Written on September 11th, 2007 at 04:09 am by Darren Rowse
Call for Prizes - Do You Want some Publicity from enternetusers?
Do you want a little publicity from enternetusers to the wider enternetusers reading community?
Later this month I’ll be celebrating the 3rd birthday of enternetusers.net.
Rather than letting the date creep up on me and then wondering what to do to celebrate I thought I’d plan ahead this year and make it a fun day (or two… or three) by doing some giveaways for readers.
I’ll be coming up with a few prizes of my own to give to readers but would love to supplement them with some other prizes and gifts from sponsors interested in being a part of the festivities and getting themselves a little attention.
If you’d like to be a part of this by offering a prize (in return for a little publicity here at enternetusers) please email me with the following information in the following way:
- email darren AT enternetusers DOT net (substitute AT and DOT with the appropriate @ and.)
- make the subject line ‘BIRTHDAY GIVEAWAY’
- describe the prize you would like to offer (what is it and what’s it’s value)
- include a link to the prize if you have one
- include your name and the link to the site you’d like me to link to in return for your prize
Please note: While I would like to include as many prizes as possible - if past experience is anything to go by I won’t be able to accept every offer of a prize.
Please also note that I have an international audience and prizes need to be able to be received by readers around the world so please factor in that you’ll need to pay for any shipping if it’s won by an international reader.
Prize submissions will be accepted until the end of the week (Friday).
Prize Suggestions: When I’ve run competitions previously at enternetusers the prizes that have gotten the most positive feedback from readers have been cash (no surprises there), gadgets, vouchers and ‘fun stuff’. We’ve previously had holidays, computers, iPods, Nintendo Wii’s and even an eye massager.
While things like ‘hosting packages’, services and ‘ebooks’ might be relevant to bloggers - they don’t seem to get quite the attention. You’re more than welcome to submit these ideas as prizes - but I do get a lot of these offers and will only be able to use a few of them. The more fun and creative the better (plus it doesn’t hurt if it’s got some value).
What do you get in return?
I don’t want to give away what I’m doing completely yet - but you’ll be getting promotion in return for your prize on a number of pages/posts on enternetusers. If past experience is an indicator - you’ll quite probably get linked to from other blogs also as these competitions cause quite a buzz. The better the prize the more attention you’ll get of course!
Looking forward to hear what you come up with.
Written on September 11th, 2007 at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse
Create a Custom 404 Error Page for Your Blog
When someone comes to a page on your domain that is no longer there (either because it’s been deleted, because they’ve typed something in wrong or because the link that they followed was wrong) they are shown the dreaded 404 ‘page not found’ error page.
This error simply means that the person was able to communicate with your server but that the server couldn’t find the page that they were after.
404 error pages come in all shapes and sizes but traditionally are quite often like these:
While these sorts of pages certainly communicate that there’s been some kind of error - they don’t really do you or your potential reader any good. In the majority of cases they’ll simply surf away from your website.
It need not be this way - Customize Your 404 Page
One of the things that I asked Ben to do when redesigning enternetusers was to put together a customized 404 page for this site. The old one was a fairly poor page that didn’t really do much (it was just an error message on my normal template).
However Ben put together a page that in the last week or so had a message about us going through a redesign process.
Yesterday I upgraded it to give more information. You can see how it looks by typing in any url that doesn’t return a page on my domain (like this one).
What Have I included in my 404 error page?
Bloggers wanting to customize their error page are confronted with a lot of choices. My own priorities on this occasion were twofold:
1. Help people find what they are looking for
2. Give people other helpful content and drive them deeper into the blog
Priority 1 is all about helping the person find the actual information that they are after. I do this by giving them a search field and the option to contact me.
Priority 2 is all about making the site sticky and giving readers an option to surf deeper into the blog. As a result I prove some of my ‘best articles’, suggest some ‘blogging for beginners’ posts and then point them back to the front page of the site.
I’ve chosen to do this all within a normal template for the blog - although did toy with the idea of a much simpler and cleaner page.
Other Options that I’ve seen bloggers use
Redirect to Front Page of Blog - From what I can tell the default 404 page on WP blogs is to serve up the main page of a blog. While this is probably better than a start white error page it fails to communicate to the reader what’s going on or to help them find their information.
Promote RSS Feed - I’ve seen a few bloggers use a 404 page to heavily promote their RSS feed. While I can see why they do this (and do promote mine right at the bottom of my own 404 page) I’m not sure how the conversion would be. People confronted with a page not found error are looking for something specific - not looking to become loyal to a site that can’t find what they want on.
