While the Vancouver Dot Com Pho seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth, Dot Com Pho Orange County keeps growing like a weed. We had a record-tying 18 people making it out to Pho Ba Co for the weekly Pho get together. Like last week, we had to take a table from the Mexican restaurant next door, which meant that some of us had to order Mexican food.

For this edition of Dot Com Pho, I answer a request from a way too serious Foursquare user asking me to leave his mayorships alone, Sally Chow makes a Fear Factor drink, Oscar shows how to build location-based networking relationships, Eric becomes the most influential realtor in Saint Louis while living in the OC, and Zagg gives us the gadget of the week. Anyone is welcome to join us for Dot Com Pho. Follow me on Twitter to find the time and location of the next one.

Is your blog currently stagnant, or are you tired of which level you are with your blog at the moment? I have good news for you, progress can still be achieved!

In this article I share 6 steps you should take to move your blog to the next level.

1 – Be Consistent, But Don’t Have a Schedule

Be consistent with your blogging but don’t have a schedule.

We’re all used to the idea of blogging by sticking to a schedule but the reality is that it hardly works if we really want to contribute value to our audience. You don’t have to be forced to post on a particular day; only post when you have something of value to say.

Of course, consider my point about consistency. In other words, not having a schedule doesn’t mean you should post once a week and then not post for a whole month. Make sure you post in a consistent basis in a way that lets your readers know you’re reliable and should be trusted.

2 – Diversify, Diversify and Diversify

This applies to traffic, income and approach. Don’t depend on just one source of traffic, income or results; let your business be built on multiple streams of everything and carry out from there. Of course, you can use one approach to influence the other, such as using guest blogging to improve your search engine traffic but make sure your blog is as secure as possible in such a way that if one or more source of results to your blog were to dump you your blog will hardly be affected.

3 – Reinforce Your Core Message and Filter Out Your Target Audience

Bloggers make the mistake of not wanting to piss their “readers” off, of not wanting to offend anyone and of wanting everybody to read their stuff because they want their brand to grow. Unfortunately, that won’t get you anywhere.

What is your core message for your blog and what kind of audience do you really want to build? Who is your target reader? Do as much as you can to filter those you don’t want out and prevent them from reading your blog; it can be by telling them explicitly that you don’t want them to read your blog, it can be by looking for ways to offend them so that they don’t read your blog and it can be by integrating a message to your kind of target audience in your USP.

4 – Start Monetizing…Now

One thing I notice most newbie bloggers say is I want to wait to build an audience before I start monetizing. Now, tell me, what does it mean to build an audience? How big should a real audience be?

Most of the people who say the above are people who hardly get results…because they don’t even have the plan to monetize. They are not monetizing out of fear and they probably will never get over it.

Don’t let that be the case for you; stop procrastinating and start monetizing now. Let your guiding light be the genuine passion to help your readers, and if it is you won’t be afraid to recommend a paid product that will provide them the solution they need.

5 – Be Professional with Your Approach

Blogging seeks professionalism and a great reason why most bloggers just can’t seem to break through the mediocre is because they are not professional. In every aspect, make sure you’re professional. This includes with your design, your content and your approach.

I was reading somewhere (I think on Twitter) a while ago that John Chow designed the current theme being used on this blog at the time of writing this article for several thousands of dollars, and that the company that designed it doesn’t charge any less than $7,500 for professional design. Now, how’s that for being professional?

We all know this to be true, someone who is willing to spend $7,500 on a blog design has already taken it as a business. Of course, you might not have a business the size of John’s right now, and you don’t need to go into debt to design a cool blog but that doesn’t mean you should neglect good design altogether. There are great premium templates out there today for around $47+ and you can easily customize them to your taste for less than $300.

Another aspect of being professional is with your approach; stop all those posts apologizing for your not having written a blog post in ages, stop all those emails barraging your readers for not having gotten in touch in a while. Choose a plan and stick to it and when you fail to do so discipline yourself.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t apologize when you’re wrong…readers appreciate it when it is rare but they hate it if it is starting to become too often.

6 – Get the Experts on board

It might seem like a great idea to keep on contributing your message to your audience by sharing your own opinion and getting people to guest post won’t be as effective because guest bloggers are easy to find today. One thing, though, is very difficult to find online today…and that one thing is expertise.

For a moment, imagine how much influence getting someone like John Chow as a guest on your blog will do for your brand; imagine the credibility, the potential visitors from him sharing the interview and the expertise he can contribute to your audience. Even better, you can easily get most experts to contribute to your blog for free these days; all you need to do is interview them.

