relevancy?  So many words have subtle different meanings and some words take on new meanings like lose weight becoming synonymous with lose fat but weight having a very different meaning than fat.  The answer is that Google only uses the exact words when determining relevancy. 

What does that have to do with how to boost relevancy?  Earlier I wrote an article about The Keyword Academy.  I was a member for the one month trial period.  When I was a member and submitted articles I noticed that the website developers used the following tags: One tag for the title and two with the keywords of the links.  Now the article hosts have incentive to be helpful because they want you to keep submitting articles to them rather than another member on The Keyword Academy spectrum.  They want your links to be as strong as possible.

I realized why they do this.  I think Google's application of Latent Semantic Indexing is so narrow that all that matters is the exact text when determining relevancy.  You can apply this principle to other article sites as well.  Ezine Articles lets you choose labels so choose labels with the same anchor as your links.  It should be easy to perform a test to see if going back and doing this dramatically improves ranking.

Monday, September 13, 2010

A case against the phrase "Google It!"

I can't count how many times someone has posted in a forum that if you want more information that you should "Google it!"(Although there has been some occassions when Bing has payed to have characters say "Bing it!").

First, this phrase runs counter to Google's model of links being a vote for a site.  It's not really a vote for the status quo as well(the stater of Google It is rarely referring to the number one site) as usually the number one site doesn't have all the information or then the GoogleIter would just say go to this site.

When some says that phrase it usually means that there's no best source for the information and they are trying to get rid of you.  Do they really think the ads in the sidebar or at the top of the page will have good info?

Either there is one best source and you should just link to that page.  Or there is currently no best source and you should design your own page and link to that.  It wouldn't be so hot to post the answer in the post as forum posts are hard to find and don't rank as well as static pages.  Why not just say "Use a search engine" unless you are an employee of Google?  I would say use Ask just to be contradictary but ask just has too many ads.

Next time you say Google It make sure you agree 100% with what the search engines are showing.  I can't think of a single topic that couldn't have search engine results improved.  In real life, don't say Google It either say hey give me your email address and I'll email you the link.

Most of the time in real life when people say that phrase they haven't validated Google's search results and say it in a vain attempt to be helpful.  They think that magic Google fairies check all the results to provide you with the best results possible.

Telling someone to use Google to find information is like telling someone how to spell Kernal Sanders using the dictionary.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Automated Link Exchanges?

I got tired of writing articles so I decided to comment bomb.  Comment bomb is basically reading a whole bunch of do-follow blogs and making some useful comments.  Yeah they usually have strict approval criteria but it may just be faster than article writing.  I found an article on optimal linking for SEO and it stated the criteria for comment approval on the end of the article which I thought was genius.

It said that the comment had to use the keywords of the title in your anchor text.  We know Google's LSI is too dumb to realize when certain things are relevant to each other.  Relevancy is determined mainly on a word by word basis.  This was a genius move.

Then it recommends that you link back to their blog using their own as a favor.  Okay, thanks but I'll skip that but wait if you don't link back to us we'll remove your wonderful link...  The link has to be from the same site so that would make the site less useful if you wanted to enhance an ezine article or something.

Good do-follow links are hard to find.  I think this sites criteria is pretty stingy(the reciprical link part) but I think requiring they use the same keywords that are in your title can be a powerful strategy.  Boosts relevancy scores after all.  If you can find a do-follow blog that allows you to use your keywords and allows you to link to any site that can be a powerful thing(like this one).  You can get links to every page on your site and to all the supporting material.  If you give out links you can assume that people will help you out with forum links or social media links once in a while. If not, oh well.  Required recipricol links are bad even if I just gave Mr. Egypt one...

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Google ranking factors illuminated by advanced search

Google has an advanced search feature.  This feature tells us what Google thinks the searcher wants.  Some of the search criteria includes:  Date, usage rights, and where the keyword shows up on the page.  Let's look at the where the keywords shows up feature.

