By the way, my website is not live on this product yet nor have I purchased the paid version of the same. I still continue experimenting with the free version which itself looks very good. I thought of writing this review based on my initial impression (and it’s not any paid review, nor do they have any affiliate program)

What is SellFire?

In a nutshell, SellFire is an easy to install WordPress plugin that can convert either part or whole of your WordPress blog into an online store very quickly. It takes hardly two minutes to install and configure the plugin and you can be live with a decent looking store under ten minutes. And there’s absolutely no need to write any code – Javascript, HTML or anything else.

Some of the features of this amazing plugin include:

• Instant store builder that pulls data feeds from your multiple affiliate accounts such as Shareasale, Amazon, Commission Junction etc. Please note that the free version doesn’t support Amazon affiliate network. Using SellFire, you can pull product data from millions of affiliate products instantly
• The store search feature allows you to search for particular affiliate programs or products using keywords or dropdown selection
• You can then store these results as well as individual products as WordPress pages or product pages hence building a beautiful looking product catalog in no time. Imagine having several product pages like ‘Mens clothes’, ‘womens clothes’, ‘Accessories’ etc in no time! You can also categorize them easily using WordPress categories.
• Store health monitoring to make sure that you are not maintaining old products or stores or outdated pricing information
• Additional features include coupon search and integration, developer version with API access, product widgets, customization and styling

You may try this product for free by visiting SellFire.com (not an affiliate link). I am impressed with it and all set to launch my experimental online store. Let me know your opinion on this product after playing around with the same.

But are there any ways to save taxes on your Freelance income? Of course, there are a number of ways and this post is about the same based on my recent experiences with the Income tax department (Please note that you may have to take help from a tax consultant to deal with your specific scenario).

My experience with blogging and income taxes

As you know, my main job is not exactly blogging. I have a regular job in the software industry and that’s my main income stream. However, there is also some income (considerable) generated out of my online activities.

Since I do not have any company registered for my online businesses, all this while I have been paying taxes at the highest bracket for every buck that I earn. After some consideration, I decided to reorganize my finances a little from the income tax point of view.

Tax Tips for Bloggers

The following are some tax tips for bloggers and freelancers based on the little information I have with respect to our complicated tax rules.

1. Scenario 1: If you are not in the payroll of any employer (government or private organization), and have the potential to generate significant income via freelancing, it’s always good to register a company and report all freelance income and expenses under that company. When you have a company for your freelancing business, you can also save some tax towards expenses such as fuel, telephone bills etc. However, registering a company comes with certain responsibilities such as annual auditing, filing quarterly statements and IT returns in specific formats. Hence take this route only you have significant income
2. Scenario 2: If you are on your own and there’s only limited income (say below a couple of lakhs per annum in the Indian context) that you generate, then there’s no need to have this overhead of registering a company. In this case, you can still file the ITR-4 for reporting your business income and pay taxes for anything above the exemption limits. By the business income, include even stock or forex trading income as well
3. Scenario 3: If you are already under a company’s payroll and you earn from freelancing as well, ideally you have to file your returns in ITR-4 (business income reporting). This may be okay to do if your freelancing income is much smaller than your actual pay from regular job. However, some employers may take note of your IT returns filing pattern (ITR-4 instead of ITR-1 or 2) and might question you for any conflict of interest. In general it’s not good to proceed via this route as you end up paying a lot of taxes along with getting under the scanner
4. Scenario 4: When you have high income from both regular job and freelancing, it is better to move such freelance business income – wherever possible – under your spouse, sibling or family member who do not have a permanent job. This saves you quite some money in the form of taxes and moreover you can focus more on your regular work while also earning well on freelancing or blogging (whichever is relevant)
5. Scenario 5: Deciding not to report any freelance income – this scenario ideally should not exist. It’s a matter of time before you are hunt down by the authorities as they have all information about your transactions

Scenario 4 is what I have done this year and it’s working well for me at the moment. I have been paying a lot of taxes for no reason where there was always someone at home to take care of your blogging business needs. All that it takes is a new Bank account, PayPal account, PAN card and a new Credit card. Moving all affiliate accounts, online campaign accounts, billing details etc are the next logical steps and that’s all! You are all set to save taxes.

Additional income tax tips include: (a) paying advance taxes so that you can save some money in terms of interest and penalties on tax, (b) tracking each and every income and expense carefully (c) providing/taking tax-deducted-at-source information and (d) saving up some money to pay the taxes – don’t spend everything that you earn via freelancing.

That’s pretty much about taxing on your freelancing income. Let me know, if you have more to add to this as experts in the taxing arena.

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Futures, as you probably know, is more like a contract that says that you as a buyer will purchase the underlying item (contracted item) at a specific price (contracted price) at a specific time (Expiry date) in the future. Now let us move on to currency futures in the Indian context.

Currency Futures in India

Unlike online forex trading, all Indian nationals are legally eligible to trade currency futures in India via participatory agencies or brokerage firms (e.g. ICICI Securities, Geojit BNP Paribas etc) These agencies offer online trading of currency futures either in National Stock Exchange (NSE) or Multiple Commodity Exchange (MCX). For example, I use the ICICIDirect.com brokerage account that’s a participant of NSE.

Once you open an online trading account with them, you can trade popular currency pairs (like in the case of online Forex trading) as futures. However, at the moment, only four major currencies are traded as futures in India and they are USD, EUR, GBP and JPY. Needless to say the other currency in the pair has to be the Indian Rupee (INR) and hence the four futures are USDINR, EURINR, GBPINR and JPYINR respectively. In other words, here you are playing with the exchange rates of major currencies against Indian rupee.

Since the volatility in forex market is very high and the volume transacted per day is really very huge, the currency futures have the potential to make money during Intraday (day trading) or during a futures contract period (a month).

How to Trade Currency Futures in India?

In order to trade futures, you need to understand the a few terms related to the futures.

• Typically, futures have an expiry time of roughly a month. All futures expire usually on the last trading day of the month
• If you see something like ‘FUT-USDINR-27-Mar-2013’ in your trading account or a financial portal, you don’t need to get scared. It just means that we are talking about a USDINR future that has an expiry date of 27th March 2013
• The future currency pairs are usually traded in lots of 1000 which means that one lot (minimum unit of contract) is 1000 USDs in the case of USDINR futures. This means, a minimum value of 55000 rupees per contract at current exchange rate. But wait…you don’t need Rs.55000 to do a future trading. Read on
• Future trading works on margin leveraging which means that although you are entering a contract to buy a lot (or 1000USDs) particular future, in order to get started, you just need something like 4% of the future value (which is about 2200 rupees). Going by this example, if you want to buy 4 lots or 4000 USDINR in futures, you just need to have around 8800 rupees
• Once you enter a contract via buying a future, it can be terminated anytime within the future expiry date when you think you have made a profit (or stop loss). If you don’t sell the futures within the expiry date, anyhow it will expire on the last trading day (or future expiry date)
• By the way, you don’t need to necessarily buy the current month’s futures but can opt for April futures or May futures etc
• A price movement of 10 paise in the exchange rate (i.e. Future’s current rate) makes you 100 rupees profit (or loss) and now you probably understand the potential as well as risks in future trading

If you want to know more about trading forex futures in India, please read the FAQs on ICICI site. By the way, in order to make good money via trading in currency futures require you learn a little bit of technical analysis. There are a number of portals out there that gives technical trends online for free and you may watch them carefully for a few days or weeks before investing.

