In Your Web

How to Monetize A Hyperlocal Blog

2011-01-11T18:30:00.000-08:00

Since I'm back to discussing hyperlocal blogging, I've decided it was better to launch a separate blog on this topic...

http://www.hyperlocalblogging.org

This blog is specific to the monetization of hyperlocal blogs, and less so on how to publish one, or build a following. I think monetization is the subject that everyone is going to be most interested in.

Hyperlocal Blogging is perhaps a buzzword that we'll be hearing more of in 2011, with the likes of AOL Patch leading the forefront, along with other hyperlocal blog networks sprouting up.

Of course, I've been publishing one of my own since 2004.

Anyways, since I'm deep into the Internet publishing/marketing business, it makes sense that I register a domain name with the "hyperlocal blogging" keywords in it, and write about it. Maybe, someone will listen. ✓

Internet Marketing Predictions for 2011

2011-01-01T00:23:00.000-08:00

Internet Marketing Predictions for 2011

With the start of the new year, I thought I'd throw out my predictions for the Internet marketing industry in this coming year.

And no "pansy predictions" here, I'm going all out...

Hosting Company Crash - Web hosting companies have been hard hit over the past few years, but this is the year it's all going to crash. By the end of 2011, most of them will have been bought out by larger companies.

All those $9.99 a month hosting providers will be gone, and what will be left are dedicated hosting services. These days, there are so many options for free hosting, including Blogger, Posterous, and Tumblr. Plus, people with no website-building knowledge can still create their own web presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Facebook for Domain Names - Facebook will provide its users with a way to direct domain names to their servers. So imagine registering a domain name (www.mydomain.com), directing it to Facebook's servers, and seeing your Facebook account? That way, you can print "www.mydomain.com" on your business card, and have people land on your Facebook account or page.

Blogger already provides this feature, allowing such users to completely customize their blogs, making them look anything but a Blogger blog. So why shouldn't Facebook do this too?

Google Buys eBay - One space where Google has little market share is the eCommerce space. Yes, they do have Google Product Search and Google Checkout, but when it comes to dominating the retail sector of the Internet, you're talking eBay, Amazon, iTunes, et al.

And buying eBay also gives Google access to PayPal, which will let it dominate the financial transaction space.

Oh, and Facebook now allowing its users to set up e-commerce on Facebook Pages, only fuels the fire.

Google to buy Twitter? Well Google already attempted to do this in 2009. But I think Google is going to feel ever-more pressured to become a major player in the social media arena. It's arch-enemy, Facebook, is only getting bigger. And as I reported a few days ago, Twitter still doesn't have a viable means of monetizing itself aside from getting injections of capital.

On the other hand, Google doesn't need Twitter to be profitable. It only needs Twitter.

And of course Twitter founder Evan Williams is no stranger to selling cool ideas to Google.

The Beginning of the End for Affiliate Networks - the large networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare, Share A Sale, and Google Affiliate Network, are going to contract, lose money, and merge.

This is because Internet marketing is making a shift towards display advertising.

If you haven't already noticed but affiliate marketing has slowly lost its effectiveness over the past few years. Publishers are losing their income and finding it harder to earn those big bucks.

This is because the Internet has become so mainstream, so saturated with consumers and vendors, that companies are having to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Where at one time it was easy for a merchant to convert an affiliate click into a sale, it's now tough for them to do with much more competition around.

Just look at your own website. There are more websites competing with you than ever before. And in attempt to protect your traffic share, you've gone to great lengths to strengthen your reputation as an authority and thereby attract more inbound links. What you're doing is brand marketing.

Instead of paying publishers for conversions or leads, advertisers are now simply looking to get their name out there. But don't think that CPM ads will make things easier for you. Instead, it will get harder. Advertisers will only buy CPM inventory from publishers who command a combination of massive page views with highly targeted audiences. What you need to do now is hone your audience down to just those people who want to buy stuff, and then build page views from there. ✓

2011 Is the Year Twitter Dies?

2010-12-28T23:59:00.000-08:00

Anytime a company requires a new round of investment money, you know things are not going good.

I mean, Twitter has been around for 4 1/2 years now.

And it still doesn't have a strategy to monetize its tweets?

Twitter is an example of what I've talked about on this blog a couple of times before. It's a cool idea in search of a business plan. But if you want to make money, you have to start with the business plan first...

In affiliate marketing, most of us started out publishing a pretty cool blog or website, and then later on tried to monetize it with AdSense or affiliate links, only to discover that we're not getting rich. When all along, you should have started the other way around, identifying a really good advertiser or affiliate program, and then designing a blog or website around that.

I hope Twitter succeeds. I'd hate to think that Facebook could wind up being all there is online. At least Twitter isn't trying to hog up the Internet for itself. ✓

Selling Local Advertising Is Tough

2010-12-25T15:36:00.000-08:00

As an Internet marketer, I've never encountered anything more difficult than making a decent income from selling page views to local advertisers.