The four options are: In the title of the page; in text of the page; in url of the page; and in links to the page.  So at bare minimum you'd want your keyword as the title, in the url(you can do it as a sub-url, if your blog is www dot make money dot com and the query is make money online with affiliate programs and the sub part is online affiliate programs you have all the keywords in the url), text of the page is easy, and finally in links to the page.

So if you want to be a true SEO master you want to optimize each of those four factors.  How would Google distinguish which is the better fit for a searchers query? 

For title, google doesn't seem to favor exact matches and it doesn't seem to really look for sub pages.  For google, it seems to be either is the keyword in the title of the page or not?  This seems to be a point for keyword sniping.

The results for searching for within title and text seem to be remarkably similar.    Again is the keyword in the text or not?

URL is the same deal.  Although, searching for within the url seems to bring up more sites with the keyword in subpages of the url.  This is a point against sniping as if you can just include your keyword anywhere in a long url you can just alter your title to include all the main keywords.

In searching for links to the page, the results seem pretty similar as well but you get results that are google bombed with the keyword nowhere in the title or url but are pretty synonymous(grow taller vs. height increase).

Now, there's a rumor that linking to other sites using keywords as anchor helps ranking.  I think this is true.  Let's say your keyword is make money online.  If you link to a site that's www dot make money online dot com, with make money online as the anchor plus has make money online as the title and within the text; don't you think Google is going to look at that as good for your pages relevancy?

Looking at all the four factors I got starred results for my main website except for all in title.  Rest assured I'm changing the title of my page :)

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Making Money by Blogs or Incentivized Websites

The amount of money you can make by blogs seems low in the beginning but it eventually becomes passive income.  With any money making method you need to get traffic.  Being smart and having good ideas isn't worth a cup of coffee at starbucks.  It's the ability of those intelligent thoughts to attract traffic.  Important pubmed articles on fat loss rank way down low in the search engines.  While inaccurate information like the BMI reigns supreme.  Search engines like google do not seem to be interested in providing people with the correct information but rather the one with the most backlinks. 

With websites designed to garner traffic the ideal traffic is those with more money than sense.  You can monetize smart traffic by building alliances and developing new ideas.  However, most people just want that money.  Incentivized websites like Neobux where you get a percentage of income for every click that your referrals make seems like a good alternative seems like a good alternative than to target credit card happy people.  Instead of targeting people with money, you're targeting people with time.  This is a lot like monetizing smart traffic where you're recruiting people's minds and ideas by ranking high in the search engines.

With sites like Neobux, you make pennies a day.  With a website, you can make a cent for just 20 people visiting and you can do that just by ranking for fluke things or by advertising on forums.  The way to make money by Neobuxian-websites is by referrals and to do that you need to either do social marketing(making friends on forums or games and then selling to them by IM), SEO marketing(which makes it competing with building links for other websites), or by PPC advertising.  With the amount PPC costs you need targeted traffic that will click on ads for a long time to benefit from PPC.  SEO is based on economic theory of opportunity cost and I think in most situations ranking your website to get referrals for an incentivized website will lose to building links for another niche.  Make Money Online is an extremely competitive niche after all and some of the top people do have referral links to incentivized websites.  Social marketing is the best for this.  Gamers are the best because they have Pavlonian training to click for a reward.  You can also offer free game items to people who sign up using your refferal link.

If you play a lot of games, then go the neobux and neobuxian sites route.  If you want to do SEO, then either recruit traffic who have ideas or credit card happy traffic.

Friday, August 20, 2010

How to monetize "smart" traffic

In the past, I've talked about how most internet marketers and search engines go after "noob" traffic.  Noobs are not savvy internet users who just go to the internet to buy movie tickets or to see the possible side effects of medications.  Noobs are the golden traffic ticket because they don't spend a lot of time searching for facts.  A fool and his money are soon parted but a genius and his money you have to pry from his cold dead fingers.

So, what do you do with this genius traffic who advertisers don't want?  Now, it's hard to get money from savvy individuals but you can still get value from individuals.  Capital is more than just money; it's relationships, knowledge, etc.  The most common value listed that you can get from smart traffic is back links.  Smart traffic know how to build a website.  If it's mutually advantageous for you to work out some sort of link exchange or link for content exchange it'll work out.

