Internet Marketing – New Google PR Update & Best Posts of 2008

Posted by JR in Internet Marketing, Odds and Ends

Well it’s time to say goodbye to 2008. I hope that you guys had great success in your Internet marketing business ventures and personal lives.

Once again I want to thank all my wonderful readers and commenters for all your participation and support for this blog, it has been one of my biggest online successes because of you.

Over 200 Subscribers
1911 Comments - Thanks to you
Page 2 of SERPS
91 Posts
Over 10,000 backlinks and counting

I wish you the best for the New Year and a big toast to all our success for 2009!!!

New Google Page Rank Update

Well another PR update has taken place. I think Google has f**ked this one up, one of my sites went from PR0 to PR3, and it did not really deserve it, but I’ll take it! Another 2 sites were appropriately ranked from PR1 to PR2. This blog stayed a PR3, surprising considering the number of backlinks, but substantial amount were no-follow from the many blogs I comment on, but I will have to look into this further.

Internet Marketing Goals for 2009

As with any business, Internet marketing and online campaigns should have some kind of business plan and specific goals. I think this is especially important in Internet Marketing because we work alone and we need to maintain a high level of organization and focus that is so crucial for success.

With all the tedious daily tasks and hard work before us, such as, link building, writing content and articles, website design, promotion etc… it is easy to get caught up and lose site of the goals behind the work and neglect to pay attention to what is working what is not. Don’t just work, work smart.

Earning Goal – If you want to make $1000 a month in 2009, then set that goal and then outline the ways you will get there. Be specific.

List the venues and campaigns you will utilize to reach your goal, such as websites and/or blogs. Write it down and make sub-outlines detailing what needs to be done for each one to reach your goals. You may have many niche ideas in mind, but make sure to evaluate each one and focus on those that will bring you to your goals.

Planning can make or break you in this business. You can only go so far just flying blindly. Making Money Online is not just crap shoot, having a solid Internet Marketing plan can take you a long way.

Internet Marketing Lessons

End of the year is a great time to plan for the future year by reflecting and analyzing what did and did not work in 2008. The biggest successes in Internet Marketing and affiliate marketing come from the failures and those trials and errors can be your best friends. So evaluate, analyze and re-analyze so that you do not waste more time in the future.

The Best in Internet Marketing from 2008

Here are some of the best of the best in Internet marketing for 2008.

Check out the Biggest Collection of RSS Buttons and graphics for your blog at RSS Tutorial. This really is the biggest collection, every kind of design, shape, size and color you can imagine, just right click and Save Image As.

The Biggest Collection of Smileys – Free and very cool.

Courtney Tuttle, one of the most knowledgeable bloggers in Internet Marketing, launched Make Money at the Keyword Academy and here is a must read from that blog How Many Links Does It Take To Get Ranked #1 In Google? that answers one of the most asked questions in Internet Marketing.

Jim Regan, aka, The Net Fool at Make Money Online wrote a really hands-on guide about earning more from your blog Ad Space at: Secret to Earning MORE from Ad Space.

Michael Martine, aka Remarkablogger, wrote a must read, How I Increased My RSS Subscribers to Nearly 900 in Less Than 2 Weeks.

Josh Spaulding always offers excellent, honest and white hat advice at his Internet Marketing Blog. Josh wrote an excellent guide to making money with free reports at How I Made Thousands of Dollars with Free Reports.

Make sure to check out Caroline Middlebrook‘s post How to Balance Income, Promotion and Value to Your Readers.

Another must read is from Yan of Blog for Beginners, 101 Blogging Tips I’ve Learned in 2008.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

What are your goals for 2009? What will you do differently in Internet Marketing for 2009? What were your PR results?

45 Comments

Some A-Hole Stole My Content – How to Fight and Prevent Copyright Infringement

Posted by JR in Blogging, Internet Marketing, Odds and Ends, Webmaster/Website Optimization

Some fool stole several of my posts and reprinted them on his blog. It started with one post and then daily I was noticing he was adding one after the other of my posts on his blog, a total copyright infringement.

The most comical part of this was the fact that his blog is called #1 SEO Consultant, HAH! What a crock!!!!! Any good SEO knows that scrapping content is a lame move, I guess he does not know enough about SEO to write his own guides so he scraps website content from others.

I sent him this email:

This is to advise you that you are using copyrighted and protected material on your website/blog. Your illegal use of the following posts on your site:

List of Stolen Posts URL’s on His Site

at his url is originally from my blog called JR’s Internet Marketing Strategies at http://getinternetmarketingstrategies.com. This is original content and I am the author and copyright holder.Use of copyright protected material without permission is illegal under copyright laws, and copyright infringement. Please remove the plagiarized material immediately. I expect a response within 3 days to this issue. Thank you for your immediate action on this matter.

He responded within 3 hours telling me all my content would be removed and he apologized for the inconvenience.

Content Scrappers, Splogs and Feed Theft

This unfortunately happens time and again. Losers that cannot write their own content will scrap yours and create what are called splogs, blogs full of scrapped content, as well as using it on their websites.

This thief was using a plugin developed by some other dick that actually lets you scrape feeds from other blogs and automatically insert them into your blog, feed theft is rampant on the net and considered copyright infringement. So if you publish a full feed then your whole post just gets injected into any scraper that uses this plug-in.

