So after spending about 3 weeks futzing around with Solid State Drives, Vista and Windows 7, I think I have come to a set of truths that I have learned.

First, upgrading your operating system is a mistake, you should always install a new clean version of your operating system no matter what. You can find all the install codes you need for your software and you can figure out how to back up your data, and a clean install just fixes a myriad of problems and sins that have built up over the life of your previous operating system lifetime.

I managed to get a good size solid state drive, and I have learned that if you install your operating system correctly on the device, your system will run much better (if you are running Windows 7). I think putting an SSD on a Vista or XP system is just not worth doing (Windows 7 seems to understand the devices and optimizes to use it). You should run Windows 7 to use an SSD.

Attempting to Clone your disk to the SSD while it sounds like an interesting concept, is a bloody waste of your time. I ended up with a somewhat faster system, but, not as fast as when I simply reloaded the OS from scratch and loaded it onto a formatted SSD.

I am not sure what the lifetime of an SSD is, so you should have a reliable back up system for your important data (or better still have all your important data on a NAS or server elsewhere). This makes the system you are running on almost “disposable”, but it is much faster for now, and that is what you are looking for.

The system I upgraded was a POS HP Laptop, which was having no end of issues with Blue Screens of Death and overheating issues that seem to have subsided for now. As I have ranted previously HP laptops are not worth buying, and not worth buying at any price (I have had to replace 2 of them for my daughters), but if you stick an SSD in one, it might make it a bit more reliable (I we shall see).

All in all an interesting experiment, but if I had simply started from scratch as I was told to do by folks in the know, I wouldn’t have wasted 3 weeks the way I did.

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How many requests do I receive for folks who wish to add their content to THE Canadian Personal Finance Site? This week over 10, and most weeks at least 5 of them, and 99.9% of all of them are from folks who I do not read, nor do I know of them. If I ran a corner store, and someone who I did not know walked in and said, “I’d like to run your store today, can I?“, I would give the same answer I give most Guest Post requests, NO!

I realize that most of the How to Create Hype About Your Site newsletters say this is one of the best ways to get traffic to your site (I hope you didn’t pay money to get that advice), help your page ranking and solve world hunger, however, speaking as the person at the other end of the TSUNAMI of e-mails on this topic, please cease and desist the Cold Call e-mails.

The one guest post request I have agreed to over the past year, was actually a referral from another blogger who I know and trust, who asked me as a favour to help out a new set of bloggers. The Post about the Side Effects of Credit Card Balance Build Up, fit with my point of view and did not heinously inundate the reader with links to sites and weird graphics with hidden crap in them. Yes, I am fully cognisant of the dirty tricks a lot of these alleged “guest writers” pull if you let their content onto your site, and that is the other reason I don’t usually allow guest posts.

I have discussed this with other bloggers (and believe me, I am not in the minority on my opinions of the Guest Post game), and some of them now will simply reply to all Guest Post requests with a form e-mail saying that they charge for guest posts, and they still reserve the right to refuse any content that they feel is inappropriate to their site (the charges range from $20 to over $100). I like this idea, but I am always afraid that someone might take me up on the offer too.

Advice on Guest Posts

Let me give some free advice on how to get your guest post accepted by a site (no this does not mean you should use these on me and no I am not guaranteeing these will work, after all this is free advice):