Humor - There’s been a trend over the last few years (or longer) to serve up funny 404 pages - either with funny images or statements. These can definitely take some of the sting out of a reader’s frustration at getting an error - but unless they have a way of helping them or driving them into the site I suspect most will surf away from the page - be it with a smile on their face.
To see a list of different 404 pages check out Smashing Magazine’s post on the topic with lots of examples (and another one).
How to Customize Your 404 Page
The process for creating a customized 404 page for your blog will vary from blog platform to blog platform (and for some hosted options it may not be possible). I don’t propose to go through each option in this post - but if you are a WordPress user (as the majority of enternetusers readers are) I would suggest you look at a post on 404 pages that Average Joe Blogger posted on the topic a few days back which reminded me to fix my own 404 page.
If you’ve seen tutorials for other blog platforms please feel free to suggest them below. If you’ve customized a Custom 404 Page - how did you do it and what did you include?
Written on September 10th, 2007 at 06:09 pm by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking - 10 September 2007
A few quick links to get your week started:
- Mark from 45n5 put up a Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs late last week which is a pretty good list of blogs in this niche. What is more interesting to me than the list itself is his videos talking about how he’s building the list itself into getting some good traffic (part 1 and part 2). As he says in his videos this type of strategy can be used in lots of niches and not just the ‘making money online’ one. One idea I had for Mark on improving the Top100 list is to include RSS feeds of blogs featured - or even make one mashed up feed of them all.
- Many readers of enternetusers use social media sites to promote their blog posts. While I don’t recommend that you spam them all with every post you write it can be useful to submit your best work (and that of others) to participate in these bookmarking sites. Social Poster is a tool that enables you to submit posts to multiple bookmarking sites at once (or at least to prepopulate their forms with good information to speed things up.
- Aaron at Technosailor has put together a ‘self importance test‘. Funnily enough I came up as being like Chris Pirillo and not myself (apparently I’m one of the answers).
Written on September 10th, 2007 at 11:09 am by Darren Rowse
New Printing CSS at enternetusers
Just a short note to let readers know that over the weekend we finally got a new Print CSS set up for enternetusers.
It always surprises me to know that many of the readers of this blog like to print out posts. A few readers print every article and even keep them all in a binder!
I get a lot of requests for a cleaner printing option and finally got it sorted out!
Now if you go to print a enternetusers post you will not print all of our navigation and sidebar - but will get a much cleaner and simpler layout. Hopefully this will mean more useful prints (and you using a lot less ink).
We’ve also made the decision not to include comments in printing - simply because on many posts there are hundreds of comments which mean you can end up printing many pages (saving a few trees in the process). To see the new print styling simply do a print preview.
Written on September 10th, 2007 at 05:09 am by Darren Rowse
How Long Have you Been Blogging? POLL
It has been a while since I ran a poll on enternetusers but thought it might be time for another one.
This week’s poll is one we’ve run before (over a year back) and it will be interesting to compare the results.
Please note - there is a formatting issue with the ‘results’ part of this poll that we’ll try to fix in the next few days. You’ll still be able to see the results - they just won’t be graphed as a result of some kind of incompatibility between my template and the Democracy plugin that I’m using to run the poll.
Anyway - on with the poll:
Written on September 10th, 2007 at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse
Designing Banner Ads that Get Clicked!
The following guest post was submitted by Shrihari from GotChance - a Geek’s Blog.
Advertising campaigns are undoubtedly one of the best sources of traffics from other high traffic website. Especially on huge blogs like TechCrunch, EnGadget etc.. and even on other big blogs like enternetusers, John Chow etc.. There are primarily two factors that affect the click through rate of your banners :
- Position of the banners
- The Look and Feel of the banners
The second factor is what we will be discussing about in this post. So, how to design your banners and how not to design your banners ?
Informative Ads
The ultimate aim of every advertising banner is to tell the readers as much information as possible and get them to visit your website. This works for most banners, but sometimes turn negative. Especially when there is too much information, it maybe a turn off for the users. Consider these two banner :
The first one is stuffed with information. It looks attrActive and people might be interested in clicking it. But, the second one, though it provides more information than the first, looks less attrActive. With such a look, i might consider it as a SPAMmy ad.
AttrActive Ads
While it is information that should work, what really works is the look of a banner. The more pleasing it is to the users, the more is the probability that he will click-through.
