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Posted by Max Miroff | 5 Comments »

Posted by Max Miroff | 17 Comments »

Does it matter? In short: yes

How often you should post on your blog is often a hotly debated topic. Whether you post weekly (lazy!), every few days (me), daily (me with ideas), or multiple times a day (HOW?!?!?!), though, it’s clear that it does have an effect on traffic.

WHY?
There are three main ways in which blog post frequency affects traffic:

• More posts = more indexed pages = more search engine visitors = more pageviews (this also applies to blogging consistency)
• More posts = more content for readers to absorb = more pageviews.
• More posts = more resources for the reader = more likely they’ll return to the site/link to you = more pageviews/publicity

All of these seem to show this seems to point to one thing: the more you post, the more traffic you’ll generally get. In most cases, this is true - you just have to make sure your content doesn’t suck and your readers aren’t getting overwhelmed if you put out more than one post per day (this is why I don’t read Problogger).

SO, IN CONCLUSION…
Posting on your blog more often generally leads to more traffic. Can you still have a successful blog and post once a week? Yes. Will it be harder than if you posted daily? Generally. Just remember that frequent posts should take a backseat to post quality and marketing - you can be successful with the latter two but expecting visitors just because you crank out a bunch of generic, boring posts every day is folly.

Posted by Max Miroff | 17 Comments »

Article marketing is one of the many ways to send traffic and backlinks towards your site. Although it’s more time-consuming than methods like high pagerank dofollow blog commenting, blog carnivals, and forum marketing, it still yields results.

Google, of course, hates duplicate content and thus probably views articles reposted on different sites with contempt. Unless you intend only to submit your article to a single directory (why even go through the effort?), your poor content might suffer!

Google actually doesn’t penalize for duplicate content on different domains in most cases - props goes to Internet Marketing Strategies for pointing that out (note to self: research topics before posting about them. Not that I don’t already do that, of course. Wink wink. Nudge nudge). Google simply dislikes duplicate content on the same site (i.e. the normal and printer versions of an article), so submitting the same article to various directories should be fine. There are other uses for this trick to make money blogging, though, so don’t fret.

GETTING AROUND THE PROBLEM
Ironically, a simple way to get rid of duplicate content and bypass Google’s stringent content policies is with Google itself. Its translation tool, to be exact.

Basically, just plug in your text and translate it a few times. For example, your pattern could go something like English -> Spanish -> French -> Russian -> German -> English. At the end of this chain, you’ll get a whole new article with some nice synonyms and different phrases used. Just make sure to proofread the article, or else “One day, Roberto the Magician decided to pull a rabbit out of his magical hat at a birthday party.” can turn into “One day, Roberto, a magician decided to send a rabbit from his hat magic child to a birthday celebration.”

Every new combination results in a whole new article, and it shouldn’t be too hard to whip up a script that does this automatically due to Google’s lack of a captcha, creating a simple way to spin out hundreds of different and often nonsensical articles.

Posted by Max Miroff | 17 Comments »

Which of the above posts would you rather read (assuming you spoke Lorem Ipsum)? If you picked the one on the left, then log off of your computer and go read a book. War & Peace by Tolstoy could be a good choice for you.

SHOCKING POSTING ADVICE
Contrary to popular belief, the length of your post does not determine how good your content is. No, really, I’m not kidding! While it might have made you look smarter in elementary school (and probably bored your teachers into giving you A’s), writing long essays is generally not a good blogging technique unless you’re in the niche of… uh… writing long essays.

ITS A FACT: LONG POSTS MAKE PEOPLE LEAVE
Think about it this way - walking up a mountain or a hill. A small knoll takes less effort to conquer than a mountain. Basically, you can:

• Write concisely in an easily digestible format to attract readers.

OR

• Drag on and on and on and on and on (repeat ad infinitum) to scare most away.

BUT WHAT IF I HAVE A LOT TO SAY?
There are few acceptable times and ways to write a long post. If you’re some affiliate marketing genius who has a brilliant idea that has never been discussed before and for some odd reason you want to saturate your market share your money making technique, THEN you should write a long post (right after giving me the idea first ). Even if you do that, break the post into segments or even just make a series of posts - make it bearable to read. If you are appealing to a certain niche audience that requires lots of information (i.e. historians, lawyers, med students, etc.), then you should write long posts.

