V O A S I

New Way to Track Ads on your Competitors

2008-06-06T20:42:00.000-07:00

I was just waiting for the day someone did this. AdsSpy.com has starting charging customers to keep track of mini ad networks by publishers. Here are a few reasons why you'd want to sign up:

See Made-For-AdSense-sites networks.
Analyze different ways of ads placing.
Watch for you competitors in seo and Adsense arbitration.
Identify sites owners.

I've done my fair share of adsense sites and arbitration. This just reminds us that having multiple accounts is always a good way to go. As the mantra states: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".

...noted.

Website for Sale: SpywareBlockingSite.com

2008-05-27T20:03:00.001-07:00

If you'd like to buy this domain and site, with all unique content, go here: http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/37070

Thanks!

Coolest 404 page EVER!

2008-04-14T16:22:00.000-07:00

I found this via the Warrior forum: Coolest 404 page.

WOW... I really need to re-evaluate how much time I put into my 404 pages.

Digg it here...please!

The thing about April Fool's Day

2008-04-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

It's probably the only day out of the entire year I don't up Google reader. What's the point...it's all BS :)

Video Results Below PPC

2008-02-28T16:26:00.000-08:00

I was doing a search for "Quit Smoking" (no, I don't smoke) and I noticed that Google is now placing video and news results underneath that gigantic space they've never utilized below the PPC ads.

My question - Is this a substitute for placing News and Video results within the SERPs (universal search)? This would keep this type of content below the fold, which I don't think Google wants to do. What are your thoughts?

Here's a screenshot:

**UPDATE: I did a few more searches and noticed Google is importing all their Universal Search verticals onto the right. The 3 components I see going there is: Video, News and Local. This is really going to free the clicks above the fold on the organic side (I know, it's all organic).

Future of Your Google Rankings: Saving Searches

2008-01-29T10:26:00.000-08:00

I was browsing MotorTrend today and noticed in the right hand column they have a little box, which is below:

When you click on that link, you get taken here. I think we're seeing a glimpse into what SEO could be like in 5-10 years.

As Google increases grabbing our personal data to provide more and more personalized search results, SEO's are going to find alternative ways for people to subscribe to the content and save the content directly with Google, making the information "credible". The more personal saves, or "subscribers" you have to your content, the higher you'll end up in the SERPs. Maybe, just maybe, they're already starting to integrate this data into the Universal platform (which I think they already are with the "Searches Related to:" section).

On the other hand, Motortrend might be wanting their visitors just to subscribe to their content so they'll continually come back, resulting in more pageviews and ad revenue.

I think we can all take a page out of MotorTrend's methods and start providing a way for our visitors to subscribe to our content directly with Google, outside of Feedburner. This type of ranking benefit will take time for growth, in which case I'd get started NOW! What if you knew links were going to be so important in 1995? You would've started gathering all the links you could so you could be ahead of the curve. I think MotorTrend is showing us we have that opportunity now.

PS - I can already see this as a way for spammer's to manipulate; creating fake accounts and subscribing to their own MARKOV pages.

Underground Links - Providing help to helpless SEO's

2008-01-20T21:06:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, Google has decided to really start tackling this "problem" of websites selling text links to monetize their site. Google has lowered the PR of tons of sites they may or may not be selling text links. Other companies have voiced their opinion about links going underground.

I've been thinking of starting a text link service, offering text links that are underground. Text Link Brokers have a good thing going on - but unfortunately - they're just not enough. We need more companies like TLB; keeping the links underground and out of site from Google. TLA isn't helping that much. I contacted a dozen other text links "brokers" and they all weren't that great either. I had one text link company send me their entire database of sites in an excel sheet. I couldn't believe it.

It's going to be a long while before Google starts really pushing their algorithm away from a link based ranking model, if ever. They're trying their best, grabbing personal data and buying up other online properties to see what you're all about, hoping to make the elusive "perfect SERP", which in my opinion, is not close.

