If you are using Twitter, you may have already noticed that people out of nowhere mysteriously started to follow you. They usually have a pretty girl’s picture as their profile photo, and their twitter username usually ends with 3 digits, a sign that they are using some sort of automated twitter tools to generate these fake accounts.

It usually works like this: the spammer get an affiliate link through Clickbank or other affiliate networks; she or he then shortens the link by using bit.ly; they then create a lot of twitter accounts and start following people automatically; these links are posted to their twitter stream – usually as the first and only tweets these fake account will post.

So why do spammers target twitter now? It turns out it is quite profitable for the spammers.

I recently noticed that I have been spammed with all sorts of links related to online forex trading. I don’t know much about the forex trading market but it must be highly lucrative for the spammer affiliates promoting forex trading ebooks through clickbank.

Let’s do a quick back of envelope calculation on this type of spams. The url shortener service bit.ly has a nifty feature that gives you the statistics of clicks on a particular link. Here is a screenshot of a spam link that promoted a forex trading how-to type of ebook.

As you can see, this guy generated 14,571 clicks to his landing page in just one week. Let’s conservatively estimate that only 1% of clicks generates a sales for him. That’s almost 145 sales in one week. For an ebook on Clickbank that sells for $47 a copy and pays out 50% to affiliates, 145 sales would amounts to $3,407 in profits for this spammer in one week. Of course this is just an estimate, but you got the idea.

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Option No. 1 – Hosting Script Installer

If you have a shared-hosting account with cpanel, chances are Mediawiki can be installed with one click of the mouse, because cpanel allows you to install many php based scripts from a central web console. I don’t have experience with other hosting configuration and management software. But a script installer is pretty much standard feature these days.

If you have your own dedicated web server, you can get a free hosting management software such as ServerCP etc.

Option No. 2 – Install Mediawiki from Scratch

If you have relatively good knowledge of Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php, you could do your own installation of Mediawiki pretty easily. It does not matter whether you have a shared-hosting server or a dedicated server, as long as it matches the system requirements of mediawiki.

Generally, if you want to install newer versions of mediawiki, such as mediawiki v1.6 and above, you will need to have php5 and MySQL 4.x or 5.x installed on your server. These are usually pre-installed on most more recent Linux OS.

Misc – Installing Mediawiki on Windows

A lot of people does not know this, but you can actually install Mediawiki on Microsoft Windows. The following description is based on my experience installing Mediawiki on Windows XP Pro.

If you have a relatively clean machine, you just need to download the latest Apache, MySQL 4.x or 5.0 and PHP 5.0 setup programs from their respective download sites. After you install Apache, MySQL and PHP, you need to download Mediawiki and unzip the files to a directory on your c drive. In your Apache configuration file, httpd2.conf or apached2.conf, you add a virtual directory entry to point to your Mediawiki source directory. After restart the Apache service, you should be good to go.

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The local search is a less mature or saturated market but there is a lot of demand on local search. Even when people buys from local stores, they always tend to do online searches first. Therefore these local searches are harder for internet entrepreneurs to monetize. However, there are a couple of ways you can still profit from local search traffic.

The first is through affiliate programs. For example, if your site gets people who is searching for life insurance in your area, you could join an online insurance affiliate program that pays for leads. You can generally search engine optimize your site to get very targeted local search users who would be happy to fill out a simple lead form for discount auto insurance quote and/or life insurance quote. You could also provide auto insurance quote comparison information to your visitors to gain their trust by providing something valuable.

The second is to operate a niche directory listing website. You will charge members, usually local businesses, a monthly fee to list their website, product or promotions on your directory site. There are big sites that already do this in a very broad industry. Sites such as citysearch.com and craigslist.org have tens of thousands of listings in various industries. You want to target a very specific niche market so you can add value to your business members by providing better services and more targets leads. For example, you can set up a directory for local businesses that sell holiday gift baskets or corporate gift baskets in New York. These business will be happy to pay a nominal fee to get qualified leads.

There are more ways you can make money from local search traffic. The above are just two starters. Feel free to add your favorite ways to profit from local search engine traffic.

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Even if you have a relatively new site and you have not started search engine optimize your site, it is never to start your PPC search campaign. The simple reason is that when Google looks at your site and decides whether to include your web pages to its search index, it factors in whether your site is getting visitors. Just like a linkback link, a real visitor is also a vote for your site.

Of course, when you don’t have money rolling in, you should be mindful of your budget. Be sure to set an AdWords campaign daily spending limit. But keep your campaign running for at least two weeks. Hopefully by then your SEO campaign would have started sending your organic traffic.

Send Traffic To Deep Content Pages

When sending PPC traffic to your site, do not just everyone to your main page. You should alternate your pay per click campaign landing page, and send real visitors to pages deep inside your site. These pages should serve as your content hub pages and should be indexed by Google first to pull in other deeper content pages. An added benefit of this approach is that using rich content page as your AdWords landing page will help you improve your keyword quality score and dramatically lower your ppc cost.

Don’t Put AdSense Ads On Your Site Yet
The biggest mistake for a new site is to put on AdSense Ads immediately. That will drive away your visitors not attain them! Instead, you should put on email signup form and feedburner feed signup form in prominent places, and start communicating with your readers / audience.

PPC Search Engine Traffic Tools

If you have done your keyword research right, you already used all the tools you need to drive smart PPC search engine traffic. All I had to use is freely provided by Google. You need learn as much as possible about these free Google tools.

