Sense amongst Madness - Wit amongst Folly

After Google’s recent Farmer or Panda update, where untold thousands of webmasters, including myself to a lesser degree, perceive themselves as collateral damage in Google’s attempt to police the quality of online content. See my other post on Panda and solutions here.

Admittedly, things were pretty out of control. LOL.  The economics of outsourcing content creation, , then monetizing called Content Farming, are, hehe or were, compelling.    Freelancers overseas will produce blog posts for $1 or $2, a web page created, with advertising, ranked on the search engines, which earns back the ‘investment’ within days. Multiply by millions and a huge industry prospers.  And what fun it was!  But all good things come to an end. (more…)

Google is joining Citigroup and Mastercard to set up a mobile payment system that will turn Android phones into a kind of electronic wallet, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The new technology, which is in its early stages, will allow consumers to wave their Android phones in front of a small reader at the checkout counter to make payments, the Journal reported.

Sounds exciting! Oh, there is more…

The planned payment system would allow Google to offer retailers more data about their customers and help them target advertisements and discount offers to mobile device users near their stores, the sources told the WSJ.

Maybe some people would find that ‘not exciting.’

One of my favorite blogs, The Satorialist, a fashion blog by Scott Schuman in New York. A satorialist, is a person interested in sartorialism, which is an interest in matters of or relating to the tailoring of clothing.

I keep getting asked for how to make wordpress secure so here is the URL for changing your tables –

http://tdot-blog.com/wordpress/6-simple-steps-to-change-your-table-prefix-in-wordpress

This is a tutorial for getting under the hood and into the guts of WordPress and making it bullet-proof.

Is it really necessary is the next question. That depends on whether you have anything worth taking. If your blog has no traffic and no Page Rank, then it probably isn’t a big issue because there isn’t anything worth stealing. If you have a PR6 blog that is clean (no links to prescription drug sites, life insurance sits etc.) with hundreds or even dozens of Authority sites one-way linking to you, then you have something valuable and worth taking.

How valuable? A PR 5 – 6 link sells for $20 – $30 per month. The last hack on one of my high value sites put 50 or so invisible links at the bottom of the page. Even at $20/month, thats $1000 per month of free links!

If you have been blogging for a few years, or even 4 or 5, then you have accumulated a huge amount of material on your subject matter. And presumably, covering every possible facet and related topic.

If it is properly indexed, they you have 300 or 400 pages of material which is a huge boost for your rankings and traffic. Beyond that, it is just sitting there.

What you do with this accumulation is compile it into an ebook which you can sell! Here is what I did with a 5-year old blog, plus several years of article submissions and masses of site content. (more…)

Here is the high-brow view – http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/03/28/blogonomics-monetizing-readers/ – Chase READERS not Pageviews!

Aaron Wall offered an interesting view on his blog http://www.seobook.com/blog which I can’t locate, and I am paraphrasing here, saying to keep most content just above the medium quality level, and then smaller amounts of very high quality content.

How do you actually convince someone to pull out their credit card and actually busy something from your website?

Anyone who knows the answer to that question, or even part of the answer is worth a million bucks. Unfortunately there ins’t any one answer and ‘the answer,’ such as it is, comes slowly and hard. And further, it is different for different types of sites.
Strategies for Education sites are going to be different from strategies for sites that sell machinery.

My personal strategy for promoting sites is the “learning library” approach where lots of free information is provided for browsers with a soft sell approach. This type of promotional strategy works well for education related sites, dating sites, some web and Internet related sites, for example SEO content sites, but not web design sites. Maybe more…

The learning library strategy means creating an online library of material that is related to your product or service. See my other posts on Anatomy of a Content Site, Broad Conent and Content Sites Sell

Surveys and statistics released this week show that Web2 continues to explode and Web1 brochure sites are stagnating and getting left in the dust. Consider:

* Blogger.com is the web’s fastest growing service at 528% over last year.

* Myspace.com grew at +318%

* Wikipedia grew at +275%

* Traditional web1.0 sites are losing ground: MSN.com (+1%), AOL.com (0%), ebay.com (-3%), Yahoo.com (+5%) and Google is still positive at +21% but slowing.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes the ComScore Data in New Trends In Online Traffic
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Here is a great plug-in that I have found for increasing traffic from Social Bookmarking sites. This WordPress plug-in automatically bookmarks your site to Social Bookmark sites each time you post, including:

blinklist.com
furl.net
del.icio.us
myweb2
shadows.com
simpy.com
spurl.net
ma.gnolia.com
blogmarks.net
rawsugar.com
smarking.com
linkrolling.com
blogmemes.net
markaboo.com
linkagogo.com
feedmelinks.com

This plug-in avoids spam with a clever option which randomly selects ‘X’ sites for submission, so you aren’t spamming.

Check it out Auto Social Bookmarking

Lots has been written about promoting blogs which covers the basics, of pings, submitting, creating content people want to read and all that. In this article I thought I would take it one step further and talk about some of the techie SEO aspects of promoting an blog, and specifically, avoiding penalties.

For the basics of promoting a blog, the best article I found was Margin of Eric – Making Yourself Known.

This is the place to start and covers all of the basics.
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