100 Rules For Bloggers #12 – Get Viewers Involved

December 24, 2008

If you want to drive repeat visitors to your site and really drive traffic, you need to not only provide great new content on a regular basis, but you need to figure out ways to get readers involved in your site. Encourage comments, host contests where people vote, hold votes and polls, anything to get [...]

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Amazon Affiliate Data Secrets

December 22, 2008

Ok, I’m a geek at heart and love charts and graphs that actually represent data in a meaningful way.  I’m going to let you in on a couple of little secrets here using a graph I pulled up from Alexa.com: This graph represents the “Daily Reach” of Amazon and Ebay, as a function of the [...]

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100 Rules For Bloggers #11 – Host Your Own Blog

December 22, 2008

Rule #11: Sure, it’s easier to use a free host for your blog at first.  Minimal startup time with WordPress.com or Blogger and you’re off to the races! But you’re not in control of your own destiny. For WordPress.com, they won’t let you advertise or put up affiliate links to 99% of the  programs out [...]

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100 Rules For Bloggers #10 – Help Your Readers With Quality Content

December 21, 2008

Rule #10 Hundreds of Millions of people hit the Internet every day looking for something.  They’re either looking for: Information that they need or want.  For instance, I went looking for a Cinnamon Raisin Bread recipe this morning and found it. Entertainment. You need to provide one of these two things to your readers, or [...]

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100 Rules For Bloggers #9 – Do Promote Your Blog!

December 17, 2008

If you have real compelling content on a real blog or site (not a splog or squeeze page site), you need to promote it in a meaningful way, both to get SER (Search Engine Ranking) and to get actual subscribers and repeat visitors. There are lots of sites and lists out there of how to [...]

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100 Rules For Bloggers #8 – Don’t Spam Your Blog

December 16, 2008

I see this on the BlogCatalog forums all the time.  There are lots of threads where people ask for comments, or visits, or Diggs or whatever and if you look through them, the same people troll them for visits over and over and over, posting their blog in every thread no matter what the subject [...]

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Affiliate Links are NOT against the Google Adwords TOS.

December 15, 2008

I’ve read a bunch of forums lately where people state that buying PPC on Google Adwords for Affiliate links is against the Google Terms of Service (TOS), and nothing could be further from the truth, at least not today.  Go check out the Google Adwords Terms of Service if you don’t believe me. It’s possible [...]

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100 Rules For Bloggers #7 – Write About What You Know

December 14, 2008

Rules For Bloggers #7 Write about what you know.  Sounds simple, but it seems like people either don’t know it or forget it all the time.  Pick a topic you know about and like, write about it on your blog a topic and stick to that topic or you’ll never gain readers and keep them.

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Feedburner Is Bad SEO Mojo For Your New Blog!

December 13, 2008

If you are a new blogger, Avoid Feedburner.  Do not install Feedburner WordPress plugins for your blog, and do not use it.  If you don’t know what you are doing, Feedburner can be very bad for your SEO. I switched a blog to track my feed with Feedburner and my organic search traffic went down [...]

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100 Rules For Bloggers – #6 – Don’t Ask People To $upport Your Blog.

December 12, 2008

Rules For Bloggers #6: I’ve noticed a trend on BlogCatalog lately where random people will post a message to my Shoutbox saying things like, “I just $upported your blog, come $upport mine!”, or “I $miled on your blog, come $mile on mine!” If you can’t read h4x0r, replace the $ with an S.  That means [...]

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