I mentioned earlier this month that I had made another push towards making my local blog profitable. I hired a sales person to sell ad space on my local website, "Menifee 24/7". It's been tough, but I'm sensing that we're close to turning a corner.

Thus far, we're getting positive feedback from local businesses here in Menifee about buying advertising space, but we haven't received any money in hand. We've gotten commitments, and we've had advertisers tell us what they want from us before pulling the trigger, which we've complied with. But again, still no money in hand...

There are perhaps as many as ten other local news websites in my general area that publish exclusively to the Internet. And these websites are not having any luck selling ads to the local community. Some of these websites command much more traffic than I, and enjoy greater name recognition. Yet the only ads that appear on their website are network ads like Google AdSense, Doubleclick, and ValueClick, as well as their own promotions like, "Advertise Here". It seems they aren't making much money either.

The thing is that I don't know if they have a dedicated salesperson or sales staff knocking on doors and placing phone calls the way my dedicated salesperson is doing. I don't know if they have already knocked on all the doors and placed all the phone calls, and I'm simply just late to lunch.

But again, I feel like we're about to turn a corner here, and things look optimistic right now.

Just yesterday, I talked with the general manager and assistant manager of a sports bar here in town, and they both sounded convinced they had to buy advertising from me. They just needed to get the OK from the ownership. Now, I don't know if they always have to get the OK from the ownership on every piece of advertising they do, or if they just need to get the OK to buy online advertising from my website. But still, I feel optimistic.

But just to temper things somewhat, I recently discovered that a newspaper here in town went out of business. Well, it was not actually a newspaper, it was a direct mailer disguised as a newspaper. Regardless, it went out of business. I presume it died because it couldn't sell enough advertising. In fact, newspaper advertising continues to trend downwards, while online advertising is trending upwards.

But then again, maybe I shouldn't talk until after I see cash in hand. ✓

Not All Content Is King

2010-12-18T09:52:00.001-08:00

"Content is king" is the old saying, but it's not as simple as that.

Content is indeed king when it comes to building a large and loyal following of readers, but you also need good content, compelling content.

Another common opinion is that content can't be king if no one is reading your content. And that makes sense. However, if no one is reading your content, it's likely that you have nothing worth reading. ✓

Leather Cases for Samsung Galaxy Tab Ain't Cheap

2010-12-15T20:32:00.000-08:00

I discovered that cases and sleeves for the eBook readers are about 30-40% cheaper than the cases and sleeves for the tablet computers.

I bought a leather case for my Samsung Galaxy Tab. The case was actually designed for the Amazon Kindle. But because the Galaxy Tab and the Amazon Kindle are the same dimensions, the case works just fine.

What I bought is the "Zierra Leather Portfolio" from Targus at a price of $29.99 at Best Buy. Meanwhile, Best Buy also had a leather case designed specifically for the Galaxy Tab, I can't remember the brand name, but costs $49.99.

Targus Zierra Leather Portfolio for Amazon Kindle fits Samsung Galaxy Tab

Yet the Zierra I bought is clearly better quality, feels more solid, has pockets for business cards, receipts, and a pen holder. While the case for the Samsung Galaxy Tab was smaller, didn't come with any features, and had a flimsy feel.

And that was the cheaper case. Best Buy had other cases designed for the Galaxy Tab that went as high as $75.00.

So why is that cases for eBook readers are cheaper than cases for tablet computers? ✓

Back to Local Blogging, Again

2010-12-13T23:48:00.001-08:00

I'm making a renewed focus towards my local blog, "Menifee 24/7", a blog about the town I live in. I started that blog in 2004, and by late 2009 I had boosted traffic to as many as 15,000 visitors per month, which is a lot in this town 67,000 people.

But I found out fairly quickly that monetizing such traffic via Google AdSense and affiliate programs just doesn't work at the local level. The only way to monetize local traffic with a significant amount of earnings is to sell ads directly to local businesses. And I learned that I'm no good at selling ads to local businesses.

Hence, I ended up writing the blog mostly as a community service, by attending city council meetings and school board meetings and reporting on what took place. But eventually, I got burned out and stopped writing it. I still had a few local residents volunteering to write material for me, and they kept it going.

But a month ago, one such volunteer offered to help find local advertisers for me in exchange for a cut of the sales. I agreed.

So now, I've followed through by taking up writing again for Menifee 24/7. I've also updated the look of the site by incorporating a new template, and removing all references to the word "blog", in hopes of making it look more like a news organization.