Disclaimer: This is not a paid or promo post and I have myself just started currency futures trading. I am not really an expert in future trading but I see a huge online money making opportunity using this method. Please use your own judgment and/or seek expert advice before investing your money in currency futures.

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Shashank

Can u please tell me where can I get real time streaming charts for USD/INR pair(NSE,MCXSX,BSE)?

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Well, it’s not just the case with blogging, but I had quit facebook around this time last year and have been maintaining low profile on other social media handles as well. However, unlike my Facebook exit, going slow on blogging is something to do with priorities in life and not that I am going to quit blogging.

Current Priorities

In the middle age, you are thrown with a lot of challenges in life – career woes, kids, relationships, health, wealth management issues, retirement planning to name a few. At the moment, though I do not have any major concerns regarding my relationships or finances, I would like to do a little bit more about stabilizing my career and that’s priority number 1 right now. Then there are kids at home that are not growing younger and their right upbringing needs a lot of attention. Lastly, I am trying to do my bit for the community that I am living in by taking up small projects that impact a few lives.

The above mentioned priorities come way ahead of blogging and hence the retardation.

Updates on my online ventures

Okay, this doesn’t mean that I am doing badly with respect to the websites that I own. While my personal blog doesn’t make any money, this blog still fetches some referral income – thanks to some of the great products that I used and endorsed in the past.

Then I have a couple of coupon blogs that are doing well even without any new addition of content to the same.

There’s then this autoblog that I set up for fun, which started building some good traffic without any effort. It’s being monetized with the Amazon program for the time being.

So overall, while I am visibly slow, the situation isn’t all that bad from the income generation point of view. I still run 8 websites off which 4 are doing quite fine.

I hope to continue updating this blog but definitely not every other day or week. Well, good thing about blogging is that it allows you to increase or decrease your post frequency at your will. That’s better than closing down altogether like many online businesses, right? (Just read that AdBrite closed down their advertising business)

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Ajith Prasad Edassery

Melvin, I became too slow only during the past one year, I think. However, so far, I haven't accepted any guest posts - perhaps, I may take that route at some point :)

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Last week, I took a bold step of using this tool to filter unwanted backlinks to my site. While I am waiting for any significant results from Disavow links tool, let me summarize my experience about this tool and what could be the ideal way to go about using the tool.

What exactly is Google Disavow Tool?

As you know, backlinks are one of the most important aspects of SEO that determine how well your pages are linked from other websites and their internal pages. Good and relevant backlinking boosts your search rankings (Of course, you need to have very good content).

Unfortunately, from time to time you may end up receiving backlinks from sites that you don’t quite like. At times, this happens as a result of your own paid SEO efforts and some other times due to link baiting or natural linking by others. Whatever be the reason, if you want to remove those unwanted backlinks from consideration by Google’s search indexing algorithm you can do it now using the Google Disavow Tool (Nice name, by the way!).

How to go about Disavowing certain links?

Using the tool itself is very easy but consolidating all those bad backlinks and domains is not so – especially when you have large number of backlinks pointing to your website. For example, this blog domain had a total of 175,364 backlinks off which I could disavow only around 12000 so far. Well, it’s difficult to manually go through all the links, you see.

Anyhow, here’re the step by step instructions for using the Disavow tool:

Step 1

Create a text file of all bad domains and links that you want to disavow in the format given below. You need to enter one link per line and if you want to block the entire domain from linking back to you then you should have the format ‘domain:whateverdomain.com’ in your disavow file.

Google recommends to use the webmaster tool backlinks data (Via Traffic => Links to Your Site option) to consolidate a list of disavow links and domains. Unfortunately this is not always practical and in reality you may have to use multiple tools

Step 2

Go to disavow links tool, select your domain name and click on the ‘Disavow Links’ button.

Step 3

In the next page (or after a warning page), you can upload the text file that you prepared from Step 1 and click the ‘Done’ button, that is it.
Now, Google will ‘supposedly’ ignore these links and bad domains that are in your disavow list. By the way, I am yet to see any major result in increased traffic but a few SERP positions have definitely changed.

Some more Disavow Tool Tips

As per Google, the disavow tool is NOT for all sites. However, if you belong to one of the categories listed below, you may want to try the tool yourself.

• You have done some off page SEO efforts recently that seem to have backfired
• You received bad backlinks warning in your Webmaster Tools account
• Your website traffic has been hugely hit due to unknown reasons (Or animals such as Penguin or Panda hit you hard!)
• You marketed certain products with backlinks (e.g. Theme sponsorship) that went into wrong hands and you want to block all those domains

Now, once you decide to go about using the tool, it may be a good idea to start with all those domains belonging to categories such as sites with rated content, discontinued domains, parked domains, sites that host hate/warez content, sites with script or page load errors, websites with totally outdated and unrelated content etc

As a second step, you can try identifying bad deep links of good sites (or those you don’t want to disavow at a domain level). The reasons could be irrelevant or bad internal page from which the link originates. This step is rather difficult and I am yet to try it.

Disavow Tool – Shortcomings

Okay, so what are some issues with the tool itself?

Firstly, there is no way to consolidate all links. Ideally, Mr.Google should have found out an automatic way of determining which backlinks are good for your website and picked them. By not doing so, it’s basically passing the buck to the Webmasters. How bad is that?

Secondly, majority of the backlinks to my site originate from Blogspot.com which is essentially huge number of links from blogger hosted blogs (e.g. myblog.blogspot.com). Unfortunately, there is no way I can pinpoint how many blogger blogs have to be disavowed. So I still do not know what to do with those blogspot.com backlinks that weigh at 90,000 plus as of today!

Third, never ever upload too many links/domains in succession. In other words, if you keep updating your disavow links file too often, that itself may backfire. That’s the idea I am getting from various webmaster forums that discuss the Disavow Links Tool topic.

That’s pretty much for now. I shall keep updating the section below with more of Disavow Tool success or failure stories.

Disavow Tool Results – Update

1-Jan-’12: Before using Disavow Tool
Total Backlinks: 175,364
Blogspot.com: 92,689

4-Jan-’12: First attempt with Disavow Tool
Domains uploaded: 29
Total links from the above domains: 11,256
Type of domains removed: Rated/Hate content, Domain not resolving/parked domains, Unrelated content, Less frequently updated sites, Sites with script errors

9-Jan-’12: Links Statistics
Total Backlinks: 137,075 (Significant drop beyond the 11,256 requested)
Blogspot.com: 90,352
Inference: Removed domains still appear in the list, Some of the keyword positions moved up on SERPs significantly while some others went out of first page

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Jack Gao

Yes, you are correct. To increase the high quality back links is important. But yahoo need many back links.

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• There were only about 350 keywords that would fetch me real money if I were to put AdSense on this blog
• Out of these keywords ONLY about 30 gives me more than $1 per click
• The highest value keyword was worth only $8.50 per click

Well, disappointed but then that explains why I am not into AdSense these days. However, it’s NOT just about AdSense but the overall attractiveness of your blog in the eyes of a potential advertiser or marketer. So I decided to do some more comparison study with respect to other similar blogs using SEMRush itself. And what did I see?

