I am not a copywriter, or a graphic designer

IM Remarkable Offer Page "before"

I spent most of my time concentrating on the product – despite being just a free bonus for signing up to someone else's promotion, I wanted it to have both value and longevity.

Whilst in the legal paperwork I placed emphasis on the "casual" nature of selection, I spent significant time on each niche rooting out great offers, uncovering a few pitfalls etc.
Even some of the Clickbank offers I highlighted had a gravity as low as "0" nada, ziltch, but had great landing pages, credibility, sometimes even celebrity branding to help conversion rates.

IM Remarkable Bonus - Howie Schwartz - Old Version

IM Remarkable Offer Page "After"

IM Remarkable Bonus - Howie Schwartz - New Version Of Free Offer

The bonus offers system was experimental and early results suggested needed some tweaking

• More people signed up for Howie's bonus than so far claimed mine (even though people already on Howie's list who signed up through someone else any time in the past could get my bonus) – I expected some differences, but not to that extent.
• Some people filled out the form but didn't provide enough of the email for the matching system – these I processed manually.
• Some people I could see on Howie's affiliate back-end (downloading a CSV), signed up, but claimed the bonus without entering one of Howie's emails – I deemed that enough justification to send them the download. The intent was there.
• A few people tried to spoof the bonus system – it isn't infallible, but it isn't stupid either.

Ultimately I decided I need to make things a little easier for those with honest intent, though it does provide a hint at what is happening, and removes part of the filtering.

Greater Emphasis On Value Proposition

Anyone who has been watching the free videos Stompernet have been publishing over the last week for their Formula 5 launch would know that if you invest more time in explaining the value and benefits of your offer to your prospects, you can charge more.

The same is true as an affiliate, though then it could be looked on as pre-selling

In a situation where you are offering a bonus as an affiliate, either for a sale, or just for a lead as in this case, you need to explain the value and benefits of both the target offer, and your additional bonus or bribe.

JV Opportunity?

There is a "latent" JV opportunity here, but until the landing page can be shown to boost opt-in rate compared to direct traffic, any JV would be a fool to send me traffic, even with the rebranding.
The traffic that is worth sending would be people who through segmentation are known to have opened an email, clicked through to Howie's offer, and not converted into a lead.
I doubt there are many people segmenting their list to that extent.

Viral?

I doubt I will achieve enough critical mass for any hope of viral momentum, unless I "stack the cool" a little more on my free offer… yes affiliates can do that too.

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Whilst he employs 80 people, he also has a team of 200+ website creation, content development, link building and social media specialists to call upon (native English speakers).

If you can avoid doing all the work yourself, either with automation or outsourcing it is more scalable.

Keyword Titan

Just over a week ago, Todd Hogan the founder of Keyword Titan approached me to see if I would be interested in taking a look at their new Keyword research automation tools.

Trust me, I have spent thousands on various keyword research tools in the past, some of them even still get updated by the authors despite changes in the way data can be pulled from the search engines, many of the services are still in business and even booming, and in many ways I am quite happy with what I already have available.

That being said, time is one of my most valuable commodities (though I tend to not use the resource to it's full potential)

Another problem is grouping

It is fairly easy to group keywords if you are generating them from various root keywords.

{specialty} {profession} {location}

Annulment Attorney in Los Angeles

It is far harder, or at least more time consuming on researched keyword lists.

Keyword Titan Ultimate Challenge

I was already starting to prepare a monetization list to offer as an opt-in bonus, as a companion to Howie's 36 Niche report. I knew he was covering keyword research in his training, along with monetization, but I wanted to help accelerate the success of anyone taking part in his competition, and continuing that into the future.

If you help people achieve results, good things happen.

The amount of time involved to research 36 niches, highlight 100s of core topics to focus on, and drill down into traffic data, grouping etc using conventional tools would have been astronomic.

2 hours per niche wouldn't be unreasonable for a shoddy job x 36 niches = 72 hours

2 weeks work, maybe one if you are a machine

It would be less if all you were doing is generating the keywords using some kind of spinning technique, but you would still have to identify the root keyword lists, and then think about negative keywords, grouping etc.

So I challenged Todd to create me 36 keyword lists that I could give away, highlighting the best opportunities for competition and traffic, suitable for both SEO techniques and PPC.

Due to timezones, national holidays in the US, long weekends and various discussions on objectives etc, from start to finish it has taken 8 days to prepare these lists.

I asked Todd how much time it took to prepare all 36 keyword lists.

I couldn't even contemplate that with any of the tools I own, or have seen. The closest were products like Keyword Bible, but on a broad topic such as Howie provided an initial cross referenced search would have been grinding away on my PC for 30 minutes or more, without any thought to whether the keywords were
actually useful, grouping etc.

These days such poorly defined keyword lists for Google PPC would be a liability.

36 “Opportunity” Keyword Lists Free

What we have prepared are what I would term “core opportunity” keyword sets, the kind ideal for small niche sites, social media promotion tactics etc.

These lists were prepared in exactly the same way as the demonstration video on the Keyword Titan website.

Each list is approximately 150 keywords highlighting the cream for traffic and commercial intent.