I've also submitted the site to Google News for possible inclusion. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

And now comes word that the city's local newspaper went out of business a couple of months ago. Well, it wasn't really a newspaper. It didn't publish any hard news, just stuff like "student of the month", tips on how to grow bigger begonias, and stuff like that. Nonetheless, now that it's gone, perhaps it'll be easier for me to sell ads to local businesses.

We'll see. ✓

Will Tablets Ever Replace Laptops?

2010-11-30T08:22:00.001-08:00

The question that keeps coming up is if the iPad, and other tablets, will replace the laptop.

I keep saying no.

I tackled this question almost a year ago under a blog post entitled, "Will Smartphones Make Laptops Obsolete". To summarize, I said that people still see laptops as being more productive than smartphones, primarily because you can't connect a 24 inch monitor, full sized keyboard, and a 1 terabyte external drive, into a smartphone.

That is, people will always spend most of their time sitting down, either at their home or in an office. Hence, if you're sitting down, you might as well have a 24 inch monitor, a full sized keyboard, a 1 terabyte external drive, designed around a powerful laptop...

The same applies to tablet computers.

Tablets will only replace laptops when people spend less time at home, and less time in an office.

But I can tell you right now, that's very costly to do. Being away from home means spending money at a restaurant, cafe, or coffee shop. It means purchasing Wi-Fi service from AT&T or T-Mobile, or getting a mobile hotspot from your wireless carrier. It means having to plug your tablet into the wall for power.

It also means burning more fuel to drive around.

My point is that as long as we're spending most of our time sitting down at home, or in the office, it makes sense to have a desk with a full blown set of peripheral devices all connected to a powerful productivity machine like a laptop.

Certainly you can plug all those peripherals into a tablet, but that would defeat a tablet's mobility wouldn't it? It makes more sense to keep the laptop as your primary productivity machine, and the use the tablet as a peripheral device for mobile computing.

Personally, I still use my smartphone as my mobile peripheral device. I just like the concept of having a computer that fits into my pocket! ✓

XML Sitemaps Really Do Work!

2010-11-19T08:11:00.000-08:00

Last October I wrote a post entitled, "Fixing Broken Links", where I mentioned that Google had not indexed all of the pages on my cemetery records website.

To be more accurate, Google had only indexed a little over 19,000 of the nearly 33,000 pages.

Well after having submitted a sitemap back then, I'm happy to say that as of today, Google's has increased its indexing to over 24,000 pages, after submitting a sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools...

It's a long slow process. It seems about every 10 days, Google adds another 500 pages into its index. Hopefully it continues and eventually indexes everything.

Getting every page indexed into Google is important for a variety of reasons...

More pages indexed means more pages I have competing for traffic on Google's search results pages.

My internal search engine, which is powered by Google CSE, will yield more results, which generates more page views.

Google CSE displays AdSense ads, which means more search results will display more ads.

Overall, those things lead to a happier user experience for my visitors.

✓

Company Pledges Mangrove Tree for Every New Facebook Fan

2010-10-15T21:34:00.000-07:00

A luxury resort operator, Hacienda Tres Ríos, which is based in the Maya Riviera of Mexico, has pledged to donate one mangrove tree for every new fan that "likes" its Facebook page...

http://www.facebook.com/HaciendaTresRios.Resort

The publicity stunt, which started on October 7, 2010, got under way with 3,385 existing fans, with a goal of adding another 3,000 fans. The mangrove trees will be planted in Cancun as part of a reforestation effort.

And if you happen to "like" their page, they'll give you a "I'm an official mangrove donor" medal, which is actually a virtual medal that publishes to your Facebook wall, inviting all your friends to check it out.

But they also offer existing fans the same medal just by clicking on "Suggest to Friends".

It's one way to boost fans without spending advertising money on Facebook, though I imagine they're spending money on trees. But then again, they score points on the environmentalist front as well. ✓

Optimizing Bing/Facebook Integration

2010-10-14T22:09:00.000-07:00

If you missed it last Wednesday, Microsoft and Facebook got together and did a press conference, announcing that Bing will become more integrated with Facebook.

In short, Bing will provide search results using your Facebook friends to determine relevancy.

That is, when more of your Facebook friends "like" something, that something will rank better, and be more prominently displayed on Bing's search results.

But Microsoft also pointed out that this friend-based relevancy is optional. By default, it will be turned off. But you can simply click a button to turn it on.

So how do we publishers respond to that?...

Well, if you want to get more traffic from Bing, add more Facebook "Like" buttons on your website. Facebook has a page describing its social plugins:
http://developers.facebook.com/plugins

You'll want to add a Like button that references each page of your website, as well as a Like button that references your website as a whole.

You'll also want to promote your content, products, and services on Facebook, and personally click on the "Like" button on every single item you post.

I imagine some bloggers will go so far as to beg their readers to click the Like button. They'll be like Jerry Lewis, "Our goal is 100 likes, come on and click that button people, we're gonna be here all night long!"