Getting experts on board by interviewing them also has another advantage; you will have an opportunity to introduce a new medium of communication and as a result build better relationships with your readers. For example, you can easily start an expert interview series and use mediums like video and audio…something you aren’t probably doing on your blog before. That alone will get your readers to know, and trust, you and as a result they will happily spread the message about your brand.

John Smith is an expert that researches and review TRX coupon code and the flex belt coupon for his readers.

I’d predicted that in 2012 someone would actually do this and here it is. Somebody finally created a system that’s almost “push button” and gets you to the top of Google’s search rankings.

Here’s The Concept

1. It takes links, and lots of them, to rank highly in Google.
2. It takes “real” links, and not spammy bookmark links, forum profile links, etc. to rank highly these days in Google.
3. Getting “real” links is hard… That is, unless you own all of the websites the links are placed on.
4. Owning 1000s of Page Rank 1 and above, websites is also hard. And expensive to maintain.
5. Getting the links on those sites, if you owned them, is… well, you guessed it. HARD!

Now enter SEO smart guys Brad & Matt Callen, along with Dori Friend. They’ve developed a system where they own all of the websites. They buy and add more websites daily. They cover all the costs of running the websites, and all you have to do is add your links to the system. The system then takes care of putting our links on all of these sites in guaranteed amounts each month.

Backlinks are the currency of the Google and the SEO Link Monster helps you get links on 1000′s of PR1 and higher sites. More links mean a higher search ranking for your keywords, and that means more traffic and money to you. The numbers of links the Link Monster deliver to you each month are very predictable, and unlike what many “automated” software programs, this is truly is automated.

The SEO Link Monster is opened for membership for a very limited time. Go and watch the video to get the full detail.

Here are 14 tips that helped me greatly in my blogging and personal life. I share them with you in the hope that they’ll help you as well. Let me know if anything jumps out at you.

1. Blog consistently. This is a marathon, not a 100-meter dash. Pick a posting frequency and stick to it.

2. Know the difference between accounting and finance. Keeping track of the past is accounting. Planning for the future is finance.
3. Separate your business from your personal stuff. Set up a new bank account just for your blog. Don’t mix the personal and blog accounts together.
4. Understand the difference between good debt and bad debt. Good debt makes you money, bad debt cost you money. Use credit cards to your advantage. Earn air miles or get cash back, but NEVER carry a balance.
5. Surround yourself with success. Find the most successful people in your field and get on their radar. Don’t be afraid of rejections. Many will agree to mentor you if you respect their time.
6. If you’re going to hang with success, then it also means you need to stop hanging with failures. Don’t let well-meaning friends or family member bring you down with bad advice. Take your advice from people who are where you want to be.
7. Treat your business partners well. Never try to screw them over. What goes around comes around and payback is a bitch.
8. Think positive. You attract to you what you are, and you are what you think. Negative thinkers attract negative people. Positive thinkers attract positive.

9. Live below your means. While I do live in a nice house, I don’t drive a $250,000 sport car or have any flashy cloths. In fact, I get most of my cloth by taking all the free T-shirts at various trade shows.
10. Always keep working on your brand. It’s what separate you from the other 120 million+ blogs
.
11. Don’t take things too seriously. Have fun at this. It’s not the final destination that matter, it’s the journey along the way that’s important. Enjoy it.
12. It’s not how much you make, it’s how much you give. Most people equate success with how much money you make. However, I think the true measure of success is not how much you make, it’s how much you give. While it’s great to have a bunch of fancy toys, you have to keep in mind that you can’t take it with you when your time comes and God isn’t going to judge you based on how many fancy cars you drove.
13. If you want to live with masses, serve the classes. If you want to live with the classes, serve the masses. If you look at any successful businesses, you’ll see that they serve a lot of people. The more they serve, the richer they get. Google serves millions of web surfers everyday. Walmart serves more customers than any store in the world. They’re among the richest companies in the world. The rich got rich because they serve the masses. The masses being their customers, employees, shareholders, etc. The poor are poor because they serve the classes (their boss). The more you serve, the richer you become.

14. You attract what you give out. If you give out negative vibes, you’ll get negative vibes back. If you want people to smile at you, just smile at them. If you want love, give your love. If you want money, give your money. It will all come back to you in greater amounts than you gave.

I have been running ThinkComputers since 2002 and over the years we have found many instances of people stealing or copying my articles.  Most of the time it is content farm type sites that just rip entire articles, or they just rip our RSS feed and call the content theirs.  In other cases it has been review sites that steal our content and put it off as their own.  You wouldn’t think that it would happen, but believe me it does.  I’m sure if you run any type of content site it has happened to you at least once.