As for starting this new venture, I think this could be an excellent niche catering specifically to SEO companies.

I love SEO..I really do!

2008-01-15T20:22:00.000-08:00

You know, this industry has always fascinated me. I really do love SEO and everything it comes with. Its a great feeling to know that you get to do something you love to do. I love working with clients, building their website into a selling machine - making them huge amounts of money - because of the rankings my company has achieved for them.

A couple of nights ago, I told my roommate's girlfriend I'd help her with their website. They have a website selling custom sashes, which is a great idea and these girls are full of them. They didn't have any analytics, so I got them hooked up with Google Analytics. They didn't do any keyword research, so I did some via Keyword Discovery. They didn't have optimized pages, so I optimized, based upon the keyword research, as well as create more pages to target 2nd and 3rd tier keywords.

THE RESULT...

They're already starting to rank. I love it. They made a sale today - I'm not sure if it was because of me, but helping people grow their business never gets old.

I hope in the future, as my personal wealth increases, I'm really able to focus on that. Providing more services and products that really help people. I'd love to work more with the SMB community more. A lot of those people, unfortunately, have no clue about "internet marketing" and what they're missing out on. Forget the classic YellowPages book - get some good 'ol website optimization and start making GOOD money. :)

Link Building Tactic #1: Give to Get

2008-01-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

New Year...new posts. I thought I'd start giving away decent tactics to get links. Link building is one of the hardest parts of building up your SEO "portfolio" to Google, Yahoo and MSN. I've decided to give a little more this year. Here we go:

Tactic #1: Article Distribution
Now, you may be thinking of article directories like EzineArticles.com or ArticleDashboard.com. Those are good places to submit articles to, but that's not what I'm talking about. Here's the process.

Hire a writer. You can find someone who will do articles at 0.01 a word. They're all over the place.
Have them write 10-15 articles for you. They don't have to "I graduated from Harvard with an English degree" article, but at minimum legible.
Go to places like DigitalPoint and give away this content in the freebies forum
When giving away these articles, make sure you let them know that they must keep your link on the article. They're getting a completely fresh article piece on the net - so no duplicant conent and all you ask in return is that you keep the link that's in the content.

They'll have no problem with putting your link up for a piece of content they can slap some adsense on. And for $4-$10 per article, you're getting one-way links on nice, on-topic sites (at least, that's what you're looking for). Make sure you hold out until you find sites that fit within your niche. No need to put your cat articles on an HD-DVD site with links back to your cat site.

The CONs to this tactic is you can't really monitor them and if they do decide to remove your link, you're kinda SOL. Having said that, you could publically humiliate them within the forum, completely ruining their credibility and they're probably add it back - if it comes to that. So at worst, you may lose a couple of bucks.

Stay tuned for our next Link Building Tactic!

Christmas Present for David Airey...LINKS!

2007-12-25T12:00:00.000-08:00

If you haven't read about the misfortune to David Airey, read this post. In a nutshell, someone hacked into his Gmail account, stole password information pertaining to his .com and transferred his DavidAirey.com into their possession. He's now had to change his domain to the co.uk version, where he doesn't have nearly has many incoming links has he does with the .com version.

.com incoming links: 36,000
co.uk incoming links: 1,500

In the spirit of Christmas and giving, let's give David a link. He might not get his website back and he's lost a lot of Google juice because of this hacker.

I know I've read David's posts and he's always providing excellent content.

So, if you have a website, link to David's new blog. You can use the following anchor text below...I know he'd appreciate it! :)

Anchor Text: Logo Designer
URL: http://www.davidairey.co.uk/

Like this: Logo Designer

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

PS - Let's promote this - Sphinn this if you haven't already. I'm sure a little Stumbling wouldn't be bad either. :)

StumbleUpon Traffic - I Like these Numbers!

2007-11-28T14:35:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a few social media campaigns for clients and our own personal network of sites. I have to say, I'm enjoying the traffic spikes coming from Stumbleupon. Here's a snapshot of a client's analytics:

As a result of a good article piece, someone decided to put it on Reddit too, which resulted in a nice little bonus.

