Monthly Archives: May 2007

Open Season For Questions on Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, Social Traffic Generation

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Here’s an open solicitation for questions in the 3 areas I focus on:

  • Blogging
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Social Traffic Generation

I get lots of feedback on general posts, but here’s a chance for you to pose questions and get answers in a future post.

To make things a little easier, here’re some of the foundation between each of the areas I cover, so you can better “get” me and pose a question which might best help you:

Blogging

I see blogging as the next generation of web publishing. It certainly beats the HTML I was bashing out on a text editor in 1997 when I was managing web portals.

The introduction of RSS and Social Networking/Bookmarking widgets means you can easily get a blog from the starting point to more than 10,000 uniques in less than 6 months after starting.

Someone might say, “Sure, I can do that in a single day by getting my post listed on Digg or one of the other big bookmarking sites”, but what I’m refering to is a consistent stream of traffic, as in a consistent 1,500-2,000 page views per day. Not 50,000 page views today, and 200 page views tomorrow.

The underlying philosophy here is that Continue reading →

Internet Marketers Fail When They Get Lazy

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The biggest obstacle that will stand in your path as you start and travel along your Internet Marketing journey can be encapsulated in one word: Laziness. Conquering it is key to reaching your money goals.

People keep asking me why I say that 90% of Internet Marketers drop out of the industry within 6 months.

The truth is I don’t have a fixed answer, but on bad days, it seems like everyone else who started out about the same time as me has moved on to:

  • Network marketing
  • Taken up a 9-to-5 job somewhere
  • Doing the “financial trading cycle” which typically involves day trading or forex or options trading

The sad part is that they inevitably hit a brick wall, then look at what I’ve achieved in the last year and comment “Gee, you’re lucky”.

That kind of stings, considering the amount of effort I’ve spent in Internet Marketing, determining a path, building bridges to other Internet Marketers (sometimes taking a 20 hour flight each way) and taking on more than what others would normally do because I want to move along the road further.

So when I hear about the aspiring Internet Marketer who hasn’t taken action because he bought a new laptop and couldn’t figure out how to use it, and didn’t know how to configure his email, it makes me sad. Very sad.

In 2 minutes I informed him that he ought to call Dell and his ISP’s toll-free number and get his problems fixed by the next day.

Allaying blame on an inanimate laptop is tantamount to Continue reading →

Hold the Alexa, here comes URLFan

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Yes, we know Alexa isn’t accurate, in fact it has a number of blindspots, but it’s a easily accessed public web metric. But for checking out the Web2.0-ness of your site, you might like to check out URLFan.com.

urlfan.com

What is URLFan?

If you’re a “Web2.0-ish” person, you’d want to check out this metric type site which ranks sites according to their RSS feeds.

The site description says URLFan is “currently parsing hundreds of gigabytes of RSS content a day”

As of my last visit, URLFan’s stats stand at “Reading 746,006 feeds, parsing 41,334,923 posts, ranking 1,844,043 domains”

Bear in mind that the criterion for ranking is popularity of web feeds. As you know, RSS (really simple syndication) is becoming more widely adopted as the distribution technology of choice for content syndication, whether it’s into your Google Reader (or it’s equivalent at your My Yahoo! page) or the Mozilla Thunderbird email/RSS client.

Out of curiosity, I pulled the top ranked sites according to URLFan:

urlfan top sites

With content sites, not surprisingly, dominating the top positions.

Interestingly, YouTube and Flickr, rank highly despite the fact that the bulk of their content is video and graphic-based. I suspect it has to do with the content’s title and tags.

The lesson here is if you’re not already tagging your content, you should start today!

I thought it’d be interesting to see how bloggers ranked, so I Continue reading →

Search Engine Traffic vs Social Traffic: Traffic Generation and Monetization

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Getting traffic from all sources is a good way of diversifying your risks. That way a shift in the search engine algorithmn or a social networking site won’t entire rock your traffic picture. But how does organic search engine traffic compare to social traffic?

Lesson 1: Your site needs to mature

This is probably one of the harder lessons for new marketers to absorb, or mentally comprehend. You need to achieve critical content mass and have it indexed to attract either search engine traffic or social traffic.

It could be as fast as 24 hours, or as long as a month before your traffic hits ‘acceptable’ levels. [Acceptable levels could be 1,000 uniques or 10,000 or 100,000 uniques depending on your personal goal and strategies]

Lesson 2: It’s not just purely a numbers game

Traffic quantity is as important as traffic quality alone. What’s the point if you’re going to get 50,000 uniques in a day if they aren’t interested in your content? Perhaps someone inadvertedly did a redirect to your page.

Metrics like Continue reading →

Weekend Wonderings – 18 May 2008

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I’m listening to Geekcast ep 16 with guests Scott Jangro and Todd Crawford. Much funnier than the regular series (I think Lisa Picarille’s presence helps up the content quota on both Geekcast and Affiliate Thing). Perhaps it’s time to break the Geekcast into 2 separate sessions (1 content-driven with Lisa and/or a guest on) and a “frat boy” humor edition focused on Hand Teddys (sic?), Man-dles, being unable to pee in airplane toilets, etc.

Sam talked about Todd’s new blog,  be sure to check out Todd Talks. If you’re nice, you might even hear about his secret project…

This week also saw the launch of Sam’s new RedHatBlueHat political podcast. (and if you’re following the industry, political blogs are quite the money rakers…)

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In other news, I’m getting blog consultants to work on the this blog and there’re a number of neat enhancements coming up. You’ll see the weird MySQL errors popping up when you post comments, but they do end up in the moderation queue.  If you posted a comment and didn’t see it published, chances are you dropped a “nice post” or “come and look at my site -> [link to made for adsense or ebook opt-in page]. Your name makes it into the master blacklist of bloggers too…

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I’m posting twitter updates more often too. Twhirl seems to be working like a charm.

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I got a bunch of schwag from CPA network Market Leverage (Thanks Debby and the ML crew!) and have been playing with the Flip Ultra that came in the goodie bag. I’ll post an update next week.