Brought to you by Invadersforum.com (IF)
I’m sure many of you are longing for the day when you have an RSS following in the thousands and an Alexa Ranking in the Top 10,000. Fess up…
You are impressed by stuff like that – High PR,…
Please visit Grizzly’s Make Money Online for Beginners for the rest of the post.
Guest Post by Andy Walton
There are more ways than you might think to make money by writing online. Whether you are yet to pen your first paid words or are an experienced author, you probably haven’t thought of all the ways to exploit your talents. Here are my top 6 tips for paid online writing.
Write for a rev share site
Open an account on an advert-sharing site such as Wikinut – these sites make it easy for you to focus on the writing, as they will sort out the traffic and the advertising. As well as earning money for any new content you write, you be able to generate cash from any existing articles you’ve written. Plus you’ll be able to build up an online portfolio within a community of online authors.
Join a freelancing site
Middlemen such as Elance will allow you to submit a profile to their site, and put you in touch with potential clients. They list a wealth of writing jobs, plus associated work such as translation and copy editing. They will help you to gain contract work with businesses from all over the world, and allow you to earn money by writing from home.
Get in touch with old colleagues
Use professional networking sites such as LinkedIn to re-establish links with past work colleagues. Make sure you write a full profile of your skills and experience, and always add your latest CV. You’d be surprised at how often offers of work arise from your old acquaintances, so if you’re just starting out as a writer work those connections.
Write a blog
If you’re brave enough to try something a little more technical why not create a blog for yourself? You can add targeted adverts using Google Adsense, which will automatically display adverts that are relevant to your content. You’ll need to learn promotional skills to acquire traffic, so read up on SEO, guest posting and link building.
Become a guest poster
If you do have a blog or other online content to promote, contact blog owners you respect and send them some example guest posts. Ensure you try to target your writing for their style, and always provide a short bio of yourself that includes a link back to your site. By building relationships with a few high traffic blogs you’ll be putting your name before potentially huge audiences.
Author Bio:
Andy Walton is inviting you to use Wikinut , a new publishing platform that pays lifetime royalties for your writing on a massive range of topics. Use promo code “5more” at www.wikinut.com today, and get an extra 5% in royalties.
Join Sun evangelists in St. Petersburg, Russia, for an intense immersion in enterprise technologies, in which you will learn real-world best practices and improve your skills as a developer.
Facebook will soon be changing the “Become a Fan” button that you see on Fan Pages to the more universal “Like” button. According to the site Clickz, Facebook has started sending confidential email to ad agencies informing them that the “Become a Fan” button which functions as a subscription/membership button to fan pages will be changed to “Like” button within the next few weeks.
And what could be the reason for the upcoming change? Unfortunately, no specific details were divulged yet from the email sent to ad agencies. Facebook just wanted to give them advance notices as this might affect their advertising campaigns or Facebook strategy. This is particularly so since Facebook is recommending that ad agencies start using the phrase – “Find us on Facebook” or “Like us on Facebook” instead of the current “Became a fan.”
In addition, the email also explained that the new “Like” button will be different from the current “Like” button that Facebook users click whenever they like particular updates of their friends.
Facebook believes that by changing the “Become a Fan” button to “Like” will increase engagement between consumers and brands as it offers a simple, consistent way for Facebook users to connect with the things they are interested in. Facebook did some research and found out the users are more likely to “Like” something instead of becoming a fan.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Facebook to Change “Become a Fan” Button to “Like” on Fan Pages
Posted by Tom_C
There’s been some talk recently in the SEO industry about ‘crawl allowance’ – it’s not a new concept but Matt Cutts recently talked about it openly with Eric Enge at StoneTemple (and you can see Rand’s illustrated guide too). One big question however is how do you understand how Google is crawling your site? While there are a variety of different ways of measuring this (log files is one obvious solution) the process I’m outlining in this post can be done with no technical knowledge – all you need is:
If you want to go down the log-file route then these two posts from Ian Laurie on how to read log files & analysing log files for SEO might be useful. It’s worth pointing out however that just because Googlebot crawled a page it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was actually indexed. This might seem weird but if you’ve ever looked in log files you’ll see that sometimes Googlebot will crawl an insane number of pages but it often takes more than one visit to actually take a copy of the page and store it in it’s cache. That’s why I think the below method is actually quite accurate, by using a combination of URLs receiving at least 1 visit from Google and pages with internal links as reported by webmaster central. Still, taking your log file data and adding it into the below process as a 3rd data set would make things better (more data = good!).