Some bloggers will republish excerpts of posts with a link back to the original source to continue reading the story and I am okay with this. But to scrape the entire post and republish it can harm the original author’s site.

Two Schools of Thought on Content Theft

Some feel it’s fine as long as their links are retained within the content and they look at it as getting more backlinks. But, many do not feel that way, and there are harmful effects, especially in cases like mine, where there were several full feed posts stolen and it appeared as if he was the author.

Some Harmful Effects of Content Theft

No matter how hard Google tries to credit the original source, the theft site can outrank you with your own content.
It appears as if they are the author of the content and it can damage your reputation, especially with flagship blogs/sites.
It PISSES you off!

Content theft on the Internet is copyright infringement and just as illegal as violating US copyright laws and we all need to be active in putting a stop to it, if we are passive about it, it only encourages more scrappers to continue stealing our stuff.

Basically how you allow your word to be used is upto you, but be sure to make it clear on your websites and blogs.

Protect your Sites and Blogs: Visible Copyright Notices

1. Website Copyright Protection:

Warn thieves and cover yourself by displaying the © Year -Site Name – All Rights Reserved notice on your website. Always place it at th e footer and you can also add it at the end of each your inner website pages that have original written content.
Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can’t do with your work. Choose a license and they provide you with tools and tutorials that let you add license information to your own site. Creative Commons License Options .

2. WordPress Plugins for Copyright Displays

Display Copyright on the Blog

Creative Commons Configurator Plugin
Blog Copyright
Numly Plugin works with the ESN ID (Electronic Serial Numbers) provided by the Electronic Standard Book Number service. This Plugin requests the ESN and adds it to your WordPress blog as an electronic time-stamp for copyright protection.

Display Copyright on the Feed

© Feed – Very detailed and highly configurable, allows you to add your own message, and has digital fingerprint options.
Angsuman’s Feed Copyright Plugin - Automatically add copyright message to feeds, fully configurable.
Simple Feed Copyright

How-To Monitor and Identify Theft

1. Blogs- Watch your trackbacks and Incoming Links. Another reason besides SEO to use internal links on your posts. If the thief left any of your internal links intact within the stolen post, WordPress will send a trackback to your blog, you can find these in your WordPress admin: in comments, on the dashboard – incoming links and often in your spam folder, via a plugin like Akismet Comment SPAM Fighter, which I hope all of you have.

2. Websites and Blogs – Use Google Alerts that will notify you whenever your links or your desired search terms show up on the web. Learn more at my post: Google Alerts a Must Have Tool

3. Websites and Blogs – Use Copyscape – Enter your url and they will scan the web to look for duplicates of your content. Free version is very limited.

4. Search the search engines – This is the hard way, but can work, just enter you web page title in the format: allintitle:”your title”

5. WordPress Plugins to Identify and Prevent Content Theft

AntiLeech by Owen Winkler - This one is classic! It does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site, instead it produces a fake set of gibberish content especially for them that includes links back to your site and sends it only to them. Since these sploggers never read the content they steal it’s perfect. Has lots of options. Use the Website IP finder with this one.
Digital Fingerprint – Detect Content Theft. Injects “digital fingerprints” into your WordPress post feeds then checks the web for evidence that your blog’s content may be illegally used.
© Feed – Very detailed and highly configurable and has digital fingerprint options.

When Content is Stolen and Copyright Infringement Occurs

Finding the Contact Info of the Thief

First look to these sources for website owners name and contact information on their site:

Contact
About
Footer notes
Email links in the source code, with “mailto”
Email forms

If none of above exist use these resources to find contact info.

WHOIS and Reverse IP Search – Provides Hosting Co.
who.is – Lots of comprehensive and detailed info
WHOIS.net
Alexa

Steps to Deal With Copyright Infringement

1. Send Email. Send a firm but polite email to the thief and demand to remove the stolen content and CC their host, like the email I sent above, you can copy it and just insert your information.

2. Contact Their Host. If they do not respond, contact their hosting provider directly and notify them of the copyright violation. Many hosts will close those accounts or work with you to resolve the issues.

3. Cease and Desist. The above usually does the trick, but if you still do not get a response you can start a Cease and Desist Order, that is more official and threatening.

Here are the best sources to learn more about Cease and Desist

Sample Cease and Desist Letter – Allows you to easily create your own
Online Policy Group – Cease and Desist
Wikipedia on Cease and Desist

4. Contact the Search Engines. This is the ultimate step and as per the Digital Millineum Copyright Act, compels search engines and online service providers to work for you to stop the copyright infringement and violation.

Contact Search Engines:

Learn more about copyright infringement at Internet and Copyright.

51 Comments

Internet Marketing – Laughing our Way to Page 1 of SERPS

Posted by JR in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Search Engine Optimization

Happy Holidays everyone! I really wish you guys and your families the very best this holiday season and endless success for all your online endeavors.

I really want to thank you all of you for reading my ramblings and all the support and participation on the blog and I look forward to interacting with you more in the coming year!

Internet Marketing – Link Building Affirmations

Never forget that the cornerstone of Internet Marketing is link building. The main way to Page 1 of SERPS (Search Engine Page Results) is via quality backlinks from other sites with relevant keywords in the anchor text.