You can sense the "Like" becoming a commodity. You can also imagine people threatening to unlike something to lower your rankings.

As it is right now, Bing drives only a fraction of traffic compared to Google. But it appears that Facebook and Microsoft are strengthening their relationship even further. And as Facebook has now replaced Google as the top trafficked property, one can only guess how far Bing will ride on its coattails. ✓

Using Facebook Pages as a Surrogate To Your Website

2010-10-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

One of the things I'm finding useful with Facebook Pages is that it's a way to get content indexed immediately, and completely.

Compare that to your website, where after several years you might have published thousands of pages. But if your website has a moderate to low PageRank (PR0 to PR6 on the Google Toolbar), Google simply won't index all the pages. In fact, it will start dropping pages out of its index.

The reason is because Google does not want to index every page of a website that is not totally trustworthy or reputable. Hence, the higher the PageRank, the more of your pages it will index. For comparison purposes, my biggest website, Interment.net, is a PR6 on the Google Toolbar, and has 33,000 pages, yet only about 20,000 are indexed in Google, according to Google Webmaster Tools.

However, Facebook is a PR10. Hence, every page on Facebook gets indexed.

That means you can set up a Facebook Page, and post content into it, and Google will index it all.

So how do you use that to your advantage?

Well, you post links to your website.

Every time you post new content on your website, you should also post an announcement on your corresponding Facebook Page. Even if Google drops your content from its index, it'll still keep your Facebook announcement, and hence you'll still have some way of getting Google traffic to that content.

What are other high PR websites that will let you post content? ✓

AdKeeper Launches New Advertising Network

2010-10-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

A new advertising network launched yesterday called "AdKeeper", which allows visitors to "keep" an ad banner.

It places a little "k" icon in the bottom-corner of the ad. When a user clicks on it, the ad banner is marked for later viewing. Meanwhile, the visitor can continue reading the webpage they're on.

Later on, the visitor can log into their own AdKeeper account to view all the ads they kept. They can click on them in there, or view additional materials associated with the ad.

They can even rate the ad, and share the ad on Facebook, Twitter, et al.

So will this be popular enough to kill AdSense? Well...

It doesn't appear AdKeeper works with other advertising networks like AdSense, ValueClick, etc. Any advertiser wanting to add the little "k" on the ads must buy through AdKeeper.

Right now, there is no option for publishers to sign up with AdKeeper. However, there are some publishers on the advisory board of AdKeeper, such as Federated Media, Huffington Post, New York Times, and Yahoo, and perhaps ads will be display there initially.

Advertisers, on the other hand can sign up, and they will enjoy free ads until July 2011.

So why in the heck would people want to "keep" ads?

AdKeeper explains that people already do this, in form of coupons and brochures. AdKeeper is simply taking a time-tested practice that traditional advertisers are already familiar with and understand.

The fact that online advertising has different metrics and targeting criteria has made traditional advertisers confused and slow to spend more money online.

And in fact if you look at AdKeeper's line up of advertisers right now, they are all traditional advertisers like Ford, General Mills, Pepsi, Sara Lee, etc. ✓

Will Site Speed Kill Off QuantCast?

2010-10-11T15:09:00.000-07:00

I wonder if Google's new "Site speed" signal has started the demise of QuantCast.

Last April, Google announced that it is using the load time of our webpages as another signal towards its webpage ranking algorithm....

But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

In thinking about this, this is going to cause the demise of many plugins, javascripts, and widgets that we add to our websites.

For example, most of my websites have two stat trackers...

A detailed stats tracker just for me to evaluate, usually StatCounter or Google Analytics,

And a public stats tracker, for advertisers to evaluate, QuantCast.

But now I'm wondering if I should just jettison the QuantCast code from my pages. Albeit, their code doesn't add that much more time to the loading, only another 370 bytes, and still another fraction of a second for someone's browser to execute that code.

But as it is, Google thinks that 3 seconds to load a page is "slow", whereas 1.5 seconds is average.

Below is a graph that I copied from Google Webmaster Tools showing my website, Interment.net, with an average load time of 3.2 seconds...

So if 1.5 seconds is the difference between getting a Google penalty and not, then that makes all non-critical scripts, including QuantCast, look like unwanted baggage.

While Matt Cutts explained that site speed plays a smaller role in determining your overall rankings, I can't help but wonder the fate of such companies like QuantCast who make a business out of taking up additional space on our webpages. Companies that squeeze out a living offering cute widgets and gadgets on our blogs may soon find themselves going out of business due to this new SEO signal.

