Thoughts on Pay Per Click Advertising

If you are considering doing Pay Per Click advertising (Google Adwords, Overture, etc.), there are two contrasting opinions expressed in two recently published articles.

In the first one, published by Lawrence Deon ("Surviving Google's Aging Delay") and referenced at e_Marketing, Lawrence suggests that search engine marketing practices that worked in the past (most notably, aggressive link trading and link buying) are no longer working quite as they were. Google seems to be delaying the results of aggressive linking, and therefore, you cannot count on SEO to get you short term traffic. The only way is with PPC. He says, "If you purchase non-directory links, reallocate that budget to Adwords advertising."

I am interpreting this as a general comment on SE marketing, not just link buying/trading. The very clear suggestion is that you will not get the same short term traffic from SEO and linking strategies, and therefore you should resort to PPC.

Contrast this with this article written by Cari Haus who points out that PPC is very hard to monitor and can very quickly drain away your promotion budget if you are not careful.

My own experience is that PPC is very powerful if you meet these conditions:

1. You must very clearly define your product in terms of the most critical key words, and target your ads to these keywords.
2. Your landing page must be geared to generating responses and sales.
3. You must have a very simple method of generating responses on your landing page.
4. Your product must be very competitive - the kind of thing potential buyers will buy NOW.

If you are trying to generate long term exposure, or build a web presence, PPC can be a very expensive way to do it.

My most successful PPC campaigns have been for:

Vinyl Banners, PopUp Trade Show Displays, and 25 Free Links. Notice how all three of these products and their corresponding landing pages meet the above criteria.

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Paypal Features Outlined in Article

There is a very good article published at Trade Show Tips in which author Merle of MC Promotions outlines many of the features and advantages for small entrepreneurs of using PayPal.

If you have considered using PayPal as an alternative to getting a merchant account, or if you have held off on getting into online sales because of a lack of a merchant account, you really should read this article.

Bottom line: you don't need a merchant account to do online sales.

Creating a Basic Website Template

What is a web "template"?

As I understand this term, it is a design format which you can apply to all (or most) of the pages in a web site. Using a "template" system like this has two major advantages. First,it allows you to make your most important design decisions at the beginning, and then just focus on content. And second, it allows you to quickly create new pages based on your standard design.

The disadvantage is that many template-based websites look homogenized and lacking in unique character. Designers who sell templates tend to use the same formats over and over again, insert the same generic images, use the same techniques.

Just as important, I have never found one that I consider ready-to-go right out of the box. They always need modification, and often modifying a professionally prepared template is difficult because the designer will have used techniques you may not fully understand or are specific to the tools he or she used to create it.

So I prefer not to think of templates as the kind of thing you buy from an online template store. Rather I prefer to think of them as simply a basic page format that can be used over and over again. The best template is therefore one that uses "standard" techniques that can be modified without the use of specialized tools or programs (like Front Page or Dreamweaver).

Creating a Basic Template

If you are not familiar with web design, try working with a "bare bones" template to begin with. There are two ways you can go. You can work with basic html and tables, or you can create your basic template with CSS. I recommend you begin with CSS -- especially if you have not yet become used to constructing web pages with tables.

CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheets", but at the beginning it is not important to understand what that means. What is important is to understand that CSS allows you to create a set of formatting parameters in a "style sheet" (a seperate file) which you then can very easily apply to your individual pages. In other words, you seperate the "style" from the "content".

A simple style sheet can contain just three or four design elements. Here is an example which you are free to copy (right click and "Save target as" to a location on your hard drive)

Sample-1.css.

This template contains a definition for the body text, a header component (with a background image), a "navbar", and a definition for two headline styles, h1 and h2.

Now that you have a style sheet you can begin building your web site by creating a basic home page. Here is an example which embeds the style sheet referred to in the previous paragraph. You can get the html code by just opening the page in a browser window, looking at the "Source" code, and saving the resulting file on your hard drive as, for instance, "sample-1.html".

Now you should have two files in the same location on your hard drive -- "sample-1.css" and "sample-1.html". You can get the image file by just right clicking on the image in the sample page and saving it to the same location on your hard drive.

Your second step will be to create the pages referenced in the "navbar", so make sure you think of names for these pages before proceeding (e.g., howitworks.html, products.html, about.html, sitemap.html, contact.html). Then build your hyperlinks into the navbar. (Look at the code of the sample file to see how it is done.)

Once you have your basic home page with links, this then becomes your template. Just save it as "howitworks.html", "products.html", etc., and make the changes to the specific pages.

The result (once you upload it all to your host server) will be a basic, functional website containing a number of properly interlinked pages. It will also be search engine friendly because the design is not cluttered with scripts, and the most important elements are clearly laid out at the top of the page.

For more web design, SEO, blogging, and marketing tips see the Linknet Marketing Resource Library.

If Google Delays Why be Conservative?

In the face of claims that Google has started delaying the impact of aggressive linking policies some SEO "experts" have concluded a more conservative linking policy is in order.

This does not make sense.

If you have to wait 6 to 8 months before links get their due (still a debatable conclusion) why does this lead to a "go slow" approach to acquiring links?

It doesn't.

Read more at e_Marketing

Does Blogger Suck or Is it Just Me?

I just spent about an hour composing a masterpiece about Google link filters and the program screwed it up when I went to save it. This is not the first time this has happened. And it is not the only problem I have found with blogger.

So in the future I will post my substantive entries over at one of my other blogs, such as e_Marketing, and just post references here.

Is Page Rank Overrated?

More and more web experts and SEO practitioners seem to think Google's Page Rank is becoming less important in the overall search engine scheme of things. The new rallying cry is "relevance". Create relevant content, get relevant inbound links, link to relevant sites in your area of expertise.

