Internet Babel

I think one of the most instantly advantageous things you can do as a… blogger I suppose, is to anticipate what people will search for. Of course people are doing this more and more now so it’s alot harder to be the first there, but if you’re persistent and obsessive enough it can be done.

If you own a blog about TV say, think up all of the most popular worldwide TV shows possible, write them down and anticipate what people will search for in a week or a month. If you can do that before anyone else, you will usually land an instant top spot in the search engines when people do start searching for that because you were already there before it was being searched for.

Now obviously given that this isn’t anything new and alot of people do it these days you need to be quick. And maybe doing it with gigantically popular things isn’t always the best option as sometimes even if you get there first there will be so many people doing it and so much media coverage from large media sites that you may still not get there.

But, still experiment. Also try and find niche things that are still popular enough to be avidly searched for amongst a curve of people but not so popular that saturation is an instant give.

You can even take it to the extreme and start buying domains years before future events that you know will be huge, like the Olympics. Then start blogging on them way before anyone else.

I don’t do this enough myself either and actually the idea for this post actually sparked the intention of me following up with it so I will also start doing this more. I think it’s a great thing to do.

One way to get alot of free traffic is to give away alot of free stuff. Free ebooks, free reviews, anything of quality to your readers that will help them and help gain your blog momentum.

Lets say you write a quality ebook, or what you think is ‘quality’ on… getting good traffic. Now you’re trying to think of how much to sell it for, you decide to sell it for… $10. Now firstly unless your blog is highly established and read alot already then where is your kudos? why should anyone buy a product off someone they haven’t heard of, they have nothing to start from, no recommendations no proof, nothing. So chances are you will sell hardly any, the few you do sell will gain you a tiny bit of traffic, if any and bring you a little income which is basically worth wiping your ass with.

Think of all the other great FREE ebooks already available from well known entrepreneurs and blogs. Short-term you may think “but if I give it away for free, what’s the point” but long-term it’s by far the best option. Just look at, for example John Chow’s ebook ‘Making Money with John Chow Dot Com’ I’ve read the ebook and it’s a great ebook, well written, clear, definitive and to a degree advantageous to anyone who reads it.

So why would somebody buy something from ‘you’ who they’ve never heard of. Giving an ebook, a quality ebook away for free will bring you lots and lots of backlinks and long-term traffic. John Chow got an unbelievable amount of backlinks for his ebook and great feedback. Another recent example is John Reece; he released the free ebook on his income.com blog called ‘The Rebirth of Internet Marketing’ I’ve also read that and it was excellent. You can tell he’s put the effort in, it’s well worth a read and… it’s free. It’s easily more intellectually written, more intellectually considerate, more honest and more advantageous than the majority of highly priced ebooks available on the subject.

I have given away in total… I think 11 free site reviews for this blog. Each of which have received a great response from the receiver, they liked the review even though they were blunt they were honest. That’s the key, be honest because if your not a naive marketer will soon lose their naivety and become aware of your previous dishonesty.

So to finish, I’m just saying, whenever you can – give your readers quality freebies! it’s a win win situation. They get a free product or review and you get free backlinks and long-term traffic as well as possible word of mouth kudos.

I’ve just implemented the new Blogrush widget as one of my sidebar items. You can see it next to the subscribe box on the far right.

This idea looks really lucrative and advantageous to any blogger that uses it. Potential traffic from expansion is unlimited which is amazing. This could be one of the best free traffic sources for bloggers ever, if enough people start using it!

So anyone who isn’t already, go sign up and start driving free traffic.

This is a new idea from John Reese. The well known Internet marketer, anyone who has been in it for a while will know and have a great amount of respect for him. I only actually heard of him recently… ish but have been impressed with everything i’ve seen from him.

If you have heard of him recently then it will probably be in relation to his new site income.com which has been in sub-launch mode for longer than I can remember but looks like it will be amazing.