1 Complete List for Acne Niche

One complete keyword list for Acne, a $15 value yours free

Acne Keyword Research list is provided free of charge on http://nicheexposed.com

You can also get another free list covering the auto industry just for signing up for a free Keyword Titan account

Full Lists For Other Niche's

Keyword Titan has 2 primary monetization models

The first is a monthly subscription which is ideal for power users. During discussions with Todd I discovered that their primary target market is specialist SEO & PPC agencies working with lots of clients, or large corporate account holder, not smaller internet marketers.

I believe however there is a huge untapped market (for Todd) within the internet marketing field, especially power users leveraging outsourcing or mass site generation.

From a single complete list, or even from the condensed lists we are providing for free, it would be easy to create 50 or more websites, or a few larger authority sites.

Thus for many a subscription would be overkill, and they should concentrate on owning one niche at a time.

The second monetization model is pre-built and custom lists purchased individually. The pre-built lists are a very affordable $15, and $30 for a custom list based on your own selection of primary keywords.

I believe all of the pre-built lists are available free to people who purchase a monthly subscription.

The 36 Niches Are Now Available as Pre-built lists

Other niches are also available as prebuilt lists

All the sample lists are now available for immediate access, including the complete keyword research list for Acne.

Get them here (Free)

Http://nicheexposed.com

Who is Keyword Titan ideal for?

• SEO & PPC agencies (time is money)

• Large corporate SEO & PPC managers – potentially less specialized skills and less time to manage 1000s of keywords

• Mega sites dealing with multiple verticals

• Mass automation niche marketers who would like some of what they throw against the wall to actually stick

• Niche Marketers looking to dominate single vertical markets (the single reports)

• Anyone who values their time

I haven't played with the interface extensively, but the results speak for themselves.

Thanks to Todd for offering to help with these keyword lists

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Something else to avoid is any mention that you might benefit financially from just an opt-in – the problem there is disclosure, and as more and more launches include a pre-launch opt-in competition with prizes, especially in the internet marketing niche, affiliate program managers are going to specifically have to allow, and encourage disclosure.

Bonus Delivery Hurdles to Overcome

• You are rarely notified about an opt-in – there is a feature in Infusionsoft to allow notifications of opt-in, but most affiliate program managers switch this notification off. Even if you have selected it as on, there doesn't seem to be a way to control it within the Infusionsoft affiliate interface, and preferably send the email to a different email address than other notifications and mailings.
• Forget about manual processing – as your business scales, manual processing of an opt-in to give a bonus just isn't possible.
• Circumvention - if you are offering something of value, you don't want it to be delivered on a directly accessible thank-you page that is indexed, or could be passed on
• Excessive friction – you want if at all possible to avoid adding any process that could go wrong, cause support questions, frustration, etc.
• Lock-in – Preferably if you do this, you want to do it with a marketer who in some ways offers a lock-in of leads that are sent – currently you can't do anything for back-end promotions of 3rd party products effectively (well unless it is Clickbank), but at least you want them to use that email address for it's primary intention… to sell your lead their products, so you make money.

Benefits Of Bonus Delivery

Higher opt-in rates – if you can give something of suitable vale, preferably complementary, there is a good chance your readers might opt-in to someone else's list to get it.

Complementary – what you offer could be complementary to their launch materials, improving the sales process, magnifying "results in advance" and giving you a reason why you are mailing… you really do care about the success of your readers, don't you?

Tracking & Automation – for slightly more advanced users, if you can get someone to take action, even if it is signing up to a list belonging to an affiliate partner, that is valuable information that can be processed using the automation rules of various autoresponders – business intelligence allows you to segment your lists more accurately, better determine offer choice, or can even steer product development.

Can be turned into a JV bonanza – with smart rebranding or cross-marketing of bonus products, you could potentially gain additional subscribers, covert others to make promotion materials on your behalf, and make more money from multiple streams of income.

Live Example

Over the last week or so, I put together a demonstration system that took relatively little coding and provides me with simple interfaces to automate bonus delivery.

At the same time Howie Schwartz was in the middle of a launch and I knew I could create a fantastic bonus that would complement his launch, so I have been burning the midnight oil.

IM Remarkable Bonus

Some Key Features

• The report isn't your normal affiliate freebie – it is 50 pages, and was a significant time investment.
• The system isn't dumb – you are required to submit the correct key
• The whole system can be rebranded – a JV partner could send traffic to my site, and gain 100% referrals to Howie – great excuse to send an additional email, plus help people more.
• The Twitter "tweet" links later in the process are rebranded as well so any viral effect, JV partners can gain a benefit.
• It would take me about 2 minutes to add additional unadvertised bonuses to the backend
• I haven't asked/forced an opt-in – I didn't want to add a negative element for JVs
• I didn't ask for a password to retweet about the site

It is simplistic, there are still some holes, but it is something that anyone could set up.

Take a look at http://nicheexposed.com & http://bonusitem.com

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Just over a year ago I wrote my first and only guest post, as an entry into Marketing Pilgrim's annual competition.
At the time when I published the article, I joked that "I had been robbed", you wouldn't believe the number of comments suggesting a way to get my revenge, file DMCA, report to Google or recover my "stolen" article.

Climbing The Heights Of Mount Google

When you set out to climb a mountain, or rank for a competitive keyword
term, some methods are effective.

This is a simplistic look at climbing the heights of Mount Google.

Human Pyramid

A human pyramid might be suitable for those low hanging fruit, but this
method is unlikely to help you scale great heights. Not only is it hard to
gain great height, but the weak construction is easily eroded by
competitors.

