Written on November 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 07:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Blogs, forums and.edu and.gov Links
This reader Quick Tip was submitted by Moshe Morris from SEM Basics.
Oftentimes links from sites with the.edu and.gov extention can be particularly helpful when trying to rank well in the search engines. Here, then, is a quick and easy way to find some (potentially) high quality.edu and.gov links. Go to google and search do one of the following searches:
“keyword” forum site:.edu
“keyword” blog site:.edu
“keyword” forum site:.gov
“keyword” blog site:.gov
For instance, if you wanted to find blogs and/or forums which relate to art simply substitute the word art for “keyword”. These searches will turn up a list of blogs and forums which are relate to keyword. All you have to do is get involved with these blogs and forums and you can start to find some quality backlinks pointing at your site. What’s more, these links may send people to your site directly in and of themselves. It’s a win-win situation.
Written on November 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 02:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Technorati adds Link Count Widget
A couple of days back Technorati released a new widget that counts the number of links pointing at any given blog post.
It’s called the Link Count Widget.
So at the end of a post you’ll get a little link and logo like this:
This is useful in that it gives readers (and you) a quick way to track the conversation that bounces off your posts. I’m sure it’ll also stroke a few egos and conversely leave a few bloggers feeling a little left out by the lack of numbers that the widget reports.
Written on November 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 11:11 am by Darren Rowse
Who is competing against you for your keywords
This reader Quick Tip was submitted by Moshe Morris from SEM Basics.
Ultimately speaking, what determines if a keyword is difficult or hard to ran in the major search engiens is the quality of your competition. You can compete against every site in the internet, but if none of them are well optimized for that keyword then you can (most likely) easily outrank them. As such, it is important to know how to analyze the quality of competition for any particular keyword.
In order to determine the quality of competition for a particular keyword you will first need to do a search for that keyword on Google, Yahoo or MSN. You will then want to analyze the top 5 - 10 results in the search engines for the following factors such as:
- The quantity and quality of backlinks
- PageRank
- The age of the site
- The number of times the site is listed on del.icio.us, technorati, DMOZ, Bloglines, Wikipedia, and the Yahoo Directory
Three helpful tools for keyword research:
- SEO For Firefox by SEOBook
- PageStrength Tool by SEOMoz.org
- SEO Elite
Written on November 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 06:11 am by Darren Rowse
How many sites compete for a keyword (and why you want to know)
This reader Quick Tip was submitted by Moshe Morris from SEM Basics. Moshe has submitted 3 tips to this series - I’ll run the next two later today as they are all SEO related.
In SEO it is extremely helpful to know how many sites you are actually competing against for a particular keyword, for this us helps determine how diffiicult it will be to rank well in the major search engiens for that keyword. Currently, the best way of determining the number of sites that you actually compete against is to run an intitle/inanchor search on Google. This search tells you how many sites include a keyword both in the Title Tag of their webpage and the anchor text of a link which points to that page.
Placing ones keywords in the title tag and anchor text are two of the most important strategies in SEO. Knowing how many sites do this for a particular keyword indicates how many sites are being optimized for that keyword, thus indicating the number of sites you are competing against.
To perform a intitle/inanchor search for an individual keyword go to Google and type in: intitle:”keyword-phrase” inanchor:”keyword-phrase”. To perform this search for a large number of keywords use Keyword Elite (currently, Keyword Elite is the only program which offers this option, to the best of my knowledge).
Written on November 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 02:11 am by Darren Rowse
How to Choose Affiliate Programs for Your Blog
Another task that is worth doing in order to prepare your blogs for the end of the year is fine tuning your affiliate programs.
Affiliate programs are quite a different way of monetizing your blog than advertising and while there are some similar principles that come into play when optimizing them they also take a different mindset to fully realize their potential.
The beauty of affiliate programs is that they have the potential to pay a lot more than most advertising programs (if you choose the right product) - the challenge is that you only earn money from them IF your reader actually takes an action (usually when they buy the product).
