Archive | Blogs

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Welcome to the first edition of the “Blogging Questions & Answers.” I will kick it with 10 questions every Wednesday, so if your question was not answered today it will be next week. If the volume of questions increase I might change it to 20 questions answered each week.

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You can ask your question either by leaving a comment on this post or via the contact form. Here we go!

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Patrix asks:

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Should we be worried about supplemental results? Mine seem to oscillate wildly and at times, remedial measures produce the opposite effects.

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You should be worried if a huge part of your content is in the supplemental index. Pages in the supplemental index get spidered less often, and they only appear in search results for very narrow search queries. If a large part of your content is in supplemental index you should run a check-up on your blog to ensure that it is not coming from duplicate content penalties or other problems that Google might find while indexing your blog.

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You mentioned that remedial measures might produce the opposite effect. My advice would be to eliminate duplicate content, to improve the internal linking structure and and to keep working on quality backlinks.

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Webd360 asks:

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Was there a specific blog or person that inspired you to start blogging, or did you just find out about it and decided to give it a try?

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Late in 2005 I already had a small blog running. I had my own domain, and it was using the Blogger platform. Basically I was posting articles that I used on my economics degree, and the traffic was minimal.

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After a couple of months I came across an article titled “How to Make Money from Your Blog,” written by Steve Pavlina. After reading this article I said to myself, “Damn, I think I can do it.” That is how I started blogging seriously.

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Aseem Kishore asks:

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\nDid you feel your web site had the sandbox effect? Are there certain times after which your traffic suddenly increases (certain number of months, etc)?

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Although I am pretty sure I passed through a “sandbox” period, I did not notice it. Mainly because I was not anticipating organic traffic in the initial months, so it felt pretty natural.

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I guess the only case where the sandbox effect would be noticeable is for a website that used some “shady” techniques and was held in the sandbox for a longer period. Should this website fix the problems it would suddenly receive a burst of organic traffic.

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Health asks:

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\nCan my site be sandboxed or punished in any way by search engines if it gets like 500 links in 1 day?

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It depends on how old your site is, and on how many quality backlinks it already has. Getting 500 links in 1 day would not be a problem for an established or popular website. It could raise suspicion, however, if a site that got indexed yesterday by Googled suddenly receive these 500 links.

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Overall I would not recommend mass buying links or directory submissions. If you still want to do it, however, do it gradually.

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Fred asks:

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How many daily visitors do you think you need to get in order to make decent money with Adsense?

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It depends on three factors: what is the niche of the site, where the visitors are coming from, and what you think about to be decent.

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The niche will affect how many cents or dollars you get per click. If your website is inside niche that pays well (college education, gambling, and so on) and your keywords are optimized, you could be getting as much as two or three dollars per click. That means that you would need less visitors to make a decent revenue from Adsense.

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Where the visitors are coming from will influence the click-through rate (CTR), which is how often an average visitor clicks on the Adsense unit. Sites that get a big percentage of their traffic from search engines tend to perform better than sites that get mostly repeat visitors (because they become blind to the ads). The more organic (from search engines) traffic you have, the fewer visitors you will need to make a decent money with Adsense.

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Finally, it depends on what you call decent. If you are aiming for $1,000 monthly from Adsense I think you would need around 3000 one-of-a-kind visitors daily (considering an average paying niche, average organic traffic and a not too aggressive ad positioning).

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Costa Fong asks:

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I see you have good sponsors to your blog. When will be a good time for a blog to get sponsors and how do you approach them?

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Before approaching direct sponsors you need to make sure that you have some things in place, like a clean and professional looking design, a popular website, and a focused audience. There are no definite numbers here, but as a rule thumb I would state that you need at least a couple thousand daily visitors or RSS subscribers in order to offer a good exposure to the sponsors.

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Once you have that in place you can start working on finding the advertisers. The first place is your blog itself. Write about the fact that you are offering sponsorships, and create an “Advertise Here” page with an overall description of the advertising options.

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Initially it is probable that you will need to find the sponsors and not the other way around. Make a list of companies that have products related to your niche. Check companies that are already spending money with Google AdWords or other forms of on the web advertising. After that just contact them directly offering the sponsorship.

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I’ve written a pretty detailed article on this topic titled “How to Find Advertisers for Your Website: The Ultimate Guide,” check it out for more information.

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Warrior Blog asks:

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It is more important to get just lots of traffic to your website or to get more comments on your website?

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It depends on your objectives. If you are trying to build a community, for example, the number of comments would be important. People often use communities to test ideas, to exchange favors and to develop projects collaboratively.

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If you are trying to build a popular website or to make money on the web, however, traffic is more important. Take a look at some very popular tech blogs like Engadget or Gizmodo. The have a very few readers commenting. Yet you probably know how much money they make…

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engtech asks:

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I’d love to see a getting started guide for blog monetization for people who have been running in “stealth” mode and already built up traffic, backlinks, search engine ranking, and a community.