As for my goal of wanting to provide advertisers with metrics they can see for themselves, it turns out that Google already offers a similar service, Doubleclick AdPlanner. It basically uses data from Google Analytics, so since I already have the Analytics code in my pages, it makes the QuantCast code duplicative. ✓

Understanding Conversion Latency

2010-10-10T06:50:00.000-07:00

When someone clicks on an affliate link from your website, it's rare that they make an immediate purchase. But eventually, after so many hours or so many days, they'll make the purchase. The time it takes from that first click to when they make a purchase is the conversion latency.

My first exposure to latency came when I had a phone conversation with Paul Allen. Not Paul Allen the Microsoft guy, but Paul Allen the marketing guru.

He described it to me as the "30 click rule", in which he described it from an affiliate marketing perspective. That is, it takes about 30 clicks, page views, and reading customer testimony combined until someone finally makes a purchase. In affiliate marketing, that period is reflected in a cookie duration...

That is, the affiliate who attracted a user's first click was identified in a cookie on that user's computer and remained there for the duration of that cookie. It used to be that cookie durations lasted from 90 to 180 days. Today, they've shrunk from 1 day to 60 days.

But in recent times, affiliate merchants have changed things up by crediting the affiliate who attracted the last click with the sale. Doing it this way forces affiliate publishers to work harder at getting more clickthroughs. The merchant benefits because they get more inbound traffic without having to pay more.

And that's kinda what I wanted to get to.

The problem with revenue shared-based traffic monetization is that publishers are paid poorly for the number of clicks they generate. That is, a visitor might have clicked on the same affiliate link 10 times on 10 different affiliate sites, but only one of those affiliates will be compensated. Yet, each of those 10 affiliates added something incrementally towards that sale.

Part of the problem are 3rd party affiliate tracking platforms. These are the affiliate networks like CommissionJunction, LinkShare, and ShareASale. Every time a consumer clicks a link and buys something, the network takes a percentage of that sale. If there was no affiliate network, there would be more revenue to share with the publisher.

If it took 10 clicks across 10 different publishers to generate one sale, only one of those publishers is compensated, but yet the affiliate network is compensated for every sale, no matter which publisher won. And of course the merchant wins too because they got a sale. But the other nine publishers are screwed.

So how do you as a publisher get the full value of each click?

The only answer is that you must hold the cards.

You have to refine your audience down to where they consist of people who are itching to buy stuff. That means, writing content that attracts these people. Product reviews tend to attract buyers, where product news tend to attract general audiences.

You have to get rid of the childish commenters on your blog, the ones who trash your potential advertisers, or write retarded stuff. Your advertisers will look at those comments and determine what kind of audience you have. You have to moderate the comments, delete all the bad stuff, and engage conversation by commenting yourself.

Offer metrics that your advertisers can see. Quantcast offers a great set of metrics for marketing purposes. Having a Twitter feed is a way to illustrate what kind of following you have. A Facebook page does the same thing. And these are also places where advertisers can gauge the quality of your audience.

Finally, you have to get off the affiliate networks and deal directly with merchants. That is, if you can build an audience that is ready and willing to take action, you can command terms with a merchant. Instead of relying on CommissionJunction or LinkShare to track clicks and impressions, you can use Google Analytics and/or Google AdManager to do the same.

Each person eventually buys something. The question is how long does it take for them to do so. The latency is what makes affiliate marketing a difficult skill for publishers to master. But you can overcome latency by demonstrating your value to a merchant, and negotiating with them outside of an affiliate network. ✓

Keyword Efficiency in Google Instant

2010-10-09T06:04:00.000-07:00

Several weeks after Google Instant went live, and having used Google Instant numerous times for my own personal and professional searching, I've found that my search behavior has changed.

Finding a relevant result in Google Instant is now about keyword efficiency. As I type in one word after another, and scanning the results above the fold, I check to see if Google found what I want. I keep adding more words, one by one, until Google has filtered results to what I want.

For us publishers, it's no longer about keyword relevancy, but now about keyword efficiency. That is, how do we compete for long tail keywords in the fewest words?

Let's say I'm looking for product reviews for Jack Link's Carne Seca Beef Jerky.

I'll start by entering "jack link's"...

At this point, I take a quick scan above the fold to see if Google found "Jack Link's Carne Seca Beef Jerky". If not, I add one more word, "Carne".

I take another quick scan. Did Google find "Jack Link's Carne Seca Beef Jerky"? Yes it did! But I want reviews. So I add another word "reviews"

I take another quick scan. Did Google find me reviews of "Jack Link's Carne Seca Beef Jerky"? Yes it did.

At that point, I take a more careful scan above the fold to see what results appear to be most interesting, and either click on one, or scroll down below the fold to see more results.

Ultimately, I ended up searching for "Jack Link's Carne Reviews".

I'm browsing at a screen resolution of 1440x900, which gives me about five results above the fold. For other people it could be as little as 2 results if they have a smaller screen resolution, or if they have a lot of browser toolbars installed, or if Google is showing local results.