Choosing Affiliate Programs
There are literally hundreds of thousands of products and services that you can promote with affiliate programs on your blog. When you consider the array of products that Amazon has available (just one of many affiliate programs you can use) it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the choice. How do you make the decision what to promote? Here’s a few things to look out for:
Contextual Affiliate Products - one of the lessons you can learn by the major success of contextual advertising programs like AdSense is that it is much easier to get people to take action when the ad/link for the product relates strongly to the context/content around it.
As a result - when choosing which affiliate product and program to use on your blog the first think you need to think about is the topic that you’re writing about. Ask yourself some questions like”
- What is my topic?
- What do people come to my blog looking for?
- What is the intent of my readers when they are on my blog?
- What types of products would my readers naturally be interested in buying?
As you begin to answer these questions you should get a feel for the type of opportunities that there are for affiliate programs.
Keep in mind that not all topics work well with affiliate programs and that it might be that they just are not right for your blog. Don’t fall into the temptation of running them just for the sake of it - it might be that you’d get a better conversion by dedicating the space on your blog to advertising programs rather than affiliate programs.
Quality - the affiliate space is one that is unfortunately full not only of legitimate and quality programs and products - but also quite a lot of rubbish.
One question to ask yourself when looking at options is:
‘what impact will promoting this product have upon my blog’s reputation?’
Whether you like it or not - the things that you promote on your blog say something to your readers about who you are. If you link to and promote low grade rubbish this can have an impact upon you.
This applies on a number of fronts:
- the products you link to (are they quality?)
- the quality of the site you link to (are they cheap and nasty sites?)
- how you link to them (ie the words you use in your link and whether you actually recommend it or not)
- the programs behind the products (ie I use Amazon on a lot of my sites because they have a good brand that is trusted by many readers)
Reader Location - one factor to keep in mind when choosing an affiliate program is the locality of your readers. This is an issue particularly if you have a site with a lot of traffic from a particular location.
For example - one of the downsides of Amazon is that they do not ship electronics internationally. This is a problem if you have a gadget site with a large readership from Australia for instance and it might be worth looking for a more localized affiliate program.
Tangible Products - if you’re thinking of optimizing your blog for Christmas you’ll have much more success in promoting actual physical products than some other types of affiliate products (such as e-books). While e-books can be quite good programs to promote - they are not really Christmassy.
Affiliate Programs
I’ve written on a few affiliate programs that you might want to check out at:
Tomorrow I’ll write more on how to improve your affiliate programs performance.
This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.
Written on November 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 12:11 am by Darren Rowse
Meeting Bloggers
I can’t believe how fast this last week has gone. I’m only here in Toronto for another two days (and then have another day sitting on a plane).
After a very long week of b5 meetings with Jeremy and Mark, VCs and other Toronto based web start ups we took yesterday off to relax. After a long sleep in I spent a couple of hours with BJ Wong (Belle) from Working Blogger and Adventures in Net Marketing (among other blogs). Belle’s reflections of our lunch are at Lunch with Darren.
Belle and I have been working together on a couple of blogs for a while now and it was fantastic to finally meet her in person.
It is amazing to meet bloggers like Belle in person. This past week I must have met 10 or so bloggers that I regularly read and on each occasion I’ve found them to be very similar to the way I had imagined them to be.
I often hear friends tell me that people pretend to be someone that they’re not online - but in 99% of cases where I’ve met bloggers the person ends up being very similar to their online persona.
Anyway - today I get to test the theory again when I meet Aaron - something I’m looking forward to!
Written on November 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 08:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Blog your Passion
Brian Lee from Genius Types sent in the following reader ‘quick tip’.
Blog what you are passionate about. Even if your area of interest is not in Google’s top 100 searches, you will ultimately be more successful when you write from your heart.
A blog is the platform of choice for personal expression in the digital age. The further you get form expressing yourself, the harder it will be to generate excitement. People can sense when you are being insincere. Trust in yourself and write from within.
