February 17th, 2010 · 10 Comments

Facebook traffic is so cheap I consider it to be free.

And it converts like crazy because it is highly targeted traffic.

If you think google sucks and you are looking for more traffic, then…

This brand new video is for you:
Facebook Crushes Google Video

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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Traffic Stats the A List Will Never Tell You

I’m sure many of you are longing for the day when you have an RSS following in the thousands and an Alexa Ranking in the Top 10,000. Fess up…

You are impressed by stuff like that – High PR, Massive Twitter Following, all the little signs of “wow this site must be successful” and “I bet they are making money”. (Success and making money do not necessarily go hand in hand.)

To that end I just thought some of you would like to know some real numbers.

Allyn Hane had mentioned in his comments on Blogger Illustrated that he was kinda shocked that Chris Brogan got so few comments on his posts in spite of 45K RSS readers. The same applies to Darren Rowse 165K or Brian Clark at CopyBlogger 105K and so on with the A list.

The thing most people don’t realize is that most of those RSS numbers are grossly inflated with the numbers added by Aweber Sign Ups. Download a free report or buy one of their books and you end up in the RSS number. The numbers are in no way reflective of how many people actually sign up for just reading the post feeds.

Hence don’t assume you are going to get a flood of traffic by Guest posting or racing to get a fanboy comment first in queue on one of these sites. The fact is only a very small percentage of readers ever bother to read the daily feed update, even less click over to the site in question and most readers just delete the notification in the email alert. This is reflected in just how few comments these large blogs get in relation to their “perceived” reach and influence.

Between the 3 sites they have 300K readers… and yet they manage only a 1000 members for the Problogger.com forum. A couple thousand (or so I’ve seen mentioned) for the Third Tribe Marketing thing/forum. Not really a whole lot of clout when you think about it. Those they do influence tend to be the same small group of fans that fawn over them on their sites while the rest of their readers have largely ignored their call to open their wallets.

I used to wonder just how much traffic do you need to breathe the rarefied air among Alexa’s Top 10k sites.

Well I have broken into it from time to time – most recently the other day, and the first time I did months ago I remember thinking how far off I had been regarding just how much traffic was necessary.

Click to enlarge images.

In fact the real numbers will probably surprise a lot of you.

Here is another shot of my site compared to the “Big Guys” taken today and you’ll notice that I topped Brogan’s site for a day or two.

Wanna’ know how much traffic he has?

Keep in mind that I’m talking averages and not absolutes. How well Alexa tracks and quantifies search traffic (they are getting better btw.) as compared to toolbar/social traffic could skew things. ie. maybe you rank better with much less traffic if it is heavily toolbar/social or maybe the same applies to search and not so much to the toolbar. Never the less, for our purposes I just thought some of you might be interested in some raw numbers…

But not until I hear your guesses…

Leave a comment and tell me how much traffic you think a site needs to sit 7k on Alexa.

I’ll tell you the answer after the comments

Cheers,

Griz

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Modern Etiquette:How to decline Facebook friends without offence

• Buzz up!
• 
  

AFP/File – Facebook has given users more control over who gets to see video, virtual cards and other digital content …

By Richard Baum Richard Baum – 1 hr 36 mins ago

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A colleague I just met at work has invited me to be their friend on Facebook. I don’t want to offend them, but nor do I want to share my candid photos and lousy Scrabble scores with someone I hardly know.

Can I ignore their invite?

“Can I be your friend?” might work as an ice-breaker among small children, but it’s not a question you hear often between adults, at least not outside of Las Vegas.

Friendship, it is generally understood, is a relationship that evolves through shared interests, common experiences and a primeval need to share your neighbor’s power tools.

Yet for many people, Facebook permits a return to the simplicity of the schoolyard.

Rather than inviting someone to be our Facebook friend only after we’ve become friends in the real world, many of us are using Facebook as a short-cut around all that time-consuming relationship building.

Why bother asking someone you’ve just met questions about their family, interests and ability to run a farm or aquarium, when you can simply send them a friend request and read the answers in your Facebook news feed? And so we think little of receiving friend requests after we meet someone for the first time at, say, a dinner party.

If you like the person, perhaps because they brought an excellent bottle of wine to the party, then you can accept the request in the hope of further opportunities to sample the contents of their cellar.

If you didn’t get to taste the wine because they accidentally spilled the bottle over your brand new party dress, then etiquette experts would probably agree that you can decline the friend request, send them a dry-cleaning bill and humiliate them in a derisory posting to your real Facebook friends.

In the workplace, however, the dynamic is very different. The consequences of offending someone by ignoring their friend request are greater with a colleague you see every day than with a careless dining companion you may never meet again.

So why are people you work with increasingly offering to share their Facebook output?

Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher who studies social software in the workplace, said it’s partly because some people just don’t anticipate the ramifications of sharing their personal life with colleagues.

But it’s also a function of the Facebook interface, which recommends other people for you to friend.

“Once you’ve connected to one person you work with you get recommendations to connect to others that you work with,” she said.

Of course, many people don’t have a problem with being Facebook friends with colleagues, especially those they know well. But for those who would rather keep their work and private lives separate, there are options other than ignoring an unwanted friend request.

One is to accept the invitation and then use Facebook’s privacy settings to limit the flow of information between you and your new “friend.” To do this, you can create a “colleagues” list from the Friends menu and then add to it your new friend. Then navigate to the privacy settings and use the “Profile Information” section to control what information people on the “colleagues” list can see.

An alternative, says workplace etiquette expert Barbara Pachter, is to suggest to the colleague that you connect instead on LinkedIn, a social network for professional relationships.

“You can just go ahead and ask them to join you on LinkedIn and hope they forget they sent you a Facebook friend request,” said Pachter, the author of New Rules @ Work.