• Do not send e-mails to bloggers you do not know, most will simply send you to the SPAM box and ignore you.  You need to have some kind of relationship with the blogger before you approach them about a guest post.
• Do not send content as part of your initial contact. I have people sending me crap as part of their pleading e-mail asking if they can guest post. I delete those even quicker, until I say I want to see what you can write, don’t send anything.
• Get to know the blogger, it is Networking that works the best. If I know of you, or know someone who will vouch for you, I am much more inclined to think about your guest post offer.  How to get to know someone? Include a link to their content in your blog, and leave comments (that are not simply, “Hi I really like your content”, I delete those comments quickly too) on their site. Ask them questions in the comments, show you are reading their site and are interested in what they write.  Once you can fake genuine interest, you are more likely to get a favorable response.
• Write good content for a while, you might just get noticed that way.
• Maybe enter a contest about writing on some of the sites like Blogengage or something like that. On Blogengage you can show what you can do, and maybe win some money?
• Figure out what the site you want to Guest Post thinks. As an example sending me an offer of writing a post about how great Pay Day Loan places are is really not going to fly (and  you will get a rude response from me).
• Think of Guest Posts like a Job Hunt, cold calling does not work at all (or incredibly rarely), you need to build up your network of contacts so people know of you, and will think of you in a good light (not with a “who the heck is this” point of view).

If I have sent you a rude “get lost” e-mail when you have sent me a guest post request, I apologize, for a while I really got miffed at this whole thing. If I have not replied to you, take the hint, you need to build up some credibility with me before I will answer you.

It has taken me 6 years to build up the meager readership, I don’t need a weird guest post to alienate the few readers I have, thus I shy away from them.

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Link Carpet Bombing

After last week’s discussion of external linking, the search for links from the big boys, I didn’t really go into depth about the current methodology I have in place.

I have been over doing the whole social media thing and plan on curtailing this activity for a while and see if it changes much, but I have added a new way to build up links to posts, and that is Carnival Carpet Bombing.

The important thing, is to get all your posts links of some kind, so they don’t become little orphans (this means internal or external links, but especially external links). As most of my readers of  THE Canadian Personal Finance Blog knows I create new content every week (usually about 5 posts), and I have been making a conscious effort to make sure that each post has a link to something internally on my site (usually a much older post), to ensure I have fewer orphaned posts (especially older ones).

The second thing I do is typically on Thursday, I will go to Blog Carnival Central and submit each of the posts for the week to one of the many Personal Finance carnivals, to ensure that then each post has an external link to it (hence the concept of Carnival Carpet Bombing).

Will this bring a lot more readership to my site? I am skeptical, it sometimes brings spikes in readership, but there is a low retention rate on these new readers. This does add external links, and if you are starting out, more likely than not from a higher Page Rank site, which then gives you a higher Page Rank. As long as the external site linking to you is not an identified SPAM or SCRAPING site, then this can only help your site in Google’s Eyes.

What might be useful would be a tool to wander around the net and draw the link map for each of your post, showing where it might have links to, and show the traversal path of robots through your Internal Link Lattice as well. Anybody know of such a tool? I prefer graphical output, since text files with thousands of words give me headaches.

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I have already given some ideas about creating internal links with Link Building a Tutorial (Internal), (see I just created an internal link right there), but now we need to do the important task of creating External Links (i.e. links from other sites, that hopefully have a higher Page Rank than you). External links (hopefully) bring new readers to your site, and can increase your prestige and page rank, so you need to take this topic very seriously.

I have learned a lot of methods for building up external links from my web site THE Canadian Personal Finance Site (see I just created an external link for that site), some have worked well, others not so much, so let’s wander through some of the methods that seem to help out.

Just Ask

One way of getting links from external sites to your site, is by asking the external site owner to link to your site. This seems obvious, but it doesn’t happen often any more either. I rarely add links to my web sites from e-mails sent to me from sites I do not know about (sorry, if I linked to everyone who asked, I’d have a site of links and not much else). If the site owner doesn’t know of you, and does not know you, don’t expect them to link to your site, unless they are incredibly generous. You can try this method, but don’t expect a lot of success with it, unless you know other bloggers well.

Life is a Carnival

This is the obvious way to get external links and to build up your links to external sites as well, simply go to the Blog Carnival hub, find some carnivals that are in your category or topic space, and start submitting posts. Don’t worry that the carnival seems to have 125 posts on it, you are worried about the link, not about if anyone clicks on it (they most likely won’t). This is how I started building up links to my site, and it has worked really well early on.

