Archive for April, 2007
HarpzOn is for sale. Sort Of
Wow. Mitch from HarpzOn.com just called it quits and is selling off his domain.
Mitch was one of the more interesting new entrants into (pro) blogging advice club with a novel and interesting idea of how to get to the top.
In addition to relying on good content, word of mouth and traditional promotion tactics, he decided to throw a pile of money at the problem, targeting top bloggers in his market segment for paid review of his blog.
Well, unlike many of us, Mitch is already successful online entrepreneur, so he could afford it. And his tactics appeared to be working. He had good content. He’s got a quite a few links from a number of highly respected bloggers.
All of which helped Mitch attract a bunch of subscribers to his feed and mailing list and get to the level of about 1000 visitors per day, in a few weeks. And his became one of more interesting daily feeds in my feedreader.
So it’s a pity to see Mitch go. If he is really going, that is.
Long tail keyword posts for traffic and rankings
One of the most common pieces of advice for bloggers goes like this:
- Find Long Tail (rarely used, uncompetitive) keywords through which new readers get to your blog in search engines.
- Write more posts using these keywords, to improve your rankings and get more readers
I may be missing something, but I really don’t understand how this can work/help?
Long tail keywords are called that way for a cause. Almost nobody uses them. And if nobody searches for them, how will they bring new readers to my blog?
OK, you may say. Just use a lot of them, post a lot and if each LT keyword will bring a reader a week, soon you’ll be looking at a steady stream of new visitors from search engines.
But I already do that with every post. And you do that too. Every post on every blog is filled with the combinations of words that someone somewhere looking for something might use someday.
BTJ -Blog Tips in Jokes – About the way things should be done
There were 5 monkeys in the cage. The researcher have hung a bunch of bananas on the ceiling and placed a ladder underneath.
One of the monkeys saw the banana and started getting up the ladder to get it. The researcher turned on the fire hose and knocked him down from the ladder, hosing all other monkeys with cold water as well.
After a while, another monkey decided to get the banana. He started getting up the ladder and was knocked off it again. All other monkeys got their share of cold water from the fire hose.
After a number of such unsuccessful attempts and cold showers, the monkeys stopped trying to get the bananas.
Then one monkey was replaced with a new one.
So, you have a brand new (make money blogging/online) blog?
Me too. And so does Darren Rowse, Shoemoney, Aaron Wall, Steve Pavlina and Eric Giguere. Think you can beat them? No? Think it’s too late to get into this game?
Then I have a secret for you. IT DOESN’T MATTER! It’s not about them and beating them. It’s about you and others like you and me.
Sure, the advice that the A Listers give us is great and there are tons of money making ideas there. But here’s the thing – the view from the top is very different then from the bottom.
They may think that they remember what’s it like at the start. And they may even remember many things correctly. But they also forgot a lot. The situation has changed strongly. And sometimes, the way they tell you about how they started and got there, can take you in the wrong direction. Don’t believe me?
Full Feed (plugin) for your WordPress 2.1 blog
I have always been strongly against partial feeds on the blogs I read.
Actually one of the main reasons I unsubscribe from many blogs is because they do not offer full feed, so I have to click through to their site to read every post. What’s the point of feeds then?
And I made sure to offer full feed to the readers of staska.net from the beginning. Or so I thought 
Yesterday I finally got to subscribing to my blog feed and saw that for the most of the posts on staska.net, only partial feed is available.
I always enable “Full Text” option in my blog administration panel. And it always was enough… Until WordPress 2.1 came out.
Turns out that one nasty feature was introduced with the latest release of WordPress. It now started truncating your feeds after the “more” tag. And since I often use this tag on my blog, all my longer posts were cut-off.
I know, WP 2.1 has a warning about this in their admin panel. But who reads these warnings after using software for more then a year?
Starting a blog. Goals and milestones
Every personal improvement expert will tell you that setting and achieving goals is a key to success. And if you are just getting in to blogging for money, or any other online money making venture, realistic and ambitious goal setting is a must.
But if you are just starting and haven’t done anything yet, how do you know what goals to set yourself? Saying that I want to be earning $10 a day, have 1000 daily visitors and 500 subscribers in a month is all good and well. But is it a goal or just a wish?
Text Link Ads on Individual Posts launches
It’s a bit later then some predicted but it’s here. Yesterday I have received an e-mail from Text Link Ads announcing their new program that will allow you to sell text links on your individual blog posts.
So far Text Link Ads have been great and reliable earner for me. And they are really good at selling my text links even on the blogs I did not update for more then 6 months. One such blog has had 2 links sold for $11 a month for the last 3 months (about $60 in profits by now). And it’s only PR4 site with 7 posts and 2-3 pageviews a day.
The only problem I had with Text Link Ads – my inventory on a best performing blog has sold out last month. And they do not give a lot of options to add additional inventory from the same site.
E.g. I have quite a few category pages with PR4 that might be interesting for advertisers. I have a few posts that have been Dugg and received tons of backlinks from lots of trusted sites, as a result. And I have a lot of posts that were linked by Engadget, Gizmodo and some other PR8 or PR7 sites.
BTIJ – Blog tips in jokes – About spelling
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Really. Don’t obsess about spelling too much. An odd spelling mistake here and there won’t lose you a lot of readers. Dull content will.
Use spell checker, double check your writing before posting, correct mistakes that readers will show you. But don’t let the thought that you are a bad speller interfere with you blogging.
On Page SEO: Title Tags and Internal Links
Ranking for important keywords in search engines is one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your blog. And ranking for many of them, that are not too competitive, is not as hard as you think. It’s even easier then I thought.
I was just checking my rankings in Google for some phrases and was really surprised. I am in the top spot (No.1) in Google for “Chitika RPU” and “double blog income” (at least from where I’m checking it).
And I’m on the first page (No.9) for “Chitika“.
Granted, “Chitika RPU” is not a popular term yet, but “Chitika” brings over 2M results in Google and “double blog income” brings over 1 million.
So how did I get there with my brand new blog that should be sitting in “Google sandbox” and ranking for nothing at all?
Pagerank update starting up?
Looks like Google Pagerank export is starting.
I just checked Livepagerank service for some of my blogs and there’s lots of Google datacenters showing PR0 for those sites that gained quite a few links since January. Some of the abandoned ones dropped from PR4 to PR1
Now if this theory is correct (lot’s of DCs with PR0 means that your PR will change. If you gained links then it’s going up) I’m in for some good news in April. Looks like John Chow‘s in for good news too 