The BookmarkMoney Blog

Social Networking

Jesse Stay posted on Guy Kawasaki’s blog entitled 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Facebook. I was surprised to find out how much I didn’t know about one of the biggest social networking sites out there. I certainly made sure to import my RSS feed to my Facebook.com account. I don’t know that will make my headlines fall under duplicate content, but as far as I’m concerned you can never propagate your post titles too much.

WordPress Security

Thanks to a great tip entitled “Turn Off Directory Browsing to Protect Your Content” posted by Gobala Krishnan, my content is a little bit safer (not that anybody is interested in stealing it) today. I had always assumed that Directory Browsing was disabled by default, and found out how wrong I was today.

Black Hat

SEO Black Hat tipped me off to the article “Messing With Digg” from David Naylor. If you’re using the Digg angle in your marketing efforts, these tricks might come in handy.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Networking by Jotun
2 Comments »

First off, I’d like to extend congratulations to Ruck, at Cash Tactics. This week he announced that his first daughter was born. It sounds like everything is going well, so I’d like to welcome him to a new world of concern. As the old saying goes: If you have a son you only need to worry about one prick. If you have a daughter, you need to worry about every prick in town. My daughter is only 17 months old, and already the boys her age are giving her the eye. I fear that it will only get worse from here.

Now, on to the goodies.

Affiliate Marketing

For those just getting started in affiliate marketing, Sean at the Warrior Blog has a tutorial that takes you through all of the steps - researching, locating, and then finally cashing the checks. I wish I had known about this when I had first started out. Your First Clickbank Sale.

Build a Niche Store (BANS) is something I’ve been looking into for a while. When my wife goes back to work, I may just break down and purchase it, since I’ve heard noting but good things about it. Affiliate Confession has a 7 part series on setting up and using BANS. A very good place to start if you want an easier entry into affiliate marketing.

Build A Niche Store Tutorials Overview - Parts 1-7
Part 1 - What BANS Does And Does Not Do
Part 2 - Niche Brainstorming And Getting A Domain Name
Part 3 - Installing And Setting Up Your BANS Affiliate Store
Part 4 - Tweaking Your eBay Affiliate Store
Part 5 - Adding Some Content To Your eBay Store
Part 6 - Article Marketing And Getting Links
Part 7 - Using USFreeAds.com For Traffic And Getting More Links

Article Marketing

The Warrior Blog has a tutorial on Article Marketing for promotional purposes. I know that a lot of people recommend doing article marketing, but it seems like a lot of work, that I’d be better off channeling elsewhere.

Mashups

Although it’s over a year old, Paul O’Brien’s list of Mashups created with Yahoo! Pipes is still a pretty good read to help inspire ideas for your own mashup.

I’m not sure of the date on this one, but SEO Book had a nice roundup of specific Pipes.

If you’ve been dying to create a mashup, but can’t program and can’t afford a program, Open Kapow may be for you. Using their simple tools, literally anyone can create a mashup in minutes just by pointing and clicking. Extremely useful if you want to use data from sites that don’t provide an Application Programming Interface (API) or Ready Site Syndication (RSS) feed.

Black Hat

If you have a Wordpress Blog, then Jimmy at Seeds for Wealth has a technique for raping Digg’s traffic. At best this trick is grey hat, at worst it’s black hat, but getting links from Digg is never a bad thing.

Continuing along the path to the Dark Side, Jimmy has tips on getting big trafic from BlogCatalog, and another one for using your avatar as visitor bait.

If you’ve been wondering how certain sellers always rank so high on eBay’s Pulse page, someone placed them under the magnifying glass, and found out that there’s a lot of cheating going on behind the scenes. estreet at Watched Item watched some top sellers on eBay Pulse, and gathered some compelling evidence that there is rampant cheating going on.

Datafeeds

5 Star Affiliate Programs has a pretty extensive list of affiliate datafeeds ready for integration into your website. Affiliate Datafeeds are great, because they help generate a lot of content for search engines to spider, as well as helping to monetize your website.