“Or you can say, Thanks for asking me. I’m keeping Facebook for my family and friends. I’m asking you to join me on my professional network instead.’”

Pachter said that whatever you do, it’s important not to offend your colleague — and that’s not just because politeness is good etiquette.

“The person you offend might end up being your boss next year,” she said.

Got a question about the etiquette of email, social networks and other workplace technologies? Send them to richard.baum@reuters.com or via Twitter to @rbaum.

(Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

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Today kicks off 30DC Web 2.0 week. You’ll learn how to use Web 2.0
sites to get backlinks and traffic to your blog. We start off
taking a look at article sites.

There are two videos in Lesson 10:

EZINEARTICLES – Caro introduces EzineArticles.com and takes you
from signing up through submitting your first article. She also
gives important guidelines to ensure your article gets approved.

SCRIBD – Michelle introduces Scribd, walks you through signing up,
lays out what your article needs to look like and shows you how to
add your document.  She also shows you how to add your URLs from
each site to Traffic Bug and to Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker.

At the end of day 10, you will have uploaded articles to
EzineArticles and Scribd with links back to your blog. You will
have also added the URLs of both articles to Traffic Bug and Rank
Tracker.

The videos run about 20 minutes.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE LESSON 10 VIDEOS
http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/training/2009day10.php

——————————

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Hi Kelvin,

There are many WordPress Plugins on the
internet. So I decided to take some
time off and compiled the top 10
Wordpress plugins on the internet.

Some of the plugins I have installed
them on my blog and you can view the
list of the top 10 WordPress Plugins
by reading the blog post below:

=> http://getresponse.com/click.html?x=a62b&lc=rIgu&mc=f&s=zjjgO&y=8&

Also if you have twitter do follow me
by click on the link below and stand
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=> http://getresponse.com/click.html?x=a62b&lc=rIgx&mc=f&s=zjjgO&y=j&

More details on the prizes can be
found @ my blog post below:

=> http://getresponse.com/click.html?x=a62b&lc=rIgT&mc=f&s=zjjgO&y=U&

Alvin Phang

——————————

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What Can One Way Links Do For You?

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I hope that you enjoyed reading this.

If you would like to read more information on
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Best Regards,
Anil

PS. If you would like to join now just go to

http://onewaylinkexchange.net/members/order.php

, 2417 Jericho Turnpike Suite 124, Garden City, NY 11040, United States

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Hi Kelvin T,

Rest day!

Now is a great time for catching up or taking a break.

One very simple step you can do today is set up rank tracking of
your blog. Rank Tracker, yet another great module in Market
Samurai, shows when your site is indexed and how your site is
ranking in the search engine for your keywords.

There are two videos in Lesson 9:

RANK TRACKER – Brent introduces the Rank Tracker module and talks
about how vitally important tracking is to the success of your
blog.

USING RANK TRACKER – Anthony explains how to set up tracking for
your blog and gets you up and tracking.  He also shows you how to
set the criteria for your tracking, how to monitor the progress of
your website using the Rank Tracker module and how to analyze your
results.

For Day 9, you’ll setup tracking for the indexing and ranking of
your blog for your theme and category keywords, as well as the main
URL of your blog, and the URL of your first article.

The videos run about 20 minutes.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE LESSON 9 VIDEOS
http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/training/2009day09.php

——————————

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www.onewaylinkexchange.net

Text Links

Text links are text objects that can link to an external
file, a web page, an FTP site, or even a prompt for e-mail.
The visible text of a hyperlink is called the ‘anchor text’
to the text link, and it is the most important factor that
helps secure a good position in the Search Engine Results
Page (SERP) and gain link popularity. Text links point
towards a specific page of a website that has been
optimized to target the Anchor text, as the keyword phrase.

The Logic Behind Text Links:

Since the main aim of most search engines is to detect
the number of text links or sites anchoring towards the
site and the inbound links in the site under consideration,
the inclusion of text links is very important. Search
engines consider every text link as a ‘vote’ to the
webpage linked ‘to’, by the webpage that has included the
text link. If link popularity had no role in Search engine
optimization, then web owners would choose to link to a
website that is truly representative of its contents,
unlike today’s practice, to gain popularity through text
links.

www.onewaylinkexchange.net

The Influence of Text Links

The anchor text used for inbound text links is one of the
most important factors employed for Search Engine
Optimization (SEO). Text links are so powerful that they
can earn web pages a comparatively high ranking even if
the keyword is not used anywhere in the page, including
headings. With sufficient votes from other webpages, the
page can even have a first page ranking. The role of text
links in SEO can be clearly illustrated by taking the
example of monster.com, which is the first site that
appears when searched for the keyword ‘Jobs’ in every
search engine, though the word ‘jobs’ has not appeared
even once in the site. If a site has inefficient onsite
optimization, it can still do well enough with good use of
text links.

The easiest and most cost effective way of optimizing a
search engine using text links is by choosing a
descriptive domain for the site as well as the folders
and files in the site, and giving a descriptive anchor
text for its text links, since descriptive keyword text
links benefit from a much higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
than non descriptive text links.

It is always recommended to use lesser graphic based text
links, since they cannot be read by search engines. Being
the most powerful SEO technique, text links should be
given a high priority in any SEO campaign.

www.onewaylinkexchange.net

I hope that you enjoyed reading this.

If you would like to read more information on
search engine optimization then please see my articles
at http://onewaylinkexchange.net/wordpress/

Best Regards,
Anil

PS. If you would like to join now just go to

http://onewaylinkexchange.net/members/order.php

, 2417 Jericho Turnpike Suite 124, Garden City, NY 11040, United States

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