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This is topic for a whole article! A short advice would be to integrate the ads slowly and test the reactions from the readers (you probably knew that). Secondly, I would also focus the PPC ads towards older posts, so that your organic traffic is targeted and not your loyal readers.

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Max asks:

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How Long did it take till you had a good number of very special visit

ors per day?

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If I remember correctly the traffic was slow for the first two months, and then it started picking up. Around the third month I was receiving 1,000 one-of-a-kind visitors daily, and that is a good number for me (at least it gave me motivation to keep working on the blog).

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Ben asks:

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Have there been any studies to find out which blogging platform is the ideal or is it all subjective? In other words, is WordPress superior than movable type, blogger and the rest. Any place that has an objective list of the pros and cons of each? Does it really matter which platform you use?

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Yes, there are many reviews and comparisons of the two platforms. Here are two examples:
\nhttp://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=167839
\nhttp://www.webmaster-source.com/2007/07/03/wordpress-vs-movable-type/

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The platform is somewhat important. Even though there are some very popular blogs using Movable type, WordPress is becoming the de fact standard platform. That means that more people use it, more people create plugins and extensions for it, and more people offer support and help with it.

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I would not think twice before choosing WordPress over Movable Type.\n

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© Daily Blog Tips – visit the site for more blog tips!

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The “Top 25 Blogs” is becoming a trademark around here. We have already created the “Top 25 Blogs About Blogging” and the “Top 25 SEO Blogs.” Now it is time to cover the web design niche.

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I have a lot of fun compiling these lists because it allows me to discover a bunch of new blogs, most of them with excellent content. It is also interesting to see how the different blogs on a specific niche perform under the parameters. Once again we based the analysis on Google’s Pagerank, Alexa rank, Bloglines subscribers and Technorati authority. The details about the algorithm can be found below the table.

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#1	A List Apart	8	10	10	10	38
#2	Smashing Magazine	6	10	10	10	36
#3	456 Berea Street	7	8	10	8	33
#4	Meyer Web	8	7	9	7	31
#5	Simple Bits	7	7	10	6	30
#6	Pearsonified	7	6	7	10	30
#7	Tutorial Blog	5	8	7	8	28
#8	CSS Beauty	7	8	7	5	27
#9	Snook.ca	7	7	7	6	27
#10	Bartelme Design	7	6	9	4	26
#11	The Man in Blue	7	5	10	3	25
#12	Andy Budd	8	3	10	4	25
#13	Particle Tree	6	6	8	5	25
#14	Warpspire	7	4	3	10	24
#15	Brian Gardner	6	7	1	10	24
#16	Sitepoint Design Blog	6	10	4	4	24
#17	The Undersigned	7	3	3	10	23
#18	Bitt Box	5	7	5	6	23
#19	Fadtastic	5	3	5	10	23
#20	Colour Lovers	0	9	5	8	14
#21	David Airey	4	7	3	8	22
#22	Design Meltdown	5	6	7	4	22
#23	Clagnut	7	3	8	3	21
#24	Dev Lounge	6	6	4	5	21
#25	Smiley Cat	6	4	7	3	20

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Blogs considered: the list thinks about only blogs that have a high percentage of web design related content.

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Google Pagerank (0 to 10): the actual Pagerank was used on the algorithm.
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\nAlexa Rank (0 to 10): Ranges were determined based on the Alexa Rank (i.e., 150k and up, 150k-100k, 100k-75k, 75k-50k) and each range was assigned a number

(1 to 10).

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Bloglines Subscribers (0 to 10): Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., 1-50, 50-100, 100-150, 150-200) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 10).
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\nTechnorati Authority (0 to 10): Ranges were determined based on Technorati’s Authority rank (i.e., 1-100, 100-200, 200-400,400-600) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 10).\n

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© Daily Blog Tips – visit the site for more blog tips!

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If you have been offering email subscription for a while, you probably have a pile of subscribers that have not confirmed their subscription. Emailing these inactive subscribers individually might be worth it, but it is certainly also tedious.

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In order to solve this problem Keith from Techie-Buzz decided to code a wordpress plugin, the Notify Uncorfirmed Subscribers (NUS).

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Basically you need to provide your Feedburner login details and the plugin will fetch all the unconfirmed subscribers. After that you create a custom message, and the plugin will send it to all the inactive subscriber.

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If you want a guide on how to write that custom message you can check this post I had written some time ago on the same topic.\n

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© Daily Blog Tips – visit the site for more blog tips!

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I know this is short notice, but my friend (and world class copywriter) Daniel Levis is conducting a special teleseminar today (in just a few hours) where he is going to share a little known way to grow YOUR list 4 to 7 times faster… without having to attract a single additional visitor to your web site?