Another blog with similar traffic and ranks had about 600 keywords that would fetch money off which 80 keywords would fetch PPC above $1 with the highest paid keyword being rated at $16.00!

Keyword = Money, Oh yeah?

In the past, I have written about the importance of keywords in the context of search optimization traffic generation. But it’s also important to make sure that the same amount of traffic can generate more money via the right kind of keyword selection (and a mix of those keywords).

Of course, more relevant keywords would mean more money? However, we have to reassess the situation a bit in the aftermath of Google Panda. You know what? In fact, you want not only a lot of relevant keywords in your niche but also a good mix of other keywords – that are irrelevant to your context – to make more money.

And what’s the best way to achieve that situation of having a good mix of relevant and irrelevant keywords?

How to Make More Money from Same Traffic?

Well, the following are some of the tips that might help you in attaining that critical mass of keywords to help with making more money.

1. Accept guest posts from marketers and advertisers and NOT from your good blogging buddies. These marketers (or their associates) are pretty smart chaps and when they get benefited immediately; in fact, your keyword richness is gradually increasing as well. Please remember to maintain a good content health ratio between your own content and guest posts
2. Write some paid reviews even if the topics are unrelated to your content a bit. For example, you can still think of writing about ‘business cards’ or ‘best vpn solution’ or ‘workplace accidents’ even though your blog is not dealing with it. You see, you can actually set the context for some of these paid plugs if you really wish to do so without sounding totally out of place. And remember to accept these valuable paid plugs even if they are quoting a low price – I am using this strategy on one of my blogs and it’s started showing some good results
3. Maintain the critical mass of keywords in each of your new posts. Please note that the keyword critical mass in the NEW context also include our good contextual keywords, totally unrelated keywords and even phrase variations of contextual keywords (that probably no one searches for)
4. Accept only those guest posts and paid reviews that has more money relevance in your traffic zones. It’s good to have high CPC (Cost Per Click) keywords but they should be in the context of the geographies where your blog gets most traffic from
5. …and finally, never over-stuff keywords just to increase your attractiveness. This rule is still valid regardless of Panda or Penguin or whatever animal to follow next

Well, it’s a matter of transformation and if you stick to the above tips for a few months, you can definitely see great improvement in your online income. Moreover, you are likely to attract more advertisers and even get accepted by affiliate networks that have rejected you in the past.

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Ram Shengale

Hey Ajith thanks for introducing to this tool. I'll definitely go and check it out.

Ram

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Now CMS Commander has shaped up well and is a paid product. But don’t worry, if you want to experience CMS Commander at a discount rate, you may use our exclusive coupon code DOLLARSHOWER that gives you 20% OFF for life on all packages of CMSCommander.

Why CMS Commander?

Well, if you have multiple WordPress blogs, you are already aware of the difficulties in managing installations, backups, plugin-theme upgrades, uptime management, analytics tracking etc. CMS Commander makes all these tasks a breeze so that you can focus more on what you are good at – that is blogging!

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CMS Commander pricing

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This time around I want to concentrate a bit more on blog content marketing and in that context how would you strategize your affiliate marketing efforts. It’s no rocket science but I would like to share some ground level tips based on my five years experience into this domain. The important thing here is that, the moment you start differentiating your blog content medium from the other wide variety of marketing channels, your efforts start showing good results automatically. Let us see how.

Why Blog Content Marketing is different?

When you are market products using channels such as search advertising, email or paid banners, you are essentially having a time bound strategy. In other words, in such cases at any point of time you can decide which products to promote, when to start and you’re your campaigns etc. Needless to say, these channels are pretty effective in pulling off instant success with even unknown or new products. Also, you need to focus and monitor your conversions pretty closely or you might end up losing money fast.

The case is totally different when you use your content (websites or blogs) for affiliate marketing. Here we have some well established content – not only popular with your readers but also with search engines. Since the content on the Internet can have prolonged shelf life, you need to strategize your marketing efforts for much longer term when compared to search marketing etc.

The other important aspect about content marketing is that it’s more of a non-interruption marketing where you don’t force people to buy products.

Blog Marketing Tips

Since we already know that thinking long term is the key, here are the additional tips for successfully marketing affiliate products via your blog.

1. Pick established products with Good brand image

Well, this may not be a brainer! However, the fact is that products that have established over a number of years may sell better than those arrived just now. It’s a difficult deal at times as some new products may offer better affiliate commissions. For example, the hosting products that I chose to promote are still doing a good job – thanks to the long term reliability of the product as well as its brand image.

Along the same lines, if you are dealing with an affiliate network, you need to go with a well established network with proven track record.

2. Beware of the relevancy

Probably, I have talked about this aspect several times – You just can’t sell a product just because of a good proposition. At the end, the product that you promote should be somehow relevant to your content – remember we are talking about content marketing.

3. Avoid overselling via content duplication

Well, you may be tempted to promote the latest product offers and coupons for the month or the holiday season. However, it may be irritating for your long term reader base if you keep churning out the same article over and again talking about a recent coupon. So avoid posts titled as ‘HostGator Coupon code for November 2012’ and subsequent posts with the same content but replacing the month and year. Well, you may get some monetary benefit out of that for short term. But remember, you are probably damaging your content. And without good content, there is no content marketing. Further, good content is created over a long period of time.

4. Indexed old content is better than new repetitive content

Instead of taking the content duplication route (as mentioned in section 3), you may actually use your old posts that are doing well on the search engines to promote your new coupon codes or offers. This is something that works very well for me for a number of years now. In this case, you can even reroute your potential visitors to your new offer pages by using the established old posts are landing pages.

5. Have dedicated pages for your offers

You may use dedicated pages to promote your offers, services and coupons. This again is no brainer but the key is that you have to keep linking your new content to your offer page so that it becomes more search relevant over a period of time. Moreover, you need to keep your offers updated.

6. Continuous product focus

Since we are (shamelessly) talking about long term, you need to keep monitoring about the progress of your promotions on a periodic basis. Well, it doesn’t need to be daily tracking like you do for search marketing but something like a bi-weekly stock taking should work. Things that don’t work over a month or so need to be terminated as far as in-content banners or text are concerned. When it comes to reviews, you can’t do a lot. You don’t need to delete the review post as such unless you were, by mistake, promoting scam products or services. However, you can always write a fresh post on your changed views on a competitive product and then highlight why you had to switch.

7. Write comprehensive and useful reviews

Ok, so you want to market products that offer lucrative commissions. However, if you yourself are not a user of the product nor have you written a good review about it, chances are you end up failing in marketing the same. The product reviews themselves need to be genuine and useful for your readers first in terms of decision making. Please note that NOT all reviews need to recommend a product at the end. You may have review posts where the verdict can be negative thereby alerting your readers to stay away from that product.

8. Avoid fooling people into clicking

A lot of people use hidden links, irrelevant content links, auto-clicking scripts and even irrelevant pop-unders to force land people into undesired destinations. These kinds of cheap tricks won’t really work for long term. Moreover, your content may be even marked as unsafe or spammy by search engines as well as safe-browsing tools.

