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Posts Tagged ‘jim-kukral’

Blackhole SEO: Has Google’s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?

Hegemony (from Wikipedia): is a concept that has been used to describe and explain the dominance of one social group over another, such that the ruling group or hegemon acquires some degree of consent from the subordinate, as opposed to dominance purely by force.

Have the forces of blackhole SEO spread beyond the reaches of Wikipedia and eBay to dig it’s claws into Twitter, as Sugarrae has asserted?

Though Rae mentioned the issue last September, SEO specialist Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl tweeted about it yesterday, together with some choice thoughts:

i mean – do you really believe that twitter links are passing NO credibility, NO juice, NO nothing…?? just like wikipedia ….riiiiiiight.

maybe implement a sandbox for new users
certain threshhold until they are trusted enough to get into a non-robots.txt directory

why not utilize robots.txt solution…instead of nofollow?
i guess nofollow in general just gets me riled up and pissed off

What would happen if twitter got rid of the nofollow on all links? How would it affect the web?

So why’re we revisiting this issue?

Blackhole SEO is where an (more…)

Do You Get A Gold Medal In The Business Olympics?

Longevity is the name of the game if you want to be in business on the internet for the long term. With that, scraped content affiliate sites, blogs republishing RSS feeds verbatim, mashups recycling content from Wikipedia, can expect short term traffic, but seriously, who is going to go back to one of these sites?

It’s important to look at long-term strategies to get your business on a solid foundation. That is, if you don’t want to find yourself scrambling from one rock to another, as your “empire” sinks into the sand.

Let’s look at some ways to build up personal credibility, especially in the vastness of cyberspace, where a billion websites are calling out for attention.

credibility

Here are some essentials that every website should possess:

  • Background and Biographical information

At the least, you need an “About” or “About Me”, “About Us” or “About Andrew” / “About (insert your name)”. And having text like “This is an example of a WordPress Page” doesn’t count either.

People want to read and possibly do business with people they know. And “knowing” goes beyond a run-of-the-mill “XYZ Inc is a leading Fortune 500, Inc Hot 100 Tech Startup”.

Pfft. These awards carry some weight, but if you take a second to think about some of the leading tech companies like Dell, Apple, Microsoft, the names Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs come to mind. Personalization if not just a “strategy”, it should be the cornerstone of your success if you want to succeed online.

Going beyond a mention of yourself the person, going a little deeper to (more…)

Friday Podcast: Got Video? Get With Jim Kukral

jim kukralI first communicated with Jim Kukral when I saw he was presenting a session on bloggers as the next wave of super affiliates during Affiliate Summit West 2007. Since then we’ve been talking over email, and he’s probably one of the few geekcasters who remembers I’m from Singapore (I’m not from Thailand, Sam….geeze!).

Aside from his experience at Kowabunga, and as one of the co-founders of ReveNews (with Wayne Porter) and having launched BlogKits, Scratchback and the now (infamous?) TwitterMeThis, Jim has just launched the Online Video Toolkit this week – a series of video tutorials on setting up to create video content.

Besides talking about the launch of OVT, we also discussed a number of video marketing strategies and its future prospect for online marketers.

Check out this week’s edition of the Friday Podcast

Online Video Toolkit

Twitter Overload and Possible Solutions…

I’m getting snowed under, even with following 92 twitterers, possibly because I live 12 hours in the future (GMT+8 vs GMT-5 for most Americans), and there’re pages of back tweets when I wake up every morning and check out my twitter account.

I am probably behind the curve when it comes to picking up new-fangled technology, unlike Shawn Collins, Scott Jangro and Sam Harrelson.

On a recommendation from Kerri Morrison (AKA @kmore) , I checked out Twitterific.

Oh great…it’s Mac-only. I typically keep my MacBook on a pile of Cat5 ethernet cables under my desk most of the time and I don’t think I’ll be firing it up, so I can burn more time on twittering…

Twhirl looks like a better alternative – it’s Windows and Mac OS X and I see a number of people sending updates using it.

I’ll probably check this out.

Anyone have experience? What do you recommend?

I don’ think I’ll venture into Pownce territory till next week, as there’s quite a bit of site development on a couple of new verticals I’m working on.

Are You Ready For Some Aural Gratification?

This past weekend was a busy one, as I’ve been shifting one of my home offices around. My 10mbps DSL connection finally works over ethernet (I was struggling with poor signals over a 802.11g network previously). Every LAN point in my home should provide connectivity. So now I have wireless and wired Internet and LAN access from just about every bedroom, as well as the living room, dining room, kitchen and the toilets if the need arises…

While I was huffing and puffing on Sunday manhandling my heavy desk and moving the computer, monitors and bunches of cables around, I was listening to the huge backlog of MP3s I had downloaded over the past couple of weeks.

I probably listened to about 10 hours of audio over the weekend and was more active than usual in my twitter stream too.

I think it’s important to use your “downtime” well, especially if you’re working on your taxes, cleaning the desk, clearing your inbox (snail mail and email), or sorting out your baseball card collection (or samurai katana collection if that’s up your alley).

Here’s my list of favorite podcasts at the moment:

#1: Geekcast (the podcast, not the network…) -  A collaboration between Shawn Collins, Sam Harrelson, Lisa Picarille and Jim Kukral, I’d classify it as a industry banter session. I can identify with Lisa’s sentiment that it seems unstructured at times, but I think it’s part of the fun, especially as the show hosts go off on each other.

There was some drama recently as Shawn and Sam had a spat with Jim, but all seems well now, and we should have the 4 musketeers back in the seat. The show is recorded every Tues and Sam usually has the podcast up within 24 hours.

Be sure to check out the “Sorry, Jangro” drinking game that accompanies the podcast.

#2: Affiliate Summit Sessions Podcast: If you missed the recent Affiliate Summit West (more…)

An Inconvenient Truth About Social Media

One of the strength and at the same time, weaknesses of social media is it’s social nature.

Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.

A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.

Jim Kukral’s TwitterMeThis social adventure.

affiliate summit west

At the recent Affiliate Summit West in Vegas 2008: Andrew Wee, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson

About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.

Shortly after, the topic was discussed on Geekcast, Jim posts a follow up about “social media being bullshit” and Sam posted a response and Shawn follows up with a sequence of 3 posts: one, two and three. In between there’s a discussion on TrishaLyn’s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.

But I’m not so keen to talk about the  discussion as to look at how it took place.

Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.

In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.

Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.

It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.

Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.

If you factor in the fact that (more…)