Extensive Squidoo Lens on Datafeeds

Tools

Marc Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection posted this week introducing us to Zemanta. Zemanta is a contextual content suggestion engine that works with Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted WordPress installations.Zemanta is a simple FireFox extension that creates a little AJAX box on the side of your write panel in WordPress, and makes real-time suggestions for related news stories, Wikipedia articles, and Flickr photos. I’m very excited to start using this. You can also keep up to date with the latest happenings at Zemanta’s Blog.

WordPress Plugins

Jeffro2pt0 at Weblog Tools Collection rounded up 10 WP plugins that fight comment spam. I personally use WP Spam Free from Hybrid 6, and have no complaints with it. I do disable it every so often to see how much it actually stops, and It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes.

Freebies

Since I like free stuff, here’s my link to Robbing Craigslist. If you want a free copy, just link to it from your blog too.

Emarket Scout tipped me off the the following: Freebies for Writers, Authors, and Screenwriters., Self Growth Freebies, and Free stuff for Windows Power Users.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Datafeeds, Gurus, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Mashups, Plugins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Tools, Traffic, Viral Marketing, WordPress by Jotun
3 Comments »

Tools

Icon Interactive has Four Free Tools for your use: Link Popularity, Search Engine Submitter, Keyword Suggestion, and Word Cloud. Of them, I found the Link Popularity to be the most informative, whereas the Search Engine Submitter and Keyword Suggestion tools kept breaking on me. I guess you get what you pay for.

Wordpress

Via Weblog Tools Collection: Blueprint Design Studio graces us with a list of their Top 10 Essential Plugins for Wordpress. I’ve used a lot of the plugins on this list, but TinyMCE always was a pain in the arse to get working properly. Subscribe2 is what all of the big boys use on their sites, but for some reason PlugInstaller breaks it, so I’m out of the loop on that one too. Finally, CFormsII seems to be powerful in the right hands, which are obviously not mine - I’ve never had any joy in getting it to work.

Performancing has a great article on using WordPress to build a web directory which is centered around two plugins; Alex Tang’s Link Directory plugin, and Links Back’s plugin WP Directory. I’m interested in trying this out, but according to Mr. Dash they’re both broken in WordPress 2.3.2, which means they’re probably just going to frustrate me. Still, something I’m going to keep on the back burner.

Search Engine Optimization / Link Building

Blogging Mix has a two part tutorial on how to get Google to crawl your website. They’re full of great ideas, and you’re probably already doing them, but a refresher course never hurts. The one tip that I always do that isn’t on this list, is adding your website feed to iGoogle. I remember reading somewhere that if you add your RSS to iGoogle it helps bump up your place in the queue. If your feed is provided by FeedBurner (a division of Google) then you should be doubly covered, right? Part 1 | Part 2

Build a Blog asks the question “To promote using blog directories, or not?”

Thanks to the post above, I was introduced to Skelliwag’s tutorial on Hansel and Gretel Link Building which is a straight forward guide to getting quality incoming sites.

Do Follow Directory is a directory of sites that have “do follow” enabled.

Info Doorway has a large list of “do follow” sites and forums arranged by Page Rank.

Eric Mitz tells us how he uses forums for backlinks.

Courtney Tuttle has a list of 102 ways to make your site a backlink superstar.

Micro Persuasion opines that we’re like a million monkeys on treadmills. Odd title aside, it’s a thought provoking discussion on channels and internet trends of the past few years.

Affiliate Marketing

Squidoo Lens on using Squidoo for Affiliate Marketing

My Web 2.0 has 5 tips for creating powerful text ads.

AffiliateSeeking.com is a directory of the various programs by which you can become an affiliate marketer.

Paul updated his Affiliate Marketing Guide. Awesome advice from somebody who is making 6 figures a month.

This post has been a week in the making, so I hope it’s not a total deluge. I plan on adding a lot of these links to the main site as time permits this week.

Tuesday I go see a specialist for my hernia and see when they want to perform surgery. I’m praying that it won’t be until after my wife returns to work. I’ve been dealing with this for several months now, another one shouldn’t hurt as long as I take it easy. A little Alieve generally keeps me on my feet, and that’s all I need. If I do have to go in fo surgery, expect posting to pick up dramatically.

