Tribune Co., Gannett Co., The New York Times Co. and Hearst Corp. have formed a new company called quadrantOne to sell ad space on their local newspaper and broadcasting Web sites.

The idea is to provide one-stop shopping for advertisers looking to tap a national network of local audiences via well-trusted media brands such as the Chicago Tribune and the Houston Chronicle.

The name Quadrant One has meaning as well. “Quadrant One“ is the upper right quadrant on a 2×2 chart, where quality audience and national reach converge. Think of “Audience Quality“ on one axis and “National Reach“ on the other. The optimal media value is in the “upper right“, and you move into quadrantONE.

With close to 50 Million unique visitors and coverage in 27 of the top 30 DMA markets, quadrantONE  could be a powerful ad network and an interesting alternative to Adwords, TPN and the various other ad neworks. quadrantONE will provide its advertisers with access to sophisticated audience targeting by context, behavior and demographics. This is a combination not really offered by most other networks.

quadrantONE enters the marketplace with a new approach to selling premium online advertising to national brands. This well-funded online startup offers a cohesive national alliance of hundreds of local, credible Web sites. Backed by four of the nation’s top media companies, quadrantONE offers exclusive ad inventory (home page, sports, business, entertainment, etc) on premium news and information sites across the nation’s top local markets.

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Ten landing page tips to turn visitors into customers

There’s something about a ten-item list that makes us want to get all Hestonian on you and break out the archaic pronouns, especially when it comes to something like getting people who visit your site to actually buy from you. After all, you work hard to get clicks. What could be more important than turning those clicks into customers?

But we’re kind of a live-and-let-live bunch here, and we’re not so big on telling people what they have to do. So consider these a set of suggestions about how to help optimize your landing pages. That way, when people get to your site, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase.

1. Tell them why they should buy from you
Clarity of your value proposition is the most important factor in determining whether a customer buys from you or not. Ask yourself the question: “Why should I buy from this site?”

2. Keep ‘em with you
Protect your landing pages from the #1 threat to conversions: site flow disruption. After identifying a unique and compelling Value Proposition, you must ensure that you express it throughout your sales process in a clear, consistent and compelling way. Eliminate site flow disruption to help maximize conversions.

3. Don’t try to say too much
Don’t clutter your landing page with unnecessary details. Instead:
• Clearly state your key message using as few words as possible
• Use summary descriptions, sub-headings, bulleted lists and short paragraphs
• Adopt a standard one-column format for easy reading.

4. Make it simple
Improve the user experience with a site that is easy to navigate. A simple page layout that employs a clean visual and straightforward design is best. Here’s how:
• Design your site with a clear hierarchy with color and contrast for easily legible text
• Use meaningful and high-quality graphics (don’t clutter with too many)
• Use breadcrumbs to let visitors know where they are on your site
• Employ a clickable logo that takes the visitor to your homepage
• Use color to distinguish between visited and unvisited links.

Just as important, make sure you don’t:
• Employ horizontal scrolling
• Direct links to new browser windows
• Have flash-based content unless required.

5. Call them to action
Focus on one primary action per screen (don’t stuff too many products onto one screen). Make the call-to-action button clearly visible without having to scroll; don’t bury it under pages of information. Consider using tabs or a pop-up box to consolidate information.

6. Get specific
Provide product details and a large product image while displaying incentives—such as free shipping and warranty information—high on the page and close to the product. Don’t discourage visitors by requiring registration to your site.

7. Flaunt what you’ve got
What differentiates you from your competitors? Free shipping (both ways?), discounts, a 365-day warranty, price protection, privacy, customer service, etc.? If you’ve got it, flaunt it!

8. Search yourself
Make your site easy to navigate by helping potential customers find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. A search feature box should be simple and visible with a type-in field, not a link. To help increase conversions, make sure your search results link to product pages.

9. Rally the believers
Credibility is a true testament: people don’t buy from websites, people buy from people. Thus, testimonials from devout customers—or even a letter from the CEO/Editor—persuades the unbelieving.

10. Let them make the choice
“Why should I buy this specific product?” Almost every e-tailer forgets about this, but it’s the question that’s key to Mr. or Ms. Customer’s mind. Prove to him or her why they should buy this over the competitive product by offering reviews, ratings and comparisons.

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I thought this post was so great I wanted to share with you. Jason owns http://www.sitesalary.com/. These are great tips for anyone who wants to increase their website traffic.