The beauty of the internet is that it allows people with similar interests (no matter how obscure) to find each other. If your passion is collecting guitar picks, blog about it! Your excitement will attract others and may even help some to discover your hobby.
Blogging gives you and I an opportunity that we may not have had otherwise: to interact with people every day about the things we are passionate about.
Written on November 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 11:11 am by Darren Rowse
Promoting Your Blog With a Series and Articles
This Reader ‘Quick Tip’ was sent in by Michael Moore from Price of Diamonds.
The bottom line is that we all want more people to visit our blog. One successful way I have found that attracts people to mine is by doing a series of articles labelled parts 1,2 and 3.
Part one I distribute around to other sites, such as article sites, and as press releases. In that article I reference parts 2 and 3 on my blog with a link to the site.
This works well and I notice it does increase the vists to the site as, of course, people are keen to read the balance of the article.
Of course one must ensure that the content is interesting so the reader feels they made a worthwhile visit.
Written on November 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 02:11 am by Darren Rowse
How to Optimize a Shoplinc Store
In my last post I wrote a series of tips on how to use Chitika’s eMiniMalls and RPU ads. Today I want to turn my attention to their Shoplinc product (aff).
I’ve had reasonable (and increasing) success with Shoplinc since it launched a few months back. Once you have people in the Shop it converts very well (high CTR as there is limited other options to click on). The challenge however is getting people INTO your shop in the first place. This is not as simple as adding a ’shop’ link to your menu (although this is one thing you should do).
One single link into your shop is not enough - consider adding other ‘doorways’ in including:
Deep Linking Strategies - the way that I’ve found works best to get people into my Shoplinc is through deep linking from individual posts on my blog to individual products in the Shoplinc.
Each product in Shoplinc has it’s own URL which means that if you link to it that you’ll have a permanent doorway into the shop.
When I first signed up for Shoplinc I spent a few days going through thousands of my old posts setting up such links in my posts. Typically they look like this:
Compare prices on the Canon EOS 30D
Of course this link works best if it’s from a page (or pages) that are about the Canon EOS 30D digital camera as people are much more willing to click a link on that topic if they are in fact looking for prices on such a camera.
This deep linking strategy took me considerable time to do. I could possibly have found a more automatic way to do it via my templates but the couple of days that it took me to do this has been well worth my effort.
Each one of these links is a doorway into your shop (the more doorways you have the more potential visitors).
The flow on effect of setting up these deep links is that they provide your Shoplinc with a little Google Juice - which in time means your Shoplinc will begin to get indexed and ranked higher in Google (and other search engines). As a result you can end up not only with traffic from your blog but from search engines.
Search Our Shop Tool - Chitika has a ’search tool’ that lets your readers search for information in your Shoplinc directly from your blog. Place this in a prominent position on your blog and you have yet another gateway into your shop.
Promote your Shoplinc - Anyway you can promote your shoplinc and direct visitors to it is a bonus. For a few months on my blogs I had a spare banner position that other sponsors were not using - at that time I ran ads for my own shop. I’ve taken out blogads and even run AdWords campaigns. Perhaps buying some ads on Performancing’s new ad system would be something to experiment with.
Other Shop Options
Of course Shoplinc is not the only type of shop that you can add to your blog. Amazon recently introduced aStore and there are numerous options to building your own (using Amazon, eBay and other programs).
The key with all of these is of course to provide your readers with doorways into your blogs (using some of the above strategies).
It does take work - but if you have a blog with decent traffic you’ll end up with an extra revenue stream for your blog this Christmas (and beyond).
Tomorrow we’ll move on from Chitika and look at Affiliate Programs.
This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.
Written on November 19th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia392 zone.at 01:11 pm by Darren Rowse
18 Lessons in Blogging - Part II
Someone recently asked me what the most popular post was on enternetusers. There have been quite a few that have done well but one that got (and continues to get) a lot of attention is 18 Lessons I’ve Learnt about Blogging.