There are some ways to stop it.  You could disable access to the RSS feed for the specific website that is pulling it.  You can block their IP using .htaccess.  If you know someone is stealing your content on a regular basis you could send them a DMCA takedown notice and send one to their ISP as well.  In some cases, I’ve seen people even disable right click on their website to stop people from stealing content.

Over the past few years though I’ve noticed that much of this plagiarism and copying has stopped.  I think the last time I found a site that was ripping my content was well over a year ago.  A few days ago, someone on our site pointed out that they came to our site because they wanted to buy an AeroCool Touch 2000 LCD Fan Controller from Frys.com and they noticed an “odd ending to the description”.  After doing some searching they found our review of the product. They said that Frys.com copied our introduction word for word.  Here is a screenshot of our introduction.

I was a little skeptical that a company like Fry’s would blatantly copy content like this so I went to their website and found the AeroCool Touch 2000 product page and there it was, our content copied exactly.  They even left in the “read on further to find out”.  Here is a screenshot of that product page.

Normally, this would not be that big of a deal to me, but honestly it made me laugh more than anything.  I mean I assume someone gets paid to write these little descriptions right? Not only are they too lazy to write their own description, they are not smart enough to leave the “read on further to find out” section out of the description.  That part makes it pretty obvious that the content was taken from somewhere else.  I mean wouldn’t you like to get paid to sit around and copy and paste all day?

Even if they decided to copy the introduction to our review, the least they could do would be to link back to original review as many online merchants actually do.  This is a great way for their customers to see a real review of the product.  In any case, there was no link back to ThinkComputers or even a mention of ThinkComputers in the description.

I went ahead and sent this e-mail to Fry’s:

To Whom it May Concern,

One of our readers on ThinkComputers.org pointed out to us that you have blatantly copied our original content on your website.  The URL in question is:  http://www.frys.com/product/6046368?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG.  It uses our original written content that was originally posted here: http://www.thinkcomputers.org/aerocool-touch-2000-lcd-fan-controller-review/.  Can you please take down this content or change the description as it was directly copied from our website, it is especially apparent with the “Read on further to find out”.

Whoever does your site copy-writing should be fired because he/she is just copying content off other websites.

I still have yet to hear back from them.

*Update – Fry’s has removed my content from their Aerocool Touch 2000 sales page. No word on whether their copywriter got fired.

Unless you’ve been hiding on the dark side of the moon, you know about Facebook‘s IPO filing on Wednesday last week. Facebook shares are expected to sell like dim sum, and the latest figures from Wall Street put the company’s valuation at $94 billion. That’s some serious money!

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, will come out of the IPO with a net worth of about $24 billion, and he won’t be the only one to gain billions.

Clearly, being the top dog in the social network niche is not a bad way to make money online. Not surprisingly, a number of challengers have come along and tried to unseat Facebook. You know about Buzz and Google+. Maybe you also remember Unthink and their sassy video. Despite causing a media stir, six months later the star of the clip remains firmly entrenched on Facebook, and Unthink barely gets any traffic.

Despite its anti-Facebook message, Unthink was based on exactly the same business model as Facebook: get venture capital funding ($2.5 million to be precise), use the funding to grow a userbase, and leverage that userbase into ad dollars.

In other words, business as usual.

If you’re competing with Facebook, business as usual doesn’t cut the mustard. You’ll need something totally fresh – a brand new, innovative approach. This is why I’m keeping an eye on a brash new startup called Zurker. These guys received no funding at all from VC’s. All their funding comes from their members who invest small amounts, typically less than $100. In exchange, the members get equity in the form of “virtual shares” or vShares.

Members can also gain vShares by referring their friends to the project, and that is pretty clever.

Given the opportunity to own a slice of Facebook in 2004, who wouldn’t jump at the chance? It’s too late for that, but plenty of Zurker’s members seem to be buying the proposition that Zurker could become the next Facebook, and are enthusiastically evangelizing Zurker’s benefits on their blogs in an effort to amass more vShares. The energy from the member-owners has translated into growth and it shows in their traffic graph. But can a small startup, coming out of nowhere, seriously challenge a $94 billion behemoth?

Right now, that’s unlikely. Zurker has no mobile app, no web widgets, and no developer API. The interface is unique and smart, but a little clunky and unsophisticated. Zurker still has less than 5,000 members worldwide.

But Zurker founders – they call themselves custodians – make an intriguing point: back in 2004, MySpace was the dominant social network, and Facebook was an unknown little startup that came out of nowhere. Facebook had a deviously clever strategy for growth, namely exclusivity: Facebook became tres chic and desirable by restricting access to the elite at Harvard only, then to the Ivy League, then to US colleges in general, followed by US high schools and finally the masses. Zurker, meanwhile, have a completely different deviously clever strategy of their own: give members equity.