So Google Instant makes it easy for users to perform incremental search.

Actually, Google Instant itself is incremental search, on a character-by-character basis. But people are not going to use it one letter at a time. Instead, they'll type out full words before taking a look at the results.

If a user doesn't like what Google finds thus far, they'll another whole word incrementally, pair down the results further, and continue doing so until Google has given them what they're looking for.

And, they won't bother to scroll below the fold. They'll just keep adding more words until what they want appears above the fold.

What this means for us publishers is that we have to get our pages to rank above the fold, and we have to get them to rank with fewer words.

So, Google Instant ends the era of keyword relevancy, and enters in a new age of keyword efficiency.

Long tail keywords are still going to be important, it simply adds another layer of complexity. Gone are the days when small publishers could rank well for long tail keywords, and now we'll have to increase the PageRank of our landing pages to make them more discoverable in fewer keywords. ✓

Relaunching Strange New Products

2010-10-07T06:30:00.000-07:00

This week I relaunched an old blog of mine, "Strange New Products (SNP).

The new design

The old design

There's a couple of reasons why I chose to redesign and relaunch this website...

It still makes money for me. It still gets a respectable amount of traffic from search engines, and still earns some good revenue from AdSense. Looking at the performance data in AdSense, it seems to make sense that I should upgrade the look of SNP.

I still get a lot of press releases from manufacturers and media companies. These press releases announce the availability of products that fit the theme of SNP.

So, I figure I can still publish new content on SNP as long as I keep getting these press releases.

I originally stopped writing SNP because it took so much of my time to find new material to write about. Remember, SNP focuses on new products, stuff that has just now launched. It's tough to find funny, weird, or ingenious things that's just now hitting the market.

Yet the amount of revenue SNP was earning for me was far less to compensate the time I was putting into it.

So for this new relaunch, I'm not going to actively look for material to write about. I'll just evaluate what press releases come my way.

But you might want to think about blogging in this way. If you can eliminate the idea discovery process of writing content, and have these ideas come to you instead, it makes it more cost-effective.

You'll first have to publish some content to get your blog established, but then you can contact PR companies and let them know you want to get on their distribution list. ✓

Put Your Name On Your Blog

2010-10-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

How come so many more bloggers don't put their name on their blogs and articles?

I'm finding so many people have launched blogs that have no personality at all. They don't put an author name on their articles, they don't put their name on the blog itself, and very few ever add a photo or bio on the side column.

In fact, when I visit the "About" page on those blogs, they don't even describe themselves. They simply describe the point of the blog, and do nothing to establish their credentials...

The state of the Internet today is that there are millions of bloggers, with the majority of them struggling to get any visitors. And most of them are writing about the same subjects that top bloggers are writing about.

So, when you visit a blog for the first time, your immediate thought is, "Who the Hell is this guy?" Why should I get my SEO tips from a mysterious writer, when I can get them from Danny Sullivan or Rand Fishkin, et al?

In such a crowded community, the commodity is the blogger him/herself, not their blog or their writings. The reason why the top bloggers are where they are is because of who they are. Think about building your credentials. It would help to at least describe yourself on your blog.

A blog is really more about what you have to say, as it is just throwing content out there.

Think about what PageRank is about. The only way to get a lot of inbound links from other websites is to become credible, authoritative, and reputable.

How are you going to become that if you don't put your name and identity on your blog? ✓

FTC Busts a Publisher for Writing Fake Reviews

2010-10-04T06:15:00.000-07:00

If you're thinking about publishing product reviews on your website or other community website, you better make sure those reviews are legit and come with full disclosure.

Recently in the news, the Federal Trade Commission brought a suit against a small publisher because she was posting fake products and posting them on iTunes. She was being paid to do so by her clients...

According to the FTC's complaint, between November 2008 and May 2009, Reverb and Snitker posted reviews about their clients' gaming applications at the iTunes store using account names that gave readers the impression that the reviews were written by disinterested consumers.

Reverb employees allegedly endorsed their clients' gaming applications by consistently giving their client’s applications four or five stars or by positively commenting on them (e.g., "Amazing new game," "ONE of the BEST" and "One of the best apps just got better").

According to the FTC, Reverb and Snitker's postings did not disclose that they were hired to promote the gaming applications or that Reverb's fee often included a percentage of its client's sales of the gaming applications - facts the FTC believed would have been relevant to consumers who were evaluating the endorsement and deciding whether to buy the gaming applications.

I publish product reviews of beef jerky brands on Best Beef Jerky. Many times, I am sent samples of jerky from manufacturers for the purpose of writing reviews. That doesn't constitute a "kickback" however.

But at the bottom of each review is a link to where my readers can buy that jerky, and sometimes it's an affiliate link, could be eBay, Amazon.com, or other. It doesn't affect my reviews, I still call it like it is. But should that be disclosed also?