Manual Link Building vs. Natural Link Building

Manual link building is basically building links via manual efforts, such as with, articles, reciprocal linking, directories, blog comments etc, as opposed to natural links when other’s link to your content and web pages on their own.

It looks like the scrooges have spoken, and manual link building doesn’t work! HA HA!! Meanwhile I am LMAO all the way to page 1 of SERPS!

Lately I am seeing posts in the blogosphere that manual link building is dead, and those links are worthless, and these links don’t work anymore and that it’s a waste of time to build links manually, blah, blah, blah.

Well, I beg to differ, because several of my niche sites sit high in SERPS, a few on page 1 for their keywords and this blog is on page 2 with over 52,000,000 competition primarily from manual link building.

Now, I do get lots of link luv for this blog and that really helps, and I am not saying those natural links aren’t fantastic and wonderful, but what I am saying is that you can rise to page 1 of SERPS with manual link building only and sometimes manual link building is the only and best option for Internet marketing!

The Difference Between Blogs/Flagships and Niche-Affiliate Sites

Often times, a flagship blog like this one will get a good share of natural backlink link luv from the blog community, since there is a lot of interaction with other bloggers and the blog model usually brings about more opportunities for natural link building overall, but in most cases this alone is not enough to rank page 1 anyway.

And, when it comes to affiliate marketing websites, or small niche sites, natural link building can be elusive, unless your Laptop Mag or CNET. So, you are not left with many other options but manual link building, such as with articles, forums, blog comments and directories.

And, yes those links still work!!!

I have several niche sites that are sitting high in SERPS, with all manual link building and not one natural link. And, yes this includes directories, because depending on the directory, those links do still work, contrary to the hype. And, in reality all I really care about is results as they are always the proof of what works and what doesn’t!

Manual Link Building Time Strategy:

40% – Article Marketing
25% - Reciprocal Link Exchange/Blogroll (home page & within content links)
25% - Social Bookmark Links & Forum Sig links & Blog comment links
10% - Directories – 2 Free Directory Submission Softwares

Plus some random links, such as press releases and Squidoo lenses as listed in 13 Ways to Link Building.

In conclusion, just build links everyday! Use your anchor text and get all the links you can get, including some of those no-follows, that Google ignores but Yahoo, MSN and Live still follow and those search engines do bring website traffic as well.

And, don’t worry about the scrooges of Internet Marketing, they are probably just lazy, and while they are waiting for those natural links, and bitching about what doesn’t work, we’ll be building links and laughing our way to page 1!!

36 Comments

Internet Marketing: SERP Rank Experiment Results

Posted by JR in Affiliate Marketing, Build a Niche Store - BANS, Google, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Webmaster/Website Optimization

One thing is certain, with Internet Marketing something is always changing and the Google SERPS are unpredictable. It is important to stay on top of changes and roll with the punches.

Some of you may have heard of recent issues that thousands of affiliates have had with BANS (Build A Niche Store) sites and similar affiliate marketing websites getting de-indexed completely or massively losing SERP position. There was speculation that lack of original written content was the main reason for this. And for many I know this was true. Time and again Internet marketers do not understand the value of original website content in affiliate marketing.

Many affiliates literally just slap up affiliate sites, whether it’s BANS or Amazon, or other such sites with nothing but affiliate link pages and without any original content. As I have said before in The Importance of Quality Content, this is a really bad strategy and will kill your chances of ranking in the Google SERPS, if you even get indexed at all.

I too was hit with this issue on two BANS sites and it was important for me to correct these issues quickly as my BANS sites make money regularly and the best traffic comes from the search engines, especially Google.

These two sites rose steadily in the SERPS when first launched with regular link building and on-site SEO. A while ago, the two sites began dipping in and out of their high SERP positions on a regular basis, one day they were there, then they were gone. Then suddenly a few weeks ago the home pages were de-indexed all together and only some content pages showed up in SERPS for their keywords, an Internet marketing nightmare! So, I began to do some experimenting, which is your best friend in Internet marketing.

SERP Experiment

First, I added more content, though I knew this probably had nothing to do with the content since both sites have more content pages than auction/affiliate link pages and I add content on a regular basis, but I wanted to eliminate all possible factors.

Second, I built up more links via article marketing, some new forum postings and do-follow blog comments, to see if that would resolve the issues. Neither of those tests did anything to get my sites back in the SERPS.

I then I decided to do a test with the home page.

1. I removed the eBay auction listings (affiliate links) that I had listed below the welcome messages on the sites.

2. I added 2 more paragraphs of wording to the welcome message and a related image with the keywords in the alt tags and some internal links to relevant pages for the keywords that came up within the content of the welcome message.

Experiment Results – Exactly 4 days later:

Site #1 home page appeared on page 1 of SERPS without quotes and has been there for over 2 weeks, holding steady.

Site #2 home page appeared on page 2 of SERPS (higher than it was originally) without quotes and has been there for 2 weeks as well (Page 2 is not surprising since there are some big guns on page 1 that I am currently working to out rank).

Since I had eliminated all other factors the lesson here is obvious, affiliate links on the home page affect SERP position for affiliate sites.