The simple fact is no one (including, I suspect, Google) knows exactly what relationship the Page Rank of a given page has to its likelihood of scoring well in specific searches. People ("experts" and otherwise) talk as though they know, but unless they are talking from actual experience they are just blowing different colours of smoke.

For instance, I recently had someone tell me they had heard that two domains placed on the same server, sharing the same ip address "will not get the credit of two sites but something between 1 and 2". This sounds marginally plausible until you think about it for a minute or two. Whether or not it is true, the bigger question remains the same: namely, "what good are these "credits" anyway?" What are they supposed to do for you?

Well, two things, I suppose:

1. Improve your Page Rank (or potential Page Rank), and
2. Improve your SE rankings for your most important keywords.

But both of these things beg the more fundamental question about traffic generation. Namely,

"What does any of this have to do with generating traffic or making sales?"

We assume that answer to this question is obvious. Higher PR means more traffic. But this presupposes traffic in itself is good.

It's not, unless you're selling advertising.

Traffic is only good if it is correctly targeted, and if your content can "convert" enough site visitors into readers, buyers, ad clickers, or whatever it is you're trying to get them to do.

I know it is a cliche, but it really does all come back to content. Websites or blogs that are devoid of meaningful and well constructed content turn out to be pointless -- PR or no PR. You may get visitors, but they will not buy anything, or stick around long enough to click on your Google ads.

Carefully crafted content, on the other hand will do well on all counts. The Search Engines will (eventually) start to recognize your greatness. Other webmasters will want to exchange links with you and send traffic your way. And site visitors will appreciate the information you provide and buy your products.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Almost everything about the web has become easier over the last couple of years. It is easier to buy and register a domain. It is easier to build a website. It is easier to fill it with "content".

Generally this has meant the proliferation of garbage sites which are thrown up like the proverbial mud thrown against the wall. Most will just fall to the ground. But maybe some will stick. Not likely, but maybe.

I have especially noticed this in two areas -- link exchange and "content" creation. Virtually anybody can setup an automated link exchange program that will do the work for you. The tedium of trading links -- of actually having to contact people and ask them to look at your site, etc. -- is all but eliminated by link exchange software and automated exchanges.

The fact that most of these exchanges are worthless is only relevant if you actually CARE about the quality of your site. Most garbage sitemasters do not care. They are just throwing mud against the wall. So part of this pointless exercise involves having hundreds of links from other garbage sites.

Same goes for creating content. The garbage sitemaster does not create content. He just copies it from somewhere else. The result is just more garbage.

Surprisingly, one welcome exception to this trend is in the area of blogs. Since a blog requires regular injections of (unique?) content, it is a bit more difficult to automate an effective blog. Garbage sitemasters are lazy and do not think in terms of regular updates. They just want to throw up their site and forget about it. A blog requires regular attention, so garbage sitemasters are not likely to be interested in blogging.

On the other hand, if it is not already available, I'm sure there will soon be automated blogging software. Programs that copy or steal "content" from other sources, rearrange it slightly, and then post it to your very own blog.

Or maybe not. It could be that not enough people are interested in blog-style publishing to make this kind of software worth writing. And the ones who are interested in blogs tend to be self-righteous people like me who think the quality of one's content is important.

We'll see.

Insider's Secrets to Marketing

Here's what Robin Araoz says about Cory Rudl's product "The Insider's Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet -- Version 2004".

"Listen, I'll be the first to admit that I was hesitant when I first decided to buy "The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet -- Version 2004." But when it arrived on my doorstep (only 3 days later!), I was literally blown away by what I had received."



"Would you like to start a home based Internet business and work from the comfort of your home?

"If you've been searching for information about how to sell products or services online, then you've probably come across Corey Rudl's name at least a few times. And, if you're like me, you've probably wondered what the story is behind his best-selling marketing course.

"Well, here's the truth: This course is the real deal."

For more information, check out Insider's Secrets

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99% is Not Good Enough

Just about every website hosting company advertises that they provide 99% uptime. Stop and think about that for a minute. That means your site can be down for 15 minutes every day and still (almost) squeak in under the 99% "gurantee".

That's pretty sad, don't you think. I have a friend who works for IBM servicing major accounts and he says if their service goes down for more than a few seconds at any time they scream and holler bloody murder. None of this 99% stuff. Most businesses who operate a critical function cannot afford any down time at all. These guys demand 100% uptime!

Actually I find that most of the hosting companies I have dealt with cannot even make the 99% "guarantee". I currently have reseller accounts with four different hosts, and every one of them seems to be down for some part of the day every day. Of course it is very difficult to put your finger on this. They say they monitor their up time and will blame their problems on intermediate bandwidth providers, your "last mile" connection, or whatever.

The truth is, like the cell phone systems we all put up with, the public ip networks used by most hosts are just barely adequate for the job they are called upon to perform. This is probably because there is not enough at stake to spend the money to make them more reliable. If you want or need something really reliable then you go talk to the IBMs of the world and pay about 30 times as much for the service.

As we speak I am trying to backup one of my sites. It is hosted by one of the (supposely) top ranked hosts in the US. The service has been up and down all morning, I can't access my control panel or support "help desk" to report the problem, and my backup has been sitting there spinning at about 10% complete for the last 15 minutes.

I'm sure glad I have that 99% guarantee.

Content Wars and the Search Engines

Creating "content" for websites can be a challenge. I suspect that usually what happens with website builders (like me) is that we have an idea for a website, we register a domain or five, we throw up a half-baked temporary home page, and then about three months later we might actually get back to trying to make something out of it.