We'll call this benefit:  Trade.  In economics, trade increases the production possibilities curve for both nations.  By advertising to smart traffic you open up these trade possibilities.  You can also meet up with smart traffic on forums but you'd also want a good website to put your best foot forward.

The next value you can get from smart traffic(that you can turn into money) is partnerships.  Obvious partnerships are starting a website together.  Or for a non-IM niche, you can take the partnership offline.  Let's say you both run blogs that discuss acne cures.  You can start an acne fighting business by combining resources!

The other benefit is content.  Smart traffic posts comments that are intelligent and have good keywords resulting in more noob traffic.  Smart traffic also gives you new content ideas either through email or via the comments section.  They might even chew you a new one in the comments section resulting in traffic entertained by your rivalry.

Targeting smart traffic is a lot harder to monetize but it is a lot more powerful.  Wallets and credit cards can't change the world.

How do you target "smart" traffic?  Keywords.  Instead of weight loss, use keywords like fat loss or how to reduce levels of adipose tissue.  Use the scientific terms.

Monday, August 9, 2010

A search engine that could compete with Google

We've all seen the publicity for Bing.  I've seen a lot of product placements for it in movies and TV shows.  Remember, search engines make most of their money from inexperienced searchers.  Inexperienced searchers will go for what's cool rather than what's the best.  Bing may be worse than Google, but as long as they target noobs who spend a lot more money than internet savvy people and are a lot less demanding they will be okay in the long run.  If Google has 99% of the market share but Bing has the 1% that spends all the money then Bing will be better off.  The 1% that can be influenced by seeing celebrities use Bing in their favorite movies and TV shows.

If Bing winds up being the favorite search engine for noobs, then why not have a search engine targeted for the intelligent?  Lord knows that people are sick of seeing all the wikipedia results on page one.

The search engine results for noobs and the elite should be totally different.  When noobs type in weight loss they really want info on fat loss.  They want info on fat loss right now and don't want to click on:  Did you mean to search for fat loss?  They don't want scientific journals.  They don't want articles about all the possibilities of losing weight like cutting your own limbs off or slicing off your skin(both of which are valid answers to "weight loss").  They just want straight up fat loss info.

An internet savvy individual searching for fat loss would want info from medical journals and possibly forums(where mavens tend to congregate).  An internet savvy individual would know not to use the search term weight loss unless they already had a saw out.

The ideal search engine results for savvy individuals and noobs don't intersect so if a search engine wants to compete they need to target the savvy individuals(who unfortunately to companies don't spend money like noobs).  Internet savvy individuals don't want dumbed down wikipedia information and noobs don't want to see anything that's not on Oprah.

How to build a search engine that targets the savvy audience?  The search engine doesn't have to be as hard as google is to game as savvy people don't spend money and the potential isn't there.  The search engine would have to make it's money based on an impression based advertising system.  Although the search engine could make money on things like selling homework help or experts.  Students doing a report need to use search engines to find info and they could use one to filter through the crap.  Let's call our search engine "Find What You're Looking For".  Student goes to www.fwylf.com looking for information on his report on the dating rituals of the Mayan Empire, and over to the side he sees an ad for a professor on all things Mayan who's willing to answer questions about the Mayan Empire on his 1-800-number.  Click!  The professor makes a profit.  The search engine makes a profit.  And the student writes a good paper because no search engine can beat the human mind.

What algorithim should this search engine use?  Don't know.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Are people who don't use their keywords as their name in comments the true spammers?

The Power of Content shows us that the anchor text used to link out can help increase your ranking.  The anchor text you use to link out acts like a super bold.  People have reported a ranking increase by linking out to authority sites but I don't think it's the authority site linking that gives the ranking boots it's the link anchor text.  For example if I link out using the anchor text keyword to a post about keywords then that will help this post rank better.