• 1. Write something great about your niche and email other bloggers to let them know – there’s a good chance they’ll link to you
• 2. Have a signature link in forums that points to your site
• 3. Post links to your pages to social bookmarking sites.
• 4. Leave comments on other people’s blogs and link back to your site (tip: look in the digg upcoming section for blog posts about to get a lot of traffic).
• 5. Have the opposite opinion on everyone else on a popular topic. Everyone will link to you saying your wrong
• 6. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers
• 7. Post in Yahoo and Google Groups with a link to your site in your signature
• 8. Make a 404 page that redirects to your homepage – no point losing visitors
• 9. Have an opt-in form – trade links with someone else who has an opt in form on your confirmation page
• 10. Review a product or company – if your review is positive email the company and ask to be featured in their press section. (this has worked really well for me)
• 11. Write articles and submit them to article directories
• 12. Write a Press Release and submit it to PRWeb (make sure it is newsworthy)
• 13. Use PayPerClick Traffic (e.g Adwords, MSN Adcenter, YSM)
• 14. Add an RSS subscribe button/link in a high profile spot on your site
• 15. Add a mailing list subscribe form in a high profile spot on your site
• 16. Add a bookmark this site link in a high profile spot on your site
• 17. Use a Tell A Friend Script on your site so people can email their friend about an article on your website.
• 18. Submit a blog to a blog directory
• 19. Submit you RSS feed to RSS feed directories
• 20. Mention your website in a post on Craigslist (don’t spam)
• 21. Optimize the titles of your pages for keywords people will search for
• 22. Buy links to your site
• 23. Buy reviews about your site on other people’s site
• 24. Buy banner space on other websites if you can get a good ROI
• 25. Send articles to ezine publishers with a link back to your website
• 26. Do a big viral push for a piece of link bait, post it in forums, social bookmarking sites like digg, email bloggers, and get a few people to vote for you on social bookmarking sites – this little push could start a viral chain reaction!
• 27. Have a link to your site on community sites like MySpace and FaceBook
• 28. Use a traffic trading system like BlogRush
• 29. Purchase misspellings of competitors domains and redirect your site (be careful of trademark infringement)
• 30. Create a freebie product to give away (ebook, software, whitepaper etc.)
• 31. Submit your site to the hundreds of free directories – use the viles-silencer list
• 32. Do a group feature where you get other website owners in your niche to participate – maybe asking them all an opinion on something.
• 33. Hold a competition for the Top 50 in your niche – 1 month later post the results and let everyone know who featured – watch them link back to say what there position was.
• 34. Pass out business cards when you go to industry events in your niche
• 35. If you have a product start an affiliate program and start approaching affiliates
• 36. Submit videos to video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe. Include a link in the description and within the actual video.
• 37. If you have a product send it to website owners to get reviewed.
• 38. Look at a big website within your niche and ask to write some guest posts for them
• 39. Create pages with links to your site on places like Squidoo and Hubpages
• 40. Place classified Ads on eBay with a link to your website
• 41. Use an autoresponder on your mailing list to keep people coming back to your site
• 42. Exchange links with a few related sites in your niche
• 43. Network! Email other site owners, phone them up, go to industry events and get yourself known. If they know your face they will likely talk about you on their site if you do something interesting.
• 44. Many forums have a place for you to advertise your site once – find them and do it.
• 45. Purchase advertising in other people’s mailing lists and newsletters
• 46. Create an Amazon profile and start submitting reviews
• 47. Create profiles on MySpace and start networking in groups that are interested in your site’s niche.
• 48. Conduct a survey and publish the results – make sure you let people know about it.
• 49. Get your hand on a load of PLR content for your niche. Add a commentary to the top, create a unique title, and post them all to your site – lots of new content and lots of new traffic.
• 50. Create a cartoon mascot for your site – then hold a competition for someone to create the best game for it – pay the winner a decent amount.
• 51. Make sure you have a memorable domain name that is short and catchy.
• 52. Use a well-searched for keyword within your domain name to help rank for that keyword.
• 53. If you sell a product ask someone else who sells a product to list your product with theirs, and you’ll do the same for them – split commissions on sales.
• 54. When you write a new article on your site – link to as many blogs as possible – they will likely see your site in their pingbacks, website stats, or Technorati. They will visit your site and possibly subscribe to it and link back at a later date.
• 55. Get your RSS feed syndicated to different sites like Zimbio and hubpages and Topix.
• 56. If your site is popular and has quality unique content then apply to get listed in Google’s News search.
• 57. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google (not great but might help)
• 58. Use your robots.txt file to stop Google indexing certain directories and pages on your blog (such as archives) to avoid duplicate content issues).
• 59. Create a couple of small 10 page sites related to your main site. Offer links on these smaller sites in return for links to your main site (this is triangular reciprocal linking).
• 60. Get yourself known as an expert and get featured in offline magazines, TV and radio stations.
• 61. Use an auto-translator service to translate your site into other languages – put it in a subdirectory and watch foreign traffic come in.
• 62. Make posts about sex (don’t have to post anything rude) – and watch the porn surfers find their way to your site through Google.
• 63. Post about celebrities current events if it relates to your niche – there’s always a lot of people looking up celebrity stuff.
• 64. Write good headlines/titles – good titles get more clicks.
• 65. Get some stickers with your domain name on. Go out and stick them on strangers and say “My Website Yeah, Check it out.”

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In December, I got my hands on three confidential documents that Microsoft used in its lobbying against the Google-DoubleClick deal, and I posted them on Bits. (See that post here.)

Re-reading those documents now show that Microsoft was clear with the Federal Trade Commission that an approval of Google-DoubleClick might lead it to take drastic action–like it is doing now with its bid for Yahoo.

Microsoft wrote in one of the documents:

“If the transaction is allowed to proceed, Google will control so much of the publishers’ inventory and such a large portion of advertisers that Internet competitors trying to catch up will not have access to sufficient inventory and advertisers to mount a credible competitive challenge to Google.”