Anyway, enough theory, here’s a non technical step by step process to help you understand which pages Google is crawling on your site and compare that to which pages are actually getting traffic.
Go to webmaster central and navigate to the "internal links" section:
Then, once you’re on the internal links page click "download this table":
This will give you the table of pages which Google sees internal links to. Note – for the rest of this post I’m going to be treating this data as an estimate of Google’s crawl. See a brief discussion about this at the top of the post. I feel it’s more accurate than using a site: search in Google. It does have some pitfalls however since what this report is actually telling you is the number of pages with links to them, not the pages which Google has crawled. Still, it’s not a bad measure of Google’s index and only really becomes inaccurate when there are a lot of nofollowed internal links or pages blocked by robots.txt (which you link to).
This step should be familiar to all of you who have Google Analytics – go into your organic Google traffic report from the last 30 days, display the landing pages and download the data.
Note that you need to add "&limit=50000" into the URL before you hit "export as CSV" to ensure you get the as much data a possible. If you have more than 50000 landing pages then I suggest you either try a shorter date range or a more advanced method (see my reference to log files above).
Now you need to put both of these sets of data into excel – I find it helpful to put all of the data into the same sheet in Excel but it’s not actually necessary. You’ll have something like this with link data for your URLs from webmaster central on the left and the visits data from Google Analytics on the right:
Gogo gadget vlookup! The vlookup function was made for data sets like this and easily lets you look up the values in one data set against another data set. I advise running a vlookup twice for each data set so we get something like this:
Note – that there may be some missing data in here depending on how fresh the content is on your site (this is possibly enough room for a whole separate post on this topic) so you should then find and replace ‘#N/A’ with 0.
Now, for the purposes of this post we’re not interested in a URL by URL approach, we’re instead looking at a high level analysis of what’s going on so we want to categorise our URLs. Now, the more detail you can go into at this step the better your final data output will be. So go ahead and write a rule in excel to assign a category to your URLs. This could be anything from just following a folder structure or it could be more complex based on query string etc. It really depends on how your site structure works as to the best way of doing it so I can’t write this rule for you unfortunately. Still, once this is done you should see something like this:
If you’re struggling to build an excel rule for your pages and your site follows a standard site.com/category/sub-category/product URL template then a really simple categorisation would be to just count the number of ‘/’s in the URL. It won’t tell you which category the URL belongs to but it will at least give you a basic categorisation of which level the page sits at. I really do think it’s worth the effort to a) learn excel and b) categorise your URLs well. The better data you can add at this stage the better your results will be.
Now, we need the magic of pivot tables to come to our rescue and tell us the aggregated information about our categories. I suggest that you pivot both sets of data separately to get the data from both sources. Your pivot should look something like this for both sets of data:
It’s important to note here that what we’re interested in is the COUNT of the links from webmaster central (i.e. the number of pages indexed) rather than the SUM (which is the default). Doing this for both sets of data will give you something like the following two pivots:
And:
Now what we want to do is take the count of links from the first pivot (from webmaster central) and the sum of the visits from the second pivot (from Google Analytics), to produce something like this:
Generating the 4 columns on the right is really easy by just looking at the percentages and ratios of the first 3 columns.
25% of the crawl allowance accounts for only 2% of the overall organic traffic
So, what should jump out at us from this site here is that the ’search’ pages and ‘other’ pages are being quite aggressively crawled with 25% of the overall site crawl between them yet they only account for 2% of the overall search traffic. Now in this particular example this might seem like quite a basic thing to highlight – afterall a good SEO will be able to spot search pages being crawled by doing a site review but being able to back this up with data makes for good management-friendly reports and will also help analyse the scope of the problem. What this report also highlights is that if your site is maxing out it’s crawl allowance then reclaiming that 25% of your crawl allowance from search pages may lead to an increase in the number of pages crawled from your category pages which are the pages which pull in good search traffic.
