Archive for October, 2007
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
As most of you know, the Technorati ranking is one of the metrics used to determine advertising rates and are part of the way your paid review rate is determined at ReviewMe. Having a high Technorati rank is something almost every blogger dreams of.
The Technorati bot usually visits when it is pinged, either directly, or through another pinging service. If it’s not pinged, then that perfectly good link goes to waste and does nothing to boost your rank.
You can solve this problem in a very simple way. Each time you get a pingback from a blog, and you don’t see the link show up in Technorati, simply go to the Technorati Ping form, paste the URL of the article that links to you and click the Ping! button.
With a bit of luck (sometimes it needs multiple pings, sometimes it doesn’t work at all), Technorati will add it and it will increase your authority.
Getting Evil
Now, as an extra bonus, I’ve found out that sometimes this ping strategy also works with non-blogs.
So, every time you get a link on a new non-blog domain that doesn’t use pinging (forums, sites, directories, social bookmarking sites), ping that URL where your link shows up to Technorati and in many cases it will be added to the Blog Reactions page, increase your authority and boost your rank.
Remember, your authority increases only when a new domain links to you, so don’t go pinging every single forum post you’ve ever made.
Due to the fact that it doesn’t always work, I’m not sure if this works if your links on that page have nofollow attached.
Be Careful
If you plan to get evil with this tip it’s possible that it will get you banned on Technorati. It might not, but then again, you never know.
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Monday, October 29th, 2007
In a previous article, I’ve talked about making money with mini-sites using the 19Pages CMS, because of how easy it is to setup and use.
However, there are some cases when a WordPress installation is better.
Before you start that mini site, look at its topic and see if you might want to expand it into a full blog or a community in the future. Personally, I look to see if I might enjoy writing on that topic, how many keywords I’m targeting and what’s their traffic potential. If a mini site has 10+ articles and a traffic potential of at least 1000 visitors/day, I’ll usually go with WordPress.
This way, if the mini site takes off and starts bringing some serious traffic, I’ll just replace the static front page with a regular one that displays the latest blog posts. All the other articles that were posted on page remain with the same URL and Search Engine traffic.
I can then work on converting that traffic to subscribers and also take advantage of other income possibilities that are available only to blogs (like PayPerPost or ReviewMe).
The bad part is that it’s no longer passive income, but for topics that you feel might have potential for more, it might be worth it. Even if you don’t like the topic, you can always hire someone to write 15 articles/month for ~$60 and post them every other day. With the extra page views and advertising opportunities brought by a blog you should be able to cover the extra $60/month in expenses. And since someone else writes the articles, you can concentrate on getting those visitors to click the RSS button.
How To Make A Mini-Site With WordPress
Once I have the WordPress installation up and running, I usually go through these steps for the mini-site:
- Change URL structure to SE friendly URL’s from Options/Permalinks
- Change the settings of the articles not to receive link notifications from other blogs and not to allow comments (so I don’t have to deal with spam), from Options/Discussion. Also at Options/General I choose for users to be registered to comment, but I don’t select the option for anyone to register.
- Create a page called Index
- Go to Options/Reading and select Front Page displays: A static page. At the static front page select the Index page you previously created. This will be the front page of the site. (screenshot above)
- Delete from the sidebar anything that makes it look like a blog: Categories, Archives, Latest posts, RSS feed button, Latest comments, etc. Leave only the code that shows the static pages. Or, you can use a widget sidebar and include only the Pages widget.
- Download and install the All In One SEO Pack. Setup the front page title, description and keywords, and at the title format section delete the %blog_title% part from each line. Also, put noindex for categories, archives and tag pages, since you’re not using posts for the mini-site.
- Create Pages and write your articles in them.
From WordPress Mini-Site To Normal Blog
- At Options/Discussion and Options/General, set up the options back to be able to receive link notifications and comments.
- Go to Options/Reading and select Your Latest Posts.
- Copy the text from the static Index page, delete it and paste it into your first normal blog post. Or you can write a new text for it.
- Copy the WordPress theme again so you have categories, archives and whatever else it initially had. Or if you used widgets, add the rest of the widgets.
- Take out the noindex for archives,categories or tags from the All In One Seo Pack admin page. Depending on your permalink structure and if you use tags or not, you can keep noindex for one or two of the available options.
- Start posting.
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Saturday, October 27th, 2007
It seems that the PR update is finally happening. Shylock Blogging looks like it’s getting a PR3 for the front page and PR4 for a couple of articles that were linked to more.
For those that think they’re gonna suddenly get to the top of Google Rankings just because they now have PR, it’s not like that. PR is useful only if you want to sell PR, or more specifically if you want to sell text link ads or do paid reviews. If you want to rank for a keyword, get relevant backlinks and screw the PR.
What PR are you getting?
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Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
To pick-up some extra money for a new project of mine, I’ve decided to offer custom mini-sites for those interested. I’ve talked about making money with mini sites before, and for those that don’t know where to start or they’re too busy, I’m offering to make you one.
Mini Site Packages
$20 - 5×300 words articles on the keywords of your choice. You get full rights for the articles and they will not be sold to anyone else.