By using their name, people are denying you that opportunity to increase your ranking.  For relevancy, there's no way that google can be that smart.  I don't trust relevancy anymore beyond the word level.  I'm not sure that Google can know the relevancy between all the synonyms and definitely not between unconventional connections.  Let's say your blog is about making money online and someone posts a comment with the anchor text online banking.  You get relevancy for the word online!

Unless your name is something like Tom Cruise then your name doesn't provide any value to the blogger as anything that would be searched for.  There could be a rare circumstance like:  You post a comment under the name Jerry and someone googles "How did my friend Jerry make so much money online?"

Your name is also largely irrelevant except as a means of identification.  A rose by any other name doth smell as sweat...  If your website is a site like Fear dot com where you could die by visiting the website then it would be much better for you to describe the site with your anchor text then use your name.  Your anchor niche can also be used as a form of identification "Hey that guy always chooses banking keywords!"  If that doesn't work then you can always just sign your name on the bottom.

Don't comment spam with your worthless name!  Use your keywords!

Thursday, July 22, 2010

The Power of Forum Linkbuilding

Among the possible link building methods which include article directories, blog commenting, social bookmarking/directory submission, and creating new blogs or websites; forum link building is a powerful over looked method.  Forum link building is not just a set and forget put as many links to your website in your profile as you can.  You've got to build links to your linksArticle directories are good but you really want an article directory that offers profit sharing, requires unique content(so you can compete with people who submit to a bunch of different article directories) or has syndicated content which helps build links to your profile page, and has editorial control(in the hopes that google will manually boost the trust rank of the site and avoid possible nerfage).  In addition, you'd like an easy to use interface and have their be high traffic to the directory so you get referral traffic and a higher probability of organic links.

There's not a lot of article directories that meet that criteria.  Some you have to pay for like The Keyword Academy and you have to buy your own Wordpress Blog to take full advantage(so you can capitalize on all the people who want to submit articles to your directory).  Like with The Keyword Academy you have to make it profit sharing by profiting off the articles on your own article site.  And you have to be experienced to make back the monthly payments(although you do get a one dollar trial).

So when you've exhausted all the good article directories, forum link building is a good way to augment it.  Forum referrals from related niche forums is my #2 source of traffic behind Google.  You can have links from both your sig and profile page.  You can also include deep links within posts.  You can also link to other threads on the forum which contain your link boosting the link power of those links.  In addition, many forums have social bookmarking buttons on the bottom of the page making boosting the link juice of those threads easy.

A lot of forums are also authority sites.  So you can build threads targeting various keywords and rely on referral traffic.  Forums also are a good source of new content featuring info from a lot of mavens in a niche.  The only issue with forums is it being hard to get good anchor text but that's why we have article links.

Friday, July 16, 2010

In the future will no one post on their own blog?

Wordpress article directories are all the rage.  Due to the C-class IP restriction and self-hosted blogs built in trust ranking, sites like The Keyword Academy and Free Traffic System encourage you to submit your own Wordpress blog in exchange for you being able to post content on other peoples Wordpress blogs in their Article Directories.  You then put Adsense on your Article Directory site and rake in the money.

The experts recommend 90% backlink work and 10% work on your own site.  What if you did 100% backlink work?  If you write articles from your own directories you can get more internal linkage and not have to link to other sites.  There are Wordpress plugins that automate internal linkage and linking to other sites can help improve your ranking based on the anchor text used to link to other sites.

So basically, if you own such an article directory why would you ever post on that directory when you could be posting on other people's article directories generating precious backlinks so you can make money with adsense.  Yes, people will not contribute keyword rich content to article directories but you can overcome anything with enough backlinks.  Also, some directories like The Keyword Academy enable you to edit the content as long as you keep the links in so you can improve the ranking that way(without relying on backlinks).  And as the directories grow, you're more likely to get more gem content thereby allowing you to focus more on linkbuilding to those articles.  The coal articles still give you internal linking opportunities and hey maybe they article poster will send some link juice to those articles.

