Using Paid Directory Submissions 101

I've read a few posts where people ask me how come I have so many posts in the Hall of Fame. It is fairly simple. I follow the outline in my course, and I follow the advice in this blog.

Directory Submissions

That said, there are a few ways to fast track. If you want to make money from your blog, and you want to increase traffic and hits, there are a few ways to do it.

I mentioned one good method in the last post. Another is to submit through a directory submission tool. This is different than a website submission. Directories are not search engines.

http://www.directorymaximizer.com/

This is the service I use. They have 1000 directories in their list, and are always adding more. There is no 'reciprical link needed' increasing the value of the links. Each one costs $.14 and you can submit to as many as you need at a time. If you only have $15 to invest this month, then that is good.

After a few months you will have submitted to them all. This service has a 60-80% acceptance rate on the PR3 and higher sites.

I submit to the PR3 and higher sites first, while they are still new and looking for members. The PR0 sites will take anyone. The PR3 and higher sites will also pull your page rank and traffic exposure site up faster.

Page Rank Increased

But, beware of buying links based on the PR of the home page. A directory with a PR8 will not help you if it is on the home page, and the page your site appears on only has a PR0. (PR zero)

I have heard of the sites promising that if you pay a high price for a listing on a site with PR8 pages that your site will increase. I understand the theory. I was taught the theory in class. But, I've never actually seen a person who paid $200 for a listing on a PR8 site - a single link - actually benefit from it.


PS. If you don't use heading titles and the meta tag section of this blog, or any blog, this advice probably will not work as well as I say it will.

Fast Track Your Blog to Higher Page Rank and Traffic

There is a quick way to fast track your blog and get it ranked. It will only cost $20.00. Join Google AdWords. Here is how it works. You sign up for a Google Adwords account. Invest $20, Google says the minimum is $50, but they will accept $20.00 https://adwords.google.com/select/Login

To enter your blog or website into the program, they must rank and spider (read your website) within 24 hours. Your website is instantly submitted - no sand box. Your site is instantly ranked. And, it is rated for the campaign. Also, you will receive traffic to your site for the $20.00.

This reduces the time needed for your blog or website to be added to searches, receive search traffic, and to receive a Page Rank. A higher page rank equals more money from Google Adsense, more traffic from searches, and more exposure on the web.

However, there are a few 'tricks'

1. There should be 20 - 50 posts in the blog, even if these are 'free content' articles, reviews you wrote, or daily muses.

2. There should be at least 30 - 50 back links to the site. These can all be from another blog, forums, or directories. Many of these can be inside your blog, navigation links.

3. There should be inbound links from your site to other 'relevant' sites to help make your keywords solid. a) only use keyword anchor that matches the keywords you want Google to focus on. b) make sure the site you link to has the same keywords in the titles, links, and meta. c) use the keywords in meta information and titles on your blog

Following these rules will fast track your blog or website.

Ethical Blogging Rules

I must admit that Trick Falls made me start to think. One of the problems I face is that much of what I do, and how I do it, has become habit. When I am writing for new writers and work at home professionals, I often forget the 'little things.'

Trick falls asked about disclosure in a blog, and making readers feel like they have been 'advertised to' when they are reading. This forced me to take a good hard look at my blogs. I knew that I had disclosure. But, I never really thought about how I do it.

First, there are organizations that help bloggers with disclosure and ethical problems. There are several companies like womma that help bloggers learn how to use full disclosure and ethical blogging.



There are also disclosure badges from PPP and other places that let people know a post has been sponsored. I also use a comment such as:

This post is my thoughts and my message for the day. I thank XXX company for sponsoring it and allowing me to continue bringing this information to you free



Pay Per Post is one of the most ethical, and profitable, paid posting sites.

If you would like to make some money by writing a review for my blog, and let the world know about the information I give away free, then please click the red bar above. PPP will pay you to review my site.

New Paid Blogging Site

I've been reviewing sites that have paid blogging. I am trying to find ones that do not have a lot of rules, take newer blogs, pay more than $5 for each post, and let bloggers pick and chose the advertisers they want to post on their site.