In the above ad, with the 300 x 250 large space offered, the advertiser could have easily included a lot of information about what they offer and also their domain name. But it simple reads “Wordpress Themes for Free”. Also the WP logo looks very nice. So, i bet there would have been a lots of clicks on this one. It is always a good practice to hold back some information from displaying on your banner. The content that you should hold back, however, depends on what product you are advertising.
I found the following ad good-looking as well. It doesn’t say anything about what is being advertised, but can encourage a few clicks (though not as much as the above wordpress ad).
How & How not to color your Ads
A Banner can be made attrActive(?) by two ways. One is by making it look good and the other is by making it ugly. An ugly looking ad would get more attention than a good-looking one. But, what the user feels is more important. While coloring ads, it is best to follow the color scheme of your own website (the one that the banner will be linking too). Also using some contrasting colors would be a nice practice. Not as contrasting as this one though :
So, it is always best to keep in mind the above points while designing banners. Also remember that “Success of a Banner = Information + Attraction”.
Have you had experience in designing Banner Ads? - What have you found that works (and doesn’t work)?
Written on September 9th, 2007 at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse
More SEO Tips from Aaron Wall
Today I continue my interview with Aaron Wall - author of SEO Book. Also read Part I of my interview with Aaron Wall.
What’s the best link building strategy you ever used?
Creating free software and giving it away. It is unreal how many thousands of high quality links you can get from producing free software. One of my new Google Gadgets is about a month old and already gets over 30,000 weekly page views. I also love awards programs and interviewing others.
If you had to identify 3 important SEO tips that all bloggers should know and implement - what would they be?
Is it ok if I do 5?
Sure thing!
- Attribution is important. Linking to popular bloggers and other sources is a way of getting their attention. Its like saying hey I just talked about you, come see what I said. Many will ignore you, but it only takes a couple good ones liking you for your blog to spread like a weed.
- Make sure your content is formatted such that it is easy to read. Use headings and sub-headers, bulleted lists, spread things out, etc. Ultimately you need people to read and trust your work for search engines to want to trust it. Search engines follow what people do.
- Make sure your page titles are unique on a per post level with the unique part of the title element at the far left of the page title. This helps improve rankings and makes people more likely to click on your listing when you do rank. Descriptive enticing headlines will pull more clicks than boring and bland ones.
- Don’t ignore internal navigation. Where possible, allow some of your categories to drive your keyword strategy. Some of your categories should be well aligned with some of your keywords. Create a top hits or featured posts section that makes it easy to find your best content. Also link back to your older posts in some of your newer posts to alert new readers to the best related posts in your archives and help search engines understand which pages are most important.
- If many people are writing about the same thing you are, try to write about something else or try to write about it from a different perspective such that people want to keep paying attention to you. Don’t be afraid of being yourself. Often times our flaws are more interesting than what we are allegedly good at.
What are the biggest mistakes that you see bloggers making in SEO?
I don’t think this mistake is specific to bloggers, but is a general web thing. You can sometimes see a piece of garbage website ranking well, or see a site worse than yours doing better than you are. But you can’t beat people by following them to wherever they currently are. At one point in time some of those sites were some of the better sites on the market. If they launched a similar site today they would be nowhere. And some of the sites are in cash out mode, publishing garbage spam where something good once ranked.
Don’t believe that just by following anyone’s guidelines or doing exactly what other sites are doing that you are going to rank well. You really need to leverage your own knowledge and personality to create a brand that others can evangelize and spread.
Is Page Rank important any more?
Keep in mind that toolbar PageRank is perpetually outdated and measured on a rough logarithmic scale, but yes real PageRank is important. The reason why is that for any given amount of link equity you can only get so many pages indexed. The more link authority you have the deeper search engines will crawl through your site.
How is blogging important to your overall business?
It is huge. Where others are buying $5,000 booths at conferences and spending $500 a day on AdWords my marketing spend is next to nothing because I get many sales from people talking about me. Plus blogging got me media exposure which makes it easier to get more media exposure down the road. I was a no name SEO with one popular article before I started SEO Book, but now I have thousands of subscribers and thousands of customers. The single most important part of my business right now is blogging.
I talk to many bloggers who want to launch an e-book - what have you learned that could help them from your experience in launching SEO book?
I actually wrote a 9 page blog post offering a bunch of tips on this topic.
At the core it helps to have a strong name, keep the site clean, put your offer inline with the content, give a way a ton of value, give away review copies and just keep pushing on the public relations front.