Photo credit: S@TS

Belay or Blogroll

Whilst exchanging blogroll links can help lift you up to a certain level,
they can effectively anchor you to your peers. From an SEO point of view
they are more about securing your position than lifting you higher.
If you have achieved a certain height, there is nothing wrong with pulling
up a few team mates. They can then aid in a push for the summit, which can
be a very lonely solo trek.

Photo credit: dfinnecy

Grappling Hook

This is the "gizmo" mindset, that specific tools can blast your website or
blog to prominence, maybe as a clown from a circus cannon, or to scale the
walls of the Vatican in Mission Impossible.

Whilst I am a fan of some forms of automation, and it can achieve
significant results, those results are often short-lived.
Whether it is trackback and referrer spam, automated social bookmarking,
directory submission software, or other quick fix, the writing is on the
wall before you even start, only many are too blind to see it.

Not everyone gets a safety net, or is Ethan Hunt.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Teamwork

Teamwork is often the most effective method, especially if one member of the
team is already at the top of the mountain, and can pull you up.

Photo credit: JasonRogers

V.I.P. Ticket

It might not convey the same bragging rights, or sense of achievement, but
if you are a "big hitter" working for a major corporation, or have plenty of
funds to grease the wheels, there are faster ways to the top.

Photo credit: Photo Monkey

Highest Mountain

Don't try to climb the highest mountain from the start, it will always end
in failure. Start on lower slopes, build experience, and if possible gather
together a solid team to help you scale the higher slopes of Mount Google.

Then again, who wants to be top of the mountain, and why am I writing a
guest post ;) Pull me up Andy!

2009 Competition

The 2009 Competition has just reached the judging stages – batch 1 & batch 2 – there are some good articles to read on all kinds of online marketing

Followup

As a guest article, I was a little disappointed in the results. Not so much my results in the competition, but overall traffic, appeal to Stumbleupon visitors, etc.

I deliberately chose a different style of article, more images, light weight/broad appeal content, but with a deeper message that might have not quite sunk in for readers.

I am going to try another attempt at the same article using diagrams and more specific wording soon.

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My Advice

Ignore all the other ping lists published – they are frequently irrelevant and could potentially highlight you as a spammer.

But read all the article… things are not so crystal clear.

This is my current WordPress Ping List

http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/

To be honest, I have only just added Blogcatalog to the list though they have had an interface for a couple of years, as it seems they need a little bit of a nudge on occasion.

Feedburner Have A Pingshot Service

Feedburner Pingshot used to provide a list of services to ping. Now you just switch it on

The Problems With Current Ping Lists

• Replication – There is no need to ping a whole load of sites, which all then subsequently re-ping all the same services
• Current – I have seen many ping lists that include services that stopped accepting ping notifications 2 or 3 years ago
• Safety – You are only sending a ping to Feedburner (plus 2 optional services) and allowing Feedburner to handle notifications correctly.
• Reliable – despite the occasional problems, over 4 years of blogging I have never had a major problem with Feedburner that couldn't be fixed with a nudge (resync). I would hope their back end is smart enough to cache pings for services that they know are offline, retry problems etc.
  These are things a WordPress plugin just can't effectively replicate.
• Membership – a lot of the sites featured on ping lists are for members only – you need to have your blog listed before you send them pings.

Only add to the list if you find a specialist site that isn't covered by Pingshot (but read on… it is important)

Various WordPress Ping Plugins

There are various plugins for WordPress that handle pings, preventing a re-ping on a post edit.

I am going to be frank – rubbish (I kept it polite)

If you update a post, you want it to be re-pinged unless it is a very minor edit (there is a minor edit plugin). Minor edit prevents the data/time of the post changing on an edit, a much more significant feature for your feed readers.

If you are using the Tweetmeme plugin, in theory updates are re-pinged – if they don't pick it up, you might need to use their re-ping interface.
This is important for when the message and title of a story change.

Ping Lists For Niche Sites

I wouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, use multiple Feedburner accounts, Gmail accounts etc.

If all you are creating is spam sites, you lose the potential positive signal of Feedburner legitimacy, matching Google Analytics, Website Optimizer etc, plus of course the utility.

Feedburner's 2 Year Google Screwup

I suggested a long time ago that Google buying Feedburner was a major disaster for users.

7+7 Reasons Why Google Buying FeedBurner is a Match Made in Heaven & Hell

The pingshot feature is one item of many that has been sorely neglected through half-implemented progress.

Progress?

The Google Feedburner team supposedly are meant to be implementing an "open directory" of all the services that are supported by Pingshot – that is why they removed the ping list.

What makes PingShot different from other solutions?

You mean other than PingShot girl? Well, PingShot is an open directory. Any third party can register to participate.

And for you publishers, the service is automatic by simply activating it once within the Publicize section – just set and forget it. (You can come back and deactivate it whenever you want.) Also, our super high-powered extra strength feed management technology ensures that only changes in content trigger notification. So, there's that.

The problem is that the directory has never appeared, so you don't know where they are pinging.

This isn't new, Google have been talking about this "directory" for at least 8 blinking &*%$$ months

Every contact link on the Feedburner Help site redirects to this page.

Support questions regarding Pingshot are totally ignored in the Google groups, and when a member of the community does forward a question to the Feedburner team, no answers come back.

Feedburner is/was a great service, but Google is killing it. I PAID for Feedburner with a pro account, and would have gladly paid more if they had continued to innovate.