The two minor practical problems that make "instant websites" impossible to achieve are:

1. design
2. content

Both of these things take thought, imagination, and work. You cannot make them happen by snapping your fingers. Unless you have either an instant website machine, or a staff of five or six people, building websites invariably takes time.

This sometimes leads people like me to consider using a content generating program like Search Engine Cloaker or Article Bot. Both of these programs try to kill two birds with one stone. They create as much content as you want by spitting out machine-generated pages. If you want thousands of pages they will give you thousands of pages. At the same time they make your new "content" search engine friendly by building in "relevant" text, keywords, and links.

On the face of it, this seems like serious "cheating". If nothing else it is intended to deceive the Search Engines -- especially Google. Like so many other web marketing techniques, it is another attempt to get "something for nothing" -- ranking for content that really does not deserve it. But there is more to the story.

The morality of website content

This brings me to one of my pet topics: the legitimacy or what I call the "morality" of content. I have argued elsewhere that by setting themselves up as the Content Police the self-righteous people at Google have exposed themselves as hypocrites.

Why? Because on the one hand they proclaim that a website's search ranking must be based on "relevance". And according to their rules this relevance must be earned on the basis of the quality and importance of the site's content -- what we might call "merit". Meanwhile they are prepared to sell ranking to the highest bidder with Adwords (or Overture in the case of Yahoo). There is a pretty serious conflict between Plan A (ranking by merit) and Plan B (ranking by purchase).

This issue should not be oversimplified. Just because Google is willing to sell ranking it does not automatically follow that Plan A (ranking by merit) should be pitched. But it certainly makes one wonder if diligent rule followers are being played for suckers.

The problem is that Google has "moralized" the issue by bringing preconceived notions of Relevance and Importance and the Purpose-of-the-Web to their ranking scheme. In other media we more or less let people decide what they will watch, listen to, or read. We (usually) do not have some self-righteous body pre-determining the Purpose of Television or the Correct Role of Radio. Except in the case of national broadcasters like the BBC or CBC, it is generally assumed that "the market" will determine what thrives and what perishes.

Google's moralizing of the web leads directly to manipulative techniques like "Search Engine Optimization". In what other communication media does such an anal activity exist? Radio, television, magazines, billboards, movies, printed materials...? Not likely.

In our zealous struggle to gain the favour of Google, it is easy to lose site of the fact that Google themselves have turned the normal relationship between content and (mere) indexer of content upside down. Because of the perception that the Search Engines can determine our success or failure, we stop creating our content for people and start making it for Google -- the Great Indexer.

This is the only reason that content generating programs like Search Engine Cloaker and Article Bot exist. Nobody actually wants thousands of pages of "optimized" nonsense, or hundreds of variations of your award winning article.

Only the Search Engines.

So even though they seem to pervert "the purpose of the web", there may be some justification for such programs. Large corporate websites like about.com can spit out virtually limitless amounts of "relevant content", and since the Search Engines have declared that "content is king", these corporate websites will invariably dominate the rankings.

Given this kind of domination-based-on-quantity, the only serious way of combating it is to create quantity of your own. In other words, if you know how to machine-generate content that meets the Google "relevance" criteria, then why should you not just go ahead and do it?

The reason, I humbly suggest, is not that it is evil or contrary to the law of the Great Google God. The reason is that it is stupid and a waste of time. Garbage content can only generate garbage traffic. But chasing after the attention of the Search Engines blinds us to this fact. What is the point of having thousands of pages of garbage content? People come to your site and they find...nothing! Or what is the point of having thousands of links pointing to your site if nobody ever looks at them?

As I have suggested elsewhere, the way out of this pointless quest is to think of content as something worth reading -- in other words, leave it to "the market" to decide what is good or bad and basically forget about trying to please Google.

The other conclusion is that for all its warts and imperfections, the advertising model is a more honest way of determining "merit" than the Google-as-God model. Links should be viewed as methods of impressing the SEs only in the short term. More importantly, they should be seen as advertisements which you buy or trade for.

Questioning the Use of Content by the Search Engines

Another important side issue is the use of other peoples' content by the Search Engines themselves. Both Google and Yahoo have "news" features which it is tempting to think of as real news services. But they are not real news services. The fact is that the SEs -- Google, Yahoo and MSN -- are simply bundling search results as a news service. One might argue -- and I am sure some already have -- that they are simply stealing this content and labelling it as their own.

Of course it is true that web information is public, and that simply putting something on the web makes it susceptible to being viewed and used by others. But it does not follow from this that anybody can just take someone else's content and package it to make money from it -- for instance, by using it as the anchor for Adwords or Overture advertising.

Nor can it be argued that using content in this manner is like someone placing an RSS feed on their website. The fact is that the "syndicator" of the feed gives implicit permission for others to use it by the very act of "syndicating" it. If I "syndicate" my content that means I want others to see my feeds and click on the links that bring them to my website.

No such implicit permission is given when search results include some of my content. The Search Engines just take it and use it -- usually to make money by enveloping it in advertising. But there is something inherently dishonest about packaging other people's content and identifying it as "Yahoo News", "Google News" or "MSN News".

But please don't tell them I said any of this...

Why Do Blog Spammers Waste Their Time?

Occasionally one of my blogs will be bombarded by comments and trackbacks from someone looking for free linkbacks. They will make posts that have no relationship at all to the subject matter of the blog, and often they are quotations or pearls of wisdom like

"Life goes on no matter what we do or say."

Messages like this indicate that your typical spammer is not only being deceptive, but is also pretty stupid to boot. Anybody with half a brain would realize that you could create a generic "comment" that would sound relevant to almost any blog post, and would not be immediately rejected by the blogmaster. For example...