Probably.

We all know that the Internet is full of shady business operators, and it's given us honest publishers a bad reputation. Make sure all of your reviews contain full disclosure. ✓

Fixing Broken Links for SEO

2010-10-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

It all started with Google Custom Search Engine (CSE).

I created a CSE to embed into my biggest website, Interment.net, so that my visitors could search its nearly 33,000 pages. CSE, if you don't already know, uses Google's standard web index to search pages on my website.

Except I noticed that CSE wasn't able to find certain pages that I knew existed. I even tested things by trying to find these pages via Google's standard web search, and it couldn't find them either. It meant that these pages weren't indexed by Google...

So that convinced me to submit a site map into Google Webmaster Tools in an effort to get every page indexed by Google.

But with nearly 33,000 pages, I can't just write the XML code by hand for every page. So I downloaded a shareware site map generator to crawl my website and build XML sitemaps. I'll definitely be buying it after the shareware period expires.

Well, I discovered that once this application crawled the whole site, I could do a filter to see all 404 errors it encountered. 404 errors are "File not found" errors, basically broken internal links. It found HUNDREDS of them.

Damn! I thought. With that many broken links, the PageRank flowing back through my website was being compromised, and therefore causing my website to lose its positioning on search results pages. Moreover, it provides a bad user experience.

So I spent a full week fixing all these broken internal links.

Then I ran the sitemap generator again, and uploaded the resulting XML files to Google Webmaster Tools.

Well, I manage my website using Dreamweaver and it has a broken link checker tool which I had totally forgotten about. So this evening, I ran it, and it found another 40,000+ broken links!!

You read that right, 40,000+!

These are all broken links to images, CSS files, JavaScript files, and bad syntax.

About 33,000 of those broken links was a link to an image that was no longer on the server. It was a piece of legacy code from a previous template. I was able to go into my template and just delete it, and it effectively fixed it across 33,000 pages in one fell swoop.

But I still have another 7,000+ broken links which I have to fix, much of which I have to address individually. But some of them I can fix with "find and replaces", so it's not all that bad, though still a lot of work.

Obviously, fixing broken internal links to other pages will improve your PageRank, simply because PageRank can't flow through a broken link. But I don't really know if Google will levy a penalty on your website for having too many broken links. I'm not sure anyone has confirmed that as being true.

Also, I don't know if having broken internal links to images, scripts, or just using bad syntax like "http;//" instead of "http://", will cause Google to devalue PageRank.

Nonetheless, I end up losing a little bit of sleep just knowing I have broken internal links and garbage code in my website. So, I'm still working on addressing the rest of those 7,000+ broken internal links. ✓

Making Money from Facebook

2010-10-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

If you think about it, Facebook Pages is just a blogging platform, and Facebook Groups are just a forum platform. But the reason why us publishers don't utilize them as standalone blogs and forums is because we can't monetize the traffic.

But what if we could?

As it turns out, people already are.

There are already eBooks for sale on how to make money from Facebook. There are already spammers hiring people to post comment spam on Facebook Pages and Groups. I've been a victim of it. I have a Facebook Page with over 1,000 fans, and I'm having to delete comment spam every now and then.

Last year, Facebook acknowledged a growing trend of sponsored status updates by amending its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that users are not allowed to use their personal profiles monetary gain...

2. You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).

But what about Facebook Pages and Groups?

As it is now, there are companies already making money from their Facebook Pages. Just yesterday, Proctor & Gamble launched an e-commerce store on its Pampers Facebook Page, so that moms can shop online without leaving Facebook.

But what about us small publishers?

Well right now, it's entirely possible for us to launch our own applications from Facebook Pages. We just have to have the capital, expertise, and time to create such applications.

But Facebook already displays its ads on our Facebook Pages. If we're the ones creating the content on those pages, why can't they share that revenue with us?

Google already does this with its Blogger platform. It provides a feature whereby publishers can integrate AdSense into their blogs. It seems like Facebook could do the same thing, allowing Page authors to share in the revenue. That way, it would usher in a trend of Facebook publishers creating full length, quality content on Facebook.

As it stands now, the content that Facebook users are creating is of low quality, and in very short snippets. Facebook pages are often used to post links to external sites. But if users were compensated to create quality articles, high-definition video, and high-resolution images, all hosted on Facebook's servers, how would that affect the dominance of Blogger and WordPress? ✓

Blogger Launches "Popular Posts" Gadget

2010-09-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

Blogger announced yesterday the release of two new gadgets that should prove to be popular with its users, "Popular Posts" and "Blog Stats".

Both gadgets utilize data collected by Blogger's new internally-tracked stats.

The Popular Posts gadget will automatically find and display blog posts that have the most pageviews. You can choose whether to display image thumbnails or post snippets in addition to the post title. You can also choose the time window to be used for calculating pageviews and the number of posts you’d like to display.