JUST KEEP THIS IN MIND WHEN BLOGGING…
Make it readable. Make it fun. Make it entertaining. Make it worthwhile. Make it informative. Make it concise. Make it poignant. Make it sticky. Most of all, make it worthy of your readers time.

Posted by Max Miroff | 14 Comments »

Posted by Max Miroff | 12 Comments »

Ever wondered how those self-proclaimed internet marketing gurus make hundreds of thousands of dollars and post screenshots of their success? Of course you have - that’s probably one of the main reasons people get into the field of making money online. Now, after careful research and study, I’ve figured out just how they do it. Here’s a screenshot of one of my many successful affiliate accounts:

How did I do it? It was quite simple, actually; just copy/paste the following into your URL bar:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Once you’ve done that, select the fields that you’d like to change for your fake screenshot and type in your “earnings” - no Photoshop required

Props to Phil for the code and idea.

Posted by Max Miroff | 23 Comments »

Thinking of a great keyword, doing research on it, and figuring out just how many searches it gets daily is pretty ugly annoying. The free tools out there, while commendable, aren’t as good as the paid ones, and as for those… well, you have to pay for them.

Enter NicheFree - a blog that does all the work for you.

WHAT IS NICHEFREE?
NicheFree is a fairly new website that gives various niche ideas (complete with a background of the keywords used, how many times they’re searched, and some market predictions) as well as niche marketing tips and resources. It is in the niche-about-niches, much like Blog Badly is a blog about blogging. This could prove successful for the webmaster of the blog, Jerry, because every aspiring online entrepreneur needs a niche and there aren’t many blogs that focus solely on free niche ideas.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Even though it only has three posts at the moment, NicheFree looks very professional for a new blog. It has a spiffy looking theme, nice logo, and a clear idea of what it’s about. Still, a few improvements could be made:

• Create a clear RSS subscription section on the right. Currently, there’s a tiny button on the top right that’s a pain to find - get a noticeable RSS button that takes up more space and perhaps put that above the Youtube video that is currently there. An e-mail subscription option wouldn’t hurt either.
• Remove the “Pages” from the sidebar - it’s redundant. You already list all of your pages in your header.
• Remove the social bookmarking icons. Pretty much no one uses the ones on the blog - if they really want to submit a post, they’ll generally do it manually. Still, if you’re insistent on keeping them, only have one set - there are, again, redundancy issues when you have both there. Make sure that they’re nofollow links as well - if you keep the bottom right ones dofollow, you’ll have 40+ front-page outbound links by the time you hit ten posts.

ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT - BUT HOW’S THE CONTENT?
The subject matter of NicheFree is amazingly useful and straightforward. It’s easy to just glance over it and digest these important points:

• the niche he’s talking about
• some background info on the niche
• niche keywords
• monthly searches
• competition

NicheFree’s current format keeps it simple, but some points need to be clarified. For example, what exactly does “***can be a single niche market***” mean? Are the searches displayed daily or monthly? Are competing website the ones bidding on the keyword or the ones trying to rank for the keyword? Some more information could be added as well, like additional resources for the keyword (a link to it’s Google Trends page, for example), to make the posts even more detailed than they already are.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Pros

• Great idea for a blog
• Amazingly useful for webmasters
• Well optimized for SEO at the moment
• Excellent theme
• A general format to each post

Cons

• Needs a better RSS button
• Clarification issues
• Could use more information in it’s posts.

Overall, NicheFree has the potential to be quite a useful source of information for webmasters. The only major problem that I can foresee is that it gets so many readers that the niches become useless right after they are posted because so many people would go after them. No, seriously. I guess Jerry will just have to keep the best for himself.

And he could always share some with me. I did write this entire post about his blog, after all.

Posted by Max Miroff | 9 Comments »

It’s always interesting for me to read the blogs of people my age (14, if you didn’t already know), and Money Makin Guru is no exception. It’s a blog about a twelve year old making money online and all that jazz that comes along with it - SEO, web design, etc. Now, before you go about dismissing that as a “JOHN CHOW CLONEZ!!!11oneoneeleven,” it’s not that bad. Zach’s not a food blogger, for Gods sake!