Update: Patrick from Branded3 has just written a post on this very topic – Patrick’s approach using separate XML sitemaps for different site sections is well worth a read and complements what I’ve written about here very nicely.
I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.
Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.
CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.
BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the internet’s oldest directory.
Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed!
Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available find out more information. Be sure to check out our new Sponsored post option.
Here’s a list of some other programs and products I reccomend
Thesis Theme for Wordpress – Hands down the best theme on the market right now, read my Thesis Theme for Wordpress Review.
Scribe SEO – Improve your blog posts with this easy to use built in tool, read my Scribe SEO Review.
KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites, read an Interview with Michael Streko.
TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price, read my Tiger Tech Review.
Advertisement: Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services . #7
This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.
Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors – March 2010
Related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Let me start this post by saying that I personally don’t see any of the niches that I blog in as being a ‘niche full of jerks’.
OK – now that I’ve got that out of the way – I was recently asked in an interview a question by a blogger who did ask me for advice on working in a niche that was full of jerks (although their language was slightly more colourful than that).
The niche that they were referring to was the ‘make money online’ niche which they perceived as being inhabited and dominated by people who took advantage of others, didn’t mind engaging in unethical tactics, engaged in all kinds of obnoxious marketing tactics.
I’m going to leave the debate as to whether that niche is ‘full of jerks’ to others – but wanted to share part of how I responded because while not every niche is ‘full of jerks’ – we can all probably benefit by presenting ourselves in a way where we are not seen in that light.
You see – whether we like it or not – some people see the internet as being filled with people and sites that can’t be trusted. That may be changing as people use and trust the web more but the if your media is anything like what we see from some parts of the media here in Australia – there’s still plenty of mistrust and examples of shoddy internet use being highlighted every day in mainstream media.
So how does a blogger develop trust, build authority and be seen as authentic?
Following are a few thoughts on the topic, none of them by themselves will flip a switch and make everyone trust you – but I think combined they help:
One of the first things I’ll say about ‘jerks’ is that most of them don’t last the distance. They tend to get found out, exposed or seen for what they are eventually (and perhaps increasingly as the web develops and becomes more social).
Work hard at consistently producing something worthwhile and and in many cases you’ll outlast the jerks or at least will find that people begin to realize that you approach things differently to others and perhaps are someone worth taking a 2nd look at.
PS: one thing I’ll add here is that it’s not just about longevity but also consistency. People get suspicious when your message changes too much. Your ideas will naturally change and evolve over time but if you’re chopping and changing your approach and perspective too much people can find that a little odd.
One example of this that I saw recently was a blogger whose readership pushed back hard at them after he’d been doing too many affiliate promotions of products that didn’t match up with the values that he was ‘preaching’ in posts. He was recommending products that were not consistent with the advice he gave in his teaching.
There are times in almost every bloggers career where they will be accused by someone else as being something that they are not. People will form perceptions of you as you blog and some of those perceptions will be far from reality. This has happened to be numerous times over the last 8 years of blogging but in most cases things have turned around (to some extent) with some personal contact.
In some cases its simply about leaving a comment on a blog post to show you’re willing to interact, in other cases its about engaging in a conversation via email, sometimes it is about jumping on the phone or Skype for a voice chat and once for me it even involved a face to face interaction.
There’s something very powerful about personal contact. I’m not just talking about fixing false perceptions – I also mean being personal in the way you go about your normal blogging. Sharing a little personal information or giving a little insight into who you are outside of your blog can have a profound impact on how people perceive you.
PS: one of the things I’ve noticed is that when you put yourself out there in different mediums (whether it be video, audio or in person) you will connect with different people. The occasional video post or podcast will make your ‘more real’ to some people.
Building on this idea of ‘being personal’ is that of being relatable.
We like people who are like us – people who we share something in common with. This might be something personal (like being a parent, or reading similar books) or it could be something a little more on topic to our blogs (like having a similar question, experience or challenge).
Show people that you’re normal – that you have similar problems, passions, challenges, breakthroughs and experiences – and you’ll find people are a lot more willing to trust what you say.