9. Stop selling Fast-money products

Again, I have stressed this point many times. Most of the quick-cash-making products are nothing but scams. You may not only stop promoting them but stop writing about them as well.

10. Finally, Don’t be Greedy!

Affiliate marketing doesn’t have a quick start success formula that works for everyone. What works for me, may not work for you and your type of content. Take your time, analyze, experiment and derive a LONG TERM strategy that works for yourself.

If you keep the above points in mind, you are sure to be successful in your blog affiliate marketing ventures.

Recent Comment

Dean Saliba

This is invaluable advice for someone like me! I am going to start affiliate marketing in 2013 and I am desperately trying to harvest some blog posts to help with tips and advice and yours looks like it will be more helpful than the others combined!

I'm going to start by promoting at the various holidays in 2013 (Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Halloween, etc) rather than all year round, just to ease myself into it. :)

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Since we are discussing more about blogs here – than generic websites – let me share with you ten blog logos that I found very effective (in my personal opinion) in branding. At the end of this post, I will be talking about a few uninspiring logos as well – despite them representing hugely popular blogs, that is.

Top 10 Blog Logos – My List

(Please note that I just tried to pick the best logos from some of the blogs that I follow or seen. Also, the list is not completely in the right order of preference)

1. Engadget logo

My first choice is the Engadget.com logo. This one being a hugely popular blog that deals with mobility and gadgets, I believe that it’s one of the best logos for a blog. What do you think?

2. Hotair.com logo

In my opinion, Hotair.com logo goes very well with the hot topics such as politics that they handle on the site. They have got a pretty cool domain name as well that’s good for a blog or current affairs site.

3. Smashing Magazine logo

Well, the smashing magazine logo seems to be facing some resizing issue on the blog layout these days. Nevertheless, in its original size, as given here, it’s one of the best logos for a blog.

4. QuickSprout.com logo

Neil Patel’s neat blog has got a really impressive logo. I like its overall theme, logo and the favicon – all of them highlighting sprouting ideas.

5. Joystiq logo

Well, most people must be aware of this popular gaming information blog. I particularly like this logo among all gaming sites primarily because of the custom font used for this logo which stands out and reminds of multiple gaming peripherals.

6. CopyBlogger logo

CopyBlogger blog has been one of my favorite blogs for a long time now. I like their simple logo that reminds me of old style news papers (and hence copy editing). Needless to say, this particular blog has some great content for wannabe content creators.

7. Yoast logo

Well, Yoast.com is not exactly a blog anymore but a blogging related site that I frequent. And here I am talking about the old Yoast logo (which has been replaced since I first drafted this post). I used to like the old Yoast logo because of the ‘Y’ character that is shaped like a little spanner and hence the tweaking aspect there in. They still have that little spanner on the favicon but the logo is gone.

8. BoingBoing.net logo

BoingBoing.net is not exactly a site that I visit a lot. However, being a popular blog I was somehow attracted to its logo which animates on mouse hover. The pressure pumping lady animation pretty much means ‘boing’.

9. TutsPlus blog logo

Well, although I didn’t quite understand what Tuts+ blog logo stands for, I believe that it looks like high class stuff – May be I am attracted to its orange and charcoal combo.

10. FrugalRules logo

Since I write a lot about Make Money Online topics, it’s only appropriate that I pick at least one good logo from this space and my choice is the Frugal Rules logo. I kind of like the little frugal family represented in this particular logo though the color combination there in is not exactly my favorite.

Uninspiring Blog Logos

Now, what about some uninspiring logos?

Well, most of the highly popular blogs have pretty bad logos. Perhaps they don’t need a great logo anymore as they are already established and way ahead of others.

Some of those big blogs that sport poor looking logos (personal opinion) include Huffington Post, Mashable, Tech Crunch (used to like their old logo), John Chow.com, Steve Pavlina.com etc.

Over to you…

So which blog (not necessarily from my list) according to you has a great logo to boost its brand image?

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Srivathsan G.K

Tech crunch logo is worst !

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Please note that the information shared here is as per the best of my knowledge. I am not an authority when it comes to topics like government financial regulations, policies etc. And, I intent to keep this post updated as and when more information is available (If you find any discrepancies here, please let me know)

Online Forex FAQs

Let me begin with the most asked questions first:

1. Is Online forex trading illegal in India?

Yes. Forex trading by individuals or businesses is ILLEGAL in India unless you are trading futures or options via recognized stock exchanges in India. RBI has made it very clear in the past as well as a more recent communication that you can find in this news item.

So if you are an Indian citizen, stay away from forex trading on the Internet.

2. So, why are you promoting Forex trading products on this blog?

This blog has visitors from all around the world and there are a lot of countries where forex trading, gambling etc are completely legal. I am unable to selectively display information for each country.

3. Is Forex trading regulated and legal in certain countries?

Yes. For example, in the UK, FSA or Financial Services Authority regulates the investments like Forex trading and protects clients’ money. You need to choose a regulated broker and understand the jurisdiction in your country before trading forex.

4. Is Forex trading risky?

Yes. Forex trading is extremely risky as you are leveraging on margins by 10, 50, 100 or even 400 times. Hence as much potential you have to earn money quickly; the risks are equally high as well. Basically, when you leverage more, it’s riskier as volatility result in huge sudden changes.

5. How to reduce risks in Forex trading?

Reducing leverage is a good way to trade pessimistically. This ensures that there is no sudden rise or fall of your positions. Also, pick stable currency pairs to trade or even commodities as explained below.

6. What are some good instruments to trade for beginners?

Commodities such as Gold is the best place to start when you do online Forex trading. It is possible to trade commodities using the same Forex trading account. If you are adamant on trading currency, then USD/CHF (US Dollar vs Swiss Franc) is a good one. Since Swiss Franc is a relatively stable currency, the movements will be more predictable though this particular pair is less liquid than crowd favorite pairs like USD-EUR.

7. What is Social Trading?

Social trading is explained in a dedicated post here.

8. Sitting in India, can I operate a Forex Account created by my friend or relative abroad?

If your friend or relative operates from a foreign country where Forex trading is permitted, I would believe that the financial compliance, taxing etc are on him. You cannot directly fund his account and hence it has to be completely managed by him while you may in principle trade using that account sitting here. This setup can work though there may be still legal issues? My mind says this setup may turn out to be illegal as well.

(I shall update this post with more Forex FAQs soon)

Disclaimer: As a law abiding Indian citizen, I do not trade Forex myself and I advise fellow Indian citizens to stay away from Internet based Forex trading activities. If you are from a country where trading forex is legal, you may still exercise caution while trading forex as money can be gained or lost in a jiffy.