Hosting a Carnival is really good for this kind of stuff too, because you link to many external sites, but typically those who are in the carnival are supposed to link back to your post as well, which will give you scads more external links into your sites. Hosting a carnival isn’t easy, and if you are a Newbie, the blog carnival owner may not be too enthused to have you host, but keep trying, it pays off.

Best of Posts

Create your own carnival is another option, where you find the big sites in your category, and create a Weekly Best of Links post ( an example of this would be my Random Thoughts: Slash into Lent post). You end up creating outward facing external links, and if those sites see you linking to their content, they may do the same for you, not often, but it does happen.

Remember with these kind of posts, don’t include too many links, because folks just don’t click that many links on any site.

Big Social Media Sites

There are a few big Social Media sites that actually give you a link back from them, and if you are a newbie, their Page Rank is bound to be higher than yours, so having them link to you is good for you. A few of these sites include: Zoomit , OldDogg, Fwisp and others. These links are very useful to have, and more exposure in Social Media, means more eyes on your content, and possibly more folks linking to you as well (and more money to be made as well). A great list of good sites is 10 Social Networks That Will Get You More Traffic, very useful link.

Mainstream media mentioning you will also cause an explosion of links too, but that is very much hit and miss as well, but more exposure in Social Media, increases the chances of this kind of lucrative exposure.

Networking

Get to know other bloggers in your field or in your city. Meet them face to face, or via Instant Messaging, because the larger your circle and network is, the more links you will end up with as well.  It’s not easy to do this (don’t leave comments about how you’d like to get together with the author on web sites, that is just creepy), but you must try. Use Twitter or something like that and say you are in some city and looking for fellow bloggers to meet, you might be surprised who might answer (but also be careful, there are a lot of Trolls and Odd Folk out there too).

As with job hunting, networking is a key to building  your site and links to your site.

So with these two tutorials, you should be able to start building your stature on the web with links both internal and external.

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So it has taken me about 6 years and a lot of mistakes to figure out how to slowly but surely build links into your site (and across your site) and thus build your Page Rank as well. I will describe the techniques and ideas that I have used with THE Canadian Personal Finance Site .

Old “Dead” Content

This is the big problem, if you don’t have internal links to your old content, it is as good as dead (not making you any money, or giving your readers a feel for your ideas).  If you do not link to it, once the post is off your front page, and it does not have any links to it, the only way that a reader will find it is via SEO trickery (which is snake oil in my opinion) to manipulate searching, or via a blind luck search hit. This is why you need to create a tight lattice of internal links to your own content, to make sure your old content is still useful (and by useful I mean money making).

I have heard many times that External Links are the most important thing for a new site, and existing sites to pick up, to increase Page Rank and other ratings, but I like to think that an internal linking structure is also a key to making sure that all of your content has the capability to make money for you, which is really why you are running this business.

Best practices for internal linking? Read on, here are some of mine:

Favorites or Best of Page

This is the first and easiest thing to do. There are posts that you like, and that other folk have liked over time, that you should make available to them in the easiest way possible (eye catchers in the marketing world). How do you do that? There are a few ways that I have seen:

• Have a title and short description rolling widget on your front page, that simply runs through these posts and may catch a new reader’s eye, and thus cause them to read more of your content (and increase their stay on your site). This is a great idea, if that is the way your web site is laid out (don’t just shove this widget on your page, if it doesn’t fit with your theme).
• Create a Best Of/Favorites Menu item at the top of the page. This is really useful too, you then create a static, Best of Page, where you put links to your Keystone posts, that hopefully grab you more readership.

These two methods are easy to implement, and is a must for any new web site, after it has been up long enough to have some older content you still want to monetize.

Weekly Round Up Links

In my weekly round ups on Friday (which I may move to another day since everyone seems to be doing one now), the first set of links on this page is a set of links to all my previous posts for that week. Is this sneaky? Not really, it’s pretty darn obvious.  Have a look at Random Thoughts Slash Into Lent, and see that the first section of links are actually all to my own posts.