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And that’s actually just one of the profit boosting secrets you’ll discover on this power packed free teleseminar.

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Click here now to register!

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Daniel is also giving away a complete 5 step strategy for supercharging the selling power of your ENTIRE web presence that he says ANYBODY can use to instantly start growing your lists up to 7 TIMES FASTER!

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If you want your web site to begin making more sales…

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generating more traffic…

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capturing more HIGH QUALITY leads…

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and bringing in more customers like clockwork while you goof off and enjoy the profits…

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– YOU DO NOT WANT TO MISS THIS EVENT! –

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Everything you need to prepare for this exciting training is available at this link:

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Click here now to register! (It’s FREE…)

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Go ahead, the whole thing is completely FREE!

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See you on the call…

P.S. – I’m not sure yet if he is going to make the recording available yet or not, so you need to do whatever it takes to make it onto the call live.

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Click here now to register!

\nTags:copywriter copywriting Daniel Levis Email Conversion Landing Page Conversion List Building On the web Marketing teleseminar Teleseminarscopywriter, copywriting, Daniel Levis, Email Conversion, Landing Page Conversion, List Building, Online Marketing, teleseminar, Teleseminars

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After my earlier post on the results I’ve received from using high quality “action shots” on websites, I’ve had a few readers email me and ask me how to get good quality photographs to use on their websites.

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My answer is easy. All of the pictures used on my website (and many of my client’s sites) are all taken by the same person. (The ONLY person I trust for my sites pictures.)

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Mary Mazzullo from www.SeminarPhotography.com.

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In fact Mary has taken the pictures that just about EVERY top marketer or speaker I know uses on their websites.

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As the “Conversion Doctor” I have ample test data that supports the fact that using high quality photo’s can dramatically increase the conversion rates of most websites.

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In fact just ONE of the poses Mary took for me has improved the opt-in rate of the page it’s on by over 37%!

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But… The flip side is also true. Poor quality pictures can actually injured conversion rates.

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Your visitors will judge the trustworthiness and professionalism of your website and company, by the quality of the images that appear on your site.

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So it’s critical to make sure that you only use top quality pictures.

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The good news is… (more…)

\nTags:Building Trust Landing Page Conversion Marketing Multivariate Testing Offline Marketing On the web Marketing Split Testing Success and Mindset Testing and Tracking Web Usability Website DesignBuilding Trust, Landing Page Conversion, Marketing, Multivariate Testing, Offline Marketing, On the internet Marketing, Split Testing, Success and Mindset, Testing and Tracking, Web Usability, Website Design

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It always amazes me when web designers try and hide the primary call to action on a page or make it “blend in” with the overall design.

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Time and time again my test results have shown that the bigger, bolder and more obvious you make your primary call to action, the higher your conversion rates will be.

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Larger buttons, high contrast borders around buttons, arrows pointing at your calls to action… These are all ways to draw more attention to the action you want visitors to take.

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Well… Here are the results of yet another test that illustrates this principle.

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The following test was conducted on one of my coaching clients forced opt-in pages.

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In this test we wanted to see if using a large “action shot” picture of the client pointing at the opt-in box, would help boost conversion rates.

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In the control version we used his standard opt-in box area, with no image.

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In the test version we used a pic similar to the one below.
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(To protect the client’s niche I’m not showing the actual test version. This is just an example from one of my own squeeze pages.)

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Here are the results:
\n (more…)

\nTags:Landing Page Conversion Multivariate Testing On the internet Marketing Split Testing Testing and Tracking Website DesignLanding Page Conversion, Multivariate Testing, On the web Marketing, Split Testing, Testing and Tracking, Website Design

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Sorry about the short notice on this but I just found out about this call myself.

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In just a couple hours (3:00 PM Central) my friend JP Maroney is conducting a special FREE call that you should definitely attend.

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Why?

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Because, every entrepreneur — every business — feels
\nstuck at one time or another.

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When growth is sluggish, cash-flow sucks and
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It’s a natural part of the Entrepreneurial
\nlife-cycle.

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The good news: Miracle growth is not only
\npossible – it can be downright simple!

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In fact…

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You’ll find out exactly how to create the
\nkind of growth you want in your business when
\nyou attend this red-hot “Business Breakthrough
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>>> http://web-site-evaluations.com/rec/jpcall.htm

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\n>>> http://web-site-evaluations.com/rec/jpcall.htm

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When You Attend You Will Learn JP’s…

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\nblock the day and time on your calendar.

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\n>>> http://web-site-evaluations.com/rec/jpcall.htm

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See you on the call…

Eric Graham

\nTags:business growth entrepreneurial life hot business JP Maroney Offline Marketing Online Marketing Success and Mindsetbusiness growth, entrepreneurial life, hot business, JP Maroney, Offline Marketing, Online Marketing, Success and Mindset

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