"Good point. This is a very interesting topic and I hope you write more about it in the future."

or

"I really found your post interesting. I'll watch for more in the future."

or even

"Thanks for the insight. Homer Simpson made a similar point in the famous ice cream cone episode."

But no. Spammers start out with a mental deficit, and it is unlikely that they will actually do something that makes sense. Invariably blog spam comments are planted by poker, gambling, or porn sites. And also invariably they are new sites with no history, traffic, Alexa rating, or PR. Somebody has told these webmasters (I use the term lightly) that there is traffic and ranking to be gained by spamming blogs with meaningless comments, and so they dutifully spam blogs.

It is pretty amazing to me that people actually do this. They must not be aware that most, if not all, blogging software comes with anti-spam features that allow you to filter out posts and comments like these. As soon as they are entered, an email message is sent to the blogmaster and the comment or backtrack is dealt with. Any serious blogger will watch his or her comments carefully. And there is no point in having comments in non-serious blogs. So it is a pointless exercise.

What's worse for the offending parties is that they get put on a blacklist that gets referenced by all the major blogging sites, and to which most bloggers will be connected by default. So now "http://genaholincorporated.com", a poker site which has been spamming a few of my blogs over the last couple of days, is blacklisted and on the master list of banned keywords. It is right there along with all the standard XXX, penis enlargement and "cheap drugs" keywords. Nice company to be in...

This is really no different from other types of spam such as mass email, FFA link/classified ad sites, traffic exchanges or "I'll give you 10,000 hits for $10". They are all attempts to get something for nothing. They are all examples of how playing a "numbers game" can sound good in theory, but be completely pointless in reality.

Why don't these people spend their time doing something more useful? I guess that would be too much to ask.

Justice for the World is Aim of Website

Millions of people are subject to various forms of suppression and torture each day and it is vital that the truth about innocent people being persecuted and various forms of violations of human rights all over the world is told and recognized and that it shall be discussed.

Justice FTW International, also called Justice For The World, is an independent, artistic, nonprofit human rights organization founded in The Netherlands on March 2, 2004 whose mission it is to protect human rights and help reestablish justice and morality in the world. Justice FTW uses nonviolent ways exclusively to draw attention to the severe and constant violations of human rights throughout the world.

The primary aim of Justice FTW is to get the truth out into the open and to raise awareness and morality.



Justice FTW features extensive articles and commentary on a broad range of issues including:

- Child Traffic throughout the world
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- Persecution of Falun Gong in China
- Widespread human rights violations in China
- many more justice and human rights issues

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Send demos, or request more information from:
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Get Your Own Product Page on 30 Sites

Here is another advertising and link generating opportunity from Linknet. I have developed a series of "product pages" and placed them on 35 sites.* You can have one of these product pages all to yourself for just $49/year. That means you get a unique page of your own that is dedicated to your product or site, and has no outbound links (other than navigation).

For a limited time I will even throw in a listing in Business Webs - a feed that runs on 25 high visibility pages. These ads generate traffic direct to your site, and they give you another 25 or so links. Your listing is guaranteed to be live for at least a month.

For more information, and to see a sample of the product pages go to Linknet Product Pages.

*The number of sites should be up to about 50 within two weeks. I am expanding the Real Estate and Health Products sections of Linknet.

Finding Good Link Exchange Software

As part of the Linknet Services I offer, one of my objectives is to get the PR, traffic, and SE ranking of all my Linknet websites as high as possible. As you can tell from the subject matter of this blog, I consider getting inbound links an important part of my traffic and rank building strategy.

As I have outlined in various places, I try to pursue a "three tier linking strategy", with the first tier being Reciprocal Link Exchange. I consider reciprocal links of only marginal value, but as I have said in other places, exchanging links with other webmasters has other side benefits that are hard to quantify.

The bottom line is that it would be foolish not to develop an intelligent and efficient link exchange system for any site you want to enhance. Having said that, the important question is "What system?".

On some of my sites I have a manual entry system. Someone requests an exchange and I just enter it into the appropriate page. On several others I have been using LinkMachine. This software has some good points, but the biggest problem with LinkMachine is that the developer is completely uncommunicative. This is not unusual for software developers. But in this case I had some very specific questions about using the software on multiple sites.

In at least three emails I asked the developer to clarify his very unclear policy on this matter, and his response was complete silence. Now, six months later, after setting up numerous installations on the assumption that a reasonable licensing arrangement would be forthcoming, many of my installations have been shut down because I do not have sufficient licensing to go around. No notice. No email telling me what is going on. Just a page telling me I can't continue using the software until I license it properly. I have no idea if I have been properly credited for the licenses I have already purchased. Somehow I doubt it.

This is particularly aggravating considering the basic program is now being given away FREE, and the free version contains all the features I want. So because the developer has changed his licensing policy I assume I will have to uninstall the paid version and reinstall the free one, risking the loss of my previously constructed directories. Is there a way to just downgrade my current installations? I don't know, and I'm not interested in waiting another six months for a reply from the developer.

There are other problems with LinkMachine too. The biggest one is that it is too slow. Saving time is one of the advantages of an automated system over a manual one. But I often think my manual systems are quicker than the automated ones. Another problem is that LinkMachine installations seem to be fairly tightly integrated with the developer's own site -- at least for licensing and updating. This means you are at his mercy. Given the history of independent software developers, this is not terribly reassuring.

Is Link Management Assistant too good to be true?

I had put this entire issue on hold for a week or so, but since the link exchange requests continue to pour in and I cannot access many of my old directories using Linkmachine, I thought I'd better look for alternatives.

It did not take long to latch onto Link Management Assistant created by Duncan Carver of OnlineMarketingToday.com. Wow! A developer who actually has a name!