I did 2 other StumbleUpon campaigns yesterday too, here are those screens:

The image above, with the 2,271 visitors, is still climbing. I'll probably get 4k with that campaign. The 777 visitors site wasn't as successful, but still, having 777 visitors isn't bad! ;)

You can find hoards of people pushing their "Stumbling service" on the various forums. This is proof that it works and will continue to work, as long as people to use these social networking sites.

The traffic is easy enough to get, but what do you do when you get them to your site? That's the real money making question. Here's a few answers:

Have your RSS Feed ready. Place it above the fold and prominent. Have eye-catching graphics to get visitors to click on your RSS feeds.
Javascript Pop-Up. Its a very good idea to capture email addresses. As they say, "Money's in the List". Offer some type of incentive to give away that precious email address. A lot of the time, the "offer" doesn't even need to be that great, just something the visitor receives for free is sufficient.
Forms. If you're selling a service and lead generation is your biz, then make sure your forms are above the fold and easy to get to. Don't burden your social users with filling out 10 fields, just get the bare minimum; an easy in-out. Try sticking to 2-3 fields (Name, Email, Phone - something to that effect).

There are other things you should do with that traffic, but I'm already spending too much time on this post and not working on stuff, like PPC Arbitrage (upcoming post).

As I've always said, to clients, friend and peers - don't always take what I write, you read in forums or anywhere else at full value. Do your own testing/tracking and see if what people are saying is actually true. A lot of the time, you'll find interesting elements people aren't sharing.

5 Ideas for your Next Blog Post

2007-11-16T13:12:00.000-08:00

I can't think of anything to write about!

Does that ever cross your mind? If you're been writing at one particular blog for any given length, you'll understand that it can be hard to come up with new ideas for writing new entries into your blog. There are only so many activities throughout the day that spark an idea and sometimes, the sparks just don't fly.

I've created a list of different areas and ideas to get the creative juices flowing. We know you have the talent and flair to write, now you just need a little direction...sometimes.

1. Forums
Forums provide a wealth of information. Find out what others are talking about within your topic. If there is a heated debate, write a post about it. Is there a question that no one in the forum has answered, answer it on your blog and then post a link to it in the forum. Here's a list of forum search engines:
- http://www.boardtracker.com
- http://www.omgili.com
- http://boardreader.com

2. Blogosphere
Networking with other bloggers and seeing what they're talking about is an excellent way to bring the discussion to your post. Doing a write up of other blogs within your niche is always timely. Maybe they're featuring a product/service you've never heard about. Let your readers know about it (don't forget common courtesy and credit the source). Here are a few other blog search engines:
- http://blogsearch.google.com
- http://www.icerocket.com
- http://www.technorati.com

3. Yahoo/MSN Answers
Blogs are a lot of the time answering questions. People will be asking specific questions in Google/Yahoo! and will come to your blog and find the answer. Yahoo and MSN provide a service where people ask questions. Can't think of anything to write? Do a quick search on your topic and answer a question on your blog. If one person is looking for an answer, there will be more looking for that same answer. These 2 places are great for brainstorming new ideas:
- http://answers.yahoo.com
- http://qna.live.com

4. News
Find out what's happening in your niche by doing a few news searches. Always are good posts, especially the fresher the content is. If you can be "first to the scene" with your post, even better. Your visitors are looking for you to be the authority on your topic, so provide them with the most up-to-date news available to you. Here are a couple of places to gather news:
- http://news.google.com
- http://news.yahoo.com

5. Press Releases
One of the best places to get new news on your topic is press release websites. Usually business owners will send out a PR to let everyone know of a new product or service launch. Why not let everyone know. Most of your readers will never visit these PR websites, so it's your job to let them know what's going on. Here are a few places to gather PR's:
- www.prweb.com
- http://www.prnewswire.com
- http://www.24-7pressrelease.com

Lorelle has a list of hundreds of places to find content for you blog posts. In short, if you're short ideas, there are plenty of places to get both sides of your brain moving.