Rankerizer free download version of the keyword rank checker software is neat product. In a nutshell, it can simultaneously look up Google, Yahoo and Bing for your keyword ranks in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Rankerizer – Features

Well, there are numerous SERP position analysis tool available out there for free. I however, liked Rankerizer because of the following cool features that it offers:

• Extremely fast: It can come up with the SERP positions of a dozen keywords for your domain very quickly if you opt for only Google search
• Queries up to top 500 rank positions for your keywords
• Stores keyword positions history and shows it on a beautiful graph
• Shows backlinks count and page rank of ranked pages for a particular keyword
• You can organize your domains (any number) across multiple projects and even schedule them to auto-run
• Pulls out ranking sub-pages (and not just the domain name) information in a cascading fashion
• You can opt for Country specific rankings – i.e. Know the difference of rankings between Google.com and Google.co.uk for example
• Enforces random delays between queries so that your IP address does’t get banned by Yahoo or Bing

Given below is a small screenshot of Rankerizer with some sample data from my personal blog. Please note that this is only sample data and certain high ranking keyword information is not shared here. I found this free tool to be extremely useful for SEO gurus and webmasters. It is way better than using those SEO toolbars and other standalone tools that don’t offer privacy.

Get Rankerizer Free Download

You can get your free copy of Rankerizer tool by visiting this URL. Please note that you have to provide a valid email address to receive your product key.

Let me know how your experiment with Rankerizer go. The only shortcoming that I noticed so far is how sub-domain rankings are shown. I didn’t figure out how to check ranks of sub-domains yet.

Recent Comment

Mia Cross

Helpful article. Thank you so much. Rank Tracker Tool is another interesting tool that tracks keyword ranks across top 5 search engines. The link is ranktrackertool.com


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1. Instant conversions: What percentage of your first time visitors buy the products or services that you are offering on your landing pages?

2. Patronage: What fraction of the visitors subscribe to your newsletters and communications (and hence become future prospects or buyers)

3. Brand building: How many are willing to social like your content or endorse your brand?

In each of the above cases, the success is bound to happen sooner or later. However, the sad part is that most Internet Marketers find their potential customers (visitors) leave their landing pages without taking any action at all. Let’s figure out how to fix this and increase conversion rate on your website or blog.

Simple Tips to Increase Conversion Rate

For the sake of brevity, let me put my ideas on increasing conversion rate into the following bullet points.

• Meaningful Squeeze pages: It’s true that majority of your prospective customers will leave without taking any action, if you don’t field an attractive squeeze page. This should be fast loading and straight forward. It shouldn’t feel like a trap to collect email addresses but project your points on why one should sign up to your newsletters or offers (Also read: AdWords Landing page Quality score)
• List building on Content: I must admit that I still do not do this on all my blogs but list building on blogs (and similar content) is the single most effective means of building patronage and guaranteeing long lasting success. No wonder why products such as MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet are selling (and working) so well. If I look at my bounce rate on THIS blog, I lost the opportunity to build a list that is 600,000 strong!
• Take a NO SPAM oath yourself: Most email marketers fail because they fancy big that they can keep sending direct product offer letters to their email list every other day. That’s foolishness! You should think of a realistic approach of communicating once to thrice per month. That’s it! And none of them, ideally should be direct selling type communication
• Social Media strategy: Use it ALWAYS for strong brand building alone and never for direct sales or service. I have seen some customer care professionals taking complaints on Facebook and Twitter and not using their CRM systems to do that job. This is highly ineffective!
• Right products to the right people: Imagine that you are building a list on a fashion site. Since the products in that segment earn you less commission, you want to now sell electronics and gadgets to that crowd. It’s simply not going to work and all your list building efforts are going to be wasted in such a scenario. So, if required, build multiple lists that are categorized
• Never cheat: Some of the so-called Internet marketing gurus failed when they tried to cheat their patrons. When greed gets in you, that’s the beginning of your end! Go slow and steady in an ethical way and you are going be successful. Patronage and brand value are invaluable at any point of time when compared to the small difference that money makes at times.
• Instant conversions for Innovative products: In my experience, instant conversions took place only in the case of highly innovative and new product offerings. For example, I had some great success in promoting a particular brand of Karate (martial arts) product because the product was new in offering and quite unique too. However, with time the competition built up and it wasn’t selling further. So instant conversions are all about being innovative all the time and relentlessly looking out for newer opportunities. The only other option for quick conversions is MASSIVE and RELEVANT organic traffic hitting your product pages.

That’s pretty much about brand building, marketing ethics and planning that essentially result in high conversion rates. Anymore to add from your end?

Recent Comment

Ajith Prasad Edassery

List building is the key to retain customers :) I know a blogger who has several domain names with minimal traffic but have excellent squeeze pages. He now has a list of more than 20000 emails in couple of years. Imagine the potential for high traffic sites.

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Needless to say, that kind of content will be easily guillotined by Panda because of duplicate post excerpts on huge number of pages. I had to do something pretty quickly to remove them and a quick browse around revealed how to easily remove post category and tag pages from Google Index in ONE EASY STEP.

Remove Category and Tag Pages via Google WM Tools

Initially I was thinking of something more complicated such as using robot.txt and what not. But it was so easy with Google Webmaster Tools and here is how you go about it.

• Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and click on your WordPress blog (assuming that you have already added your blog to WM Tools)
• Expand the Optimization group and click Remove URLs
• Click the ‘Create a new removal request’ button and enter the URL http://myblog.com/tag/ to remove all tags (and further http://myblog.com/category/ to remove all post categories) from indexing. Click the Continue for each of the above two requests

On the next page, choose the reason as ‘Remove Directory’ from the drop down and Submit

• That is all! Google will effect the removal of unwanted URLs from its Search index in a couple of days from your request

This technique can be used to remove duplicate indexed entries from other CMS based websites as long as they follow directory style URL structure.

Removing categories and tags from Google index has become all the more important with more frequent Panda updates being rolled out by Google every month to axe duplicate content creators.

Setting your categories and tags pages to ‘No Index’ (using your SEO plugins or premium theme settings) is the next logical step to do, if you haven’t already done so.

The following are some of the affiliate product categories where some serious money can be generated online from your blog or content:

1. Forex Affiliate Programs
2. Hosting Services
3. WordPress, Blogging related software, themes, plugins
4. …anything that you actually use as a blogger…

Top Affiliate Programs for Bloggers (IM, MMO, Blogging Niche)

The following are the affiliate programs that do wonders to your online income if you happened to be in a blogging niche like mine.

1. Best Forex Affiliate Program – eToro Partners

Well, I have tried a few Forex affiliate programs here on this blog and the best one so far is the eToro Partners affiliate program.

The eToro Partners Forex Affiliate program offers $200 in CPA (i.e. 200 dollars for every customer that you refer who deposits at least $200) or the same amount of deposit if the customer happens to deposit less than $200. This Forex Affiliate program also offers the 25% revenue sharing alternative whereby affiliates get 25% of all revenues generated by all the referrals, for life. The payment is monthly and prompt. Even better, your assigned affiliate manager actually helps you with anything that takes to become a successful eToro Partner.

(There may be many Forex affiliate programs that offer similar CPAs but I can only recommend the best as I have experienced it)

2. Best Hosting Affiliate Program – HostGator

This is no brainer! Most bloggers that I know have been successfully earning from the HostGator Affiliate Program. This one actually works in almost all blog niches because their affiliate banners are actually very tempting. However, I should mention that the affiliate competition is pretty high in the Hosting affiliate space.

As a HostGator Affiliate, you earn a minimum of $50 per active referral and it can go all the way up to $125 per referral depending on the number of people that you refer to the HostGator hosting – no matter, what hosting package your referrals opted for.