Why do this? My guess is that most folks who end up at a page with lots of links, get overwhelmed with the sheer number and will stop clicking after the 3rd or 4th link (I checked with a few other bloggers on this theory and they tend to agree as well), so make sure it is my content that they get to first (yup, self-serving stuff like this is how you get more eyes on your stuff).

Normal Linking

Another trick I have been doing lately is posting a lot of my older content onto Twitter (with the tage OBG, (Oldie but Goodie)) to see if I can get more eyes on my older content. I didn’t touch on that in Twitter Etiquette (see what I did there, I linked to some older content on this site, tricky eh?), but it is another way to get older content a little more life (but I will talk about that in my post about External Linking). With these OBG posts, I sometimes try to link them into my new content as well, thus creating a more complex linking map on my site.

Linking old content from new content just freshens your money making capabilities that much more.

These are just a few of the tricks I have tried to keep my older content fresh, but you must make sure that the old content is “Green and Fresh“, so linking to a post you did about something that happened 5 years ago, and has specifics about it isn’t going to help much (unless you couch the link with a title like Historical Background: then you can sneak those in as well.
Next post will be about external linking, hopefully soon. Sorry my writing here is not as prolific as my regular site, but I need some spare time to think about these things (and discuss them with my blogging peers as well).

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Twitter Tsunamis

I am still learning how to use Social Media as a tool to drive more readers through Canadian Personal Finance (and thus hopefully create more income from the site) but I am starting to learn a few things about one of the major social media engines Twitter.

Twitter Etiquette

First thing is Twitter rarely creates much of a buzz for my site, so my guess is I am not in any way an expert, but I have learned what does not work (so that is a good start):

• Do not create Twitter Tsunamis where you post 10 things at once on Twitter. Nobody can, or wants to read that much on Twitter, and most of the posts will be ignored. I have created my own rule that anyone whom I follow, if they create a Twitter Tsunami of more than 3 posts, I unfollow them right away. Use Hootsuite or something like that to spread the info out.
• If you are retweeting a post, add something to it, unless it is the SEO Secret of Life say what you think of the link or post, or I won’t click anything.
• Directed posts that attempt to get you to click because they put a link to your userid is done by scumbag phishing dirtbags and I will retweet their userid every time calling them a scumbag. Don’t do this, it might make you money, but you are then a scumbag.
• I don’t welcome new followers in any way shape or form, that is my preference. Others send a nice welcome message, OK, I guess that is fine, but if you send me a Welcome Message, with a Make a Million Dollars link on it, I will unfollow you right away.
• Don’t just post links, post your ideas, try to start conversations or arguments in Twitter, it’s much more interesting that way. Simply posting links will get you unfollowed eventually, especially if they are links to stuff I don’t care about.

Tweet, Tweet

The results of this are, that I don’t have that many followers right now, but I am not worried about it either. I will not follow folks just to follow, and if I feel like someone is trying to manipulate me into clicking on things, they will be gone.

Are other folks like this? I have no idea, but I can’t think that I am the only person that thinks this way.

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Another relatively successful year for THE Canadian Personal Finance site, however, not nearly as successful as I think it should be to justify the amount of time I spend on writing and developing the business.

Some of the highlights of my successes (to be optimistic):

1. My Alexa ranking has gone from off the face of the earth to 98,186, which means I think I have succeeded in the Yakezie challenge (got below 100,000 on Alexa).
2. My income from Adsense is up about 5% this year over last, which while good is still slave wages compared to the amount of work put into the site.
3. TextlinkAds kept up it’s regular payment pace, and it paid about 10% more for the year, so I mustn’t complain about that.
4. I had other income of about $200 from other bits and pieces, which is up a little bit over last year.
5. My presence of Social Networking seems to be much higher these days and I am drawing more readership from these sites, but they are not of very high quality, in that they are not big Adsense clickers, or purchase stuff that I link to on Amazon.
6. Had my first guest post in a while, with Side Effects of Credit Card Debt Build Up, which was received quite well and I did help out a starting blogger, so good for me.