You just can't compete with an article directory that wants to make money.  Any article directory designed to make money is going to work harder to ensure readable, unique content(The Keyword Academy has a checker to make sure the content is unique).  This is of course where TKA beats Free Traffic System as submitting your word press blog only gets you 7% bonus back links regardless of the actual quality of the blog.  Whereas if you want to make money with a site, you're going to want to make sure your site has a good trust ranking and authority ranking.  You're going to need those two things to beat out the site that the submitted article beats the site it's linking to.

So, I foresee a future where eventually no Internet Marketer writes a word on his own site.  The most they'll do on their own site is install plugins, register a domain name, pick tags and categories, and edit posts so they rank better.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Article Marketing Experiment

In the past, I've been using article directories mostly for backlinks.  Now I'm going to try to actually feed people to more article which still links back to my site.  Here's my "Super" Article on Table Clamps for height increase.  Now my hypothesis on trust rank was that sites with more trust rank can have more backlinks counting than un-trasted sites.  So the question is:  Can I rank this page on infobarrel more easily than on my own site?  This page is directly related to height increase so I want a high click-thru rate.

For infobarrel, you're not supposed to have a call to action but height increase is so complex that there was no way to cover everything in the article.  The reader could never feel complete with one article and would be compelled to click-thru. 

Now when I've done interlinking on my own site, I do notice some of the interlinking anchor text used to help find my site.  But I wonder if interlinking counts more on trusted sites, I might try linking a few other infobarrel articles to it just to see if it helps.  But theoretically, links from external sites should help more.

Also, my article may get irrelevant searchers looking for table clamps and people looking to increase the height of their table.  This will be my first foray into a "normal" buying niche.

I'm going to start out by sending 10 ezine articles to the page.  My trust rank hypothesis is that infobarrel being a trusted site should have all of those ezine articles counting even though there are probably already a million ezine articles linking to infobarrel.  I'm going to use my other ezine link to link to this site so this site doesn't look like a can.

Most Internet Marketers have their farm sites on Tier four or five of the pyramid.  If this site doesn't have a lot of backlinks it looks like a tier four or five farm site.  Google doesn't like farm sites so I want this site to get backlinks especially since it's a blogspot blog.

I'm not worried about anyone stealing my niche because there's no way some internet marketer could perform the height increase experiments that I have on his or herself.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Trust Rank

Trust Rank is one of the things most sought after by internet marketers.  How does one acquire trust rank and what does trust rank give?  Here are some theories.

First, we have to look at all the other factors that are not accounted for by the other variables like Page Rank, Site Authority, and so on.

The main factor is the C-class IP restriction.  Many have noted from their own sites get less link juice from the same domain over time whereas domains like ezine and hubpages don't have that restriction.  Trust Rank is one possible explanation.  The higher your trust rank the more links that are counted from a single domain.

Self-hosted domains rank higher than Web 2.0 sites but Web 2.0 sites can eventually catch up but why?  One possible explanation is trust rank.  Trust rank is a modifier on how strong links are.  So the self-hosted domains start with a higher trust rating so they start off with more links counting and stronger but as the Web 2.0 sites acquire more trust rating their links begin to be valued equally to the Self-hosted domains links.

How does one acquire trust rank?  It can't work like PR which can be generated from any form of content.  It also has to be a fairly automated system.  Each domain has it's own trust value. Every link from a new domain gets you a greater point of trust value.  You can't get trust with internal linking like you can PR.  Each unique domain link is one point of trust.  Trust rank has to operate differently from the Page Rank system to have a purpose.  Hence each domain one point of trust.  Higher trust equals more links per C-class ip counting.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Is it possible to Make Money Online without targeting Noobs?

I was recently looking over at Ben's SEO blog and he mentions that normally he caters to noobs whereas with his SEO blogs he targets smart internet users.  Maybe, I should take a page from pro-wrestling and call them smark fans?  Now, he doesn't run any ads on the blog but he does hype infobarrel a lot and constantly drops his affiliate link(with infobarrel's affiliate program you get 2% of your refferals google adsense adviews).  Now, after the google destruction where a lot of sites were de-indexed, he hasn't posted since.  I take it he wasn't making very much money with infobarrel refferals?  He even had a hook too(100 infobarrels in 100 days, and sign up using my affiliate link so I get 2% of that).