Google Keyword Tool: you can study your keywords, get estimated traffic and bid price from this tool.

Google Analytics: The most important part of Google Analytics is to learn how to use its conversion tracking capability. There are a lot of content on the internet that shows you how to track conversion with Google Analytics.

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Usually such problem as service scalability issue can be a good thing for a young company as they can solve the issue earlier and prepare themselves for greater success in the future.

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So how do you speed up the process of getting more organic traffic?

One technique we tried to boost our search engine ranking is to use PPC campaign to drive traffic to targeted content pages on your niche web sites. Here is what we did. We started with searching for some low-cost keywords that are related our website. We then setup some campaigns at Yahoo Sponsored Search,. Because of the careful selection of keywords, we were able to pay under 10 cents for each click on Yahoo’s search network. Make sure you one of your ads points to your website’s home page, one or more ads points to an internal page on your site. More over, you need to have a link from your main page to all internal pages that you are driving traffic to.

A few days later, when Google updated its PageRank, our home page get a PR2, not too bad for a new site in less than one month. What’s more exciting is that we started to see organic traffic from Yahoo flow in after a few days. Once we have almost equal number of organic and paid Yahoo traffic. We stopped Yahoo PPC ads. But the organic traffic from Yahoo just kept growing, which is terrific.

Our educated guess for reasons behind this interesting search engine rank boosting is that search engines (especially Google) will rank your pages higher if the pages are getting real human visitors. With Google Analytics running on my site, Google knows way more about the traffic to my site than I can imagine.

This trick may not work for all websites or all search engines. However, if you can afford to spend a few bucks a day on PPC traffic, this is a worthy SEO strategy to try. Post your experience below if you had similar situation.

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Use Robots.txt to Block Special Wiki Pages

For a starter, you don’t want to Google index your the special random page or the special search page. If your wiki install files are in a directory different from ‘wiki’, for example, they are in ‘wk’. You want to prevent search engine from indexing all pages under subdirectory ‘wk’. You could use the following in your robots.txt file to achieve these objectives.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wk/
Disallow: /wiki/Special:Random
Disallow: /wiki/Special%3ARandom
Disallow: /wiki/Special:Search
Disallow: /wiki/Special%3ASearch

Internal Linking Structure

When you first start your wiki site, you probably don’t have a lot of external links into your individual wiki page (deep link), so you want to make sure you have a linking structure that allows both human and search engine to easily navigate to all your pages. Once you have a decent PageRank for your wiki home page. The PageRank can be spread to internal pages to keep them out of supplemental index.

Get External Links to Your MediaWiki Pages

Deep linking refers to linking to individual pages on your wiki site from external web sites. It is widely known that deep links boost PageRank and helps to keep your page out of supplemental index.
An often used method of getting deep links is using article marketing techniques. You write quality articles that are related to the content of the page you are linking to and submit the articles to various article directory. Popular article directories can even help you get additional site visitors.

You may also want to check out our posts installing mediawiki a quick guide,

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Redirect non-www to www.yourdomain.com

This can be done either through an .htaccess entry, or through a plugin called “permalink redirect”. Also redirect all http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php to http://www.yourdomain.com/
RewriteRule ^(.*[^/])$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1/ [R=301,L]


Organize Site Structure to Kill Duplicate Content

You should always use the ‘read more’ feature on all your posts. This ensures that your original content only exists in the post page not on your index page or category archive pages. On your category pages, you also need to enable the excerpt.

Another way you can do this is to instruct the search engine spiders not to index certain pages on your blog by using the nofollow attributes through this “wordpress duplicate content cure” plugin. Additionally you can implement the so-called silos on your blog. We will talk about silos in an upcoming post.

With these simple changes to your wordpress installation, your blog content should start ranking high in the big search engines.

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There are literally millions of making money online blogs out there. Hence the competition for page ranking, link building etc are pretty high. A new blog like ours is very lucky to have achieved PageRank4 this quickly.

So in the past two months, this blog had 15 posts and only 3 comments. Clearly we want to do more to engage our readers. We just need to find out what kind of topics interest our readers in the blogging for profit community. Maybe our posts tried to appeal to a broad affiliate marketing audience or search engine marketing professionals.

The question is, how do we know our website visitor’s interests? We plan to look at two major factors.

One is study the keywords that visitors used in search engine traffic. The other is look at the posts that gained the most links from external domains. The winner of this study revealed two popular posts on our make money online blog.

• The Worst Search Engine Spam I Have Ever Seen
• Why Adsense Arbitrage Is Dead

Both posts provided some quality information in the content, not just personal ramblings etc, which I suspect is why both Google search engine and people loved them.

What would you like to see posted? What question would you like to get answered?

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Mike Filsaime, one of the most successful internet marketers, owner of numerous online properties, did exactly that.

In his free 37 page long report, Mike details all the tools he uses for his internet business, including, of course, tools that his team created and that are available for sale to anyone who aspire to making money on the internet.

But before you can get your hand on this report, you are going to see two OTO (one-time offers). The first one is a little expensive. If you decline it, a second OTO pops out screaming for your attention. At this point, I imagine most of you would have been sold. His offers are just too good to pass by. Don’t believe it, check it out yourself.

When you proceed , you will be asked to opt-in an email list AND to generate an account on the membership site, in order to get the report, although the sales page mentions that ‘Email Me the report’. To me, this is a little misleading.

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