While I have heard this before, it never had affected me until recently and so Google is obviously hitting hard not only on affiliate sites with little or no content but also on those sites that have affiliate links on the home page.

This just proves how important experimentation in Internet marketing really is. While many panic and follow hype instead of using common sense, checking results and testing.

A great example of this is the widespread and ongoing inaccurate hype about duplicate content and how it still manages to be a leading and misleading focus on many forum threads because people just do not check things out for themselves and therefore limit their success online.

About BANS

Contrary to what some haters in the Internet marketing world may say, BANS (Build a Niche Store) is not at fault, in fact, BANS is regularly making lots of money for many affiliates who optimize their sites correctly and bring in regular search engine traffic and now thanks to this experiment I am back on that track.

BANS is really great, because it is cheap and allows anyone without any coding knowledge to build unlimited numbers of great money making websites centered around the eBay affiliate program, as well as any affiliate programs of their choice. One of the best things about eBAy is they have over 10,000 products and so the possibilities and keywords are endless.

Many of the BANS bashers never take the time to actually do the work required for success, instead they think they can use the software to quickly put up some sites that are nothing but mirrors of eBay and start raking in big bucks overnight. Sorry, nothing is that easy in Internet marketing and making money online takes more effort than just buying software.

I highly recommend BANS and you can see my full review with screenshots at: Review of Build a Niche Store or Check out the BANS official Website.

What do you guys think? Have you been affected by recent SERP changes? Do you add content regularly to your affiliate sites?

48 Comments

15 Great WordPress Plug-Ins: SEO, Subscribers, Bounce Rate and More

Posted by JR in Blogging, Essential Marketing Lists, Search Engine Optimization

I updated to WP 2.7 and had nothing but problems. The most important of which was the NoFollow Free plug-in stopped working and all my comments went No-Follow. I went to the forums and saw that many were having worse problems than me. I have since gone back to 2.6 until the bugs are worked out.

The good news is that developer is working on the 2.7 upgrade of that plug-in now.

Anyway, I suggest you guys think before your upgrade, I am not saying that it’s bad, I just wish I had waited for everyone to catch up and for them to work out the bugs, instead of jumping on it and wasting 3 days trying to deal with the issues, not to mention the stress!

A BIG thanks to Hostgator for helping me to restore the blog to where it was, as I said they are the best website host!

Here is my list of must have WordPress plug-ins for SEO, visitors, subscribers and for admin user friendliness.

Search Engine Optimization Plug-Ins

1. All-In-One SEO Pack – A must have for optimizing your post pages for relevant keywords. This will give you the Meta Tags module for customizing meta tags for every post, as discussed in Website Traffic that Converts.

Make sure to check the box – Overwrite Titles – in the settings of the plug-in. This will ensure that your site wide Title and description does not automatically get inserted into all your posts. Then use the All-In-One SEO module that will appear below each post so you can customize the Title Tags, Description and keywords of the Meta Tag.

It also provides some other great features. One, is if you have your keywords in your blog title you can set the plug-in to automatically have all your posts and blog pages have the format: Post Title | Blog Title in the Title/Meta Tag. This really helps for on-site SEO.

If you don’t have your keywords in the blog title, you can just enter you blog keywords instead: Post Title | Keywords

2. SEO Smart Links – Internal link building plug-in. It is very important to have a comprehensive deep internal link building strategy on all your blog pages, as discussed in Internal Link Building for On-Site SEO. Automatically inserts your desired url’s with related keywords of your choosing within your blog posts.

3. Google XML Sitemaps – Google says: “Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover.”

Google needs that sitemap in an XMl format and this plug-in creates it for you, and has lots of customization settings.

4. Home Page Excerpts – For those that want to avoid the duplicate content penalty and still have their entire posts on the home page.

It is much more search engine friendly to have excerpts of your posts on the home page rather than your recent post in its entirety as some bloggers have. But, if you must this plug-in makes blogs that use full posts on the homepage more search engine friendly. It also gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

The Google duplicate content penalty applies here and that is why the content of your posts should be displayed fully in one location only, and that is the single post page. The Homepage Excerpts plug-in can be used to reduce this duplicate content while keeping full posts on the homepage.

5. Excerpt Editor - This one allows for a lot more customization of excerpts all over the blog and provides a convenient place for creating and editing excerpts. It can also add custom excerpts for blog pages, which is only possible with a plug-in.

Append excerpts from the most recent posts or from the sub-pages to all Posts and/or Pages.
Set pages and posts that you want to eliminate from showing excerpts
Replace the content with excerpts on the Home page, all archive pages and/or all tags pages.
Set number of words in excerpts & customize the actual excerpt manually, lots more…

6. Google Positioner – Track your blog for your keywords in Google.

Track relevant keywords that you want to rank for with a rising curve
Track your rank for those keywords
Add regional settings
Add competitors to compare, lots more…

Visitor Retention and Bounce Rate Plug-Ins

7. Dagon Sitemap Generator – Sitemap for your visitors and NOT for Google. It is always good to have a sitemap on your websites for visitors to have another option for navigating through your content. This is especially crucial for blogs since navigation can be difficult.

This is a great sitemap generator and allows for lots of customization, you can see mine at here. Just create your sitemap and then link to it on your blog, I have mine as a page in the top nav bar.