One of the most ‘perception changing’ things that I’ve ever done is to visit industry events/conferences. This is no easy thing for me as I’m ‘locationally challenged’ and live 24 hours travel from most events in my niche – but it’s certainly been worthwhile.
Meeting people in person is perhaps the best way to show someone what you’re like – it’s the ultimate in ‘accessibility’ (unless you surround yourself in people you know and book yourself solid with meetings).
Of course traveling to events does not suit everyone’s budget or life situation – however there are other ways to increase your accessibility. One that I’d like to do more of is livestreaming video events. I try to do these every month or two on Ustream and every time that I do I get feedback that indicates that people both enjoy it and find it to be something that changes perceptions of me.
Adding contact forms, doing interviews, answering reader questions, interacting on other blogs – all of these things can help a lot.
Sometimes the only thing that really matters to people is whether you’re useful or not. If you solve a problem for someone or make their lives better in some way… you’ll create a lasting impression. They still might not ‘like’ you but it can’t help but improve your reputation on some level in their mind.
Be useful over the long haul (persist) and you will grow that reputation and hopefully in time garner some respect also.
Even trustworthy, authentic and honest people stuff up every now and again. Mistakes are made – tempers are lost – bad days are had – temptation to ‘do evil’ can get the better of most people.
No one is a complete angle and on those occasions where things get the better of you the best way forward is to be transparent about one’s failures and own up to our short comings. In fact in my experience – it’s sometimes when you own your mistakes and failings that you become all the more authentic and trustworthy to many.
Ultimately it comes down to actually being the type of person that you want to be treated as (sounds like something most Mums probably drum into their kids). If you want to be seen as trustworthy – be trustworthy. If you want to be seen as authentic – be authentic. If you want to be treated with respect – treat others with respect and act in a way that will be respected.
Being true to yourself and a trustworthy person doesn’t guarantee that others will perceive you in that way – whether it be a personality clash or someone else having had previous bad experiences, some people just don’t trust easily – but ultimately the best way to be seen as ‘not a jerk’ is to avoid being one.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
How to Stand Out in a Niche full of Jerks
Google’s launched “Real Time Search” and now’s your chance to rank for things you normally wouldn’t using services you probably normally wouldn’t
Let’s just say I’ve been twittering like an obsessed teenager for a few weeks now
Made a script to make it easier on everyone: Black Hat Digest Real Time Search Twitter [...]
I bought a slingbox early this year. Watch and control your sky/cable box over the internet from anywhere in the world. Great!
After a couple months of using it, it started to play up, not connecting to the network and such like. Usually a reset would fix this.
About 9 months on and the box now refuses to connect to the network and won’t even reset. Before contacting Sling Media for support, I take a look around online and found forums full of people with the same problem. A hardware issue that means replacing the unit. Sigh, not ideal. After leaving it plugged in (not working) for a few weeks, I came back and now no lights come on. The unit is dead.
I call up Sling support but am told that they can’t help me until I register the product online. Why they can’t do it over the phone I don’t know, not a great start. After registering online, I call back and am advised that the product only has a support/warranty period of 90 days. I’ve never bought an electrical product before that didn’t have at least a 1 year warranty! If I want any support now, I need to pay 29.99. Thing is, It’s quite clearly a hardware fault so even if I pay this rip off charge, I won’t get anywhere unless they agree to replace the unit.
If possible, buy an alternative to the Slingbox or other Slingmedia products. Their support is practically non-existent and based on the number of people complaining about the same hardware issues, there’s obviously common faults. If there support had actually made any kind of attempt to help then I’d have considered buying another one, even with its faults. But now there’s no chance I’ll pay out more cash for any Slingmedia product.
This will only last for a while until Megaupload changes their site so take advantage.
Just note this is not a real premium account and you can only download one file at a time (even though you get the premium speed and do not have to wait).
For example, if this is your download link:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HN0L1QBM
Just add “mgr_dl.php” after the “.com/” so the new link becomes:
http://www.megaupload.com/mgr_dl.php?d=HN0L1QBM
No captcha, No countdown, Full speed.
Try it on these links or add “mgr_dl.php” to any link… it works perfectly for me!