After a hiatus of several months, the guys behind Elite Retreat have thankfully announced a new Elite Retreat for this April in San Francisco. If you're entertaining any thoughts whatsoever of someday quitting your day job, I simply can't recommend this conference highly enough. It changed my life, and I have no doubt that it will change yours, too. Nowhere will you get the one-on-one time with this many true experts. ... Keep reading »
Developing a sense of community among your readers not only helps your readership grow faster, but it also keeps people coming back more often. I realize, though, that some of you would rather only your mother read your blog (and through a feed reader no less), so for those readers I'm excited to present two quick, easy ways to make sure your blog grows very slowly. Don't Respond to Comments This one works great! ... Keep reading »
So I read Search Engine Myths Exposed yesterday. (If you're involved in Internet marketing at all, I'm sure you saw at least one person pushing it.) It was free, and since getting good at SEO is what started my journey, I figured I'd give it a look and see what "expert" advice this "guru" was giving. The first thing I found was that he definitely has the Internet Marketing Hype Meter turned all the way up to 11 ... Keep reading »
Well, to be more specific, the title tags are there but there's nothing in them. I thought it was just the homepage, but it appears to be every page on their site. Title tags are the single most important element of the page in terms of search engine performance, so they're really doing themselves a disservice. We used to have stuff like that happen all the time, though, so I understand. You don't notice the title tags very ... Keep reading »
Most of the blogging business models you read about sound great, but aren't actually grounded in reality. Yaro has one tonight that's worth a read, though. Check out How To Launch a Niche Blogging Business.
Today Aaron Wall has the best definition I've seen yet of what constitutes search engine spam. It's simple, clean and true. We should all apply it to our sites.
Monday, Frank Schilling coined the term Ballmerfreude -- taking pleasure from Steve Ballmer's misfortune. I shared that post from within Google Reader, so it shows up on my sidebar now. Well, an unintended side-effect of that is that I'm now the only site that ranks for that term right now in both Google and MSN, while Frank is the only one who ranks for it in Ask. (Strangely, Yahoo still doesn't have any ... Keep reading »
On some of my blogs, trackback spam has now become rampant. Not content to simply spam the comments, spammers are now scraping content from the RSS feed, posting it to spam blogs (splogs), and sending a trackback to the violated site in order to pick up a free link. The problem is that you wouldn't realize it was spam in most cases. On the surface, it looks pretty legit. Why is trackback spam a problem? Well, aside from the ... Keep reading »
Of course, that's not because I have budged from my PageRank of 4, but because ProBlogger.net, CopyBlogger, John Chow, and Blog Herald have all been chopped to a PR 4 -- apparently for selling links. Again, I'm not taking a stand on it one way or another, but if this doesn't convince you to stop selling text links, you must be earning a ton.
When trying to drive traffic to your site, bloggers are your best friends. Not only can they drive some great traffic with just a mention on their site, but when they link to you search engines take notice. Right now, nothing beats a good link from a blog. So how do you get them to mention your site? Get Their Attention If you've got a great site, this might be all you have to ... Keep reading »
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