Google Stealing My Readers

Now Darren might not mind that advert for another of Google's services, but he is not being paid for it. It adds to his subscriber count, but often email subscribers are more responsive than RSS readers, especially with people abandoning RSS in favor of Twitter.

People don't abandon email totally.

I don't have as many readers as Darren, but if someone wanted top and bottom placement in every one of my blog posts (in the feed), it would likely cost them $1000+ a month, not that I would do it, and that is based upon my current irregular posting schedule.

I wouldn't accept Google reader as an advertiser, because it is a negative on my ability to market in the future

Well… maybe for $5000/month

Sneaking advertising into email subscriptions could even be looked on as an endorsement. A false endorsement – if Google want me to promote Google Reader, they should pay me.

Darren had a few other requests / complaints as well, but this is a deal breaker for me. My email is moving.

If Google don't fix things, I expect I will be pinging Feedblitz instead soon, and I am still undecided on email. None currently offer all I need, which is why I haven't switched, and have constantly encouraged innovation.
http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?XmlPing

I am sure Phil from Feedblitz will see this, who if anyone does Feedblitz ping?

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I just went to follow a link on Twitter and discovered it was blocked by OpenDNS

Bit.ly URL SHortener has been blocked by OpenDNS

I must admit I did smile – I know at least one friend's site that is reported by bit.ly to be a phishing site, notable SEO and ninja link builder Jim Boykin.

That being said, Bit.ly is the default URL shortener for Twitter, and receives 31% of their measurable traffic from Twitter, thus both are growing like weeds.

What Are OpenDNS & How Big A Deal Is This?

OpenDNS is like a yellow pages for internet resources, an important internet backbone.

Just a few days ago they reported serving 14,000,000,000 requests in a single day. That is a lot.

I use OpenDNS because web pages open faster when I use them, and the DNS provided by my Internet Service Provider doesn't recognise when I type in URLs without WWW.

Looks like I am going to have to use SU.PR or Cli.gs for a while

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Friendfeed Now Counted In Feedburner

It can make quite a striking difference with Feedburner if you have a few followers there.

But even this doesn't really account for the shifting sands in online attention.

The latter half of this post was originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

Since then Twitter has for many people emerged as the primary way they read RSS feeds, combined with various forms of lifestreaming.

The first time I see tweets and blog posts often is also on services such as Blogcatalog's dashboard or even Mybloglog (though that can sometimes lag a little on updates these days)

Current Calculation Problems

• Blogcatalog & Mybloglog numbers are just as relevant as Friendfeed
• Twitter numbers are probably more relevant than any Lifestreaming service
• Facebook subscribers are still not counted
• Aweber & Feedblitz, along with Feedburners own RSS to Email service are included, but they are the only ones I know about. Where is the Getresponse support Simon? Infusionsoft should really offer something as well, though they don't offer RSS to email – I am not sure about Mailchimp

The onus really is on the developers of these other platforms to report numbers to Feedburner, but I have no idea how that can be managed with Facebook and Twitter.

With both Facebook and Twitter there are 2 significant problems

• The data doesn't always come from an RSS feed – individual Facebook apps programmers use various methods to pull data, and often Facebook items come from other sources. The source on Twitter could be any one of the many RSS to Twitter services, but equally could be a WordPress plugin.
• Items get shared – shared items in Google reader have often affected Feedburner data in the past, how does this work with retweets?

It is good to see services like Postrank now feature within Feedburner stats, as they provide various ways to filter RSS content on multiple topics, and then include only the best items for you to read.
(Niche marketers will probably find a way to make best use of that)

Note: I do have specific strategic reasons why I don't currently display any RSS subscription options, or even an email subscription box.
This post used to have lots of comments, but Disqus hasn't managed to sync them after 2 days.

It is amazing how long it takes for things to catch up, the following was written over 15 months ago, and the numbers are really still totally inaccurate

Originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

I have been digging around in my Feedburner stats to see how various social streaming and life streaming applications I use are reporting data to Feedburner.

Friendfeed

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feedreader & Aggregator
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +http://friendfeed.com/about/bot)

5 subscribers

Blogcatalog

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Bot
Blogcatalog bot

1 hit

MyBlogLog

I am not sure which Yahoo service they are reporting as, so I am listing a few possibilities

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feed Readers and Aggregators
My Yahoo
A web-based newsreader that allows you to select and manage RSS headlines within a My Yahoo! account.
42 subscribers

There is also Yahoo! Slurp and Yahoo Test Bot – both listed as bots

Is Lifestreaming Subscribing?

Here are some reasons Lifestreaming should count as a subscription

• Personal – with most applications views can be attributed to individual users
• Selected – unlike meme trackers, someone has made a specific choice to read your content
• Trackable – if necessary it would be possible to identify only active users
• Traffic – traffic from lifestreaming is quite visible, though it is hard to determine if it comes from a RSS subscription link, or when someone tweets about you, or maybe from being Stumbled or dugg
• Email – Friendfeed sends subscriptions by email too – does that make it 2 subscriptions?
• Active – people are actually using these services more and more, and subscription data would thus be a useful representation

There are some aspects I am not sure should be counted, but are probably more valuable data than from many feedreaders