After a couple of installations I think I like this program. It is very straightforward and seems to be pretty fast. A word of warning though: you will need access to a MySQL database, and you may find the installation procedure a bit mysterious. It comes with a number of simple templates which are fairly easy to modify to give you a site directory that integrates nicely with your own site's look and feel. The two installations I have up and running are here:

Tradeshow-Display-Experts.com
CanadaDisplayGraphics.com

Neither of these are finalized yet, but they will give you an idea of two completely different looks. You can also go ahead and enter your site's URL, to get an idea of how it works.

Another feature of Link Management Assistant is its ability to import whole categories of sites from DMOZ. Say you want to develop a directory of "Business Opportunity" sites. According to the documentation you should be able to import the entire relevant category structure (along with all the links of course) from DMOZ. Not only does this give you a valuable directory of potential interest to your website visitors, but it gives you a fruitful base of potential link exchange partners. The program also contains instructions for exporting the link information and emailing potential partners with a request for a reciprocal link.

Best of all, this interesting little program is FREE

This Site is New Breed of Online Betting Sites

Before I was introduced to Betfit.com I was unaware that such a thing as a "betting exchange" even existed.

Betfit's customers are not limited to the fixed and discretionary odds of the traditional bookmakers. Instead, you can place bets with your own odds or you can accept bets placed by other customers at the most favorable odds offered. Moreover, you can act as a bookmaker laying bets that other customers wish to back.

For more information, see the more extensive write up at Review-of-the-week.com.

Your Website Featured on 25 sites

Advertisement - Linknet Links and Web Advertising

For one small price - $24.99 - you can have a short promo for your website placed in our feature blog called Business Webs. This blog is then syndicated across all 25 of our Linknet sites on high visibility pages.

These posts include a live link pointing back to your website, and we guarantee that link will remain in place for at least a month. We also throw in another link from each of our sites from one of our "Priority Partner Pages".

That gives you 25 permanent inbound links to your site along with the promo for your site running on 25 different sites.

For more information go to Linknet Products.

SEO Toolkit definitely worth getting

Here is the best free SEO Toolkit I have found. The 21 part "kit" includes sections on how to build web pages, how to create your titles, metatags, etc., how to get indexed by Google, and much more.

It is available online, as an ebook, and as a CD. Here is the link:

RLRouse SEO Toolkit.

Publishing and Organizing Articles with Blogging Software

After many months of messing around with different methods of publishing and organizing articles on my various sites, I have decided (as of last night) to go whole hog and just use blogging software for my articles.

The biggest reason is that blogs will automatically create an RSS feed. Once you get hooked on this RSS thing it is hard to think in any other terms. RSS is absolutely the easiest way to make your articles available to other sites. And blogging software is the easiest way to do RSS -- at least as far as I've found.

After checking out and experimenting with different blogging programs I decided to stick with the one I am already using on two sites -- b2Evolution. The biggest reason is that b2e lets you create a number of different blogs within one shell. And each of these different blogs can have its own RSS feed.

What this means is that I can view each different blog within a specific installation of b2e as a "super category" which can have its own feed. So, for instance, at Small-Business-Online.com I have created what I call The Linknet Marketing Resource Library which will have five or six different categories of articles. Each category will be its own blog, and each will have its own feed. So there can be a category (and feed) for "Marketing Articles", "Linking Articles", "Affiliate Marketing Articles", "Blogs and Feeds Articles", "Search Engine Optimization Articles", etc., etc. Once these feeds are set up, I (or anybody else) can post one or more of these feeds on any number of other sites.

In other words, I can post the feed for "Web Design Articles", or "Web Tools", or "Search Engine Optimization" on my web design site. The same goes for all the other feeds. This will make it possible to "segment" the feeds so potential users can pick and choose.

What really got me going in this direction was my use of RSS feeds to fill out a couple of sections throughout my Linknet pages. For example, my News Section consists of feeds from major news media around the world, along with a few of the more interesting current affairs blogs I've stumbled on. And my Online Betting Section consists of sports lines from various betting services around the world -- everything from horse racing to boxing to Nascar and tons of soccer and basketball (but no NHL hockey!).

I am gradually doing the same with many of the other categories -- Real Estate, Mortgages, Insurance, Small Business, Personal Health, Golf, etc. -- finding interesting content from blogs and websites dealing with the kind of subject matter I am after, and then picking up their RSS feeds to fill out my pages.

Now I will be able to do the same thing with my own collections of articles.

SBO.com featured in Marketing Best Practices Newsletter

Along with four marketing websites David Frey has a high circulation marketing newsletter called Marketing Best Practices Newsletter. He recently featured Small-Business-Online.com.

Thanks David.

At his four web sites David focuses on marketing products, and has a very active series of Audio Tips called Marketing Audio Minutes.

You can subscribe to his newsletter here:

Marketing Best Practices Newsletter

On Being "Moralistic" about Self Promotion

Here is an excerpt from a more extensive post I made over at e_Marketing. In that post I comment on the tendency for practitioners of internet marketing (including but not limited to marketers, SEO practitioners, and editors of web directories) to get all "moralistic" about their jobs. We are, after all, just ad men, and while I think it is important to be honest about what we do, it is equally important (in my opinion) to be honest with ourselves about the importance of it. In short, it is not very important. Like everybody else we are just trying to make a buck.

This excerpt is from e_Marketing...

What I call the "moralistic" attitude towards self-promotion is reflected in at least two other areas of "earnest" web activity -- getting listed in directories, and chasing after SE rankings (better known as SEO). The moralistic attitude to these things is that there are correct "ethical" ways to do them, and then there are manipulative, unethical ways to do them. And since we all want to be "ethical" that means we should very strictly follow a set of accepted rules that have been laid out by some important authority figure -- like Google, or the editors of DMOZ, or the well-meaning webmasters of some particular article archive sites.

