All posts in Marketing

Hello Entrecard users,

I have decided to offer you all the opportunity to win a week of advert exposure. This means that your entrecard will appear on the top right hand side of my website for a week. I receive over 1000 uniques a day, so this is an opportunity to get some great exposure and extra traffic.

How do you win?

• Linking back to my blog will get you 5 credits
• Dropping your card on my site will get you 1 credit
• Clicking the current Entrecard on my site will get you 1 credit

It’s really as simple as that.

I am running some software, which will track all the links and clicks, so don’t worry about yours not being included!

Recently I have been writing some search engine optimization (SEO) and traffic driving articles and today I decided to write another one, which has a little bit of a twist – Tag cloud surfing and keyword spotting.

Firstly, let’s see what a Tag Cloud is exactly:

A visual depiction of user-generated tags. Tags are typically listed alphabetically, and tag frequency is shown with font size or color.

Tag Clouds have become extremely popular and after reading around the net, it is clear that if positioned correctly, many users make use of Tag Clouds to find articles which are subject to information they find useful.

Most big article submission websites run Tag Clouds and this gives you an easy way to drive some extra traffic. Head on over to your article submission websites and have a look at which tags are most popular in the Tag Cloud on the website. Once you have done this, put together an article using the most popular tags from the Tag Cloud in your title and article. It is important to write good content, in order to target votes from the other users on the site. If you target these tags and write good content, you will see a lovely increase in traffic from the submission website.

Give it a bash and let me know how it went :)

Hey peeps,

Everyone knows that one of the first things to do with your blog is index it with Google via Google Webmasters tools and the second thing is to create a sitemap.

Creating your sitemap isn’t a hard task when wonderful sites like xml-sitemaps exists. Simply type in your URL, punch the button and their program will create an .xml file for you. This is the file you submit to Google Sitemaps.

All done? Nope.

So many people run along, submit their sites, grab the .xml file and upload it, but honestly, this isn’t the most ideal way of doing things. Once you have your .xml file, rather open the file up and have a look at all the URLs inside that file. Google has to download this file from your site and then proceed to index the various pages – what happens if you have hundreds of URLs inside the text file? Google will take a while to download the file and on top of that, Google won’t have the time to crawl all the URLs as he is a busy chap.

Open the .xml file in a text editor and remove useless URLs, as well as that, spend some time arranging the most important links towards the top of the file. The smaller the file and the higher the important links, the better your site will get indexed.

I always do this and trust me, it makes a big difference!

Many people have emailed me asking me different questions related to search engine optimization, and I do try and write a decent article now and then. I received a question earlier about Technorati and how one could go about increasing ones technorati ranking. Great question and a question that many people over look.

There are a number of different strategies available on the net and some unique ones that I use myself, so I’ve had a think about it and here’s a strategy, which I know works extremely well.

The easiest and most important step is getting Technorati to recognise all the links over the Internet which are associated with your website and which links are available on your website. Technorati often over looks hundreds of potential links and this will naturally damage your ranking. So let’s get started.

First off we need some software, something like Xenu will work. Xenu is a wonderful piece of software, which will crawl your site for links pointing towards it and links available on it. Download the software, enter in your website address and fire away.

Once the program is finished doing its thing, a website will popup – Scroll down to just over half way and look for ‘List of valid URLs you can submit to a search ening’. Once we have that list, we need to copy it to notepad. The next step is to use the technorati pinger, to ping all these URLs, you might want to remove all the external links from the list before you start pinging (http://technorati.com/ping). For sites with lots of links, obviously pinging each link seperately would take forever, so you can try Autopinger (http://autopinger.com/). Another way to submit multiple links is to use (http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping)  with your blog to automatically ping on page loads – let’s take a look at auto pinging with WordPress:

• Log in to your WordPress weblog.
• Select “Options” from the top menu.
• Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
• The last option on the page is “Update Services.” Add Technorati’s ping server (see address above) as a new line within the Update Services text box.

Applying this method to your website should see a lovely increase in recognised incoming links and therefore a stronger technorati ranking.

Give it a bash, let me know how it goes :)

 

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

Affiliate Gossip is running a competition where you could win a unique blog design!

How to enter?

You can submit as many entries as you want by:

• Subscribing to our feed (5 entries)
• Dropping your Entrecard (1 entry every time you drop)
• Writing a review on your blog (15 entries)

What you get?