• Profile views – MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Friendfeed all allow visitors to view content before deciding to subscribe to it in some way – whist no long term commitment is made, a lot of this activity can be attributed to individual unique users, thus could be counted as a subscriber in some way.
• Shared Social Media Links – as mentioned before, when links to your site appear having been dugg, stumbled or shared in Google Reader – whilst this can result in traffic, it might not be something that can be counted as it is not necessarily related to the RSS feed, but to the permalink.
• MyBlogLog Topics – this is based upon their tagging system (I have wanted it to link to content for ages – make sure you update and cleanup your tags) – I don't think it would be appropriate for this data to end up in RSS subscription stats
• BlogCatalog Social Search – also recently introduced and whilst it doesn't have RSS yet (nudge Daniel) I can see this happening in the future – again this is a search much like you would have on Technorati or Google Blogsearch

RSS Bankruptcy

Depending on how you use these sites, they can add or subtract to the total information overload you are subjecting yourself to. I am not sure whether my own usage patterns are typical, but I find I am using Social and lifestreaming more than RSS Readers.

I have 1000s of unread items in my RSS readers, though on a lifestreaming service I am not reading every item either.

If the conversation is moving away from blogs there needs to be a way to measure it, track it and possibly respond to it.

I still am not sure how to react to the new item sharing feature introduced today on Blogcatalog, where someone can share items to people following them on the Dashboard, and to their Shared widget, and leave a comment.
When I first heard that this was going to be coming just a few days ago, I immediately thought that I would be vocally against it, but it is like a Stumbleupon review or a Delicious bookmark – it is not trying to start a new conversation, just tell someone why you are sharing the link.

The problem is that people will only share content using a certain number of different methods. Isn't it best to use the one that is most likely to be seen across multiple networks?

Disclaimer: I consult a little with Blogcatalog

Update

After a little exploring it appears Friendfeed posted about this earlier on their blog and there is further coverage on Louis Gray

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Rich Schefren GPS 2.0 Live

Last year Rich Schefren did something unprecedented – what was scheduled to be a 24hr marathon live training broadcast on Ustream ended up being extended by a couple of hours.

Here is a screenshot of what Rich looked like 24hrs into the session – he was still calm and collected, solving the constraints viewers had in their business, even though his servers were being hammered and people were finding it difficult leaving comments on his blog (with 4 dedicated servers)

Rich Schefren Live

From what I have heard you will be able to listen in without signing up to the VIP list, but then you won't receive a reminder just before the broadcast starts, and you won't be eligible for any of the prizes.

Prizes? Yeah Rich is giving away a boatload of prizes, worth subjectively tens of thousands of dollars including private consultation (which I don't think he really offers these days)

Rich Schefren Live – 12pm EST (midday) Thursday 18th June 2009 – scheduled to last 4 hours, though knowing Rich he might keep it running longer if there are people online.

GPS 1.0 Review

I purchased the original GPS 1.0 course – if your business isn't going in the direction you want it, you feel you are controlled by your business, or if you have hurdles you feel you need to overcome, GPS is a unique product that will help you. Rich is an outstanding teacher.

What didn't I like?

• The notification emails regarding live training didn't import date/time into calendar programs
• Notification was often short, and from the same email address as other promotional items – I typically open all of Rich's emails anyway, but I can forsee this being a problem for some
• Downloading Videos – I am a fan of downloading videos, then viewing them at 1.5 to 2x speed – something I learnt from Rich and easy to achieve with media players such as GOM. Downloading the course material from the player inside the members area was easy, downloading the recorded live sessions was extremely cumbersome and required intelligent tools or monitoring header information.

Some of these problems might be cured as I have heard that GPS 2.0 will be made available through a totally different content management platform.

Ideally I want content pushed to me, or that I can somehow automatically pull using a download manager, though I am a geek and rather set in my ways. A counter argument is that if I just get to download it, it will sit on my harddisk untouched, and that is a problem even for $1000+ courses

Rich's launch has been running for a week or so, and this is the finale. I gained a lot of value from the live event last time – I think I watched maybe 18 hours of the 26 last time around, my son then 18 months couldn't understand why we were watching this man talking on the screen all day rather than Teletubbies, "Lady & the Tramp" or "Jungle Book", but maybe he picked up something too.

Anyway, I think you should try to reserve some time in your schedule to check out the free live event – last time there wasn't any fluff, and Rich was answering real questions llive.

Dan Thies Link Building Training – Live

This is a totally different kind of training and will suit a different audience. I highly respect Dan's knowledge and the way he presents information, both with clarity and a significant amount of humour.

Dan is running a linkbuilding course over 12 weeks, and the first part is today which you can attend free. He is only accepting 200 students for the remainder of the course and many of those seats have already been filled.
50 slots are being reserved for during his broadcast.

You can also get an idea of what the training is about from the free material he has already provided.

I am not one of Dan's affiliates, this is very much an "internal launch" for his list, plus his Stompernet students – the free info is pretty sound and I expect this training session to deliver some valuable nuggets.

Dan Thies – 3pm United States Eastern Daylight Time, Thursday June 18. The class will last about 90 minutes

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I now feel that 95% of bloggers should switch to using Disqus, though I have some reservations.

