The 5 Characteristics of Highly Effective PPC (Pay Per Click) Specialists
Clickz’s Tony Wright lists “five crossover characteristics that apply to virtually every successful paid search specialist in the market”

Social Bookmarking – What Have You Done For Me Lately?
Sleepyblogger Robyn Tippins relates how (and more importantly why) she shut down her company which generated $25,000 in sales in its first month of operation.

Getting the Word Out About Your Affiliate Program
Affiliate veteran and co-founder of the Affiliate Summit Shawn Collins gives tips to product owners and in-house affiliate managers about building buzz for their affiliate programs.

Wearing Google Shirts to an eBay Event Might Be Hazardous To Your Health
Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz brings you the latest. Whoever thought the field of search engines could be this dangerous!

Fantastic Four Character Survey
Which of the Fab Four would you like to be? Get 6 Free movie passes and a $250 Visa gift card. [US residents only]

Does post quantity lead to a better reader experience?

It would, especially if you’re giving your readers more choice, and they’re likely to find something that interests them.

At the same time though, we have a finite amount of time, and the analogy I’d use is, if I had $300 and were about to go to war, I’d rather pick up an M-16, rather than buy 1,000 water pistols.

Besides post quantity, I think post quality is more important.

Having one highly targeted post, which meets your readers needs and interests, is much better than having three average posts.

Granted the blog indexing sites will have a field day if you’re posting multiple posts a day, it would likely generate a huge amount of (short term) traffic too.

My philosophy is to shoot for traffic mass (quantity), sustainability (keeping the traffic numbers between a certain range) and more importantly, focused and relevant to your niche/focus.

A well-researched and well thought out post gives readers choices in applying your ideas to their own site. It might take longer to put a quality post together (and consequently reduce your ability to churn out multiple posts), but you’ll build stronger readership loyalty that way.

• SEO/SEM

TropicalSEO gives you the lowdown on linkbuilding services and a couple of recommendations. Is TrustRank the new PageRank? Read his post and see.

Check out:
–> The Very Best Link Baiting Services

• Blogging

Hit a plateau in your blogging efforts?

Yaro Starak has analyzed ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s path to blogdom and provide some insight that blogging can be a pathway to greater things.

Check out:
–> The Advantages Top Bloggers Have That You Don’t

• Affiliate Marketing

Super Affiliate Ros Gardner bumps her adsense earnings up 5 times and shows the changes she made to achieve that. And yes, you get to see the social proof too.
Check out:
–> Adsense Earnings Up by 512% in December

• Social Traffic

Michael Gray AKA Graywolf’s embarked on a campaign to hit the top 50 communities on MyBlogLog. Will it bring more traffic? Not according to Stefan Juhl.

Bring Michael one step closer to his goal by joining the GrayWolf community.
While you’re there, you might want to join my Andrew Wee MBL profile if you haven’t done so already.

Check out the original post at:
–> MyBlogLog Shameless Whore

Robyn certainly echoes the sentiments of bloggers who’re focused on building a brand.

In case you’re not familiar with paid posting, it works like this:

A company contracts a paid posting service provider to get bloggers to blog about their company, product or service. Usually, the stipulation is that the post must contain a backlink to the company. Bloggers may be required to post pre-written (usually positive-slanted) content and there may be safeguards to ensure they don’t post any negativity about the subject.

Payment for a single post varies, typically ranging from $10-20, and going up to $100 or even more (though that might involve making a video clip, posting it to YouTube and featuring it on your blog).

I’d signed up with some of the paid posting networks and wasn’t too thrilled. Perhaps the industry is still in it’s infancy, but the paid assignments offered to me included pharmaceutical and university sponsors. Neither of which fit into my readers needs or wants.

I was however, tempted to create a throwaway blogger account and set up a blog, explicitly for posting paid content. After all, the service provider didn’t seem particularly concerned about metrics like traffic or PageRank.

In the end, I did a calculation of the value of my time and it just didn’t seem worth it.

The time spent not just posting the content, but shortlisting appropriate offers, thinking up possible angles and developing interesting content (ie caring for your readers interests), just didn’t seem to be worth it, even at $20 a post.

Sure, the sponsored post might bring some additional traffic to your blog, but would it be targeted traffic?
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful that bloggers are getting more options beyond the typical adsense, banner and text link ads. It just seems that paid content is still in its infancy and bloggers who excessive publish ‘too much’ paid content might earn the moniker of a ‘paid.blog.whore’. ‘Too much’ being a subjective measure.

It’s great that blogger are getting more blog monetization options as blogging’s marketing potential is realized by corporate America. At the same time, bloggers who get too blinded by the cash, will end up alienating their own readers and doing damage to their personal brand.

There’s already a blogger backlash against paid content posting. The question is how far it’ll go.

What are your thoughts about paid posting?

• SEO/SEM

Shoemoney put out a tasty post and buzzed industry contacts with the hypothetical “Would you hire Matt Cutts? If you had to come up with a dollar figure to offer him what would it be? What would his job title and job description be?”