Support for multi-level categories and pages
Category/page exclusion
Multiple-page generation with navigation
Customize listing order
Show comment counts and/or post dates, much more…

8. Similar Posts – Another navigation and SEO must have. Automatically pulls your related posts based on current post content and lists them at the bottom of each post. Engages visitors to stay longer and provides a deep linked blog, which Google loves. Also, allows you to fully customize how posts are generated, like based on tags, categories, keywords etc…

9. Collapsing Categories – This one is great and really improves the navigation and accessibility to your posts. Forms a collapsable set of post links in the sidebar under their respective categories, allows you to select the icon and order of post listings, allows you add RSS link for categories and much more.

When a visitor clicks on the icon the category will collapse and show all blog posts within that category, as opposed to the WordPress default that takes the visitor to a page of excerpts when they click on a category and often does not list ever post.

Increase Subscriber Count Plug-Ins

10. FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plug-in redirects ALL possible ways that readers can subscribe to your blog and sends them to your Feedburner count, can cause a significant count increase for that Feedburner subscriber widget and allows you to track every possible subscriber.

11. What Would Seth Godin Do – Nifty plug-in that inserts a fully customizable message based on a cookie only to first time visitors to your blog asking them to subscribe or do whatever you want.

12. Comment Relish – This plug-in can help increase your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘thank you’ message to users when they first comment on your blog. Fully customizable message, where you can solicit, beg and bribe a subscription from that commenter

Admin Plug-Ins

13. Better Comments Manager – Do you hate having to go to each of your posts to reply to your readers comments? I do!!

This one allows you to reply to your comments from within admin panel without having to visit the site. Plus many other admin user-friendly features, for your admin comments section. Check it out at the link and see screenshots and all the great features.

14. Broken Link Checker – Checks your blog for broken links and notifies you in the dashboard. Very user-friendly and has many settings for personalized options.

15. WordPress Data Backup - Truly a must have, DON’T wait till you get hacked or lose your content some way, believe me you don’t want to live with the regret!

This plug-in has many options for delivery of your backup file and how often you want back up done. I have mine set to daily, because you never know when you will lose your data!

What are your favorite plug-ins?

47 Comments

Website Traffic that Converts – Are You Missing Out?

Posted by JR in Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Site Traffic, Webmaster/Website Optimization

What makes the best website traffic? Well, as far as I am concerned and I’m sure you’ll agree, it is website traffic that performs the action on my website that I intend it

too. Whether it is to buy something from my affiliate marketing niche sites, click on Adsense, to subscribe to a blog or whatever action the web

master intends that will lead to us making money. So, the best website traffic is traffic that converts.

Not all Website Traffic is Equal

If I have 5,000 unique visitors a day, and they do not perform any of the intended actions that I want them to then this is totally worthless website traffic, would you not agree?

Since the social, Web 2.0 revolution on the net there has been a craze with webmasters clammering to get a chunk of social traffic. Page 1 of Digg is often considered the holy grail of website traffic, but in reality Digg and other such popular social site traffic can be pretty worthless. You may get lucky occasionally but it’s nothing to rely on long term.

The reality is that social traffic hardly ever buys anything, subscribes or performs any other actions that will lead to you making money, which is why we are all here right?

Social traffic can be great as far as “numbers of website traffic” and getting more website traffic, becoming famous, but when it comes to converting website traffic it is often a big fat vacuum. Unless your goal is to become the next Tech Crunch, social traffic is not the best for making money online.

Look at your analytics and analyze what website traffic is making you money, I guarantee it won’t be social traffic. Of all my niche sites and Squidoo lenses, social website traffic has made me too little to mention! In fact, I recently launched a ringtones blog, and I got 1500 uniques from Stumble in one day, how many sales? ZERO!!!! A perfect example of how worthless that traffic is.

There are probably many reasons for this, first and foremost of which is the fact that social traffic is not well targeted, many of them are just browsing or bored, they are not performing an intentional search to solve a problem, a basic principle of any kind of marketing is that in order to get sales there must be a consumer with a problem and someone who provides a solution and THAT will lead to the desired action. Same with Internet marketing.

Also, the same concept applies to the website traffic from article marketing and blog comments where you may get traffic and even some who take the action you desire but it’s never a consistent nor a reliable stream of well converting website traffic. While blog comments certainly are good for networking and getting known for your flagship blogs, you constantly have to comment on blogs to get even a little bit of traffic so it is not “passive” traffic.

The main purpose of article marketing, social bookmarking and blog comments is NOT website traffic but link building for BACKLINKS and those backlinks lead to higher to Page One of SERPS for your sites keywords and THAT leads to converting website traffic.

I am not including Internet forum participation here, because there you will find targeted traffic that is looking for solutions and so that traffic often converts very well.

Best Source of Website Traffic that Converts

The best source of long term, stable converting website traffic are the search engines and specifically Google, since they dominate that arena.

1. Website traffic from the search engines is the best converting traffic because it is truly targeted. When someone sits down to search for something on the net, they are purposely looking to solve a specific problem, and they are much more likely to perform an action on your website than any one else.