These are some of the reasons why:-

• Matt Cutts today confirmed that nofollow links can reduce the amount of PageRank that flow to internal pages. The easiest current solution to solve this problem is to use Javascript for comments.
  It is an external javascript file, which Google can't really handle currently, and even if they did, the chances are it might only count as a single link to your disqus discussion.
  Blogstorm has gone into the problems facing comment links in more detail, something I highlighted when Matt first mentioned this clarification at SMX.
• Matt Cutts in the same post highlighted again who you link to matters, and I think Google is going to place more and more emphasis on this. It is a lot of work for the average blogger to keep control of user generated content, and even the best comments sometimes come with spammy links. I have always maintained that "dofollow" isn't for everyone because of the time commitment.
• Disqus is universal – it can be installed on every major blogging platform – many SEO solutions won't be universal or easy to implement
• Can Spam & Email Deliverability – this is 50/50 – I have highlighted in the past that emails being sent from your own domain can be a significant liability
  

  It is your choice based on your own research and the legal advice you have received whether you think emails being sent from your domain which are not totally under your control could represent a problem.
  I honestly don't know if Safe Harbour rules might apply to email delivery. I don't know of any blog owner who has had problems either from a legal perspective, or with their hosting or domain registrars, but then I personally only know a few people who have been killed in car accidents – I know a lot more people who drive cars than publish business blogs.

• Invalidated Cache – this is a major consideration for high traffic blogs, and potentially product launches. The javascript doesn't change on each new page load, thus your cached content also doesn't change (if you just use their javascript on your page) – this can represent a major reduction in server load, even if you are using some kind of Op Cache (eaccelerator APC Xcache), RAM based page cache (Memcached) or more advanced techniques using page chunking. Forget conventional WP Cache / Supercache for product launches, it just can't cope on its own.
• Social Media Viral Effect – the social media viral effect of using Discus is significant. Not many people are exposed to services such as backtype, but tons of people use Facebook – implementation of Facebook, Twitter and other logins for commenting whilst possible with WordPress isn't trivial, and that is more plugins to deal with, more server load etc.
• Get to visit Disqus more often – I sometimes leave comments on other blogs that are using Disqus, and sometimes the comment notifications don't get to me (deliverability issues) – I just noticed on my Andy Beard Disqus profile that Scott Rafer responded to something important 2 months ago, and I didn't see it.

Negative Side of Disqus

• The SEO of the site needs some major work – it is almost insulting that the link to Twitter on my Disqus profile is followed, yet the link to my blog isn't. The anchor text from a conversation on Disqus back to a blog isn't exactly ideal. This is how Google sees my Discus Profile
• Google is very bad at indexing content on Disqus – this is partially due to the Disqus SEO problems – certainly a conversation I took part in 4 days ago isn't indexed.
• I have heard reports that managing spam can be an issue, though I haven't tested it, I rarely see spam on highly popular blogs
• It isn't suitable for private content – you would have to use alternative commenting on private posts if you are running your blog as a membership site. That is something that can be worked around.
• It is hard, maybe impossible to market to people after they have left a comment. With standard WordPress comments, after someone has left an email, you could present a page offering site membership, a one time offer, or an affiliate product – even suggest related content of interest.
• If you have lots of niche blogs, you will hardly want to include all of them on a single Disqus profile if you want to stay under the radar of your competitors. How would a blog network cope? Retain ownership? I can't see B5 Network with a profile of 300+ blogs in Disqus and managing who can moderate comments.

The SEO problems with Disqus are fixable, and in the current Google climate could offer significant advantages – plus Disqus could conservatively gain at least 400% traffic even without new adoption.
It is possible even if they also gave much more SEO friendly links throughout the whole site.

I am recommending Disqus above competitors JSKit and Intense Debate because both of these services the email subscriptions don't stack in Gmail – a nightmare if you subscribe to comments on a popular blog, plus I believe there is more chance of Disqus fixing problems for a win/win solution.

Who knows, we might even get Twitter to remove nofollows too… eventually

Disclosure:- I am recommending Disqus even though part of my startup plans would have involved an SEO, product launch and membership friendly system with refined marketing funnel. If I ever get it off the ground, there are ways to migrate back from Disqus.

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Link to updates from Matt Cutts plus tips on how to continue PageRank sculpting effectively.

Has Google in one quick swipe removed all benefit of Dynamic Linking (old school term) or PageRank sculpting (when it became "trendy"), and potentially caused massive penalties for sites nofollowing links for user generated content and comments?

I have left a few comments on various blog posts over the last few days, especially on SEOmoz and Twitter, but though it important to solidify some thoughts here, and potentially add a little more perspective.

PageRank Sculpting Formerly Known As Dynamic Linking

The idea of controlling the flow of "Google Juice" around a website to pages that matter, or to other sites that matter has been around for a long time, at least as early as 2003 when Leslie Rohde (Stompernet Faculty) was calling it "Dynamic Linking".

Those were the days before "nofollow" and you had to use Javascript to accomplish the internal linking control.

In the past I have linked to Michael Campbell's Revenge of the Mininet which also provides access to Leslie's original Dynamic Linking membership site. They are both now free, (Michael used to charge $79.95 for his ebook)

I am sure I have sent 1000s of people to Michael's newsletter signup page over the years, but I am equally confident that 90% of the visitors didn't sign up. I don't receive any kind of payment recommending Michael's work, or Leslie's dynamic linking.

In many ways I look on at least a passing understanding of these groundbreaking ebooks as required reading for any of my SEO articles

From the comments I see on most SEO blogs, and even many of the articles, I am quietly confident that these seminal works haven't been truly understood, and of course the content rarely gets referenced.