$30 - 5×300 words articles, each based on their own keywords, and I find the keywords for you. Each keyword will have around 100 searches/day according to GTrends, and when looking for them in quotes, they will have a maximum of 100,000 results in Google. You get full rights to the articles and I will not sell them to anyone else.
If you want more then 5 articles for your mini site, the price is $4 for a 300 words article with the keywords supplied by you and $6 for a 300 words article if I’ll be the one looking for the keywords.
Other options:
If you don’t know how to make a mini site, for $5 I will upload your articles in the 19Pages CMS, set up the meta descriptions and keywords, put it in a zip file and I’ll email it to you. All you need to do is copy the files on your own sub-domain or domain, change the password to the admin area, put in your Adsense code, and it’s ready to go. 19Pages is optimized for search engines and built for mini sites.
However, I don’t give any guarantees that you will make money from those mini sites. You need to do some link building for them and maybe let them age for a bit. Making them rank is your responsibility. I just write the articles.
How it works: send an email at contact@shylockblogging.com and let me know which package you want. I’ll give you the PayPal address to send the money and I’ll start working on the articles after that. If you decide on the second package and you want me to look for the keywords, I’ll email you what I find before I start working, and you can let me know if they’re OK.
Advertise On This Blog
I’m currently looking for advertisers for November. The feed count varies around ~180 subscribers currently, and I’m planning on doing some guest posts on JohnChow.com and other big blogs in November. If you order now, the banner goes up immediately, meaning you get 5 weeks instead of 4!
150×150 button above the fold. It costs $25 for November and it includes a free review of your blog/site/product. Only 1 available right now.
160×600 banner, where the SEO Book ad is currently located. It costs $40 for November and it also includes a free review.
468×60 banner in the header, where the Adsense ad is currently located. It costs $15/month.
Reviews: they’re $15 and you get a review at least 400 words long and 5 backlinks with the keywords and destination pages of your choice. Only 1 or 2 reviews will be available and they will be made in November.
Contact me at contact@shylockblogging.com for the PayPal address and send me the graphics/details of the banner/review.
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Monday, October 22nd, 2007
For those that haven’t heard yet, TNX is a new company that takes the Text Link Ads model to the next level, and allows you to buy links anonymously. With all the problems that Google has caused recently to webmasters that sold text link ads on their site, I feel like the TLA model needs a change. It’s way too easy to spot which sites use them to sell links, and a Google penalty might just be couple of months away. TNX.net on the other hand, uses a different model to intermediate the sale and buying of text links, and I think it may just work.
Right now they have almost 30,000 users and they sold more then 31 million links
I signed-up with them a few weeks ago, taking advantage of the free links offer they have on DigitalPoint, and created a campaign to test their service. My conclusion is that the service is very good, but there are a few tips that can help you get more bang from your buck.
How It Works
For both selling and buying of text links, the site uses points. You can either buy points from TNX or you can sell links on your site and use the points to buy links from others. All links have different values, depending on the PR of the page, number of backlinks of the site, the country and the category of the site (a link in a russian directory is cheaper then one from a real estate site). So a PR0 link can cost 1 TNX point, or it can cost 20, depending on these factors.
The best option in my opinion is to buy the points if you don’t have large sites to sell links on. For $20 you can buy ~20,000 points for example.
If I were to use the TNX code on this blog to get points, 4 text links/page and 100 pages, I would get 2400 points per month. The problem is the missing PR update, because all my pages show up as PR0, when I’m pretty convinced that I got at least a few PR4-5 pages.
This is the good part of the TNX system right now. While the PR might not be important when you try to rank for a certain keyword, you can use this service to get lots of PR0 links from your niche, at a cheap price.
Tips To Get The Most Out Of The System
From what I’ve seen, it’s best to choose links from sites that have at least 500 backlinks. Otherwise you might end up with links on automated blogs that steal content. Better yet, buy links from sites with at least 5000 backlinks to be sure.
You have the option to select the speed at which the links show up on the other sites and to delete links from sites that you don’t want in your campaign, so if you keep a close eye on this you should be getting quality links from the niche of your choice.
What You Can Get For 20,000 Points
Let’s say you’ve just invested $20 to buy $20,000 points from TNX, you have a travel blog and you want to rent some links from sites in your niche.
Click on the screenshot to see a larger version. Now, in this campaign I selected the website category Travel, because I want links from related sites. I checked boxes for sites with at least 5,000 backlinks, to get links from sites that aren’t new and to minimize the chances that I’ll get links from MFA blogs. Also selected english sites only and PR 0 links.
The end result in the bottom right corner is that with 10,000 points/month I can rent 789 links from travel sites and blogs. If you keep in mind that 10,000 points cost around $10-12, and that many of them are cheap only because the PR update is late, you’ll probably see the value of this service. With those $20 invested initially you pay those links for 2 months.
I think it’s a great way to boost the authority of a site in the niche where it’s operating. Just make sure you set up the campaign so you get quality PR 0 links. Also, review the sites where your links show up, and take them out of your campaign if you’re not satisfied.
They also have an affiliate program if you want to promote them. You get 13.3% of all the points earned by the referred webmasters.
Disclaimer: this was a paid review, that reflected my honest opinion on TNX, after testing the system.
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