Microsoft warned that the DoubleClick merger would leave Google delivering almost 78 percent of all non-search ads served to third-party Web pages, on a revenue basis. That means that a combined Google-DoubleClick gives Google dominance over more than three-quarters of sites that do not have their own technology for display ad serving. Microsoft and Yahoo are the only two companies who have their own ad-serving.

Google has long been dominant in search ads, those small text ads that run alongside search results or on the bottom of thousands of sites across the Web. Google made its fortune selling those to companies that paid based on how many people clicked on those ads. Microsoft and Yahoo each lost the battle in search, as Microsoft acknowledged in its writings to the F.T.C.

Microsoft wrote:

“One need look no further than search advertising to see that despite Microsoft’s size, technical prowess, and strong incentives, it has been unable to compete effectively with Google in search and that Google’s lead in search advertising has continued to grow because of network efforts.”

But the next flood of advertising money is coming online for display ads - flashy photos or videos that are used to generate brand recognition rather than immediate clicks for advertisers like Pepsi and Nike. And display ads will provide the next battleground between Google and its foes.

Google hopes to use DoubleClick’s connections to brand advertisers and major media companies to get in on the display pie. Microsoft warned the F.T.C. that Google might initially offer DoubleClick’s tools for free to media companies so that it can gain control over display ads.

Yahoo and Microsoft each separately have leads over Google in display ads, but Microsoft told the F.T.C. that a Google-DoubleClick would be much stronger on this front:

“Significant companies like Microsoft, Time Warner and Yahoo! that continue to make investments in non-search advertising will be unable to counter the anticompetitive impact of this transaction.”

You can count on Google’s lobbyists giving a good fight against a marriage of its closest two competitors. Microsoft, after all, did its best to block the Google-DoubleClick deal. The technology giant hired the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to create a group called the Initiative for Competitive Online Marketplace.

It might seem the commission allows almost anything. It has only been weeks since the commission cleared Google’s acquisition of the ad-serving company DoubleClick and just months since the commission cleared Microsoft’s purchase of aQuantive, the main competitor of DoubleClick.

You can also be sure that Microsoft will use its arguments against Google’s recent deal again to claim that it simply had no choice but to shell out $44.6 billion for Yahoo.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/microsofts-inner-thoughts-on-online-advertising/

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 Let me first say - I have been begging for this for several years. Googlenow has about 55% of the search market, way too much for any one company. They control way the income of many US based companies, as well as people such as myself and most of you reading this. Google needs a good challenger to keep it from being evil.

I’ll watch this one very closely. This could be an epic battle in the making here folks, and I hope webmasters and American business comes out on top.

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Affiliate links are usually not search engine friendly, so making them a bit more friendly is always beneficial. There are FOUR EASY STEPS to setup your affiliate links and this can work for any affiliate links you might have.

This not only helps you make the links friendly, but if the affiliate link ever changes, it’s as simple as changing one line in your affiliate link file and it’s updated on all of your pages.

Regarding what to name your affiliate file(s), I originally said to name it unique to your own site. After thinking further, I realized that a lot of webmasters want to completely hide who they’re working with from the search engines. If this is something that is a concern for you, here are two additional steps to add:

 

 

• Name your affiliate file with common words found on all sites. Example names: file.php, html.php, page.php, add.php

  Or make it even tougher and use their names: google.php, search.php, yahoo.php, googlebot.php

   

   

• Now prevent search bots from following your links. Use the rel=”nofollow” when linking to your affiliate file. For example, if you name your affiliate file “google.php”, link to the file like this:

  <a href="/path/to/google.php" rel="nofollow">Affiliate</a>

  You can also use your robots.txt file to block them from reading your affiliate file(s).

  Disallow: /path/to/google.php

Of course, the last two steps are only necessary if you want to disguise who you’re affiliated with. I am seeing more and more affiliate links in the SERP’s ranked really well, so if you don’t need to hide things, shoot for being ranked. Having your affiliate link ranked well translates into more money in your pocket!

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eBay plans to cut the fees it charges sellers across auctions in its three biggest markets — the United States, Germany and Britain, executives told investors. Next week, eBay will announce changes in the pricing of its services and improvements in the way buyers can rate sellers, Donahoe said.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/22808450/for/cnbc

Personally, I think eBay needs to really shore up it’s affiliate program and make it a bigger incentive for webmasters to place eBay ads on their site. I think they should be taking care of the top line and drive buyers to buy more often, instead of lowering fees and saving the seller money.

A study from the University of Maryland suggests eBay buyers save billions of dollars every year by purchasing via online auctions rather than conventional retailers. A research study by two statisticians from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business—Wolfgang Jank and Galit Shmueli—finds that consumers save billions of dollars every year by buying products through the online auction service eBay rather than going through conventional retailers. The study claims to be the first time the overall economic impact of online auctions—specifically eBay—has been quantified. 

So why would you cut the fees charged to sellers? To get them to sell more? They are going to do that anyway. You need to just drive more buyers to eBay. A great way to do that is through affiliates. How many people think to buy an automobile part on eBay and then have a mechanic install the part. You can save alot of money doing that kind of thing. But, many people dont know that. Websites such as my automobile forums can help educate them, and are more likely to do so if eBay provides a decent incentive to do so.