Anyway, this new idea is going to be part of the ‘income.com network’ and it will launch 14th September… mid-day (US time) I’m actually in the UK so it will be a different time for me… but anyway, that’s when it launches.

This new idea is going to be a sort of… traffic sharing network for bloggers. Basically you sign up (for free) and grab some javascript code for the widget, put the widget on your blog and that widget then displays relevant posts on relevant blogs. Also you get syndication credits for people you refer to blog rush which will build up and ultimately get you more traffic. You can see an image of the widget below:

So if somebody clicks ‘Add Your Blog Posts – FREE’ or the BlogRush tab then that counts as a referral as they can tell what blog it came from.

You will also be able to filter out certain keywords so that no posts with those keywords appear on your widget and you can even filter out specific blogs.

Personally I think this is a great innovation and I think it will become huge. It’s got a huge viral aspect, it’s free and it gets you free traffic. You actually give your readers relevant posts, targeted relevant posts as aposed to just ads so i’m sure that will be a good thing which people will latch on to.

The only downside I can actually pick out is the fact that your sending people to potentially competitors blogs, I mean you can filter out what you want but still… your inviting competition which brings me to a new point that this will actually make people try harder! so forget that downside I think this may actually improve any blog that uses it as you will want to be better than anyone else in your widget.

Amazing innovation from John Reese, bloggers get ready to sign up soon! – Blogrush.com

Also keep a close eye on income.com which will be launching after this and should be amazing.

Revver is a video upload site designed to provide you with unique video content on a regular basis from original thinkers and creative directors as well as give the people who do just that something in return. When you sign up to Revver your signing up as an original video creator and agree not to break copyright laws. They very strongly avoids getting into any copyright disputes unlike other video sites like YouTube who find it hard to diverse between original and copyright due to the volume of traffic. They rely purely on the honesty of their uploaders where as Revver is very upfront about what they do and do not want and actually have humans review each upload to decide if it can be approved.

Revver pairs your video with a targeted advertisement, which is how you make money from your video. The nice touch is they split the revenue with you 50/50 which I think is one of the main selling points of the site. Also if you embed someone elses video aka share it, you earn 20% of the ad revenue then the rest is split between the creator and Revver.

So anyone reading this who didn’t know what Revver was when you saw the title. Now you do. So… the anniversary, well Revver are celebrating a million dollars payed out to video creators. This is their first anniversary of any sort given that the site isn’t that old and it was sort of stomped out by YouTube.

Anyway, if your not a member of Revver and haven’t tried or heard of it. I would recommend you give it a go. I personally haven’t made much from it but then again I haven’t put much effort in with it either, I’m sure there are more active people with more creativity than me who could make money with it though so if you haven’t already. You may as well go have a gander!

Sphinn is a social networking site for Internet marketers. Just like digg, you submit new articles and they either get props or they don’t. If your article is liked it gets ‘sphunn’ obviously the equivalent of a ‘digg’ on digg.com. Nothing new but it is a decent addition into the social networking arena and I think it’s going to grow amongst marketers over time. It’s already doing pretty well but I don’t think it’s as well known as it should be, it’s specifically for Internet marketing so anybody in that field I think should start using sphinn more.

I think specific niche social networking sites such as this may soon expand and things like digg will never die out but will maybe fade out abit for the more motivated specific marketers. Sphinn is good if you are in Internet marketing because you are speaking to your peers, superiors and learners, it’s a good way to get your relevant articles seen by motivated people in the same boat as you. Obviously there are specific categories on digg but it just seems like niche things never get big… only ever novelty things or big round the world news topics. Which is fine but I think sphinn is definitely or will definitely become a more useful tool for Internet marketers.

So if you’re reading this and you don’t use it already, go check out sphinn and get sphunn!

In this episode everyone plays poker to test their ‘reading’ skills.