The payment is on CPA basis (once per acquired customer) and you will get your affiliate earnings at least 60 days (between 60 to 90 days) after you referrals are verified to be active. I must admit that initially I had some issues with HostGator affiliate program but all that have been sorted out now and I am on track with respect to earnings from this wonderful Hosting affiliate program.

3. WordPress Plugins Affiliate Programs – MaxBlogPress, OIOPublisher, Gravity Forms etc

If you happened to be in the niche of WordPress Blogging then there’s no better option (after Hosting affiliation, may be) than marketing those amazing premium WordPress plugins that you actually use.

Some of the best affiliate programs in the WordPress premium plugins arena are the following:

- MaxBlogPress Affiliate Program: Market those wonderful plugins like MaxBlogPress Ninja affiliate plugin to earn 55% commission on each sale. Please note that it is a ClickBank affiliated merchant and hence all terms and conditions are as per the ClickBank ToS.

- Gravity Forms is an e-Junkie affiliated program. It offers only 20% in commission, but compared to many WordPress plugins they sell a lot and hence the volume sales strategy works here if you happen to have the right landing pages.

- Affilate programs of the other popular WordPress plugins also do a very good job for my earnings (e.g. OIOPublisher, WPRobot autoblogging plugin etc)

Tip: It’s always advisable to market those plugins that you actually use and found useful. Essentially, your readers are going to buy only those products that you actually use and review. Just putting some banners are not going to do any good in terms of affiliate conversions.

4. WordPress Theme Affiliation – Genesis, Thesis etc

Most Premium WordPress themes offer wonderful affiliate programs that offer 30% to 50% commission to their affiliates. As a thumb rule it is always better to promote those themes that you actually use yourself. This will surely increase your conversion rates and help you earn more money.

Tip: Hosting solutions, WordPress Plugins and themes are like ONE package that work together and can be promoted together as well.

5. Any other products that you use…

The essence of affiliate marketing success with your content or blog is to make sure that you promote those things that worked for you. For example, if you had success with aWeber email marketing solution, you may talk about your success story and thereby sell it and make more money.

And what about DONTs?

You should be very careful (or even stay away) while marketing those Instant money machines, profit formulas and chronic commissions systems that don’t have any kind of real proof attached to them in terms of REAL success. If you go greedy and try to market such baseless schemes, you are bound see some negative repercussions sooner or later. It can really spoil your image in the online world and hence don’t go after those instant success schemes.

And the above is true regardless of the Internet marketing channel that you use!

Wishing you the very best in your Affiliate Marketing endeavors!

Recent Comment

Vishnu

Can you suggest me few best affiliate programs for indian traffic...Thanks

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And even better, CMS Commander comes with the integrated WPRobot features meaning that you can now insert free content such as Youtube videos, Yahoo Answers, eBay-Amazon-Shareasale affiliate links, Flickr content and a LOT more into your real content.

What is CMS Commander all about?

Imagine you have several WordPress sites to manage. The day to day maintenance of these blogs in terms of upgrading plugins, themes, upgrading and backing up WordPress, comment moderation, posting etc are going to be a daunting task by itself. And that’s where CMS Commander comes to your rescue and you can now manage all your WordPress sites and Joomla-Drupal-phpBB sites from ONE place. That’s right, from one portal.

The following are some of the salient features of CMS Commander. Please note that the product is still under development and hence the feature list changes every day.

• Save your time as a webmaster by not having to login to each Admin area of the numerous WordPress, Drupal or Joomla (1.5 for now) sites that you own
• If you are into autoposting, you can neatly blend content into your original posts. It supports article spinning options as well
• Moderate comments, create sections or categories, manage users and a lot more day to day affairs
• One click Plugin-Theme updates on all sites
• Instant automatic backup of all sites into your DropBox account

How does it work?

Well, the CMS Commander requires you to install a small plugin on each of your WordPress, Joomla or Drupal sites to help manage them remotely from CMS Commander portal and you don’t need to enter your passwords within the portal itself. This makes the tool very secure.

If you are into autoblogging, you can schedule WPRobot campaigns to run within this tool so that you can pull and publish legal content from open content sources.

At the moment, I am playing around with two of my blogs and a experimental Joomla site to see how things work with this multiple site management solution. So far things look bright though there are several improvement areas.

What could be improved with CMS Commander?

The very first improvement area is the ease with sites could be added. Although, adding your sites to CMS Commander is still easy, it could be even easier. For example, I have seen ManageWP providing a direct click add of the CMS management plugin by redirecting to the site’s plugin page. This is missing in CMS Commander as of today.

Also, the menu navigation of this WordPress based site could be improved. At the moment, there are dozens of links on the left navigation bar which really needs to be grouped better. I am still experimenting with each of them and hence too early to judge. However, something like a prompt based system (e.g. ‘Your tasks today’ kind of thing in the content panel) would work better and make the user interface easier.

I sometimes also have the confusion as to which site(s) are selected – as there’s a selected background styling as well as checkbox on some. This needs some cleanup as well.

And the competing products have a lot more features such as Analytics integration built into them. CMS Commander has to catch up with all these features as well.

Overall, the author has to make the usage of this portal a lot easier for the common blogger. I am told that they are now focusing mainly on the WordPress sites management features and there are some functionalities missing in management of Joomla and Drupal based sites. I will probably keep updating this post with more news and features coming in. Until then the product gets a 4 out of 5 for a very good attempt. The product now gets a 5/5 with most of its features implemented for the WordPress blogs.

In the mean time Check out the CMS Commander portal and signup for your free account. There are plenty of video demos already available for the currently supported features.

A number of ever varying parameters have made the lives of Internet Marketers very tough in the recent times. This includes changes in search technologies, impact of Social media networks and the patterns and channels of Internet consumption by potential buyers. Let us analyze some of these challenges that Internet marketers are facing today.

Internet Marketing Challenges

The following are some of the hurdles that have made Internet marketing difficult and unpredictable during one’s journey towards Internet and affiliate marketing success.

1. Google Search Algorithm Updates

It is no brainer that most of those who depended on organic traffic to their website, in order to drive their internet marketing campaigns, have been severely hit by Google’s Panda update (and now Penguin). Google – being the most popular search engines for the past decade – have majorly succeeded in dictating terms for Search and organic marketing success. Undoubtedly this is the first and foremost risk that you have in the online marketing business especially for content centric marketing.

2. Search Engine Market share changes

If your online marketing strategy is still around Google, it may be time to plan ahead for the next few years. Google, by far, is STILL the top most engine but its market share is on a steady decline since last three years in the United States. Right now, the Google market share hovers around 65% in the US while in countries like UK, it’s still on the rise. So, if your target audiences are in the US, you may need to think about Search Engine Marketing and Optimization beyond Google.

3. Autoblogging is almost DEAD!

Sometimes back I wrote about how autoblogging can be of practical use and that part still has some relevance. However, there is no more life ahead for those fully automated and spun blogging technologies and hence those online marketers who had taken the complete autoblogging route face the point of no return.