A number of informative and insightful responses from the likes of Kris Jones (CEO PepperJamSearch), Patrick Gavin (CEO Text Link Ads), Greg Hartnett (Best Of The Web), Christine Kim, Rand Fishkin (Owner SEOMOZ), Jason Calacanis (Former CEO Weblogs INC & AOL Exec), Neil Patel – CEO ACS Web Consulting, Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall – SEOBook

Here’s the link: Would You Hire Matt Cutts?

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• Blogging

Robyn Tippins looks at the backlash from the bloggers perspective from the proposed acquistion of Performancing’s assets by PayPerPost (as mentioned earlier PerPerPost Acquires Performancing Assets). The PPP and Performancing deal nixed? Good thing or bad thing?

Here’s the link: Pay Per Post and Performancing Deal Nixed
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• Affiliate Marketing

Has Click Fraud been blown out of proportion? Jon F gives his perspective and gives his fix to the solution. The fact that he filed his post under “Industry Bullshit” will give an indication of his straight up, in your face perspective on the issue. (I’m looking forward to checking out his session together with Shoemoney at Affiliate Summit West)

Here’s the link: Click Fraud – The Overrated Internet Killer

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• Social Traffic

Social Marketer Michelle MacPhearson is back. Having given birth to a beautiful son, Colum, expect more social traffic tips from Michelle this year. I learned quite a bit from her about social traffic generation last year and will be expecting more good things from her this year.

Here’s the link: 1 Day Old

I continued the second installment here.

Today we go into the third installment.

Stuart Tan runs InternetMarketingSingapore: Stuart is an amazing guy. One reason why i’m speedlinking is that my neural connections are a little fried after talking through some Internet Marketing issues earlier this evening. He’s launching some new programs in October and if you’d like to be kept in the know, leave a comment and I’ll include you in the notification list.

The Japanese Are Crazy: one of the most unconventional sites on the web, check out the video clips. You’ll watch and think that the Japanese are the most innovative people on the planet, or they’re simply insane. Maybe even both. Check it out and leave a comment.

Kloudiia.com: Welcome to Kloudiia’s kit: dating affairs. An interesting mix of dating advice, magical quotes and occasionally Biblical references. Check out the Ask Kloudiia section where you get to pose your enquiries to the dating dame. I read it regularly. You should too.
GobalaKrishnan.com: one of the better Malaysia-based Internet Marketing blogs in the blogosphere, Gobala puts out quality content on WordPress-based blogging and adsense. I especially like his post about his Internet Marketing journey. It’s well worth the read. You can check it out here.
RomanceFire: This is my friend, JhongRen’s blog. It chronicles his wedding preparations since December 05. Wow, that’s a long time. I think I spent about 2 months preparing for my own wedding. But do check out his wedding preparation advice too. But regarding the activities on the wedding night itself, you have to figure those out yourself.

SoccerTipCentral: until a short while ago, my friend, Aloysius Nge, had one of the most…shall we say enigmatic avatars on the Internet. I’ve helped him snap a new photo (whether he uses it is another matter). Do check out his site though. I’d expect that it’d help you do better on wagers on the game where 22 men on a very big field run after a small little ball. Face it, it beats staring at the wall on Sunday.

I’m continuing the tradition my buddy, Jag Senghera, started a couple of days ago.

You can see his post here: Jag Senghera Internet Marketing Malaysia.

Here’s my speedlinks:

Jag Senghera : Jag is a cool guy with lots of blogging ideas and is quite an adsense expert too. Sometimes you read someone’s online postings and have this bigger than life impression of someone.I was looking forward to meeting him.He lives across the causeway and supposed to pop into town last week. didn’t get to see him. what a pity. he has a book on blogging coming out soon. any day now.
Stuart Tan: Stuart is a guy I’ve known for the past… gee… is it 4 years or 5 years already? He’s really smart, somewhat funny and can be very sarcastic. I can’t figure out how he manages to do NLP, public speaking, internet marketing, and come out with CDs. does the guy ever sleep? I’m not sure, but you can check the time stamp on his blogs and websites (too many to count, so i randomly picked one). he’s always got lots of strange interesting ideas.
Ryan Chua (ambatch seocontest): Ryan is a really nice guy. and he writes really slowly. i am wondering if i should take a wager with him whether he or i will finish a book first. i’m not so worried what i should wage a prize on, i’m more concerned that i’ll win… get your book out soon, Ryan… oh yeah, he’s planning to win the ambatch seocontest, so head on to his blog, read his post and support him. ’nuff said.

Violet Lim LunchActually.com: Violet or Miss Match is going to be a mummy soon. Gee, i wonder where she finds the time. besides being the co-founder of lunchactually.com (surprise! a lunch dating service for professionals), she’s active in toastmasters, women’s entrepreneurship organization, rotary club… and finds time to work on a baby.

Rachit Dayal Google Adwords expert: Rachit is founder of RachitDayal.com.

He does copywriting, PPC, direct marketing. Is there anything he doesn’t do? frankly, i’m not sure. but he sure has lots of ideas. oh yeah, he’s recently taken on the vice-president education role at Raintree Toastmasters Club and also volunteer to be program director for a Patterns of Excellence NLP course. good luck to him. he might not be sleeping much.