NOT A CLONE?
Well, for one, Zach’s honest. He doesn’t pretend to get hundreds of thousands of hits and have a truckload of cash. Of course, he wishes he had these things coming in (don’t we all) but he doesn’t lie. Another problem with most MMO blogs is that they are far too vague to get any knowledge out of them. Zach writes in absolutes which take you step by step through his various tips. While the ideas on Money Makin Guru aren’t as innovative or well-written (we’ll get into that later) as some of the advice I’ve read on other blogs, most aren’t generic. I’ve yet to see a “how u maek moneyz with ADSNSE” post on his blog, at least, which makes Money Makin Guru better than all of the MMO blogs that process Shoemoney through their rewriting machine and come out with regurgitated crap.

THEN AGAIN…
One of the things I really hate is when bloggers use their age as a marketing tool. Zach does this as well. Sure, you’re twelve, but is your content any good?

THE ANSWER
One problem plagues Zach that I’ve seen affect most young bloggers - he’s unprofessional. His posts have some grammatical and spelling errors in them (one of his post titles is, “So You Think Your Creative?”) and he often writes very informal, conversational posts that talk about things like which logo design his viewers most like and if this banner ad is better than the other. You’d be hard pressed to find this kind of stuff on Blog Badly, mostly because I think you guys probably don’t care about it - no matter how much you love me - and I find it a bit odd that other bloggers would do this kind of stuff. I would personally just ask a few friends on an instant messenger or Twitter if I needed feedback rather than “wasting” a post. Some refinement in this casual-ness would be a welcome addition to Money Makin Guru.

A FEW MORE COMMENTS

• Currently, Zach brands Money Makin Guru as, well, “Money Makin Guru.” This can be confusing because rather than typing in “moneymakinguru.com” in their browsers, they could type in “moneymakingguru.com.” Money Makin Guru should become Money Makin’ Guru - the apostrophe helps signify that the “g” has been taken off the end.
• The permalink structure on Money Makin Guru isn’t optimized. Zach uses “/%year/%month/%day/%posttitle” instead of “/%postcategory/%posttitle”.
• Money Makin Guru should use the All-In-One SEO program to switch around its titles. Currently, the homepage title is “moneymakinguru.com” - you’re not trying to rank for your website name, right?
• Add an “About” page! Tell your readers about yourself! Seriously, without an “About” page a blogger is no better than a creepy 41 year old that lives in his mom’s basement. That’s not who you are, Zach. Right?

IN SUMMATION…
Refinement is the key word here. Refined posting styles and on-site optimization would do wonders for Money Makin Guru. Zach’s got potential and time, and with some more finesse he can really become what his title implies.

Posted by Max Miroff | 24 Comments »

Every bloggers dream is to get an article on the front page of huge bookmarking sites and reap the rewards of having your servers crash due to the massive amount of visitors you’ll receive. Since it is quite hard to game social bookmarking sites due to their fancy schmancy algorithms and community participation, it’s not an event that can be forced. There are, of course, a few ways to nudge the masses to your favor - with a certain style and subject of writing, you can hugely improve your chances of reaching that front page and building some buzz and backlinks for your blog.

GET INSPIRED
The easiest way to get ideas for a post topic is to simply look at the front page of the bookmarking site you want to get popular on. Digg around a bit in the categories until you’ve Reddit all (puntastic!). If one of the top articles is about a bizarre animal, do some research about another peculiar being and write about that. I did this once for another blog and got a hefty number of views (and a nice sum of money as well). Don’t be afraid to steal borrow ideas.

PICK A FORMAT
Social media users don’t want long, drawn-out articles. They want something digestible and easy on the eyes. Fill your writing with loads of pictures, bullet points, humor, and numbered lists. Great examples of viral content can be found at Cracked’s “Top #” lists.

WRITE
The self-explanatory part. Just follow your format and your topic and you’ll (hopefully) soon have a ready viral article!

PUBLISH
Put your post up on your blog and wait. It’s best not to submit your post yourself unless you’re an extreme power user and you’re SURE you won’t get penalized from the bookmarking sites. Self-submission gets your stumbles devalued at Stumbleupon and makes Digg-ers hate you. Twitter your new post and hint that you’re trying to make it viral. Contact other webmasters in your niche and tell them to check it out. This should get the ball rolling.

THE CATCH
You can’t force social media popularity. After all, it’s SOCIAL - and there is no “I” in soci-

Uh. Well, there is. Regardless, gaming these sites =/= easy. There’s only so much you can do before throwing your content to the masses and hoping that someone sees how good it us.

Posted by Max Miroff | 15 Comments »