4. Wrong Social Marketing Strategy

A lot of online marketers have failed miserably on social networks because they tried direct marketing on Facebook or LinkedIn just like they used to do Search Engine Marketing on Google. This just doesn’t work! As I have mentioned many times in the past, the Social networks work best for brand building, engaging customers or prospects and making them patrons to your services and products rather than doing any direct marketing. The moment you get this idea right, you are going to be more successful in your online marketing ventures.

5. SEO and related Marketing Expenses

With Pandas and Penguins striking hard, the amount of money you have to spend on good quality SEO services is on the increase now. You can no more push up your website or landing pages using cheap link building techniques post Panda attacks. I have personally experienced this with some of my new projects where a small service that would have cost $50 in the past is now costs $200 and still things aren’t easy.

6. Email marketing hit hard

Well, the number of young and prospective customers that use email as a primary means to communicate is on steady decline – thanks to Social networks (Read this article). Even worse, the opt out rate on first instance is on the increase and the rest is done by spam blockers.

7. Poor mobile strategy

It’s surprising that many of the mid and small size content generators still haven’t got into the act yet when it comes to the mobile reach of their content. Even worse is the case with some of the search marketers who conveniently ignore their campaigns on high end mobile devices. One has to be smart here while targeting the mobile users because NOT everything is directly sold via mobile channels. Basically you have to see how can a prospective customer or lead come back to you even when direct marketing on the mobile device didn’t work.

8. Shelf life of online products and services

In the online marketing world, you have to keep reinventing yourself at a pretty rapid pace because something that works today, doesn’t quite work tomorrow. The situation gets more challenging with ever lowering saleability of certain products. For example, I was quite successful in positioning certain software product landing page well up the SERPs but now that particular product is no more in demand or relevant. This can happen to any niche website or individual landing pages.

9. Wrong Niche

Well, the last thing you want in your online marketing life is to land up in a niche that is in one of the extremes – i.e. either a low-potential niche OR high competition niche. In either of the case your efforts are not going to reap good results. It’s very important to pick the right niche to market after very good research and feasibility study on the competition. I have a good example of very high competition in the web hosting niche.

10. Lack of diversification

I have seen a lot of maketers who focus only on one mainstream monetization strategy (e.g. One of Search advertising, Amazon affiliates etc). This can easily backfire with something as small as click fraud auditing or ban by the Affiliate Company or even changes in publisher policies. Hence it makes sense to diversify your marketing channels, products and even have multiple niches to work on.

Summary

In short, the life is not getting any easier for online marketers although the addressable market size keep increasing every day. Early innovation, constant change in strategies and early identification of new niches/products are the only ways to sustain in Internet marketing.

Old post continues below…

Well, this is more of a query to the readers of this blog. I have been trying to reduce AdSense usage on my blogs and this include all types of AdSense channels – including mobile and feed ads. However, I do not seem to be able to remove the AdSense Feed ads at the same easiness with which I enabled them.

The Old AdSense interface, as I remember, had an option to remove feed ads and in the new interface, you can only add feeds and not remove them.

Do you have any idea as how to remove feed ads from AdSense?

Common practice of ‘hiding’ the feed ads

When I surfed the web on this topic, I could see only the following workarounds to hide AdSense feed ads.

1. Opt for feed ads after every four feed item or post (Frequency)
2. Opt for feed ads for posts longer than 500 words (Post Length)

Both these options can be set from my AdSense account -> My Ads -> Feed Ads and clicking the particular feed ad (as in the picture below). However, they are not totally effective and won’t really hide ads permanently.

If anyone has figured out how to remove the RSS ad without removing the feed itself, please share your knowledge here.

I am planning to stay away from AdSense for some time and that’ why the question. Let me know if anyone know the secret. It’s really frustrating that Google doesn’t provide an option to disable AdSense for feeds.

Note: My AdSense account seems to be smart-priced and that’s why I am removing AdSense blocks from all blogs. From around $0.55 CPC, it has come down to 10 or 12 cents. I tried a few things but in vain and hence planning to go slow on AdSense for now

Recent Comment

Anil M

Hi,
Did you figure out how to do this? I am having the same issue. It's bad that Google don't provide a way to remove feed ads.

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So I decided to take some corrective actions with respect to the way I have been doing my link building activities. These actions included (1) Removing bad links (2) Avoiding link packages from those SEO experts and (3) Building/Rebuilding links from the right places at the right pace.

Based on my research and theory (still evolving), the following are some of the best link building practices you can follow to acquire or get backlinks in a way that it helps your cause.

Go Get Backlinks the preferred way

The tips listed below are by no means a comprehensive list nor something that might work for everyone. I found them working for me after the Google Panda attacks on some of my websites (not this blog) and hence thought of jotting down the same.

1. Clean Up act first

The first thing to do is to remove any bad backlinks wherever possible. As you know, it is not always possible to correct every damage that has been done in the past. However, the following things are possible:

Forum links: If you had the habit of creating backlinks via forum signatures, it is probably time to change or remove them. Forums create numerous backlinks with the same anchor text and sometimes from totally unrelated topics. Removing these links is more like a one-time fix that you can do by removing the signatures.

Template sponsorship links: Next, you may now want search Google for your template sponsorship back links description and see if there are any rated site linking to you via using the theme that you sponsored. You may then request the particular blogger or webmaster to remove these links – mind you, at times you have to provide technical help to get that done in your favor.

Remove any automated links: Links that are created via automated tools or plugins (e.g. Text Link Ads etc) may be instantly removed via subscribing out of such programs.

2. Work on Internal Links

Your internal links are as important and powerful as good external links. You may read my post on internal link building for more details.

The only point I would like add here new is that you need to use several variations of anchor text even in internal linking. This is very important in the Panda era.

3. Get Good Links

Here are some Do’s and Don’ts bullet points for effective link building in a safe manner.

1. Avoid massive link packages: Basically if someone is offering you a 25000 forum, wiki or blog backlinks for 25 bucks or so, just avoid it. One needs to also avoid massive comment or trackback packages
2. Directory inclusions: These are still fine as long as they are manually edited and approved directories
3. Diversify your anchor texts: Never ever build links for your primary keyword alone. Support it with five to ten secondary and long tail keywords to make the link building look more natural. You can even include generic anchor texts (such as ‘click here’, ‘this link’, ‘you may read this’ etc). At the end a good mix of related anchor texts will do the job for you
4. Avoid focusing on your home page: It doesn’t quite help to have thousands of backlinks to your home page and nothing to internal pages. A better way of link building is to use deep linking to your key pages including links to ‘About Us’ pages,
   ‘Our services’ etc
5. Do guest posts than commenting: Somehow, I get a feeling that blog commenting is no more doing the job as much as it did in the past. A good way of building quality links are via guest posts or relevant manual deep linking with mutual understanding
6. Totally avoid spinning: Article marketing is something that needs to be totally avoided, regardless of those ‘Panda and Penguin safe’ offers
7. Get Social links: Search Engines are giving more and more weightage to Facebook and Twitter buzz. Getting social links and social media generated traffic is a real boon to your sites (I am low on this aspect, however, retweets are doing the job for some of my sites)

Summary

In short, it is best to avoid bulk link purchases, article spinning etc. Concentrate more on deep linking, natural link building methods such as guest posting or exchanging links with close acquaintances.