So I am going to do something unprecedented, and I hope Michael won't mind – the page does appear in the SERPs

Here is a direct download link for Revenge of the Mininet

Once you get there, you can pick up a password to access Leslie's Dynamic Linking site

Leslie has always had this great disclaimer

DISCLAIMER!

Some of the techniques and technologies described in the foregoing are not without their pitfalls and potential unintended consequences. If you are new to web business, inexperienced at search engine optimization, or do not feel comfortable with HTML and Javascript (at least at a rudimentary level), you should not attempt to employ the advanced techniques shown here!

Access The Source of SEO Knowledge

Michael Campbell

I have just given you access to 4 or 5 year old information that in all likelihood is more advanced than you will find discussed on 95% of SEO blogs and forums, and whilst I don't from principle/ethics join any private SEO content area to avoid conflict with what I blog about, I am quietly confident that it would still be looked on as advanced content for members only, or not even covered in such depth.

But that is just a trickle of knowledge compared to direct access

Michael has had an internet marketing newsletter for years.
He also now runs a private membership site which is very affordable, and you can follow him on Twitter @dmcorp

Leslie Rohde

I am still eagerly awaiting an update to Leslie's Dynamic Linking suggested on his SEO Software site.

A major update to this material is currently in process owing to some recently discovered changes in the way Google is processing links. Look for an announcement early next year (2009) — the changes will likely revolutionize on-site linking techniques … again!

Leslie also has an SEO Strategy blog, which he actually updates once in a while. I am going to have to explore the blogging platform he uses, Pebble. You can also follow Leslie on Twitter @leslierohde

There are 2 other ways to learn more from Leslie

1. Just before the New Year Leslie put together a new site "Optimize Recession" where he introduced the idea of "Zone Based SEO" – I mentioned it on Twitter.
   Zone based SEO might seem obvious at first, but it allows you to systematize and possibly even automate specific SEO campaigns, especially now it is possible to extract ranking positions from Google referrer data.
2. Stompernet – Leslie is one of the faculty at Stompernet, who now offer very progressive SEO and marketing training. Start off just by joining their newsletter and the 7 Deadly SEO Sins course plus free videos, and possibly get their "Stomping The Search Engines 2" course for $1 (plus a trial to their Net Effect magazine)

The Death Of Dynamic Linking With Javascript?

Of everything that has been discussed about Google making changes to which links they will follow and count going forward, how they handle javascript is probably the one that is worth the most consideration.

The first I read about it was on Search Engine Land in an article by Vanessa Fox (who used to work for Google as a member of their webmaster team) covering Google Javascript Links.
(Note: I know that anchor text is very contrived, but SEO is about helping people find what they are searching for, not snake oil or gaming Google)

Having given a great link, I can justify grabbing a small code example

Some examples of code that Googlebot can now execute include:

• <div onclick="document.location.href='http://foo.com/'">

• <tr onclick="myfunction('index.html')"><a href="#"
  onclick="myfunction()">new page</a>

• <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open
  ('welcome.html')">open new window</a>

Javascript That Is Still Dynamic?

This will probably work

onclick="myfunction('jkhhjstdysd')

Have myfunction() within a file loaded in the header, or preferably in the footer for faster page loading. You would still want to use the CSS that Michael and Leslie suggest for usability.
Somehow define which destination 'jkhhjstdysd' refers to, and that could potentially be broken down into components.

If Google somehow cope with that, and possibly easier would be to just use pure external javascript that pulls in some XML, but that then complicates things if you want to mix real links with dynamic ones.

But this is moot if nofollow actually still works.

Does Nofollow Still Work For Dynamic Linking or PageRank Sculpting?

I am going to lead with the freshest insight I have read, Dan Thies (also Stompernet Faculty) thinks things are being blown out of proportion.

Here are the primary opinion pieces and coverage I have seen, though I am sure there were plenty more

Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting

Didn't comment, was too busy looking for other coverage

Google (Maybe) Changes How the PageRank Algorithm Handles Nofollow

My comment on the post

I can only think that Google have been misinterpreted.

If I have a blog post with 300 comments, and have the links nofollowed (my blog is dofollow but example), then there would effectively be juice lost due to the comment links.

Links are valuable, because they add to the relevance of a comment made, because a reader can follow them to find out more about the person.
However they also form part of disclosure.

If this is only for internal links, there are major problems because often a link will be nofollowed because it points to a tracking link that is also blocked by robots.txt

Any sensible knowledgeable webmaster is going to nofollow those links, because they serve no purpose for Google in their current state, and who wants to turn them into hanging pages.

That may also be a workaround, if Google handles links blocked with Robots.txt differently

No Clarification Forthcoming from Google on Nofollow & PageRank Flow
My comment on the post

I can't see any evidence that this is affecting external links.

Wikipedia is still a black hole of link equity. If this affected Wikipedia external links, we would see some effect, because due to recursive calculations through internal linking, it could potentially reduce their juice pool by as much as 30%

It would also affect the Ebay group with sites such as epinions.

If it has any effect, it will be internal links only.

The amount of juice lost could be similar to dangling or hanging pages, and due to many poor SEO articles suggesting robots.txt for duplicate content, Google Webmaster guidelines suggesting robots.txt for search results, and just ignoring obvious signals such as TBPR.

Yes, any smart SEO could spot the toolbar showing some green on pages blocked by robots.txt and work things out for themselves.

But the juice goes into the internet ether, and due to macro PageRank calculations, comes back.