So Ben failed to make money with his high quality SEO blog and made the majority of his money writing about random products which targeted internet noobs.  Most of the internet marketing guru's recommend targeting low hanging fruit with buying keywords.  There are tons of long tails for each product:  Cereals, board games, make-up...  I just typed in "Where can I buy Count Chocula?" and the number one ranked site was Amazon so apparently it's not a very profitable niche.  Now I type in "Where can I find Dilbert Calendars?" and now I get a clear internet marketing site called freeality which is nothing but a bunch of ads.

Anyways you type in any conceivable long tail product keyword and there are sites there looking to profit on it.  But if you type in more intelligent questions you don't get very much or you don't get what you're looking for(usually a wikipedia entry).

Now my website has some of the best information on growing taller myths and it doesn't rank very well for non-scientific terms relating to height increase.  I'm the authority of the science of height increase but if I rank so well for all science + height increase long tails shouldn't I rank somewhere in the trenches of the height increase keyword as well?  If my height increase method is not a success then I can't make any money to support height increase endeavors.

The search engines only care about shopping.  They only care about internet marketers who compete with their advertisers who take 60% of the ad clicks for thin buying keyword sites.  The search engines don't care that irrelevant wikipedia pages take up the first few entries when you're trying to find hard scientific information.  The search engines set their priority for buying keywords versus informational keywords.

Can anybody make money from informational keywords?  The search engines don't bother doing it.  Scientists charge a lot though for their four page "e-books" off of pubmed.  You don't see scientists using adwords to advertise their articles though...

If people can't make money by targeting intelligent people then all we'll see is 100s and 100s of crap articles targeting the same interweb nobs.  You have to provide a lot of value to make smart people take notice whereas for noobs you don't have to provide nearly as much.

I don't think there's a way to make money on the internet unless you find a cure for cancer or a way to increase height(the too are related by cellular proliferation by the way).

Saturday, July 3, 2010

The C-class IP restriction

The Power of Content theory states that each page must have some link juice value.  It's rather like a can in fighting where every page no matter how many links go out(how bad a record) gives some benefit to the page it's linking too.  I get a lot of random links but google still shows them in webmaster tools.  I get a lot of random links from the same sites like righthealth and kosmix for my quest for height blog.  Usually, when I search for my blog whichever site is the double listing for when I search for "quest for height" is the site with the most random links.

If Google stopped counting links from the same C-class ip per domain then why are people building links to their ezine articles or hubpages?  The logical conclusion is that the C-class ip thing is by a ratio and that the search engines expect you to have a lot of different links from a lot of different C-class ip's.  And what about internal links?

What I've done is to adapt to what I see in google webmaster tools.  Google says I have 520 links to my domain in my main blog but only shows my 160.  However, for the rest of the pages on the site it shows me all of the links.  This says hey I need to build links to the other pages of my site.  Whenever I hit a plateau on domain wide links showing up, building links to the internal pages of my site seemed to help.  It could however be a sandbox thing(where domain age affects how many links are counted) but the counterargument to the sand box is news stories which get a lot of links very quickly.  Usually they are not whole new sites though but are part of an already trusted domain.

Basically, my view on the C-class ip thing is that Google tells you when it counts links or not.  When links stop showing up then you get links from a new source.  Google Webmaster tools says that anchor text is valuable so if the anchor text is showing up that means it's a good link(comment links show up).  The amount of time that it takes for the anchor text of a link to show up correlates with how valuable that link is.

I think the whole C-class ip thing is over-exaggerated and mainly designed to sell products.  I mean if you're making mini-sites that are one page with exact matching domains then maybe the C-class ip thing matters more but I don't think so for larger sites(I think you can have a very large percentage from one domain no problems as long as you vary anchor text and page linked to).