2. Search engine traffic is all day everyday, 24/7, unlimited possibilities. While social traffic is temporary and gets buried over with newly submitted content, sitting on Page One of SERPS is far more stable. It may take time to get to Page One, but once you are there your site will get exposure to that targeted website traffic with little maintenance.

I am not saying that you should not test every possible traffic source for your niche, and especially when your site is new and you are working on ranking high in the SERPS, you should get all the traffic you can get. What I am saying is that search engine website traffic should always be the main end goal of any online campaign and it is the best converting website traffic.

Website Traffic with SERP Domination

Many webmasters and bloggers work hard to get their home page on Page One of SERPS by utilizing basic Search Engine Optimization. They do all the requisite tasks such as, on-site SEO, link building, keyword research and optimization etc… But, they completely ignore the inner pages of their websites and/or blog posts. This is a complete waste of perfectly good search engine website traffic. This is especially true for bloggers.

Time and again I see blog posts that are obviously just randomly picked titles without any keyword research when there is ALWAYS a good keyword that can be found for ANY subject. So the end result is that your home page may sit high in SERPS, but all your other pages are just randomly floating somewhere around the web missing out on a ton of good targeted website traffic and all for the price of ten minutes or less of research.

Also remember that as your home PR (page rank) increases it will bleed that PR to your inner pages. This blog is a PR3, but several of the earlier blog posts are PR1 and PR2 and those post titles were carefully keyword researched and now they sit on several Page One’s in Google for their keywords and continuously bring targeted website traffic to this blog. Google will spread the authority you’ve earned from your home page to inner pages placing you higher all over the SERPS, for all your keywords and this SERP domination is what brings more and more targeted, converting website traffic. And the absolute same applies to static website’s inner pages.

Keyword Research for Inner Pages

Use SEO Book Free Keyword Suggestion Tool and/or Google Keyword Tool to look for good keywords for your inner pages, I look for at least 30 searches a day, but the more the better.
Search allintitle:”your keywords” in Google to evaluate the competition. I usually choose lower competition keywords for inner pages, under 20,000.

As always you want to have the most possible searches with the least amount of competition.

3 Keyword Optimization Essentials for SERP Domination:

Here are the most important aspects of optimizing each and everyone of your website pages and blog posts for the SERPS.

1. On Page Title vs. Meta Title

On Page Title is the one the visitor sees on your page, such as the title of the blog post. The Meta Title is the title in the Meta Tags that the search engines will look to for your SERP placement. So, you can make the title the visitor sees longer and more detailed if you wish, while the Meta title can be shortened to comply with Meta Tag character standards and to zone in on keywords, but make sure it is still attractive to get the click from searchers.

Both titles should have your keywords in them
The Meta Title should have the keywords listed first or as close to the beginning of the tag as possible.
The On Page Title should be the header on your website inner page with the <h1> tags. In WordPress this is automatic.

If you don’t have it, you really need to get the All-In-One SEO Pack plug-in for WordPress. This will give you the Meta Tags module for customizing meta tags for every post and it is really a must have for WordPress. It also provides some other important features for SEO on WP blogs.

2. Keyword Density

Long posts and website pages are the best for the SERPS and getting more website traffic, they allow the most room for keyword density and they also give the edge of lots of content for Google.

5% Keyword density per post/page, especially first couple of sentences, middle and ending paragraph.
Bold the keywords a few times and especially in the last couple of sentences.
Use <h2> and <h3> tags for the paragraph headers within content using your keyword, as I did in this post. Example: <h2>Keyword – Paragraph Header</h2>

3. Permalinks

The permalink must have your keywords in it. So, if my keywords are “how-to bake”, then my permalink for the blog post page or website page would be: htttp://www.recipes.com/how-to-bake-cake. That’s it, nothing else, if you add the whole title you just confuse Google as to what you want to rank for.

Some website software, and WordPress will automatically add the entire title of your post/page into the permalink so, you must edit this. All extra words except for the keywords are UNNECESSARY and can be a detterent to ranking well in the SERPS.

Permalinks and WordPress

With WordPress you have to make sure to select the proper permalink structure. By default WordPress will create permalinks for posts using the post number, like this: http://getinternetmarketingstrategies.com/?p=123. This does nothing for you in the SERPS.

How to Change Permalink Structure in WP:

From your Admin Dashboard go to Settings and then Permalinks. From there either choose Month and Name OR if you do not want to date your posts you can choose Custom Structure and then enter /%postname%/ into the box. This way you will have the optimal setting of http://www.yourdomain.com/posttitle

Editing Permalinks on a Post by Post Basis:

When you are writing posts from the editor after you enter the title the permalink will be formed automatically, click edit and get rid of everything but the keywords with the dashes in between each word.

Performing these steps is really important for SERP rankings and getting website traffic from a multitude of keyword sources to get those visitors to your sites. Also, please see 6-Step Checklist for On-Site SEO for more techniques for keyword optimization for inner pages, such as Alt Tags for images.

What do you guys think? Do you research each page and post? If not, why?

33 Comments

Link Building – 7 More Do-Follow Social Sites

Posted by JR in Essential Marketing Lists, Link Building, Search Engine Optimization, Social/Web 2.0 Marketing, Website Promotion

Hello everyone, hope all is well, sorry for no posts in a few days, have not been feeling well, I think it’s the sudden cold up here in the California mountains where I live. Will have our first snow on Monday, should be snowed in for about three days …gotta love it.