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vBulletin-faq.com always has been near the top of the Google Serps for almost any vBulletin related keyword I sought after. Normally, if you search for "vBulletin" you get vBulletin.com, vBulletin.org, Wikipedia vBulletin page then vBFAQ. To my delight I noticed the other day that vBulletin-faq.com replaced Wikipedia in that slot and now ranks ahead:

So I started looking around and found Wikipedia has dropped a few spots in the rankings on various other searches. Now this isnt scientific, its just a casual observation on my part. But it makes me wonder if this is just a fluke change in algorithim or is Google starting to downgrade wikipedia in anticipation of the upcoming Google Knol? I would like to hear other’s thoughts on this so leave a comment.

While we’re on the subjects of Wikipedia and Google, I ran across this:

The professor of media studies at the University of Brighton has had enough of students turning in "banal and mediocre work" and decided that Google and Wikipedia must go. Tara Brabazon provides her students with a reading list, of books, and expects their work to reference those works, rather than a rehash of a Wikipedia entry or the top five results from Google. To achieve this she has, reportedly, banned her students using search engines and Wikipedia. ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/15/wiki_google_ban)

I found it humorous.

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The company, the second-largest cable provider in the United States, will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.

This also doesnt look too promising for regular people. As the internet grows and becomes faster, video delivery  is becoming more and more popular.

Could this mean a return to more basic, less graphical and lower bandwidth websites? Time will tell, but if this kind of pricing does push ahead, which I suspect it might, we may see something of a reversal of website size.

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Osama Bin Ladin was amazed, so he said, "I want a wall around Afghanistan, so that no infidels, Jews or Americans can come into our precious state." Again, with a blink of the Genie’s eye, ‘POOF’ there was a huge wall around Afghanistan.

"Uncle Sam" (A former civil engineer), asks, "I’m very curious. Please tell me more about this all."The Genie explains, "Well, it’s about 15,000 feet high, 500 feet thick and completely surrounds the country; nothing can get in or out—virtually impenetrable.""UncleSam" says, "Fill it with water."

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Im happy to report so far so good. I have spent about $350 on Google Adwords and taken in about $1,370 in affiliate revenue so far this month. Pretty good for the first 2 weeks I think. So, I know I am on the right track. Just a few statistics to point out where I am at for this month:

• Impressions: 116,931
• Clicks (from adwords): 1,429
• Ad Clicks On Page: 894
• AdWords Cost: $331.56
• Earnings: $1369.92

So I seem to be converting well so far. 63% of the people that come to the page click through to an advertiser.

The next step is to refine what I have done so far in order to further improve. One thing I have noticed is that I am really not placing well with Google AdWords. What I mean by that is I am paying more for clicks then I probably need to be, and not ranking as high. When I look at my Keyword Quality Score for each phrase Google is ranking them either"ok" or "poor" — which means I have to pay more to have my ad’s display. Many of my keywords are not displaying the ad on the first page even.

Just as a point of reference, Google Adwords gives you a Keyword Quality Score for each keyword. You can read more about that on the Google Adwords Blog.

So, I started looking at my landing page. Landing Pages are nothing more than information-rich pages. They suit search engines by providing rich content, and they help human users, by providing clearly focussed pages to find information they need, and help direct them to specialist internal pages for further information as required. And it suits the webmaster, because it allows the traffic to be targeted in a much more precise manner.

Now, I am advertising several different companies which provide similar products. My landing page is designed to educate the reader about the topic a bit and then offer them several choices, comparing those choices and offering reviews of some of them. When I designed the page, naturally I optimized it for search engines and to sell the products. However, according to the Keyword Quality Scores, I didnt do so well apparantly. So now I need to research some of the finer points and see how I can improve that quality score.

More on this in the next post. Please feel free to post comments and suggestions as to resources you think I should look at to help this research along and make necessary improvements.

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Hello AdSense publisher,

We are writing to share some important information with you about
referrals to the AdSense product. As part of ongoing efforts to
optimize revenue opportunities for our publishers, we are
constantly experimenting with new revenue-enhancing features as
well as tweaking those products already available to our
publishers.
In this spirit, we will be making some significant changes to
referrals for the AdSense program in the coming weeks.

As some of you may remember, in February 2007, as an experiment,
we raised the bounty paid (from $100 to $250) when a publisher you
refer brings in $100.  We have decided to conclude this experiment
and return to the original paid bounty amount of $100. In
addition, we will no longer be offering the $5 bounty for the
first $5 that a referred publisher brings in or the $2,000 bonus
for referring 25 publishers earning $100 or more in any 180 day
period. $100 will be the only bounty paid for referrals to the
AdSense program.

If you’re currently displaying referral units on your site
directing users to sign up for AdSense, read on below for details
about what to expect in the coming weeks.

In early January, your AdSense account will be updated to only
note the $100 payment for referring users to AdSense. You will
continue to be paid under the current bounty structure ($5, $250,
$2,000) until late January, after which you will receive $100 once
a referred publisher brings in $100 within 180 days.