I found that in smorty. click the link below. It gets a 5/5 review from us.

Google's Duplicate Content Filter - Urban Legend?

If you are on a blog like writingup, then yes, use original content, and ping after every post.

I have posted at five major blog sites for three years. I am not big here - yet, but I make more money from this blog because of the traffic.
However, your personal website is different.

The Duplicate Content Penalty

Let’s look at the “Duplicate Content Penalty.” It has been around for years, and haunts society like an urban legend.

It is feared despite the near total lack of reasonable proof that it exists in the form that most web owners understand.

The Penalty suggests that if my site has the same content as yours, one will be penalized.

Then, you do a Google search and what comes up as #1 on the search? An article directory, and an article that has 15000 downloads.

As usual, Google's duplicate content penalty has nothing to do with duplicate content. And it’s not a 'real penalty. It’s just a by-product of how the search engines work.

What happens is 'authority' sites get ranked. So, your little site with 100 articles on how to make the world's best short bread has the same article on mixing batter as a massive, 10 000 page website that focuses on cooking cookies - they get ranked - you don't. This is not a penalty, it is the 'natural consequences of living in the net environment.'

But, let's say that you've dutifully posted your article on 50 000 other websites, with an inbound link to a single article (never your index page) - then wham - you've just knocked the poor cooking cookies website off the charts.
What to do --- What to do?

You can do two things.

1. Put new content on your site weekly. Syndicate actively. And build links.
2. Toss the whole thing and become a Social Networking expert like Sharon Hurley Hall - and laugh at the search engine crawlers all the way to the bank.





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Do You Use BlogCatalogue Properly?

At another blog community, I found a post stating that Blog Catalogue is a waste of time. I had to look twice, before I realized that the author was serious. Then, I went to their blog neighbourhood and found why.

1. This blogger never helped promote other people's blogs

2. There was no 'recent visitor' widget (high enough on the bog that the screen shot captures it and show other blog catalogue users) So, the big bloggers who will trade a 'view' for appearing as a recent visitor will over look him.

3. He did not collect a neighbourhood of similar blog communities - so no one knew he was there.

4. He obviously didn't appear on other blogger's 'recent viewed' widget (my neighbourhood is good - but it offers no incentive for people to repeatedly visit your blog)

5. He himself had not chatted with other bloggers or even participated at Blog Catalogue

So, there is nothing wrong with Blog Catalogue - there is something seriously wrong with this person's expectations. If you give nothing - you get nothing.

New Google Toolbar

Have you downloaded the new Google tool bar. If not, you will probably do so after reading this post. I put the toolbar on my new system, and just copied over the old system, on my other computer. Both methods worked.

The toolbar you want is the Google Toolbar 2008

Spyware

This includes a spyware software package that cleared 271 trackers and 4 malwar from my son's computer. It also includes a free- but fairly useless version of Norton, but, take it anyway. You never know when it will route out spyware and help your computer.

Social Networking Tools

You really want it for the social networking tools. It does not have stumbleupon - yet. You still need to download that toolbar, but you can download a delicious, dig, and technorati widget. When you find a page you like, just TAG them. When you are in a network, tagging articles becomes super easy.

In fact, just copy the first few 'intro' lines from the article and paste that into the description line. It may take some time to set up, but trust me. It has already saved me time.

Blogger Resources

I also added the blogger widget, so I could find my blogs. Other widgets I included were the spell check, youtube, yahoo home page (which is my home page), Facebook, Readdit (great for research), and most important....

VOTE NOW TOOL

That is right. Google has now gotten on the WEB2.0 bandwagon and included a tool that lets users vote for a web page - in essence - effecting page rank. I am sure that it is much more advanced than it looks ( a happy/a sad smiley) but time will tell.

Do You Use Drupal or Wordpress?

Running an online business is frustrating. I know that there are several people here running IT businesses that can add their own horror stories to this blog post.