• a Total unique designed blog theme
• 2 Banner Designs for your marketing use

Competition Rules

• Every second month ALL the entries EVER made will be compiled and a random selection will be made. This means you stand a chance to win every month.
• We will contact the winner via e-mail and the winners will be showcased on this website

Prize does not include:

• Logo design
• Mascot/Character design
• Custom developed widgets

Head on over and enter!

Everyone is starting to talk about SEO, which is the short hand for Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Now, search engine optimization is not something you learn over night or even in a couple weeks, it requires an on going understanding of the growth of the Internet and a deep understanding of search engines. That being said, not every has the time to learn the tricks of the trade, so we look for simpler options.

Enter: All in one SEO pack Plugin for WordPress ! (DOWNLOAD)

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.

How to use it?

Here is a list of the most important on-page ranking factors and how they are addressed by this SEO plugin. You might want to visit Options – All in One SEO to tweak the default options.

• Titles
  The text that you see in your browser’s window bar is the most important thing *on* your page. Make sure your titles are getting rewritten and the important stuff (your post titles) always come before anything else. You can leave a few words from your blog title to do some branding but don’t overdo. If your post titles don’t contain your most precious phrases you want to rank for then tweak them. Leave the post titles as it is but change the meta title.
• Descriptions
  Once your pages rank in search engines your description (aside of course from your title) makes a potential visitor want to click through, or not. It’s mta descriptions, believed dead by many people, that decide over your site’s fate. If you don’t want to invest the time and write a description for every post at least let them be auto-generated. This vastly better than the usual “Share This … Posted on … under …” description that is often used. If a post has an excerpt it is used, but not if you specify an explicit description.
• Keywords
  All in One SEO Pack can generate them from your categories (this was the old way of tagging your posts in wordpress) or from Ultimate Tag Warrior or, starting with WordPress 2.3, the built-in tagging system. Using your categories is optional, the rest is auto-detected and used if there.
• Duplicate Content
  You can have “noindex” and the like generated for archive-, category- and tag pages if you seem to have trouble with duplicate content.

That was about the 20% of effort needed by you to achieve 80% of results with on-page factors. Of course you also need incoming links, no plugin can do this for you in a safe manner. If anything is unclear, some feature is missing, or you are in supplemental results hell feel free to ask.

This SEO plugin is designed to give you the best options out of the box, however depending on your situation your mileage may vary, and no set of options is perfect for every site. To give you some hint the screenshot below shows how I use it on this blog:

 

 Thanks to Uberdose 2.0 for bringing this great plugin to life!

rssHugger is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that the readers are interested in. Through the power of the internet and viral marketing, rssHugger looks to bring blog writers and blog readers closer together. If you own a blog, you can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years for giving an honest review of the site on your blog.If you want to join rssHugger but do not want to review our site, you can pay a one time review fee of $20. rssHugger will be the first ever quality, spam free, and viral rss directory strictly for bloggers. To learn more about what rss feeds are or how owning an rss page can benefit you; visit the About page.

This is a topic I hear people talking about all the time and 80% of the time they have absolutely no clue what-so-ever.

Keyword density is the amount of times a keyword appears on a website.

After running a keyword density check on Yeigo.com (A Mobile VoIP application for your mobile device), I got the following results:

This breakdown shows us which words occur the most on the Yeigo.com website. We can clearly and easily see that ‘mobile, ‘phone’, and ‘voip’ are the prominant words, which is a good thing seeing the Yeigo is about mobile voip applications. Now, people normally think to themselves that by repeating and repeating their keywords, the each time Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc search engines crawl their website, they engines will immediately see what the website is about and rank them high in search engines. Right? Wrong! Yes, the search engines spiders will see what the site is about, but if a keyword is used in excess it will be seen as spam, hence it being a bad idea to create a website just with one keyword repeated continually! This is such a common mistake people make and it’s normally the people who claim to know SEO, that say this.. Continue reading →

I’ve spent a great deal of time surfing the net looking for some affiliate systems, which don’t require PayPal accounts, but rather use cheques. Cash Crate is a great action system, which pays you for performing tasks such as signing up for services or reviewing products.

I signed up within 2 minutes and started performing some tasks already. I’ve made $20 in the past 10 minutes – If you ask me, that’s some easy cash!

On top of this, Cash Crate has a number of online stores linked to its name, and when Cash Crate members make purchases at these online shops, they get cash back!

Head on over, take a look around, sign up and see how easy it is to make some extra cash.

Accepted: All countries

Payment: Check (Minimum payout: $10)