Lest I be accused of promoting unethical behaviour let me say that I agree there are right ways to do things, and wrong ways. But I would just draw the line in a different place. I would propose the important line is the one between truth and deception. In other words, as long as you're not lying or intentionally trying to mislead or deceive, then I say go ahead and self-promote.

For the full article go to Some Thoughts on Writing Articles for Promotional Impact...

I welcome your comments.

Blog Promotional Tips and Tricks at Blogger

Here is an excellent article at blogger.com about tricks for promoting your blog, getting noticed, building traffic, how to structure your posts. This article is by Biz Stone who is on the blogger.com staff, so he should know what he is talking about.

There are a few other blog-help articles linked at the same address.

Index of News Feeds at Linknet

A couple of days ago I received a Linknet order from a "news" related site. Since I didn't have a category for "news" sites, and since there is an abundance of material out there, I decided to create one. Of course this meant creating 50 new pages devoted to different kinds of news content.

Now where to get easily posted content? Answer: RSS News Feeds. All major news organizations (and many minor ones) have about 20 different "feeds" for things like "World News", "Entertainment News", "Politics". So I made a list of 50 and with the aid of "Carp", the software I use to integrate feeds with my sites, I had 50 unique pages. These were the fastest totally unique 50 pages I have created.

Here is an index to the News Feeds in the "News" Section at Linknet:

1. MSNBC-Newsweek

2. Washington Post - Front Page News

3. Washington Post - Middle East News

4. Washington Post - Religion Newsl

5. Washington Post - News of the Americas

6. CBC - Top Stories

7. CBC - World News

8. CBC - Health & Science

9. CBC - Sports

10. BBC - Front Page News

11. BBC - UK News

12. BBC - Politics

13. BBC - Science News

14. BBC - Entertainment News

15. Yahoo - Business News

16. Yahoo - Top Stories

17. Yahoo - World News

18. Justice for the World

19. Ziff-Davis - Windows Tech

20. Talking Point Memo

21. Guardian - Front Page News

22. Lessig Blog

23. Israel Peace Blog

24. Is That Legal Blog

25. Pendagon

26. Washington Post - Science

27. Washington Post - World News

28. Washington Post - European News

29. Washintgon Post - World Opinion Roundup

30. Washington Post - Politics

31. CBC - Canadian News

32. CBC - Business News

33. CBC - Arts News

34. CBC - Hockey News

35. BBC - World News

36. BBC - Business News

37. BBC - Health News

38. BBC - Technology News

39. BBC - Week at a Glance

40. Yahoo - September 11 and Terrorism

41. Yahoo - US News

42. Yahoo - Politics

43. Ziff-Davis - Tech News

44. Political Animal - Washington Monthly

45. Informed Consent

46. Guardian - Film News

47. Afronetizen

48. WarBlogging

49. The War in Context Blog

50. TechnoPuritanism

Free 25 Link Exchange Made Easier

Now that I have had several webmasters take me up on my Free 25 Links offer I have been able to fine-tune it a bit to make it easier to take advantage of.

All it involves is copying the contents of this site description page to an active page within your website. The page must be linked no more than two steps from your home page.** If you have more than one site, just copy the page to all your sites. We can even supply different versions of the site description page to avoid the appearance (horrors!) of duplication.

We will then put your link(s) on a specially designed page within each of our sites. These pages will not have more than 25 outbound links.

Of course if you don't want to mess around with exchanging links we can give you the same 25 links for just $14.99. This is what I call our .

**If you don't understand this try the following: first, you have link from your home page to a link directory index page. Second, you have a link from your link directory index page to the page with our links on it. Two steps. One step would be even better -- linked directly from your home page.

Blog Focuses on Corporate Blogging

In my regular search for interesting blog sites and marketing information I stumbled on to CorporateBlogging.info. The article that tweaked my interest is called More Than Links to Blogs' Search Engine Success written by the blogmaster of the site, Fredrik Wacka.

Fredrik draws on more than four years experience of blogging in business environments, so knows a bit of what he is talking about.

His main points:

Blogs are usually tightly focused, the posts are straight and to the point, and usually keyword rich, and structured in a way that is SE friendly. And they are usually linked in SE-friendly fashion as well -- to other resources that are closely related.

While on the topic of the "structure" of blog posts... one thing I've noticed: blog commentators tend to emphasize that blog content is short and to the point -- different from "articles" in this sense. Then they often go on to turn their post into a 500 word article. I am sure there is a good reason for this... and it probably has to do with the unrealistic expectations the theorists (including myself) have for "short and to the point" posts. Sometimes you just need more words.

You can find the article here: More Than Links to Blogs' Search Engine Success

Great Article About Getting Effective Links

Yesterday I posted one of the best articles I've read in a long time about getting high value links. It was written by John Gergye and is called How to get 50 High PR One Way Links Each Month.

In the article John lays out a very detailed strategy for posting articles on high impact sites. What is unique about the strategy is that John recommends you post your articles on regular websites not on article archive sites. As he says,

Typically article banks, directories and the like are NOT going to be your best bet. Sorry. I’m not saying you shouldn’t submit articles to them as part of an overall article marketing scheme. Just don’t do so in the hopes of snapping up many high PR one way links is all.

Instead he suggests you do a search for your most important keywords and find some sites that rank for those keywords that accept articles. Then make a list of the sites that have articles with a PR3 and above.

One of my own best examples of such a site is BF Printing. I have a couple of articles on this site on pages with PR4. And they are highly relevant for the keywords I emphasize in these particular articles.