Building a web platform (website) on a software program that promises to do 10 times what you need, and then only produces half of what you need - and that is with continual updates, bug reports, and a multitude of widgets and plug ins. We did that this year - twice.

Then there are programmers. I can say one name Bxxca and a cold child will run down the spine of any TE at www.inspiredauthor.com who was with us about 15 months ago. Yes, the programmer who did half the job and then demanded more money than my car is worth to finish, that is after we found porn running out of the back end of our server. That hit our Page Rank hard for a good long time.

I have been trying to hire a programmer for months at places like ifreelance. Most of the time I get people who want to be paid to learn their trade. When asked, they don't know the software program - but that is no problem..they are use to being paid to learn. I can't afford that. I doubt many of you can.

Then comes a good day. You find someone that actually knows what you are talking about. I found someone like that in Sheldon www.gamedevguru.com who is not expensive, because he doesn't need to spend fifteen hours figuring out the software before he gets started. He did more on my www.inspiredauthor.com in 2hours than anyone else I've met.

I wanted to let you know about him, one - because he not only knows Drupal but he is great with Worpress, too. I know that many of you are on wordpress - which is a good content management system (as Sharon HH has taught me :).

So, next time you are stuck, want to do something new, want to fix a bug. Don't panic - there is someone who can help you at: www.gamedevguru.com

Compare Web Hosting Services

One question most new web owners tackle is the hosting problem. Trust me, I've been on every level. From buying into a great marketing campaign, only to find that the company is a reseller and doesn't know what they are doing, to owning virtual server space and hiring a programmer to run things (expensive!).

I've been through several hosting companies. Now I use siteground. I can host all of my sites from one dashboard. The service is great. In fact, in a year I only heard of them failing to fix a problem once, and that was a programming problem.

They install scripts free, from wordpress to moodle. And they have alwasy fixed my small problems - like when a script stops working. In fact, they are so good at fixing problems, I've only paid programmers $100 this year! And that was for improving, not fixing.

All of this for a cost of $70 a year for my first site, and about $50 a year for the rest of the sites.

I haven't moved to a dedicated server yet, because my bandwidth allotment is more than it was on the dedicated server, and I have less 404 messages - meaning that the system isn't clogging with traffic. In fact, at one site that claimed to be one of the top 10 in the country, I had 20% 404 messages!!!

They use Cpanel, with excelent stat information, more than 30 scripts for blogs and websites, chats, newsletters, forums, etc - everything you need.

There is a good reason why this site is the #1 hosting site for many of the top ecommerce scripts.



Most important, I have never been hacked, but at the same time, there is no probelm with search engines. I found out - the hard way - that many resllers or 'amateur' hosting services work through Internet companies which make it difficult for search engines.

In fact, our response from Google changed from 2 - 3 months, to days, after switching from the other 'big host' to siteground.

However, to be fair. Godaddy is a better place for newbies. You can phone about everything, you can get 'instant' websites, and they will help you with problems - but they are more expensive. While siteground does offer a domain service - I still manage my domains through godaddy. One thing I did learn, is that many resellers work for godaddy-which gives them the right to say they are the biggest.

Stat Counter

There are hundreds of stat counters on the web. However, I like using http://my7.statcounter.com You'll notice it on this page. It works great with the new blogger 'add page element/HTML' feature. Just open the box and add the code. After saving the counter will appear on the page.

They have a wonderful counter wizard that lets you change a few dozen different colors and layouts. If you do not want visitors to see your hits, then just insert the button at the bottom of the page. This can be done two ways. One by using another HTML element box. Or, by opening the template and pasting the code at the very bottom, just above the /< body > code.

In the three years that I've used the free version, I've been able to track repeat visitors, unique visitors, and compile data based on weekly, monthly, and yearly data.

Spell Check

The best spell check tool is the one you can download with the Google toolbar.

Downloading the toolbar, and installing the spell check, will enable you to spell check any text box on your screen.

However, it is still important to write all your blog posts in a word doc and transfer them to the web. This is the only way to manage your posts and cross posts, and protect you if the blog host goes off line.