If anything, this will help Google surface more long-tail content, and sites with lots of pages will benefit.

Live Blogging Of Matt Cutts @ SMX

You & A With Matt Cutts

Is What's Good For Google, Good For SEO
Important to read both articles because it gives a clearer insight to the exact wording on lots of different issues.

Alternative Reactions

PageRank Sculpting is Dead? Good Riddance

PageRank Sculpting – Recent Matt Cutts Video

I have to strongly point out that this video was recorded before SMX, and maybe even a week or 2 before. It is on the official Google webmasters channel on YouTube, thus has probably been vetted in some way for accuracy.

Full Transcript

Matt Cutts on PageRank Sculpting

Rand, In Brighton, and that might be Rand Fishkin, I don't know asks:-

What are your views on 'PageRank Sculpting'?
Useful and recommended if implemented right, or unethical?

Well I wouldn't say it is unethical because it is stuff on your website – you are allowed to control how the PageRank flows around withing your site.
Erm, I would say that it is not the first thing that I would work on.
I would work on:-

• Getting more links
• Having higher quality content

Those are always the sort of things that you want to do first.

But then if you have a certain amount of budget of PageRank, erm… you certainly can sculpt your PageRank.
I wouldn't necessarily do it with the nofollow tag, although you can put a nofollow on a login page, or something that is customized where a robot will never log in for example, but a better more effective form of PageRank sculpting is choosing for example which things to link to from your homepage.

So imagine you have got two different pages.
You have got one product that earns you a lot of money every time someone buys, and you've got another product where you make… you know 10 cents.

You probably want to highlight this page. You want to make sure it gets enough PageRank that it can rank well.

So this is more likely to be a page that you want to link to from your home page.

So when people talk about PageRank sculpting, they tend to think nofollow and all that sort of stuff, but in some sense the ways that you choose to create your site, your site architecture, and how you link between your pages is a type of PageRank sculpting.
So it is certainly not unethical to have all the links come into your site, and you decide how to link within your site, and how to make the pages within your site.
Erm, I do think that having more links because you have great content is a better way to rank well because it is a second order effect to be sculpting your PageRank.

It can be useful, but it wouldn't be the first thing that I would do.

Commentary on Matt's video I will leave to my good mate Dave
PageRank Sculpting; its all old school baby

Response From Google After SMX About PageRank Sculpting

None…. yet – regard this as a placeholder

I do have some thoughts though:-

1. I think we need a strong statement that external links with nofollow would not cause PageRank to evaporate.
2. Nofollow is a simple solution for user generated content and comments, but if it has any effect of PageRank disappearing, we are going to lose the links on tons of blogs totally.
   It would be a sad day that an action by Google reduced the interlinking of the web.
3. I don't want to encourage use of javascript for PageRank sculpting – it is not really very good for accessibility
4. Noscript – Nested embedded object items, containing links or thumbnails to source that may well be descriptive of content? This is needed if RSS Readers and web based email clients are going to continue to strip out video embeds.
5. Links that lead to pages blocked with robots.txt and other hanging pages really need to be nofollowed. I think we need to know that in that situation PageRank wouldn't normally evaporate, but I can understand why that might not be confirmed.
6. I would love a much clearer indication of page size that Google will index as there are just vague notions that it can be more than 100 links per page.
   If a size is specified, is that gzipped?

Matt Cutts On PageRank Sculpting

Matt Cutts today (June 16th 2009) wrote a post confirming that Google now treats PageRank significantly differently than the original PageRank patent, and that links with nofollow, whilst they don't pass PageRank to the linked page, also can reduce the amount of PageRank that flows to other links on a page.

Rank Fishkin has already responded with analysis
Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow

I also missed this commentary from Matt Leonard on why this could potentially make life harder for niche sites

There are bound to be more posts appearing on Techmeme today

PageRank Sculpting Isn't Dead – It Has Evolved

Lets take a look at my WordPress SEO Masterclass

Those Red links in the Sandcastle structure are not nofollow, they are oneway linkage.

It can be achieved with fairly simple coding, I even posted part of it over 2 years ago though the code needs to be updated for WordPress tagging rather than UTW.

This linking structure still works extremely effectively, but with one major caveat – internal & external links on the tag pages being used to channel juice back to the home page can't be nofollowed.

If you are using default WordPress "ugly excerpts" they don't contain any HTML content, no links to worry about other than the links to the posts.
Tag pages should thus be restuctured to highlight your best content, otherwise you end up with 3rd level push. 3rd level push in most cases isn't a bad thing, if you don't have a lot of comment links.

Rather than remove links that you previously nofollowed, the key is to add additional internal links to useful pages.

There are ways to handle the comment links, retain the benefit of having the comment content on your blog, and even keep giving your visitors a little link equity (dofollow links), though that solution will require significant programming effort.

Blogspot bloggers are now totally messed up, as even adding nofollow to their tag links isn't going to retain juice.

Those who based their internal linking on my advice are not significantly affected by this change, and as this actually happened over a year ago, it is one of the reasons they have benefited.

The new PageRank sculpting could be looked on as advance information architecture, which was always the advanced PageRank sculpting

Expect a new WordPress SEO Masterclass soon, but it is unlikely to be free, and I would avoid following the advice of anyone who suggests conning your community using Iframes and Javascript for comments.

Update: Additional coverage worth a read @ Search Engine Land, Future Now & Search Engine Watch

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