Here are 7 more Do-Follow social sites for you link building efforts, and a couple of no-follows worth checking out. I have added these to the master list of 65+ Social Bookmark Sites.

Qassia – Do-Follow. PR5. This one is really great, 100% do-follow. At Qassia you have to add articles or snippets of content, they call “Intel” on any topic and at the end of each of those you get a do-follow backlink to the site of your choice. You can add your pre-published articles or original stuff and earn Qassia dollars. The content can even be a couple of paragraphs, nothing fancy is required.

Also, you can “Screen Intel” on member’s articles with a simple rating system and earn Qassia dollars that are used to make your content rank higher and get more link juice.

In the end you can distribute your Qassia dollars between all your sites depending on those websites or blogs you may want more link juice.

Megite – Do-Follow and easy submission.

Spotback – Do-Follow. PR5 – Spotback has cool widgets to add to your blogs and websites for rating your content, simple little star boxes (see mine at the end of the post). Readers do not have to leave your blog, once they rate it, it automatically goes to Spotback, COOL!! Also mouse over it and checkout how you can add tags without leaving the blog. Spotback has several options for widgets, as well as a WordPress plug-in.

Launch Feed – Do-Follow. PR4, no anchor text, just URL. This one only allows you to submit your site once, so you can pick home page or a subpage.

Go Zoof - Do-Follow - PR4 – This is one is good and is 100% do-follow.

Really Awesome People – Do Follow. PR2 @ $5 per link with your own custom personal page. This is Jim Kukral’s creation, not sure if it’s worth $5 but check it out and decide for yourselves.

No Follow Social Sites Worth Considering

Blogengage – No-Follow - PR3 – Blogengage is new but has some good traffic. Brian, the webmaster has also just added Adsense revenue sharing program, I think it’s 50/50. This one is easy submit with the browser bookmark button.

Wobblog – No Follow, but lots of traffic there, can give good exposure for your websites and blogs.

Kaboodle – No Follow. PR6. Shopping site links, lots of members, especially female, good traffic!

Earners Club – No Follow – IM/AM content only, still PR0 it’s fairly new but has some good traffic, brought me a few visitors to this blog.

2 Considerations for No-Follow Social Sites

1. Traffic – Some of them can bring lots of traffic like Stumble and Reddit and others are just a waste of time. This is something you have to determine on your own by testing, because some niches do really well on social sites and some just don’t!

2. Yahoo and MSN ignore the no-follow tag and so they are still worthwhile for backlinks with those search engines.

As a rule, I always submit to do-follow social sites for the links, but the no-follow sites I usually submit to on a case-by-case basis after some testing.

Happy Link Building!

17 Comments

THE Tip to Staying Organized in Internet Marketing

Posted by JR in Internet Marketing, Motivation & Success, Webmaster/Website Optimization

I figured I will post light this Saturday and offer a big piece of advice that has saved me along the Internet marketing journey. USE YOUR BOOKMARKS!!

Weather you are using Internet Explorer or Firefox both browsers give you the greatest invention since ice cream…Bookmarks!

I will tell you that you should always keep very organized bookmarks for the simple reason that IT WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE!

The reason is that there is tons of information that you are and will be coming across as you work, from helpful blog posts, guides, tools, resources, etc…, the possibilities are endless, and if you don’t keep organized bookmarks as you go, you will be scrambling and pulling your hair out when you want to go back and find something.

It really does give a lot of peace of mind to know that the stuff is there and well organized, especially with all we have on our plates in this biz and because I am sure that most of us do not have personal assistants

The browsers really make it so easy to bookmark with drag and drop capability that there is no excuse not to. Some of you may be just clicking bookmark for everything, but, the problem is that you then just have a long list, without any order, this leaves you having to look through a possibly massive list…ugh!

What I do is I have folders in my bookmark tab that are titled for specific subjects and then I just drop relates links into those folders

Just a few that I have are:

Active Affiliate Programs (for easy check of $$$$ )
Site Launch Submissions (list all tasks/submits for a new launch)
Forums
Add URL
Products Maybe to Promote
Content Research (folder for each of my sites)
Word Press Stuff – Plug-Ins
Website Promotion/Traffic Sources
Tools and Checkers
Must Reads

and many more…

How and what you organize is totally a personal thing, but just make sure that you do, because believe me when you are working and very busy, you will come across things you want to save for later, and resources you currently use and you will want to have these things easily categorized and accessible, IT WILL SAVE YOUR SANITY!!

By the way, I just added 1GB of memory to my PC and WOW, $25 on Amazon for the module, did it myself took 5 minutes, I feel like I was released after serving 10 years in a tiny cell, my PC is flyiiiing without ANY limits. If you have low memory I highly recommend it!!

What do you guys think? Do you keep bookmarks? Any tips for staying organized?

26 Comments

Internet Marketing Bloggers Doin It Right

Posted by JR in Odds and Ends

Here are some great bloggers in the Internet marketing and blogging arenas that offer useful and valuable content.

It seems that with some bloggers the more Internet Marketing “guru” they become, the less value they provide. In my opinion the main point of blogging is to provide value to your readers within your niche, whether it’s Internet marketing, MMO or purple dog leashes, content is the central focal point of blogs, so if there is no value a high subscriber count does not a great blog make.