As we can see from Analytics there were a few spikes in the year:

2010 Readership Analytics Graph

What Did Work This Year?

And the list of my most popular posts for the year were:

1. Gifts You Should Never Give to Your Kids, which goes to show that if you rip off an idea from MSN you can still get a lot of readers too. (2143 page views)
2. Pet Insurance WTF, does portray me as a heartless oaf when it comes to pets, but hey, if it sells, who cares?  (1443 page views)
3. Gosh Darn CPP and EI, which simply is me bitching about paying premiums, which is cool. (1342 page views)
4. Advice to Future University Students shows that any story that talks about teenage drinking, can’t be all bad (1230 page views)
5. Banking on Sunday is the first post that I really tried to push hard using Social Networking, and I guess it shows that this can be of use as well. (1181 Page Views)

So I guess the best thing I can do is repost these on Twitter this week, just to get a little more bang for my post?

Goals for Coming Year

I think I have a few simple goals for the coming year:

1. Make more money doing this.

Seems like the only real goal, so let’s work on that.

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To my readers, and their families and anyone visiting here, I wish you a Merry Christmas and hope you enjoy the day and the season.

Christmas day and the whole Advent and Christmas season is a time to enjoy Spouses, Family, Friends and the time to relax.

And to you Scrapers, Spammers and SEO Spoofers, I hope Santa left you a lump of coal!

Merry Christmas

My Christmas Tree

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Yup, here I am resurrecting this site and posting about what I am learning about Social Media and such, and I have managed to kill the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) for this site, which is at least ironic, but very infuriating as well.

I first noticed that my previous post Scrapers and How to Trap Them, never showed up the RSS feed even 2 days after it had been posted, so then I started to dig into what may have gone wrong. At first I thought Feedburner had gone off the rails, so I attempted to go through their Troubleshootize page and found out that in fact the Feed for NotHowToDoit.com was timing out.

I then wandered over to Dreamhost, my hosting company, and checked, but no nothing was wrong on their end, so finally I gave up and went to Google, and tripped over the culprit.

Evidently WordPress Plug-ins can and do cause loading issues (slowing things down and such), so I finally came across one which had a very simple methodology:

Turn off every plug in and see if the RSS feed returns, if it does then slowly add plug ins to find out what the culprit might be.

I did that, well I turned most of them off (I left Akismet on, I don’t trust those SPAM commenter). Sure enough my RSS feed returned and Feedburner was able to see it all.

My guess on the culprit after a slow adding of each Plug in, is that SexyBookMarks may have been the tipping point in terms of Plugins, so I have left it off for now and may try it again in a while, but for now, I am enjoying having the RSS feed back for this site.

Moral of the story is, don’t just keep adding Plugins to your WordPress configuration, check them out and add them very slowly and watch for any possible side effects (like say your RSS feed dies).

Spam Comment Update

I have integrated a new plug in to try to stop the Spammers, it is called SI-CAPTCHA-FOR-WORDPRESS and so far it seems to be doing OK. I am still testing, but anything that cuts down the deluge of spam is appreciated.

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As my site has drawn more readership lately, it has also drawn a great deal more SPAM comments. These comments are mostly crap, some are funny, but it is annoying too (since I have to at least look at the SPAM list to see if AKISMET has set some genuine comment as a SPAM).

The graphic from AKISMET shows just how the volume has increased markedly over the past few months. In June I had only a few a day, but now I am getting Hundreds a day, and the volume does not seem to be dropping.

I think I’ll need to look closer into a more automated SPAM removal system, or I may look to introduce some kind of Comment validation technique to at least slow the spammers down a little.

SPAM Comment Levels Growing A Lot

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