My New Blog Network

2007-11-15T11:56:00.000-08:00

My posts are know becoming every month now! I know, I don't want to become THAT person. Hopefully, I'll have more time to post on cool stuff.

Speaking of cool stuff, I've really started vamping up my blog network. This network is 2 years in the making. I've been planning it for a while and just recently have I had a chance to really start to dedicate some time and effort into it. I've got a few ideas for company names, but here's a list of sites we've launched the network with:

YogaInformer.com
GreatFelines.com
CruiseShipsSite.com
WebsiteSecurityInformer.com
WeddingInformer.com
HostingBat.com
MakeUpJournal.com
KnivesJournal.com
WeightReductionCoach.com
PinDropCellPhones.com

If you'd like to write at any one of the blogs listed above, shoot me an email and I'll set you up. We have a compensation plan in place, so you won't be blogging for nothing. :)

We plan on launching 2-3 new blogs a month in various sectors. It will be a challenge, but fun none-the-less. I really want this network to have a connection with its readers. Most of the time, you visit blogs and you never see the face of the people writing the posts. With this network, I hope to break down that barrier and let people see our bloggers.

Ta ta for now!

Been scammed by an SEO company? Post at SEO Rip Off

2007-10-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

I was browsing through a few forums and I came across this site - SEORipOff.com. Reminds me a little bit about RipOffReport.com, but towards the SEO community.

I hope more and more people post here. It doesn't look like there are any reports yet - which I know there are a ton of people who could post there. I hear about it all the time, companies and individuals who've been scammed with SEO services, paying $XXXX every month and never received any type of ROI.

New Story at SEM Blog

2007-10-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

I posted a new blog about Word of Mouth Marketing. If you'd like to Sphinn it, that would be very nice of you. :)

Secrets revealed in Matt Cutts Interview

2007-10-08T10:43:00.001-07:00

This was an excellent interview by Eric Enge. Lots of in-depth answers about outbound linking, redirects, indexing, hidden text and signals of quality.

Here's a quote for Matt Cutts that I thought was interesting about reputation and analysis of quality signals:

I would convey Google's basic position as that we are open to any signals that could potentially improve quality. If someone walked up to me and said, the phase of the moon correlates very well with the site being high quality, I wouldn't rule it out, I wouldn't take it off the table, I would do the analysis and look at it.

The interview of Matt Cutts is located at Stone Temple Consulting.

Subvert and Profit Founder has Passed Away

2007-10-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

That was a little bit of a shocker this morning as I was going through emails:

With deep sadness, the subvertandprofit.com team brings you news of a tragic accident last month that took the life of a subvertprofit.com founder. The past weeks have been very difficult for family, friends and fellow crowdsourcing marketers. The sudden sense of personal shock and grief contrasted so starkly with the euphoria and vibrance associated with the innovative expansion that has been underway here at subvertandprofit.com

Nonetheless, we must apologize for the resultant affects that, until now, have given us pause in accepting your content and votes. As we have celebrated the life of one of our brilliant undercover marketing pioneers, we are uplifted to know of your support and are at your service to assist you in high-rank placements and content voting assignments.

My regards and wishes pass to their family.

Signed up with Mochila

2007-09-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

I just had one of the reps call me to sign up with Mochila. I found out about them from a comment on a blog I was reading (which I can't remember at the moment). Its a very interesting business model they have - selling content as advertising.

I've been reading about other major players in the publishing world sign up with Mochila as a distributor, so the opportunity seems vast.

I'll be publishing content through the Mochila network on a handful of my sites and see how it does. I don't really monetize my sites currently, so this will be an interesting trial.

Link Building Tactics That Work

2007-08-31T13:18:00.001-07:00

I was reading Debra Mastaler's blog and it struck a cord with regards to link building. She talks about strategically placed blog comments that, can be construed as comment spam.