Thank you for referring users to AdSense in the past. We
apologize for any inconvenience this news may cause.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

 What this basically says is that Google is reducing the referral payments. Now, if you refer someone to Adsense, you only get paid if they earn $100 in the first 6 months they are on the program, and then, you only get $100 as a referral fee. Currently you receive $5 when they earn their first $5, and then, you received $250 when that publisher you referred earned $100. Plus, you receive $2000 if you bring in 25 of those $100 publishers in 6 months. All that is gone. Now, you will only receive $100 as a referral payment, and you only receive that if the publisher earns $100 within the first 6 months.

I guess Google doesnt really need referrals so much anymore.

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Today I found a perfect example of the "any forum topic can be successful" concept.

theflatearthsociety.org

Yes, The Flat Earth Society. They debate the Earth being flat.They also have 13,000 members and more then 300,000 posts. All talking about the earth being FLAT.

It just goes to show, you can have a successful forum regardless of the topic, if you work hard enough at it.

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Forget about PageRank.

I mean it. Take the Google toolbar off your browser and forget about Google Pagerank completely. Pagerank is really nothing more then a manipulation and marketing tool Google uses. It causes people to focus on what Google wants and keeps you focused on Google. Hence, it keeps you from thinking about other search engines.

Instead, focus on things like where a site ranks in the search engines and what kind of traffic it gets. Wanna buy links? Do it. But do it because of traffic, not because of some Google created measure. PageRank is but one of over 100 factors in search engine placement. Why do people worry about it so much?

Advertise on strong sites with good traffic and you’ll be fine. Focus on search engine placement, and Forget about PageRank completely. You’ll be more successful.

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I found them because of their recent post, Your Blog Sucks and I Got 20 Reasons To Back It Up

I would like to take each of their 20 reasons a bit further.

Your Blog Sucks When…

You have more ads, banners, and/or widgets than you have words that you have written.

This is a common problem. Too many ads for too many things with no focus. I personally wont place an ad unless I think it is beneficial to the readers. I also see this in forums alot, especially among new forum owners. I am sometimes guilty of this though myself. Sometimes, I am trying out a new ad system and have to populate it with something. (hence the Ad Stripe I posted about the other day)

Your blog’s color scheme hurts the eyes. Literally.

I have had a few say that about this blog, but really, to me, this refers to blogs where the text is light and the background is dark. I specifically did not do that here so as to make the content easy to read. That said, many people opt for something that looks "Cool"; 9 times out of 10 I find "Cool" looks terrible, especially after a few minutes.

Your last post was written 3 weeks ago.

Yes, this is a biggie. If you want people to come back frequently, then you need to post frequently.

Your blog only has one reader everyday: yourself.

HA - I fear this one myself.

Your blog does not offer RSS or email subscriptions.

These are very important things to offer (which is why I offer both). Most importantly, it reminds people about the existance of your site. This is a great lesson for forum owners as well. eMail your members from time to time. You’ll find more come by to post on your forum if you do.

You blog about making money online, but you have never made a cent.

This is a great one. There seem to be more and more experts out there every day. I see this alot with vBulletin webmaster forums. For awhile it seemed as if there was a new one popping up every week. Its the same with forums that tell you how to make money. I always tell people, I make a good living on the internet, but there is alot I dont do and want to learn about that. Part of what I hope I can do is share what I learn with the readers of my blog.

You waste hours putting random ads everywhere instead of writing content.

Yup. Even I have been guilty of this. It is an easy trap to fall into. I have since learned to better focus my time. I’m not perfect by any means, but I am improving. You too should try to focus on building content. I have ad spots I havent even bothered to fill yet. I dont even know if I plan to do so, I may just put something else in those places.

Your content is poorly written with bad grammar and spelling.

Short of normal typos, which I am certainly guilty of, I dont see this too much unless the blog is written by someone for whom english isnt their first language. That said. Try to write intelligently.

Your blog has no visuals that appeals to the readers.

I couldnt agree more. (hence why I posted the photos of my Tee Shirt Model - hee hee) This DOES NOT MEAN you should fill every post with 20 images. But post appropriate graphs and/or illustrations.

Your blog is not usable at all.

I a not sure what they meant by this one. Perhaps they mean blogs where most of the functions dont work and there is a script error message across the top all the time. You cant have much credibility with your readers if you cant even get your blog to function correctly.

Your blog does not link out to any other.

Let me expand on this. Your blog does not link out to any other OR you only link to your friends. People are too stingy with links IMO. How many people link out to bloggers such as Shoemoney or John Chow or a number of others - now go look at who they link to. DOnt be stingy. If you find a blog or website that you like and think your readers would like, share it. (kinda like I am doing in this post)

Your blog and its content is not search engine optimized.

Well, this is a good thing to do, but I wouldnt say your blog sucks if itsnt SEO’d. I gotta disagree wtih them on this one.

Your blog has no information about how to contact you (or who you even are).

I am half guilty on this one. I stil need to creat an About Joeychgo page. BUT the Contact Joeychgo page works just fine!

You do not have a statistic/analysis meter.

I have several, but I think they were reaching on this one.

You don’t network with other bloggers.

This is hard to do. But you can also see the "Your blog does not link out to any other" line above.

Your blog is not using permalinks.

I think they were reaching on this one.