Another similar site is my own InternetGolfReview.com where I post golf articles which are mostly my own.

The best example in my own stable of sites is my Linknet Pages. These offer a perfect opportunity for authors across a wide range of topics. Surprisingly I have not received many direct submissions. I get the impression that marketing article writers talk a good game, but in the end, most either do not have the time or the motivation to do the hard slugging. They are content to submit through a service like PhantomWriters.com, or send their articles out through a group list like Publisher_Network at Yahoo Groups.

You can find John Gergye's article at this address: How to get 50 High PR One Way Links Each Month.

Changing Website Hosts Can Be Easy

It used to be that making any change to your domain configuration was complicated and confusing. I remember trying to change DSN servers for one of my first websites. Since everything back then went through "InterNIC" (or maybe it was Network Solutions -- it was never clear who was who), you were pretty much at the mercy of their ridiculously cumbersome system. And it usually took at least two days to finalize any change at all.

Now things are very different. You can make changes to your domain registration and configuration without ever having to talk to a real person or wait more than about 10 seconds.

The most serious change a webmaster has to make is moving a domain from one host to another. Even this procedure is pretty straightforward these days, although you'd better be prepared for some glitches along the way.

How the Process Works

Here is the bare minimum you should understand before starting:

- Your current host - This is the company that "hosts" your website -- the location where your website actually resides. It is likely a third party, but you could be hosting your site yourself. Either way your host will have assigned an ip address to your site, and will have DNS (name server) entries that relate your domain name to the actual (ip address) location.

- Your new host - This is the location where you want to move your website.

- Your domain registrar - This is the outfit that tells the world where your domain name servers are, and spreads this information around the web. When you registered your domain you might have used a 3rd party site like 000domains.com, or NetworkSolutions. Or you might have used the registration service of your original host. Either way your domain registrar is separate from your host. To change hosts you have to logon to your domain registrar and tell them who your new host is going to be.

Step 1. Get Your Information Together

The first thing you should do is collect the information you are likely to need along the way, and keep it handy -- preferably in a print out of some kind rather than in an email message or series of webpages scattered over three or four screens on your computer. Here is the minimum you will need:

- The address and logon information (id and pw) of your domain registrar. This is where you point to your host's DNS servers. Everything starts here.

- The address and logon information of your current web host. You may not actually need to make any changes here -- other than to eventually cancel your account -- but it is good to have this information available.

- The address and logon information of your NEW web host. If you have not already chosen a new host, you must do so before proceeding. Check out possible hosts. One good source of information is one of seveal web host "review" sites that compare web hosts in terms of cost, reliability, customer service, and so on.

Step 2. Sign Up With a New Host

Once you have selected a new host, sign up with them and create an account. Normally this involves selecting a "plan", registering your domain name with them, and paying them an initial amount.

"Registering" your domain in this case is not the same as the original registration of your domain name with your registrar. Here all you are doing is telling them to create a spot on their servers for this domain. At this point there will actually be two locations for your domain, but since you have not officially switched your host, only your old one will work.

Once you have registered with your new host you should be able to logon to the Control Panel for your new site. This is a good time to connect to your Control Panel and configure your new site. Normally you will be able to do things like enable Front Page extensions, and add email accounts even before you officially switch. But if your new site is not yet fully accessible, don't panic. I give you a method of "tricking" your computer to let you in even before your new location is completely made public. (see below)

Step 3. Back Up Your Site

Before you proceed you want to make sure you have the most up-to-date version of your website files. If you work with a program like Front Page, you should "publish" your entire site to a location on your local computer. If you work on your pages locally and then upload them by using ftp, your local version should already be up-to-date. If you are not sure, then just connect to your site and download all the files to your local hard drive.

Be sure to maintain the same file names and directory structure when you create your backup. Your new site should be an exact copy of your old one. The pages should all have the same file names and directory structure. If it doesn't then chances are many of the links will not work, and -- just as important -- you will have lost all the Page Rank and Search Engine rankings you have built up over the years. And searches will point to pages that no longer exist.

Step 4. Upload the Files to Your New Host

Ideally, you should upload all your files before you tell your domain registrar to point to the new site. That way there will be absolutely no downtime.

The problem is, however, that you may have no straightforward way of connecting to your new location. When you try to connect to (for example) ftp.mydomain.com, you will be connected to your old site. Many hosts will give you a temporary address that will get you into your new site. But if they don't you will have to make the official host change before you can proceed.

Step 5. Make the "Official" Change

Now you are ready to make your change "official". Don't be intimidated by this. All you have to do is make one change -- you have to point your registrar's name servers at the new host rather than the old one. Your new host should have given you this information when you signed up with them. There should be at least two name servers and you should have both a name and an ip address for both of them. They should look something like this:

ns1.hostname.net ip address: 205.123.222.223
ns2.hostname.net ip address: 205.123.222.224

(Note: Don't use these names. Thye are just "dummy" names and addresses, but may actually exist.)

Once you have made this change it will usually take a few hours to spread the change around the web. During this period web surfers will continue to access your old site (which you left intact), so you have a few hours to get your new site into shape.

Step 6. Tricking Your Own Computer to See the New Address

At this point you will still not be able to access your new site using ftp or Front Page. Until your new host address is "propagated" you will still be pointed to your old one.

One way to get immediate access to your new site using your domain name is to change the primary name server entry on your local computer to point to one of the name servers of your new host. They will already have the change (assuming you have already registered your domain with them), so there should be no delay.

To do this (with Windows), find where your "connection" information is configured. On my system it is called "Local Area Connection Status", because I am on a small network behind a firewall. Once you find your active local connection, click on "Properties" and then "Internet Protocol". There should be a place where you can enter "DNS Server Addresses".

