If you’ve been in Internet Marketing for some time, you would’ve heard of forum specialist Lee Dodd and his Cruise Line Fans forum. A number of his forums are generating income in the region of $xx,xxx and you can read his story at his “My love of forums” post.

Lee also happens to be doing a promo for his Earners Forum site, targeted at Internet Marketers, with a “Webmaster Inspiration Month” contest. To sweeten the pot, there’s $5,500 worth of prizes at stake, including a iPod Touch, cash prizes and other assorted goodies.

There’s about 7 contests within the competition, each with a distinct winner, so you could submit a blogging-related entry, a forum-related one, affiliate marketing, SEO, or a rags-to-riches one.

Each prize package includes:

• $250 worth of Text Link Ads
• $250 CASH from NeverBlueAds
• 24 T-Shirts to promote your blog or site

Regardless of whether you (more…)

• Internet Marketing events
• 48 Comments

It’s been about 5 months since Amazon launched it’s own Wikipedia-type site, where users could tag and submit their opinions and review.

So what’s happened since the launch?

In Jan, when WebProNews announced the Amapedia launch, early feedback was along the lines of:

The site looks pretty raw currently and has little info in it – it is after all brand new.

And now nearly half a year later, I find 15 product reviews on the site, none of which are particularly inspiring. Worst still, some product discussions haven’t had an update in 55 days.

Ghost town?

For sure.

Critics will question, Is it even a worthwhile exercise for the mammoth online retailer?

Let’s look at the demand for Wikipedias, or user-contributed content sites:

So there is high demand for online information reference sites.

And the chances are, once you’ve discovered wikipedia, you’re likely to bookmark or keep it in mind, and head over there to bone up on unfamiliar topics.

I’ve gone over there a number of times in the course of my blogging and site development efforts to fact check or build up my background knowledge.

So where has the story gone wrong for poor Amapedia?

The site design certainly looks polished and is consistent with Amazon’s branding and consistent sitewide design.

I do find the (more…)

• Internet Marketing
• 1 Comment

A key metric typically used to measure blog popularity is the number of bloglines subscribers or feedburner subscribers. These measures give an idea of the number of subscribers you have to your RSS feed.

In theory, this represents your “subscriber core” and indicates how ‘sticky’ your content is.

You might think this blog fares abysmally, according to Text Link Ads “Blog Juice” calculator.

A 5.4 out of a supposed 10 ranking?

Let’s look at the components of the score:

• Bloglines: the number of Bloglines subscribers (accounts for 40% of score)
• Alexa: ranking determines 15%
• Technorati: 30%
• Links: Inbound links 15% (determined fromTechnorati).

From the example above, the low number of bloglines subscribers (32) has hit my rankings hard.

De-emphasizing bloglines subscribers and feedburner subscribers (also a set of RSS subscribers) would be detrimental to your rankings.

Why would anyone want to do this?

In that case, why would a blogger deliberately aim for low RSS subscriber numbers?

Simple. (more…)

• blogging
• 3 Comments

This is an “after the fact update”.

A contact mentioned that Google had updated Toolbar PageRank ratings last week.

I hadn’t noticed changes on my blog, but some of my content sites have done from PR3 to PR4. Fairly decent consider that they’re a little over 6 months old.

As mentioned in previous PageRank-related posts, take note that Toolbar PageRank is different from your Live PageRank which is registered at the datacenters and determine how frequently your site is indexed by the search engine spiders.

You can find out your Toolbar PageRank by installing the Google Toolbar.

But more effective than the Toolbar PR, which some would say is ‘old PR’ is the live PR, which can be accessed through the Live PR datacenter check.

Backlinks (one way links to your blog or website) determine PageRank.

If you haven’t already, the following are (more…)

• Google
• 14 Comments

Here’s a roundup of insightful posts:

• 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

• speedlinking
• 7 Comments