Zurker came out of private alpha testing on January 22, 2012. You still need an invite to get in, so here’s one from me.

I don’t know if these guys will really follow through and eat Facebook’s lunch. But if they do, remember you read it about it here first.

I have recently been writing about some of the common marketing strategies used to increase traffic to blogs and websites. I thought I should now look at a comparatively less popular form of marketing called Joint Venture. If implemented correctly, joint venture marketing can be effective in driving traffic to a site.

A joint venture is an agreement between two or more persons or businesses with the purpose of forming one entity. In its basic form, joint venture marketing can be as simple as swapping ads with another person or business.

How Could Joint Venture Marketing Benefit You?

By joining forces with another marketer, you instantly leverage existing resources. Many of the things you need already exist – for example, if you desire a source of targeted traffic, you could go into partnership with an established marketer. You could use their reputation alone to increase your list of subscribers . Alternatively, you could create an e-book, and split the profits with your partner. Obviously, you have to provide your partner with an incentive for them to collaborate with you. However, if the venture is to create an e-book, be mindful that you’re likely to do a majority of the writing, because sales will be made solely on your partner’s reputation. Essentially, everyone wins in a collaborative venture. Also, collaboration with your competitors can be profitable:

• The income of 20% of large corporations such as Sony comes from joint ventures, and 50% of that is based solely on collaborations with their competitors.
• As a small business owner, you’re less likely to fail in joint ventures. So don’t be reticent about collaborating with your competitor.
• The chances are you’ll have spare time to devote to other areas of your business.

How to Setup Joint Venture Partnerships

Identify successful and reputable marketers in your niche. Contact them and suggest a joint venture deal by offering a complementary product or service – It provides both of you additional sources of income so the venture will ultimately benefit both of you.

Here are some examples of joint venture deals you can consider:

1. You could, for instance, write an e-book on how to decorate a home on a small budget, and strike a deal with a website owner of a furniture store, and collaborate with them to promote your e-book in return for a percentage of every e-book sold on their site.
2. If you have a great product but you do not have many visitors to your site, you could approach someone in your niche who has a substantial list of subscribers and enter into a joint venture with them and get them to promote your product on their list in exchange for a share of your profit.
3. If you have a specialised knowledge of a particular product but lack the ability to create a product, you could approach someone with great creative skills, and ask them to create a video or an e-book. Again, make an agreement on fixed percentage of earnings.
4. Another example is to collaborate with e-zine publishers, with the aim of building a list of subscribers: when a visitor to your site subscribes to your newsletter, you could redirect them to a “thank you” page on which you could have the details of your partner.

Where to Find Joint Venture Marketers

Potential joint venture partners can be found through the following sources:

• Forums such as Warrior are a great source. Join and search through their websites for products or services that are in your niche. Contact the owners and propose a partnership.
• Many sites offer referral contest. Identify the top ranking promoters and ask them to promote your product. You would be required to provide them with promotional tools.
• Social media networks are also a great source of finding partners.
• Directories and joint venture networks.
• Use Google and other search engines to identify products in your niche and contact the site administrator.

Well, I hope I have given you some insight into what is joint venture.

Wishing you every success!

Pope Moore

My name is Pope Moore, I am an analyst, entrepreneur and keen blogger, and I live in Sutton in the UK. I run a business called Internet Commerce and I have been operating in the internet industry for over 5 years, and designing websites and blogs is one of the many business areas of IT I am passionate about. My blog is blogs design.com, and it primarily provides a step-by-step tutorial of how to design a blog using WordPress. Email: info@onlinepricecomparer.com

If you’re like most people, you’ve probably noticed drops in your Google ranking over the past year or so. Google has been making MAJOR changes to their ranking algorithm. In the year 2012, it’s going to be almost impossible to “luck” into ranking for keywords that send worthwhile traffic to your websites.

If you don’t know what Google wants right now and beyond, you can bet other websites are going to outrank you and take the traffic that you could have potentially gotten. Would you like to know how Google is ranking websites right now? Then you’ll want to attend this Monday’s SEO Webinar. The webinar is being put on by Brad & Matt Callen, and
Dori Friend and is free to attend.

Register for The SEO Webinar

The webinar starts on Monday, Feb. 6 at 8:00PM EST and is only going to be about 1 hour long. Seating is limited to 1000 people, so I encourage you to register right now. You’ll also notice on the page above that they’re releasing something called SEO Link Monster on Feb 7th. I know that there is a special surprise at the end of the webinar relating to SEO Link Monster, so be sure to look out for that. See you at the Webinar!