Now enter one of your host's name server addresses in here. Then close it up and test to see if it is working. With XP and NT/Win2000 you don't have to reboot to make this change effective. It might be good to close all browser windows before trying your domain. You may have to "flush your dns cache" as well to get rid of references to your old host address. To do this, open a "Command Prompt" window and type at the prompt:

ipconfig /flushdns [Enter]

Now type:

ping www.mydomain.com

...where "mydomain.com" is the name of your domain.

This will "ping" your domain -- send a little message to it and ask for a reply. You should get a reply telling you which ip address it is sending the message to. If it is sending the message to your new host (you recorded this information earlier), then you are in business.

You should now be able to connect to your new site with ftp to upload your files. You should also be able to connect to your Control Panel using your domain name. Now you have a few hours to upload all your files and get your new email accounts working.

Good Luck!

So Much for My SBI Site

After a year of using Ken Evoy's Site Build It for one of my primary ecommerce sites I decided a few days ago to move the site over to a conventional server. Today I got the deed done -- with no serious hitches, no downtime (so far), and no lost ranking or PR (as far as I can tell).

The site in question, namely TradeShow-Display-Experts.com was set up as the primary vehicle for promoting our company's trade show display and trade show graphics business. When I set the site up just over a year ago (in December 2003) I did it partially as an experiment. I told myself I would set up TSDE.com using SBI, and my other primary site -- Small-Business-Online.com, set up at pretty much the same time -- using a conventional host.

I was impressed enough by Ken Evoy's pitch focusing on the Search Engine Optimization and submission tools built into SBI that I felt it was probably worth the difference in cost. After a year of head to head comparison I would be able to make an informed decision.

The difference in price is not insignificant. You can get a normal site up and running these days for around $5 a month. That's $60/year. Ken's package costs in the range of $300 (I'm not even sure what he is charging now). The justification is that SBI helps you select a "niche", holds your hand while you build it, and then helps you promote it by submitting on a regular basis to the SEs.

After a year of working with the SBI site, and building about 25 others on normal hosts, I have concluded that there is no significant advantage to SBI. I say that from the perspective of someone who has approached web building in a very serious manner. On all counts -- traffic, SE ranking, PR -- my SBI site has not done any better than 4 or 5 of my other main sites. And that, in spite of persistent PPC promotion for the entire year drawing traffic directly to my SBI site.

Here are my conclusions:

1. The claims for constant and regular "submission" to the SEs are overstated. I have concluded that submission is unnecessary. If you are interlinked with other sites, and if you keep your content updated often enough you get spidered automatically. No need for resubmission. I could be wrong about this, but, as I noted above, I could not see any effective ranking or placement difference.

2. The site building tools built into SBI are restrictive and clunky. I never used them anyway. I built my pages in Front Page and then uploaded them, one at a time. I found this process aggravatingly restrictive.

3. At least two important technologies cannot be used (as far as I could tell) in SBI sites: SSI (server side includes) and dynamic pages such as .php or .asp. Both of these things make building a dynamic site much easier, and both have become important for the kind of sites I am currently building. I think the SBI claim is that not allowing these things keeps their sites cleaner and more SE-friendly. I suspect the real reason is that they cannot easily implement these technologies in the restrictive hand-holding "modular" environment they use to build their sites.

4. The cost is not justified. Yes I know there are many tools made available to SBI subscribers, but I could not make use of any of them. It would be interesting to know how many SBI sites really make money for their owners. I can't say that I have ever seen one that looks like it has significant traffic.

5. One thing I will say is that I have never had any problem with my SBI site going down. Virtually every other site I own has had serious and very annoying downtime. It is hard to say how much this reliability is worth. I also find it hard to believe that there aren' at least a few reliable hosts out there. I assume it's just a matter of finding a couple.

The SBI package is probably a good investment if you don't know anything about web building, have no design experience, and need serious help formulating a business plan. But I suspect anybody with this many strikes against them isn't going to make it in online commerce anyway.

Wear the Right Golf Shoes - Bite the Turf

Product Feature from Review-of-the-Week.com



from Golf-Topics-Tips.com

Mechanics and golf shoes. We have all heard the term mechanics applied to golf and particularly the golf swing.

A slight change in mechanics by any part of the body can adversely affect the way the rest of the body performs during the swing and thus affect the swing itself. The term also applies to golf shoes and their importance in controlling the mechanics of your game.

If you are even slightly familiar with how Kurt Schilling’s ankle affected his pitching during the playoffs and World Series, and how special footwear was designed to help stabilize his foot, then you will understand the importance of proper golf shoes to the golf swing.

During a golf swing, weight and torque are being transferred from the upper body to the lower body and, simultaneously, from the right leg to the left leg.

This weight shift is stabilized by the golf shoe that is biting the turf. Prior to beginning your downswing, most of your weight has shifted to your right leg. When you start the swing, you are swinging along the centerline of the right leg. This creates torque.

Without proper support of the right ankle and foot, stability is lost and that centerline will fluctuate. This leads to a loss of power from your stroke.

During impact with the ball, weight and momentum are abruptly shifted to the left leg. If the left foot and ankle are not properly supported, you’ll get a swaying motion in your body’s movement that will cause an over compensation by your upper body as it tries to assist in your overall balance. This leads to an exaggerated swing that typically causes a hook.

A good pair of golf shoes is important to provide the added support necessary to stabilize the feet during the golf swing.

Of course, you also want them to be comfortable when walking the course, bending to retrieve the ball from the cup or, if the case may be, hunting a ball in the woods.

For more information and to explore your options, go to Golf-Topics-Tips.com.