Do you have any other link building tips?

Recent Comment

Ajith Prasad Edassery

Dean,
I personally reduced my forum activities :) However, at times it has helped me to create some affiliate sales.

Panda is screwing up many sites - especially in the technical niche, IM, howto sites etc. Fortunately, this blog is not affected yet though one of my high profile ventures after huge traffic boost in the first four-five months got trashed lately.

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I have never been an auto-blogger nor do I like all those evil terminologies that come with the same viz. scraping, spinning, replacing and rewriting. However, after experimenting with the WPRobot plugin (for writing reviews here that is), I tend to believe that there’s something that you can always do ethically with autoblogging while majority of what people do with is actually nothing short of crime.

Let’s see how one can use auto-blogging in an ethical way and what type of sources to use.

The Wrong

Before considering what’s good, let’s talk about the bad and unethical side. Autoblogging is all about ‘source consumption’. i.e. The minimum requirement for autoblogging is that you should have a consumable source in the first place. Now, if you are using someone’s creative idea as it is (with or without credits) is WRONG! If you decide not to give credits or further spin the content it’s even worse. So all those who do Blog RSS scraping, Thou shall go to hell!

Now, if someone is manually rewriting others content, he should still go to hell because regardless of whether he’s using a tool or not, he’s still stealing content. In fact, this is what many bloggers are doing these days.

The Right

How can you use a part of others content in an ethical way?

Assume that you are writing a fresh post and would like to mention a solution that’s invented by someone. Instead of projecting it as yours, you may give a reference to that solution with credit links (even better if it’s a citation). Even in this case, the credited portion should form a very small part of your content and not the whole idea. Unfortunately, this is not the case with many content providers – especially bloggers.

Now, can you reuse certain content as it is? The answer is ‘Yes’ and let’ see the following scenarios:

1. You have niche website with some good content and you would like to provide a Yahoo! Answers stream relevant to your audience
2. You would like to setup an online store with data feeds from your favorite affiliate network (e.g. Shareasale, CJ etc)
3. You would like include relevant Youtube clips (that is not yours) to set the context to your blog posts
4. For your review sites, you want to add more value with a product comparison study through Amazon feed

All the above are the exact scenarios where auto blogging is the right fit. And none of them violate the ToS of Youtube, Yahoo or your Affiliate network – rather they would like to see more such consumption where as Google may not be all that happy about the same.

Summary

In short, feed scraping, article spinning and direct content stealing still suck while part of the ‘relevant’ additions with due credits mentioned will be Win-Win!

What do you think?

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Taimoor

Seems legit :) Thanks for sharing.. I will think about it

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I have been a huge fan of some of those plugins by MBP – especially the Ninja Affiliate Plugin that drives some good affiliate sales for me on my blogs. Ninja by far has to be the best paid product that they have ever produced while I tend to like some of the free plugins such as the MBP stripe ads. After the Ninja plugin, they had the so-called Subscribers Magnet which I used only for reviews (as I do not build a list) and I thought it was a decent plugin for list builders as well. But does the new long named sibling BMBVB as good as the previous kids? I doubt that – especially for its proposed price tag.

What’s MBP BMBVB all about?

Well, as you already know most of the MaxBlogPress plugins are all about increasing traffic, building the prospects base (list) and monetizing the blog. The new plugin is pretty much around the same theme which claims to increase blog traffic dramatically via the RSS route (What is RSS?)

As you know there have been several attempts to monetize RSS feeds by means such as feed ads, RSS footer plugins (that can embed affiliate links) etc. However, this particular plugin is talking about beautifying the RSS feed in such a way that the RSS subscribers of your blog will be tempted to click on those links provided there to land back on your blog.

Well, in theory this sounds good. However, can you expect that much of traffic back to the blog via these enhancements? I doubt, because RSS by design and definition is meant for passive reading. As an example, I have around 600 RSS subscribers via Feedburner and may be a few hundred more via other readers. When I check my Feedburner statistics, hardly a dozen people take some action on a daily basis from the RSS. This may be due to the fact that I do not update this blog daily. If that was the case probably the action rate would have been something like 10% or more. In order to help them take more action, what ‘MaxBlogPress Bring My Blog Visitors Back plugin’ does is to include the following in your feed (You can check it in action on my blog feed)

• New header and footer for the post feeds (I have not enabled header yet)
• The most recent comment included under each post (‘Click here to comment’ prompt if none exists)
• 5 Related Posts under each post – I found this feature very good
• Social icons – Already existing feature with Feedflare etc

With the above set of features, I am still wondering if there may be any significant traffic to the blog as compared to what it’s today. Definitely, there may be a few clicks coming our way but can it make that big a difference? I doubt.

However, it may be true that for those blogs that are updated at least once a day, there may be some increased traffic. But before making a purchase decision of this $97 plugin ($67 on pre-launch), you have to analyze your current traffic and current RSS subscription count to see if it can help at all.

The plugin also attempts to save you from scrapers though I am yet to figure out how.

Overall, I must say that I am a little bit disappointed with the features behind the fancy name. I was expecting a lot more from this successful WordPress plugin development house.

Some improvement areas

The following is my genuine concerns about this new plugin.

1) Since some of my posts already have manually embedded ‘Related Posts’, including them as part of the new plugin feature would make the feed look a bit funny. Also,

2) Social icons provided are just 4 – Facebook, Twitter, Digg and Stumble. So far, there is no option to customize for anything new or even style the existing ones.

3) Since, there are a lot of related posts added (which is good for genuine content syndication), any scraped site would also contain as many links to my site which results in even more spam.

4) I believe that the plugin works best in the full text mode and not excerpt mode as excerpts wouldn’t make any of the add on content (e.g. Related posts) complete. Also, if you are syndicating only excerpts, anyhow the readers have to click back.

Despite all the above concerns, (on top of related posts feature) I liked the fact that, now I can remove any RSS footer plugin, Feedburner feedflare etc and expect the feed to work well on almost all feed readers. And on top of AdSense ads for feed, I could add some relevant affiliate links either on header or footer of each post feed. That’s pretty much my thoughts.

Overall, I am a bit disappointed with the new baby from MBP. Of course, if it was a free plugin or even a $20 plugin, I would take it any day. At the moment, at $67 (on pre-launch) price tag, I think it’s a bit overrated. That is, assuming that they haven’t planned any major feature that is yet to come. Or may be they plan to come up with a single license version priced at $20 or so?

You may Check out the MaxBlogPress Bring My Blog Visitors Back plugin site for more details.

(Launching on July 12th)

Recent Comment

Ralf Skirr

Mike, I just checked out your 'free' recommendation. Actually it's not free, the free one is limited in features - if you want to have the full set of features for unlimited sites you'll have to pay $97 - that's even $30 more than the MaxBlogPress plugin right now.

Ajith, I agree that the 'MaxBlogPress Bring My Blog Visitors' price is a bit steep. I'm still going to buy it, because I like the features. I must say, though, their sales video is a joke. A real turn off that almost made me skip the purchase. The plugin features are good, but the way they sell it is full of flawed logic, unproven assumptions, and ridiculous promises how the plugin is going to benefit. Hard to believe anybody would buy based on this annoying video.


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