Today Valeria Maltoni left a pretty comprehensive comment on it that I thought had some good stuff in it. I thought it’d make a good post in and of itself. Here’s what she had to say (the bolded parts are my subheadings on my 18 lessons and the rest is Vaeria’s):
“Hello Darren:
I’ve been one of the lurkers for a while via Stephanie Quilao’s Back in Skinny Jeans. Congratulations! 3 years in blog time is a long time. And thank you for providing useful links and tips. My blog is a tactic that fits with the integrated marketing communications strategy I adopted to learn exponentially and evolve my career. I’m not looking to make money from it directly. Still, your advice applies:1. Be Lucky — ever read Fooled by Randomness? That’s what this point is about. All things being equal, right time and right place play a decisive role in making it.
2. Work Hard — I sometimes joke that nothing ever comes easy to me as I seem to prefer hard work. The truth is that practice, attention to detail (attention in general), and discipline (very much a choice) have their own rewards.
3. Use the Power of Exponential Growth — this is the ‘be patient’ point. Evolution is often gradual and overnight success is a certain length of time in the making (built into this point are making mistakes and learning from them).
4. Differentiate Yourself — the truth is a blog is a medium, even when it’s a business. What comes out is pretty much you. What’s your voice?
5. Provide Value – How can you add to the conversation? Do you abide by the ethical standards of filtering the information you pass on? Are you a good host?
6. Target a Niche — this can be also a very specific space in the professional continuum. A lens, a filter, a unique perspective. For example, I blog about different places in which the conversation takes people (content creators, product/service producers and publics) to the next level. While the topics are different, the space is always the same — the point of interaction, the connection of ideas and people with resulting transformation. My tagline is: connecting ideas and people, how talk can change our lives.
7. Diversify — absolutely. Also, because we are human and have many ways of expressing our skills, talents and experience, not one single medium will satisfy all of them. Also, you may want to continue exploring other dimensions of work beyond the screen interface.
8. Don’t spread yourself too thin — along with your cannot be all things to all people (voice and personality are a must), you cannot be effective if you’re constantly chasing too many projects. Know thyself and respect your own rhythms first.
9. Have a back up plan — this is good to have in life and certainly applies to blogging. it does not mean you’re not focused. It means you need to stay flexible and adapt to the marketplace while you remain resilient and committed to your value proposition. It may end up looking very different than what you envisioned and still match your vision.
10. Be Light on your Feet — I think this also means to stay open to opportunities and in listening mode. Sometimes the best advice comes from the most likely source.
11. Relationships are Key — as your blog mirrors pretty much who you are, others do too. The blogosphere is a relational space that takes advantage of the linked nature of the web, which is modeled after our brain patterns. In relationships it is important to give, and blogging allows you to do so more than static web sites.
12. Establish Boundaries — this is part of your own contract with yourself as well. What kind of strategy does your blog fulfill?
13. Dont’ Read your Own Press — and don’t take yourself too seriously or you’ll lose sight of opportunities to learn and grow.
14. Beware of Hype — blame no one. expect nothing. do something.
15. Get a Life — before you can tell stories, it is much better is you actually experience them. What is unique about you will need to be nurtured often.
16. Make Mistakes — in fact, it is better to risk something often than playing it safe all the time. When I look back at my career, I realize that the most productive times where actually the ones where I was improving on something. Kind of Me 2.0.
17. Be Yourself — transparency is the key to intimacy and the blog is a one-to-one medium. It is much better to be an interested version of yourself than a perfect copy of someone else. Yes, I wrote interested as it beats trying to be interesting in spades. It’s about the conversation with your audience.
18. There are no Rules — true, we all make it up as we go along. As long as it fits with our overall strategy and reflects who we are. All the existing rules are history, they were created to make sense of and put order to a reality that is part of our past. Blogging is such a fluid activity, because it involves thought and language — they both evolve, ask our forefathers.
It has been fun spending time here. Thank you for asking.”
No thank YOU Valeria!
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