Your blog has no focal point whatsoever.

Hmmm— Not sure what the mean on this one.

Your blog’s home page has no comments in any of the posts.

Uh, every post doesnt get commented on, and doesnt necessarily get commented on fast enough to be on the homepage.

You don’t do anything to promote you and your blog.

I gotta go along with this one. I am often amazed by people who think that "if they build it, readers will come". You have to promote and promote often and continously.

You put no effort into blogging.

Yup, I gotta go here too. WHy bother if your not putting any time or effort into your blog?  Stop cluttering up the internet.

Meander on over to slyvisions.com and take a look. They have alot of good content and articles.

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The big problem I have is that it drowns out the real email and increases the chance that I’ll miss an important email from a legitimate person. Now this is something I really wish the government would step in and deal with.

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A cool “stripe” appears at the very top of your blog, where you can place text ads. The ad itself is simple, easy to use, and you can have multiple ads rotating according to your needs. As Wordpress Plugins goes, Stripe Ad seems to be a pretty well designed and easy to deal with plugin. There are tons of options to control the look and feel of your ads. Installation is also very simple - just download the Plugin, unzip, upload to your Wordpress Plugins folder and activate. All the Plugin controls will be located in the Wordpress Options section under MBP Stripe Ad.

There is alot you can control as well, such as the size and colors of the ads, how often they are displayed and more. I really like the fact you can rotate ads.

 You can get the plugin at MAXBLOGPRESS for free.

John Chow is already selling ads for $250 a month in this space. He already has 4 sold. $1000 a month in new income for a tiny piece of real estate on your blog. Not bad huh?   I need to start selling ad space here, although I would prefer to get my readership up a bit first.

MaxBlogPress has other plugins available as well such as the MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup, BlogRush Click Maximizer and the Different Posts Per Page plugins.

Take a look.

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I can tell you this, Comcast should just get rid of its customer service department because its doing more harm then good as far as from where I sit. They dont know anything, seem to not be able to do anything and really seem as if they could care less.

Anyway - Sorry I havent been posting much. But im hoping to get back on track here real quick.

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This is something I have considered very important for a long time and I believe accounts for my success, and something I am always looking to enhance. This is a top question in my mind for this blog. I am looking to establish an edge here, a point of difference. That is how you win customers, having a point of difference. Im still looking to define that here. Anyone have suggestions?

 Shoemoney just posted a video where he talks about this. Take a look:

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Sub Domains To now be Considered The Same As Folders By Google?

Tedster from Webmaster World said:

News flash from Las Vegas PubCon. Matt Cutts informed us that Google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains. We didn’t get any more information than just that basic heads-up.

An interesting question is what will happen to people from BlogSpot? If this happen what will be the blogspot subdomains owners? There are thousands of people who opens blogs with blogspot and their address will be “yourname.blogspot.com” which is under a subdomain. They may now lose their rankings, although, much of their rankings really are not earned. They really leach PR off of blogspot.

But thinking positive, there are many spammers on blogspot to earn some good backlinks gaining an unfair SEO advantage by opening blogspot with no quality posts.

Personally, I like the idea. I dont use subdomains myself because I feel they are generally unecessary. But it does give an SEO advantage. For example - if you look do a Google search for "vBulletin" you see the following:

My site, vBulletin-FAQ, is only outranked by official Google websites and Wikipdia - but vBulletinSetup has 2 listings on page one because of the usage of a subdomain. It’s not 2 different sites, but Google has always treated them as such. I see many examples of this and hope this will level the playing field.

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WordPress 2.3.2 has been released and includes a number of changes including one security fix, here is a list of most of the changes in detail:

• Performance improvements for post sanitization when raw content is required (#5325).
• Changes to is_admin() to ensure that it is only true for admin pages thereby protecting against exposing draft posts. (#5487).
• Suppression of database errors unless WP_DEBUG is true (#5473).
• Check for valid database connection information during install and display and error if the install fails due to database rights (#5495).
• Support for a custom database down page to be displayed on database connection errors (#5500).
• Changes to make sure we are more selective in what we make clickable, this introduces different rules for different uri types ([6450]).
• Changes to wp-mail.php to escape the error messages when displaying them to avoid a possible XSS attack (#5484).
• Changes to ensure that the post password is only exposed by the xmlrpc method metaWeblog.getRecentPosts to users with rights to edit a post (#5535).
• Changes to the information exposed the wp.getAuthors xmlrpc method to reduce the information exposed and add a capabilites check (#5534).
• Addition of extra capabilites checks to xmlrpc methods ([6504]).
• Addition of extra capabilites checks to APP server ([6508]).
• Changes to validate_file() to improve its traversal attempt detection when running on windows ([6521]).

For a complete list of all the changes you can read this section of the branches/2.3 log.

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Ok - one thing I am doing for 2008 is pushing into a more aggressive approach with Affiliate marketing. Up until now, I have mainly placed Affiliate ads on my sites and used my forum newsletters to further advertise related products.

For those of you who might not know, Affiliate marketing is similar to selling something on commission. You place the ad on your site and if someone buys a product after clicking the link on your site, you get a commission. Sometimes its a percentage, sometimes its a flat fee. It just depends on the advertiser. This can be highly profitable if you have a strong site and a related product.