If you are in a competitive marketplace you need people talking about you everyday. If you find a smaller uncompetitive niche then you might even be able to get away with hiring a freelance writer and having them do the writing and marketing. You can also test markets before you create your products by creating a PPC offer and promising a book as collateral for their feedback. Use their feedback to estimate demand and target pricing.
Seeing how quickly Google grabbed control of video and how aggressively they are pushing it I am not convinced that ebooks are a sustainable long term model that will still work in 5 or 10 years. Google and Amazon are both wheeling and dealing to get access to the catalogs of major publishing houses to sell their books online as ebooks. When those books are available at $8 it gets much harder to charge $80 for an ebook. I think it is better to sell a product as a service with recurring revenues if possible. Include video and other stuff as well. And the reason the web is great is because it is interActive. Most eooks generally are not. ;)
What SEO resources and blogs do you read?
I probably read about 100 different blogs. My favorites are ones that are published less frequently, but with deeply insightful posts, like:
- http://www.johnon.com/
- http://www.stuntdubl.com/
- http://www.seofaststart.com/
- http://www.jimboykin.com/
As well as ones that usually have something unique, like:
I also stop by many of the old mainstays like Webmasterworld.com and Searchengineland.com
Thanks to Aaron Wall for his time on this interview.
Aaron has been most generous with me personally over the years and both SEO Book and personal advice at different times have added significantly to my own earnings from blogging.
I commend him and his resources to you as a great source of knowledge when it comes to SEO.
Written on September 8th, 2007 at 02:09 pm by Darren Rowse
Instant Adsense Graphs With GraphSense
45n5 linked up to a useful looking service for AdSense publishers today called GraphSense.
I’m yet to try it out (this weekend has been crazy) but it is a service that puts useful graphs of your AdSense stats right into your AdSense stats page using a firefox plugin.
Give it a go and let us know how you find it. The graphs look a little primitive but they are better than nothing (which is what AdSense currently gives publishers.
As Mark comments - it is about time that AdSense built this type of tool into their report pages themselves.
They have great looking graphs in other applications (like Google Trends, Analytics etc) - why can’t they give us some useful tools to track the performance of AdSense? Come on Google - it’s time for a reports page update!
Written on September 8th, 2007 at 04:09 am by Darren Rowse
Learn How to Get Your Blog Ranking High in Search Engines - An Interview with Aaron Wall
Over the next couple of days you’re in for a treat because I’ve managed to secure an interview with Aaron Wall - a blogger and author that has literally added thousands (if not tens of thousands) to my own blogging earnings over the last few years as a result of me reading his great eBook - SEObook. Aaron’s book is 300 pages of pure Search Engine Optimization gold and he’s been generous enough to answer some of my questions.
His answers are so good that I’ve decided to split this into a two part interview so you don’t scan over them too fast and miss something.
Aaron - thanks for your time. Can you give us a short introduction to yourself and what you do?
I am a blogger who wrote a popular book about SEO. I also publish a wide array of websites and do a limited amount of high end SEO consulting with my partner Scott Smith at ClientsideSEM.com.
In addition to writing about SEO I offer free tools to help people automate doing research. I recently created a couple Google Gadgets that were well received, and my programmer created SEO for Firefox, which puts marketing data right in the search results.
It seems that a lot of people are getting into SEO at the moment - how and when did you get into it?
My first website, in early 2003, was a poorly done rant site. I wanted others to see my opinions and I figured the easiest and cheapest way to do so was to learn how to make it rank in search engines. I asked lots of questions at forums and then started moderating many of them. I had a site that listed my own notes about SEO stuff and a person hired me before I knew I was selling anything. A few months later they had already seen a 20x return on their spend and I felt pretty good about that.
By the end of 2003 I was ranking in the top 10 of Google’s results for search engine marketing, and my article about the Google florida update became popular and got me more client inquires than I could handle.
I’ve said on numerous occasions that I’ve learned almost everything that I know about SEO from your resource - SEO Book - but can you tell us why you wrote it and why enternetusers readers might want to consider making the purchase?
When I got on the web I bought SEO services from a scammy company that ripped me off. I also went down many dead end paths, trying to find where there was free traffic, doing arbitrage from unclean sources that stole my money, signing up for programs that teach you the world revolves around spreading their crap. etc. That led me to an inbox full of spam but no rankings.