Was just browsing my stats on my AuctionAds account and realised that for the affiliate program they only have text links. I know the ads themselves have the link affiliate built into the ad, it’s a referral link at the bottom, which is good. But it’s pretty standard to have lots of banner ad variations for affiliate programs, so if anyone from AuctionAds actually reads this, contact me and let me know if this is happening anytime soon! because if it is, that will be good, it will allow much more modern visual pushing of the affiliate side of things.

Since this is my first blog as I have always had targeted sites, this is my first experience with really diversing and typing naturally and often. And one primary thing i’ve noticed is how the best way to get ranked, well, is to just type for humans. It’s been said over and over and it’s true, don’t write to optimize for search engines because for a start it wont read completely naturally to the average person. And if it’s Internet pros reading your blog then it’ll be obvious and they’ll just read another blog. It wont become anodyne reading because it’ll be to formal and everyone writes like it, they try and drop in relevant keywords, they plan to. Which is fine, obviously optimize to a degree, SEO is a good thing. But I think focusing more on that than the issue of making your writing original and fresh is wrong.

If you write naturally and let it flow as it comes, it will seem spontaneous and fresh to people reading it therefore making it better to read. Which is the reason I don’t edit much at all once a post is finished. I type and let what comes out come out so it’s as spontaneously written as possible, doing this also helps your brain diverse as much as possible, naturally, whilst staying relevant therefore dropping in keywords naturally without noticing. Also you’d be surprised what people search for and what you can get picked up on maybe not because of PR or backlinks but simply because your content is so unique that Google prefers it to the copied, duped and predictable stuff.

One way to get traffic started… basically certainly to your site is by using Wikipedia. It’s one of the most popular sites on the Internet, one of the most trusted sites by Google and every other search engine and one of the most highly search engine optimized sites on the Internet.

Now don’t be stupid, obviously if you abuse it… it wont happen. But one thing I can recommend doing is one simple thing, add your site to a relevant Wikipedia article under external links. Now sometimes it will get taken down maybe if you use spammy anchor text or maybe just because they may believe it was submitted by a spambot. But now they have implemented a new code activation to type before you submit… your site should pretty much stay there. And if you notice it does get removed, just go back and submit it again. If your site is quality and not spammy and you think it should be there, put it there. No one else has anymore right than you to be there and visa versa.

The amount of traffic you can getting doing this alone is pretty amazing. You wont get thousands of uniques a day but definitely it may help you start off with a few hundred visitors every other day or even a day or at least half that. It’s not prolific I know but remember, it’s free and at least it’s helping people find your site. And don’t forget, it’s valuable, not spammy traffic, it’s a relevant site on Wikipedia… the average joe seems to think you need special kudos to get there so will be more inclined to instinctively click sites there and trust them before reaching them simply because Wikipedia allows them to stay there.

Doing this has definitely helped me get traffic started off pretty regularly to alot of small time sites. It’s a very useful thing to do and your not abusing anything, your providing someone with a useful, relevant link and at the same time freely and legally driving traffic to your site. The fact that they are already looking for whatever your site is related to because they’re are on that article, in my mind makes the quality of the traffic much higher than even the traffic of some social bookmarking sites just because it’s so, so targeted and focused.

Seriously consider doing this and do it alot. Submit your relevant sites to relevant Wikipedia articles on that topic. And remember there isn’t just one article on one topic, genre’s, people, laws, everything diverses and disperses into other areas and regions which can still be considered relevant to your site. So you can easily submit to ’alot’ of articles. The only limit is how far that topic stretches and spills into other regions.

Also it doesn’t have to be the sites homepage, so I mean… if you consider how much you might digress on a blog or within a site it’s not that hard to find a relevant page to things you wouldn’t normally think to do with your site and get away with it. So in some respects your limited pretty much only by your imagination and site span.

Another advantage of doing this of course is that Google will pick up the fact your link is a trusted link in Wikipedia, which to the best of my knowledge can only do one thing. Get you ranked faster and higher. All hail Wikipedia traffic!