I do a ton of different tactics to get client (and our own ventures) sites inbound links. And in reality, its not that difficult to do so.

THE PROCESS:
Go through your keywords you're wishing to rank for. Make it a tight list of about 5-10 keywords. Go to Google, Yahoo! and MSN and type in your keywords. Go through each page up to page 10 and see what kind of results you get. Of course, you'll get forums, blogs, community sites, social sites and other independent sites, including competitors.

Blogs and Forums: When you run across these within the SERPs, go ahead and create a profile or make a post. I never even think twice about "spamming" or if its inappropriate, its marketing and I'm spreading their brand awareness, plus a little link juice back to the client site. Like in Debra's post, ALWAYS take the time and write a compelling response to the forum topic or the blog post. Make it informative and rich. Don't take 2 seconds that says "Great post, I like "Keyword" too!". Take the time and write something others can read, relate to or think about.

Going through the SERPs, you'll also find sites that might have a way to advertise. In my experience, don't send an email. A LOT of the time, these advertisement forms either don't work or go no where. And emailing the email that is listed on the site always comes back. So, what should you do? Call them. Go to WHOIS.sc (I know, its owned by domaintools, its just easier) and find out who owns the site. Call 'em up and see what they can offer you. Talking to an actual human being goes a long distance in the online world. In a lot of cases, they own other sites that may compliment the site you're trying to advertise on, which they might throw in a deal if you advertise on a couple sites.

By going through the SERPs of the top 3 search engines, you'll get a decent amount of targeted incoming links to the site. Some will have good anchor text, some might be just the URL of the site your advertising and some might just be the company name. All, in which, is fine because

a) Having a variety of anchor text is the right path to a natural looking link structure
b) Achieving targeted, industry-related incoming links is the right path to top rankings

There are a ton of other tactics that I use, but when starting with a new client or website, this is the first set of steps I follow to get a decent amount of incoming links. And most of the time, the site is ranking excellent for 1st and 2nd tier keywords.

Scoreboard Media

2007-08-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

I have to say, I thoroughly enjoy reading the posts over at Scoreboard Media. I spent the last 45 minutes going through awesome posts about Internet Billionaires, Opportunities, Baseball Analogies and SEO Consulting. All great posts and really made me think about my own personal investments in ventures outside of my company.

If you haven't gone there, do it, put it in your blog reader and hold tight.

My First Digg - Test Study

2007-08-27T16:14:00.000-07:00

I've been really interesting in doing more and more testing with the social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon and I finally had some time last week to do a test. Here's the process and results:

Goal
To get on the homepage of Digg for our article.

Process
We used a 3rd party to help with the digging. The site is pretty good (I will not be giving out the company) and did everything they said they would do and more. It was a great investment. But using the 3rd party for diggs wasn't the only portion that made the campaign. We had to make sure we had a reasonable article to submit. I had my content developer write a piece about the "Top XX in History" with pictures and videos. It was a good piece, a little short for my liking, but good nonetheless.

Result
We did not achieve homepage status, but we did get on the frontpage of the video page. That resulted in about 10,000 uniques for the day. Also resulted in about 15 new links to that individual page.

Conclusion

It was an interesting test. I don't think the piece was as good as it could have been and since my content developer hadn't worked on a topic like this, it wasn't as "tight" as I would have wanted it. I have a couple other ideas for other clients and I'll be trying all of them in the future.

My biggest quip with using Digg or Stumble is that you don't get links that are in the same industry, especially for manufacturers or commercial clients. If we get on the homepage of Digg because of funky car images for a used car client, would they get a lot of links from car-related websites? More then likely not. On the other hand, a one-way link is a one-way link and you can never have too many of those, off-topic or not.

I plan on gaming StumbleUpon and seeing what type of traffic levels come from that. I'll also be doing more Digg projects to see if I can get a few posts to the homepage.