I really don’t give a sh-t how many subscribers you got, what I am interested in is valuable content and I think that many new bloggers, those without thousands of readers offer a lot of value and should not be ignored, in fact it is the new bloggers that often try harder and deliver a lot more than their “guru” counterparts. What do you guys think?

Anyway, onto the bloggers that do it right…

Stephan Miller of Stephan Miller Blog offers extreme value on his Internet marketing blog and has been giving me lots of link love around the social sphere, thank you for that Stephan!

Like me, Stephan loves lists, make sure to check out one of the great lists he created on his Digital Products Review Site: How to Get Traffic to a Blog – 111 Ways to Promote Your Blog

Griz from Make Money for Beginners wrote two great posts about Adsense Optimization Tips for Adsense and I just Doubled My Income -Adsense Smart Pricing, both are very hands-on and useful posts.

Jason, The University Kid at Entrepreneur Blog is giving away a very good free e-book on flipping websites, that is really unique, get your free download here Make Money Dynamo.

Yan from Thou Shall Blog offers truly insightful and very comprehensive blogging tips and it is a pleasure to read his blog because there is always something new to learn and his interaction with his readers in comments is something to model. Make sure to read A-Z Blogging Guide for Beginners.

And, Peter Lee from Work From Home Business Blog, is fantastic at networking with other bloggers and webmasters for mutual success and interacting with his readers. The content is fresh, make sure to check out his post 200 + Passive Income Resources, Tips and Home Ideas. Oh and contact him and he’ll gladly exchange Technorati faves with you.

Tay from Super Blogging Tips provides a very cool strategy on link bait at: Want Traffic Call John Chow a Bad Blogger and don’t miss Decrease Your Posting Frequency, a sound and useful outlook for bloggers, that I completely agree with opposed to the fanatical daily posting strategy that some adhere to, what’s the prob with letting a post live a little? Tay also understands the value of link luv and spreads it around!

Oh and a little congrats to myself for making the 45n5 Top 100 MMO blogs from Digital Product Reporter, 45n5′s top 100 MMO blogs. By the way, this type of list is a great link bait and traffic generator, people really love those lists and they can be created for any niche/blog topic, you can check out how they do it at Create Your Own Top 100 List.

45 Comments

Increase Web Site Traffic – 8 Tips to Using Forums Effectively

Posted by JR in Web Site Traffic, Website Promotion

Happy Thanksgiving everybody! I hope everyone had a great day and I am sure we all have somethings/someones to be thankful for!!

Here is a sign that I need a vacation, and probably a lobotomy, I was tired and I cooked today (maybe an excuse) but tonight at my dinner, there were times as I was talking that I found myself thinking about wether I was using keywords enough in my sentences, LOSER !! Anyway, on to better things…

As a follow up to my post 144 Do-Follow Forums, I wanted to offer some guidelines and tips to using forums effectively, to increase web site traffic, blog traffic and of course get the backlinks!

1. Read the TOS/Forum Rules and/or Posting Guidelines – Make sure to get to know the rules before you post because you don’t want to get banned! Many forums have different and specific rules. Usually you can find these rules in the forum index itself, as one of the first threads.

2. DO NOT SPAM - This is very important, do not write posts about your products and blatant advertising, not only will this get you banned, it’s also the fastest way to turn off the other members and NOT to increase web site traffic. People go to forums to look for information and answers to their questions, not to read ads.

3. Use Good Anchor Text for Signature Links –

Forums are great for website promotion and do-follow backlinks from your signature links. Make sure they are SEO friendly anchors that contain your keywords

BUT

Also make them provocative to get the click! For example, the anchor “Dog Food” may have your keywords, but the anchor “Top 10 Dog Foods” is much more click friendly.

4. Be an authority – Besides the benefit of do-follow backlinks, forums can be one of the greatest and quickest ways to increase web site traffic and this is traffic that is very targeted, as long as you’re in a forum relevant to your niche. You want the forum members to click on your signature links and the best way to make that happen is to respond to posts like an authority in your niche.

Be detailed, don’t just give one word answers, try to offer more valuable and comprehensive replies.
If there is a “newbie” section post there, newbies can be your greatest source of traffic.
Know what you’re talking about.
Check your typos and missing words. I for one hate a post filled with errors and broken English and I won’t bother to read it.

5. Many forums offer “Article threads” or “Guide Threads” or some such thing. This is where you can post your own informative guides, how-to’s, content etc. Make sure to use an intriguing title for these posts to get people’s attention. These posts are a great way to show off your knowledge and authority and deliver a click to your sig links, which of course means an increase in web site traffic for you!

6. Watch your reputation. Many forums use a “reputation” system that lets other members tag you with points when you deliver great posts, this is a good way to build authority.

7. Participate in the “Introduce Yourself” section. Many forums have a thread to introduce new members. Be active there, introduce yourself in detail and welcome others.

8. Check for new posts and participate often. The more you participate the more exposure you get to increase web site traffic AND the more backlinks you generate, since each page you post to counts as a backlink!

What works for you in forums? What tips can you offer for the best forum practices? Anyone have any no-no’s to share?

46 Comments

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