I have also done some minimal advertising on Google Adwords. I puchase ads on certain keywords and those ads go to whats called a Landing Page. In online marketing a landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines. Until now I have used this exclusively to advertise one product and on one keyword.

There was an ebook released recently with a target audience of people just like me (and many of you) and the book is FREE and called The Adwords Quality Guide - Free E-Book. It’s free, you might want to have a look.

My intention is to expand and become more aggressive with my online marketing. I intend to place ads on some pretty competitive, high traffic (and expensive) keywords and really try to push my overall revenue. My first goal is $5,000 a month in gross revenue from this method. The basic idea is simple. I place an ad on adwords and bring prople to a landing page where I try to sell them on a product or number of products wherby if they buy, I make a large enough commission per sale that ultimately I profit. The danger is that I pay more for advertising then I earn in commissions. The hope is that I earn more commissions then advertising costs me. With the numbers I am working with, there is a risk I could lose significantly, but it’s a gamble I am willing to take. Winners have to gamble to win. The key, is to only take calculated risks and adjust strategy quickly to minimize losses.

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 In the video Pam talks about designing with SEO in mind even if your client hasn’t paid you for SEO.

 My personal opinion is that whenever I design a site, I have SEO in mind. If the client wants to hire me for off page SEO that would be seperate, but I do my on page SEO regardless. Watch the video and see what Pam says about website design and SEO.

You can see more of Pam at her new site - http://www.thatpamchick.com/

 – BTW Pam, I dont have a wife

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In a recent poll, 58.3 per cent of you thought that when the chips are down, Google’s own brand of ethical leadership will melt under the weight of business real politics.

Not all of you are so cynical though; 16.7 per cent thought the face of business will change as more companies seek to do good, not bad. A quarter of you thought it a silly question, and fair enough too.

Im in the 58% column. I see it already happening with things such as smartpricing and the recent text link selling penalty. Google is only out for Google these Days. You dont hear too much about Google doing more to help the individual webmaster earn more money, only about things Google does to enhance it’s own revenue. Try to place an Adwords ad, and when there are no other ads watch Google, all of a sudden, tell you that your .25 a click bid isnt good enough to have your ad placed. In one breath they tell you to improve your page quality, but, that page quality is just fine if you want to pay .40 a click. I guess page quality has a price too.

God I wish a decent competitor would show up on the landscape. Google desperately needs a competitor, and so do we.

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Identified by BitDefender as Trojan.Qhost.WU, the malware modifies the infected computer’s Hosts file, which is a local storage for domain name and IP address mappings and is consulted before domain name servers.

The modified file contains a line redirecting the host ‘page2.googlesyndication.com’. This should point to an IP of a different address. This means the infected machine’s browser read ads from the server at a replacement address rather than at Google.

"This damages both users," says BitDefender virus analyst Attila-Mihaly Balazs, "because the advertisements and the linked sites may contain malicious code - a very likely situation, given that they are promoted using malware in the first place.

"The webmasters are also hit because the malware takes away viewers and possible advertising revenue from their websites."

BitDefender says its software can delete the Trojan.

-also-

US online ad revenues set new high at $5.2 billion

Online advertising is continuing its inexorable march with more than 25 per cent growth recorded in the US over the last 12 months. The report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers , released this week, shows that internet advertising revenues exceeded $5.2 billion for the third quarter of 2007, representing "another historic high" for a quarter, and a $1.1 billion increase over the same period for 2006.

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I mainly use Commission Junction for affiliate programs. There are basically 2 types of affiliate programs. One is where a company pays you a commission directly for selling only their product, such as Aaron Wall and his SEO BOOK. Aaron pays you $25 for every book sold through your link. The second is a company such as Commission Junction who handles the affiliate programs for a number of companies and products.

If you look on Commission Junction (after you sign up) you see there are literally hundreds of different affiliate programs available on topics ranging from shoes to travel. Liklihood is there is at least one program that fits your website niche. Basically it works like this. Once your a registered publisher on Commission Junction, you choose an affiliate program(s) that you like. You get the code for the ad banner (or text link) from CJ and place the banner on your website. If you have an automotive forum for example, you might choose affiliate programs for car parts companies. If you have a website that attracts mostly women, maybe an affiliate program for purses and clothing would be more appropriate for you.

But, it doesnt have to end with just placing a banner ad and waiting for the money to come to you. You can be more aggressive about it. One way, and this is especially true if you have a forum, is to send an email to your members suggesting they check out the site (via your affiliate link). This can be a very handy way to push sales. I dont mind this kind of email marketing on my forums because forum users have the option to disallow admin emails f they wish (and I dont violate that wish)

You can also do some adwords advertising to draw people to your affiliate program. First, you make a page on your website that helps sell the product (and contains your affiliate link) and you place your Google Adwords ad to point to that page. You can also have the adwords ad go directly to the affiliate website. (some publishers do not allow this so check) This is an area I plan to do alot of work on in the coming months. There can sometimes be a market imbalance and I want to take advantage of that. By market imbalance I mean you will pay less for clicks on adwords then you earn off the affiliate commissions you earn from those clicks.