I saw at the end of 2003 that the client services lifestyle was a bit feast or famine. I was getting about 2 calls a month. Then overnight it was up to like 30 in a day. Then it went back down a bit. And honestly I tended to undersell services because I didn’t fully appreciate the value of search off the start.
After I started learning more about SEO and business I thought it would be a good idea to share what I knew. My goal when I first wrote SEO Book was to write the book I wished I had read when I first got on the web. The first version was a modest 24 page HTML document that I gave away on Christmas of 2003.
Search has since got more complex and important, my experience has increased, and my knowledge of marketing has increased. As a result, the book is now over 300 pages, and rather than talking about do this do that in specific white and black my book also offers reasons why I think an idea will work or not.
When it comes to building links to a blog - do you recommend bloggers buy links, ‘use’ social media sites, trade links, linkbait, something else…. or some combination of the above?
I say try everything and see what works best for you. You might come across a trick that I haven’t used much that works well for you given your personality and your market.
- I wouldn’t recommend renting too many links right out of the gate, because it adds cost and you may not be able to recoup the costs unless you are business savvy, plus sites get trusted more as they age. I would recommend listing in the Yahoo! Directory and some of the other higher quality general directories and blogging directories if you intend on creating a long term successful blog as a business.
- Comment on related blogs and participate in related communities. These may not provide direct links, but links flow naturally after you have subscribers. You need to raise awareness if you are new and starting from scratch.
- After you have awareness many people will frequently cite you just because they are subscribed to you.
- Buy specific ads from specific sites.
- Take concepts you see poorly done and do them exceptionally well, then use email to notify people who might care. Don’t forget to ping people you know well, especially if you have done them favors too.
- Create social content as a form of marketing. Interview people, create tools, hold contests, give out awards, etc.
One other thing I would probably add is that for most people it is probably not going to be worth it to spend tons and tons of time building up a social media account on a large generalist website. If you only have a few hours a day to spend online then you should spend most of that reading and participating on sites specifically about your topic, or writing your site.
Tomorrow I’ll share the second part to this interview with Aaron and will ask him about the best ever link building strategy that he’s used, where he gives 5 key SEO tips that bloggers should implement, where he talks about Page Rank and gives some hints on how to launch a successful ebook (plus more).
In the mean time - take a little time out to check out SEO Book - which comes with a money back guarantee, free lifetime updates (and he does update) plus a few worthwhile bonuses.
Written on September 8th, 2007 at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse
27 Blog Workspaces Explored
Earlier in the week I took you on a video Tour of enternetusers HQ (office) and invited you to show us (via picture or video) where you blog from. I promised to compile all of your submissions so we could see them all in the one place. So here’s the enternetusers Reader Blogging HQ Mashup with 7 video tours and 20 pictures (click to enlarge them)!
Lindsay’s blog HQ is pretty unique - he really gets out and about!
David Appleyard’s HQ is slightly more traditional than a boat:
Lorraine’s setup is out on the patio and seems to have everything she’d need:
Glenn’s looks very cool - and he’s got a 30 inch screen!
Kevin’s setup is down low:
Tejvan shares his room:
but also points to the view he gets from a local cafe where he blogs
John has a pretty major set up with lots of screen real estate:
Char gives a glimpse in their home office (lots of storage!):
James is a Mac man like me:
Eve shows us her set up - nicely integrated into the room:
Cifra put together a video tour:
Tomaz shares their setup:
Mark also does a video tour:
Anthony has just renovated his office and has lots of pictures. Here’s one:
Ian thinks his HQ is better than mine :-)
Dave shares a picture of his - wow, that’s a big microphone!
MoneyNing’s set up is a little different to most
Rich Minx does another video tour
Sebastian gives us a look at his
Taste Like Crazy shares theirs on video - complete with cat, dog and baby:
Marisa posts hers
Dean shares his on video - very organized:
Jeremy has shared a few pics too. Here’s one:
Serge posts a picture of his
Doug just moved and needs a desk
Nate shares his mobile podcasting setup on video:
Chris is in the process of moving house - so he’s blogging from a coffee table:
Thank you to everyone who got involved with this. You’re welcome to continue to post links to your pictures and videos in comments below. I’m not sure that I’ll do a full mashup post like this again - but I’d love to see more of where you work from!
Update - due to public demand (and me missing a few) I will do one more mashup mid next week - so feel free to keep leaving your links to pictures or video tours of your office in this comments of this or the previous post - if you don’t leave a comment I won’t be able to find it - so please do leave a link.
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