Domainer - Who me?! A quick 5-minute study

2007-08-22T13:27:00.001-07:00

This morning, I was going through my normal route of blogs, headlines and SEO news when I stumbled upon Frank Schilling's speech on domaining. Andy has been talking about it for the last few months and I'd become more and more interested, but to be honest, I thought that I was a little late to the breakfast table.

Well...I might just be wrong.

THE PROCESS
After watching the hour speech from Frank, I did a little digging, just to "see" what's available. I pulled up Keyword Discovery, punched in a couple one work, very broad keywords and drilled down on the first page of keyword and even the 2nd page. Most of the results were in the range of 5-10K monthly unique visitors. I started plugging the 2-word and 3-word keywords into the address bar and just adding a .com to the end of them. If they didn't resolve to a page, I then plugged whois.sc/ in front of it to see if it was available.

WHAT I FOUND
After about 30-40 minutes of searching, I purchased: MacadamiaNutPie.com. Now, this domain might not get too much unique traffic, but it will more then likely get enough traffic to pay for itself.

One of the interesting things Frank talked about was talking his domains and building them out into actual business. That intrigued me a little bit. I've always thought about it, and I'm more use to searching through various back corners of the web to find sites that have been online for a while, have a decent amount of trust and links and them building them out into a large brand online. But buying a domain that generates a little bit of targeted type-in traffic from the get-go is something that never "clicked".

Now that I own MacadamiaNutPie.com, should I sell Macadamia Nut Pies from this website? Should I sell advertising to other pie companies at a premium? Or should I hold onto this domain and see if I can get a few thousand to a pie company that wants the domain? We'll see. :)

I'm going to be on the hunt the next few weeks for domains that not only get type-in traffic (or at least the possibility of it), but also domains that can be build into companies serving a specific niche.

SEO Questions? Let me answer them

2007-07-31T15:37:00.000-07:00

If you have any SEO questions or just general web questions, please feel free to send me an email at amaywald [@] gmail.com. I'd like to start answering your pressing questions on SEO, usability, link building, analytics and anything else your little heart desires.

On that note, I'm trying to cover a few article topics. If you have any idea for SEO topics, please send them my way and I'll try to write a topic about them.

New Day - $30k Challenge

2007-07-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

I found this over at the Warrior Forum. I fellow Warrior is doing a $30k Challenge - 30 days to $30k. This is great stuff. I always enjoy watching these challenges. Not only are the interesting to watch, but they usually provide a great deal of insight to making that much money in a short period of time.

The one thing you have to remember with these challenges, is that the person putting it on is trying to make a lot of money in a short amount of time, which is fine, but not a sustainable business plan. Most of the time, its a report or something easy to do. Sell something for $7 bucks and achieve your goal, but is that goal a monthly goal? Can you do this every month? Is this a product/service people will need 5, 10, 15 years down the road? And at the end of the day, will it pay the bills? If yes, then continue your success.

When setting up these goals and achieving them, try to achieve $30k residually. Make a product/service that people need over and over again. If you could show how you made $30k every month, starting new businesses, that would be a great experiment.

This goes back to the $15k challenge that Dan Raine started a while back. That was a great challenge, as he's very much into starting businesses that last the test of time.

Remember, making money on the internet isn't really that hard, but setting up businesses that compound residually every month is the real goal you should be setting for yourself.

Where's your $40k a year blog?

2007-07-02T11:04:00.001-07:00

Want a couple of new ways to monetize your website/blog? Search Engine Journal interviewed Ken Savage who has a blog on diabetes and is raking it in.

Since launching a couple blogs in various niches, I think this is an excellent post to remind me that AuctionAds seem to work. I still haven't given them a try, but I have a couple other sites that are non-blogs, which would be perfect for using AuctionAds. AA is great for sites that are hard to monetize with Adsense. I have a few of those.

On a side note, I went to Ken's blog and his post with the old lady fight/300 spoof was HILARIOUS! I haven't laughed out load like that in a little while.