OK - thats the first round of basics.  More to come. Tell me, do you use any affiliate programs? Which ones?

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Now, John Chow often talks about Forex trading. Im not a trader and know nothing about forex. I never received an email about Forex before. But now, after signing up to John Chow’s rss subscription I keep getting these spammy emails about forex trading. For example:

———- ADVERTISEMENT ———-

Dear Trader,

Last week, I alerted you to the re-release of the step-by-step
Forex Profit Accelerator course that’s totally taken the Forex
trading community by storm.

Well, if you’ve checked the website lately, then you know that
only 67 copies of the course remain and the offer will be closed
for good on Tuesday, December 18th, at 11:59pm eastern time.

See the latest inventory count here:

(Link Deleted by Joeychgo)

Now the only conclusion I can draw is that John Chow is either spamming directly or is selling his mailing lists to others. Either that or its a crazy coincidence. Personally, I think it’s wrong to sell your email lists. I am a forum owner and have probably over 100,000 emails stored from my various forum members. I think of selling email lists from such things to be analogous with email spam.  Has anyone else noticed this?

Maybe i’ll have to start reading John Cow’s blog instead (notice the spelling difference) - after all, that comes up #1 for a search of John Chow. (LOL - Google Sucks)

?

?

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I have just installe Yahoo! Shortcuts on this blog and will try it out. What the hell, I get a free T-Shirt out of it, and maybe I help introduce my readers to a new widget.

As you write your blog post, Shortcuts look for Flickr photos, places, companies, products, people and much more.

If Yahoo! shortcuts finds relevant content, it will let you know. Just click the Review this post button to see what Yahoo found for you.

Ok - thats a stock image. I actually found 2 shortcuts for this post.

I’ll have to play with this for a bit and see how I like it.

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I’m not going to tell you.

Well, not just yet. See if I posted the URL of the website, you would just ignore my little blog here and go to the 300+ plugin page. So I’m going to make you read a little bit before I give it to you.

I came across this on a post by Zhuli at the bloggeries.com forum. They are shaping up to be a pretty nice little site there.

Back to the plugins. This is just a reference site, they dont host or support the plugins, but they list them and link to them to make them easy to find. Here are just a few of the plugins they list that I found interesting:

• AjaxWP - Adds AJAX to all aspects of your WordPress site, which speeds up the load times.
• WP e-Commerce - Adds a shopping cart to your WordPress powered site.
• Digital Fingerprint - Adds a digital fingerprint to your posts so you can search the web to see if your content has been scraped.
• EasyPayPal - Allows you to accept payments for many services including subscriptions, trial periods, and more.
• PhotoZip – Allows you to upload a .zip file to create an image gallery.
• PodPress – Full featured plugin for podcasters including feed generation, iTunes preview, and download stats.
• YouTube Video Gallery – Displays thumbnails for any gallery from YouTube.
• WP-Footnotes - Allows you to add footnotes to a more detailed post.

Oh yeah, there are a bunch of free wordpress themes on this site also.

So, wanna know where to see this wonderful list? Scroll down to my blogroll on the bottom right.  

Now there is a little lesson on how to make someone read a whole post. Marketing. Remember folks, its all about marketing.

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I am trying to figure out a few things. First, what is it that triggers the pagerank penalty for selling links? And second, what is a safe method of link building from here forward.

I have been looking at a number of sites trying to develop a theory regarding linking. Google has said Dont Sell Links. The first problem with this is that I have seen a number of sites that dont sell links penalized. A good example of this is vBulletin.com. vBulletin does not sell links, period. Neither does vBulletin.org. However, both took a PR hit. vBulletin.com has been a PR 7 for as long as I can remember and now is a PR 6, and vB.org has been a PR 6 and was reduced to a PR 5.

However, vBadvanced.com also was a PR 7, and managed to keep it’s pagerank level.

Why?

It’s a mystery to me.

vBulletin.com does have a scrolling bar on the left where they feature forums owned by it’s customers. You cannot buy your way into this list, they have to select you. They generally list you if they consider you to be a good customer with a solid and popular forum. But they also keep this list short. (I have 2 of my forums listed in that list, vBulletin-faq.com and lincolnvscadillac.com) They title this list "Featured Forums".

vBadvanced.com has a similar sidebar list where only a handful of forums are listed (vBulletin-faq.com is also listed from there) - This list is simply of other related sites of interest, which they label "Links of Interest".

vBulletin.org ONLY links to a few other official vBulletin sites. No other external links at all.

There is one other factor to consider. The PR of incoming links. When Google implemented this penalty many sites took a pagerank loss. Some more then others. But regardless, their PR strength was reduced and the sites they link to naturally took reductions in PR strength.

Now, lets turn to statscounter.com. This site was a PR 9 before the penalty. They sold a handful of links on their homepage. They reduced to a PR 6 when the penalty was implemented. They placed nofollow tags on their outgoing  links and almost immediately received a PR 10.

SO, this is a real puzzle. I am having a hard time figuring out this one. What concerns me most isnt the ability to sell links. It’s the ability to effectively obtain links to my sites.

More to come…   Please leave comments about your thoughts and theories.

blog, forum, forum owners, google, page rank update, pagerank, vbulletin

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