I’m currently hatching several mini e-books, and when I finally hatch them, you’ll be the first to know.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Linkdump, Plugins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Tools, WordPress by Jotun
No Comments »

I noticed that Nikolai has added a Entrecard Blog Browser. That man, he’s addicted to Entrecarding, I swear

In the comments to Nikolai’s post about his first set of Entrecard tools I found a link to the Entrecard Page Ranker at John is Fit. It takes the rss feed of the last people to card you, and then compares them via Google Pagerank. That way you know who you really should be reciprocating with.

Now for the Linkdump. No rhyme, but I have my reasons. Sorry if any of these are rehashes, I came to the game kinda late.

101 Ways to Make Money With DigitalPoint Forums: http://money.earnersclub.net/2007/09/02/101-ways-to-make-money-online-with-digitalpoint-forums/
Simple Blogging SEO Techniques: http://mixedmarketarts.com/2008/02/16/simple-blogging-seo-tweaks/
The Link Building Cookbook: http://mixedmarketarts.com/2007/11/13/the-link-building-cookbook/
Flypaper Resource Pages: http://www.jtpratt.com/2008/02/05/flypaper-resource-pages-how-to-get-100-times-more-traffic/
How to Turn Spam and Splog Into Backlinks and Gold: http://www.jtpratt.com/2007/11/01/how-to-turn-spam-and-splog-into-backlinks-and-gold/
The Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing: http://zacjohnson.com/the-super-affiliates-guide-to-ppc-marketing/

A lot of these links have been posted to the main BookMark Money website, and some haven’t. Either way, it was time to clear out the open tabs in Firefox.

Tags: Entrecard, Linkdump by Jotun
3 Comments »

Well it has been a few days since I started my first Adwords campaign. 9,000 impressions, 0 clicks. Time to rewrite that one I think.

I created two more on the spur of the moment on Wednesday night. Campaign 1: 900 impressions, one click. Campaign 2: 2,500 impressions, three clicks. Slightly better than my first campaign, but only in very relative terms.

Total time spent to setup my campaigns - 50 minutes. Total cost to me - $.38. Money made - 0. Time to dust off the old thinking cap.

Still, I’m not really discouraged. I am getting ideas and insights from the campaigns I’m running, and since I’m a kinesthetic learner, I’m learning by doing. I have a thousands of ideas, so two spur of the moment ones not making money isn’t a heartbreaker. What I’m learning is well worth the $.38 I’m out so far.

Never Blue Ads called yesterday. I need to find a minute and call them back. If I’m not home I’m working, and if I am home I have to use a spatula to pry the kid off of my leg. *sigh* I really wish I had started this two years ago when I wanted to, before the mortgage and kid.

I’m working my way through Ruck’s 60 Days to List Profits in fits and starts. I know I write about him a lot, and it makes me feel like a suck-boy, but I can’t help it. He’s the first affiliate marketer that isn’t peddling re-heated two year old material (on his blog at least), and his insights make me feel like I can do it too. His recent series on the potential of Kaboodle are amazing. Catch up on them: Day 1 |Day 2 |Day 3 |Day 4

I see from my referral logs that Ruck visited here after a trackback. Probably laughed his ass off. I know that’s probably what I would do if the roles were reversed. That’s ok, hate makes me stronger

Spent 4 hours last night looking for software to power the backend of my as yet unannounced project. I swear it’ll blow your mind if I can afford to pay somebody off of eLance to write it for me. I spent a couple hours noodling around with Yahoo Pipes. Talk about your object oriented programming! Very powerful and yet very limited. Spent hours trying to get yahoo to categorize 3 different sets of rss feed items by date posted without regards to the blog they were coming from, but the closest I ever got was listing them by date yet still seperated.

Finally, I’ve noticed that every time I break out “Are You Dead Yet?” by Children of Bodom, it always starts with “In Your Face,” which is my favorite song on the album, and may just be the best one too. I’m definately looking forward to the new album and hopefully I can catch them on tour again. The last time I saw them, they were with Slayer and Mastodon. Mastodon sucked ungodly amounts of ass, and the only reason I stayed for Slayer was so that my friend could say he had seen them. Two songs later we were gone.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Music, Site News by Jotun
No Comments »