The Blog Stats gadget lets you show off pageview data, with a handful of configuration options that are easily controlled. You can choose from a variety of styles and display options. There's also an option to let you select the time window to be used for calculating pageviews.

Read more about it at Blogger Buzz. ✓

Why Blog Comments Hurt Your PageRank

2010-09-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I published an article explaining how posting comments on other peoples' blogs can help or not help your PageRank.

Today, I'm going to tell you how other people commenting on your blog will hurt your PageRank.

And it has to do with the rel="nofollow" attribute. Specifically, blog comments hurt your PageRank only when they include a link, either a link in the text of the comments, or a link in the Name field of the comments.

In short, while the nofollow attribute doesn't pass PageRank through to the landing page, it subtracts PageRank value from other dofollow links. That is, the links you have pointing to other pages within your site will lose PageRank due to the external "nofollow" links in the comments.

For example, you have a page with a 100 PageRank point value, and that page has four links. Three links are internal links pointing to other pages in your website. The one other link points to an external website, and contains a nofollow attribute. Only 75 points will flow back into your website.

That is, even though the other link has a "nofollow" attribute, it still subtracted 25 points from the PageRank that would have flowed back into your website.

And where does that extra 25 points go? Nowhere. It doesn't flow into the external website. It just vanishes into thin air.

Matt Cutts, the principal architect of Google's search engine, explains this on his blog...

So what happens when you have a page with "ten PageRank points" and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

Google developed the "nofollow" attribute in 2005 as a way to combat comment spammers. They hoped that it would cause spammers to give up and go away. But it didn't have much effect. Comment spammers still found that they could get a fair amount of traffic from the clickthroughs. So they actually intensified their spamming efforts by employing comment bots to spam thousands of blogs to increase the clickthroughs.

So Google responded by pushing the burden on to the blog owners to moderate their comments. That's what this current nofollow policy does.

As you moderate a new comment, you have to decide if that comment is worth the PageRank you're about to lose. Where at one time the nofollow attribute allowed us bloggers to accept comments comfortably, we now have to weigh the potential PageRank loss with our overall community-building efforts. ✓

Will Blog Commenting Help Your PageRank?

2010-09-27T06:13:00.000-07:00

Will blog commenting help your PageRank, if you include your link in those comments? The short is answer is no. For SEO purposes, it's a waste of time.

Commenting on other blogs is a practice that has long been suggested by SEO experts as a way to improve your rankings on Google. But these days, the SEO is value is no more. That's because most blogs include the rel="nofollow" tag, which effectively blocks PageRank from passing through to your website. Blogger automatically does this on all blogs, as does WordPress and TypePad.

However, there are hacks and plugins that allow webmasters to change this over to "dofollow". Nonetheless, perhaps 90% of the blogs out there are "no follow blogs" and make blog commenting worthless as far as SEO is concerned.

But that doesn't mean blog commenting is totally worthless. It's still a good practice for a few reasons...

You stand a better chance of winning a link on a blogger's blogroll, provided you're saying something intelligent, and not just spamming their blog. All blog owners want to see comments that contribute to their post, and if you're a regular contributor, they're more likely to accept your request for blogroll exchanges. But if all you do is post spam, they'll start deleting your comments.

You can still attract referrals from blog comments (click throughs). If your comments are meaningful, and you sound like an expert, people will click through on your link, and check out your website.

Many blogs have a Recent Comments widget on their homepage, which display the most recently added comments across the entire blog. This gives your comment more exposure. Take note of blogs that have a Recent Comments widget and become a regular commenter.

Just a word of note. I moderate all comments on my blogs, and don't let them autopost. I don't typically approve comments where a link is inside the text of the comments. To me, that looks spammy and subtracts from the overall reputation of my blogs. However, I will approve a comment if the hyperlink is embedded in the Name field of the comment.

Note: Also read about how link comments posted on YOUR blog will hurt your PageRank here: http://www.inyourweb.com/2010/09/will-blog-commenting-help-your-pagerank.html

✓

Local Businesses Can Leverage You Tube

2010-09-25T07:37:00.000-07:00

Marc LeVine, a social media consultant, writes in his blog about how a neighborhood locksmith company launched a You Tube channel, and produced some short humorous videos to create some viral marketing...

Indeed, Fidelity Locksmiths has an active social (media) life on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, where they have created some very funny and memorable short commercials to capture their audience’s imagination along with their business.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXzT5APbUnw&feature=mfu_channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0U2sYOmq4&feature=mfu_channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmIMChrzIW0&feature=player_embedded

So imagine them embedding these videos into their Facebook page and using them to keep their customers entertained.

Which just goes to show that just because you're a neighborhood store doesn't mean you can't leverage Internet marketing. ✓