Free Traffic Blog

Here we are, several months after the controversial BlogRush launch.

Nobody can stir up attention like John Reese. Blog widgets are a hot trend now and BlogRush was the first one I ever cared to try out. Initially, the widget did a so-so job. People whined and cried that it conflicted with Google’s Adsense policies. Others cried that it didn’t actually bring any traffic. Still others griped about the widget’s color scheme.

Phase two of BlogRush included changes to address a lot of these problems. First, all BlogRush blogs were submitted to a human review, which ended the spam blogs. Second, better tracking procedures were put in place to keep out cheaters, artificial blog impressions to generate syndication credits. More and better categories were added to keep niches tighter knit and so that blogs didn’t get syndicated on unrelated blogs. BlogRush even went so far as to create more sizes and colors of the widget, and now dishes out bonus credits like crazy.

After all of these changes, what do I think about BlogRush?

I think it’s awesome, and I’ll give you three reasons why:

1) Free targeted traffic. My blog is syndicated only on blogs with related categories and topics, and since all blogs are reviewed, it only appears on good blogs and no spam blogs.

2) The only incentive to click and visit is to read the post. There is no reward for attracting more clicks to your widget like there is with Google’s Adsense, so I know that every visitor BlogRush brings is a highly interested visitor.

3) The fact that blogs have to be approved gives each blog that displays the BlogRush widget a stamp of quality. I submitted another blog to BlogRush just to see how it would do. It was an old, slow blog that only posted content that was already syndicated somewhere else. It got shot down - rejected.

So if you have a real blog and want to bring more free targeted traffic, I highly recommend you simply add the BlogRush widget to your blog.

Click Here to Sign Up Free to BlogRush

In this article: Google Offers Reprieve From Google Hell a really terrible time in SEO has come to an end. The changes in Google’s SERPs to include Google’s LSI (latent search index) means that there are no more duplicate content penalties that will make pages of your site vanish from the search index because of content that Google judged “too similar” to be real.

What did that hurt? It hurt all forms of content syndication. Articles were denied exposure and template sites got deindexed without any warning.

What did it help? Well it gave birth to the concept that “unique content is king” which still has some value but is on it’s way down. A site with a few pages of unique content almost always cannot complete with a site that has 1000 pages of scraped content, when it comes to traffic.

Good move Google, I applaud you. The LSI hurt a lot more than it helped.

Instant Buzz is well known among internet marketers as the free ad tool bar that runs in your browser. Every time you go to a new page, a new ad appears. You in turn, generate credits for your own ads to appear across the exchange network. You can also purchase ad impressions in bulk.

What is my honest opinion of Instant Buzz?

In all honesty, I don’t think it’s a worthwhile program as a free member. The plain blue text ads are completely ignored by the other instant buzz members because they get used to having them appear constantly.

Paid membership is the only way to go. You can make attention getting ads with html codes to highlight your ad’s background with ’span’ tags, you can bold your text, and change the color. Those options are really your only chance for success.

Never buy the ad impressions. I’ve done it several times and the return is never good enough to justify the price.

Is Instant Buzz worth the one time fee of $150? That’s really up to you. It was for me. Instant Buzz really only becomes powerful to users once they build a large downline of active referrals so their ads will always be all over the network whether the user continues to use the bar itself or not.

Paid membership with Instant Buzz is RECOMMENDED.

Free membership with Instant Buzz is NOT RECOMMENDED.

So how do I make money online?  Lots of people are asking that, and all of them seem to have the same illusion that somehow all of us webmasters are like a mafia that makes bank by surfing the net and they all want in on it.  Is there an online mafia?  Sort of, they’re called “gurus” and are both worshipped and hated all over the world. Hated by the jealous, worshipped by the newbies, and understood by the experienced.

What do I mean by “understood” ?  I mean that the gurus don’t really have some top secret thing that they are actually going to sell you.  What they sell are different versions of basically the same business model that goes something like this: find a niche, get traffic from that niche, build a list of people in that niche, offer products to your list.

There’s no secret to the basic model.  People offer different tactics but most of them all look to that same strategy.  Sometimes the product is to get you to click on an Adsense ad, sometimes it’s to fill out a form for a CPA offer, and sometimes it’s to fork out your credit card and pay for something you didn’t know you needed until now.

What pays the best though?  I don’t have an ecommerce stores, but I’ve seen lots of those fail miserably.  Lots of them them boom though, so there’s potential there.  Can you make huge money with affiliate marketing? Yes, you can. But you gotta pretty much have your system already established, and NOT blab about it to anybody.  What about services? I like services.  The only real cost is getting customers.  The pay is assured and you know you’re getting paid for your time.

The drawback is time.  I would definitely prefer to have an automated dropshipping store online, but that’s not my style.  Doing SEO work under contract is what I enjoy, it’s tough to say I’d rather be selling digital cameras and ipods on autopilot than researching, tweaking, and working the way I do.

For now, I make money online for all of my time. The goal for 2008 is to make a lot more of it, and invest the profits into building the automated systems that bring in the big dough.

So I wasted about two minutes of my life away reading an article entitled “SEO is Dead” by Julian Adams.  The article had no basis for its claims and was more of a rant than any actual analysis or prediction. The author called all SEOs keyword spammers and claimed that all tactics were deceptive and said that everybody would be better off if there was no SEO.  As I read it I thought, “nobody is going to respect this author, because all this article does is whine, bitch, and complain.”

I’m calling you out Julian.

Here are a few reasons why SEO is great.

1) Ethical SEO practices enable new businesses to reach people who are searching for their services or products.  I SEO for a family business that is extremely profitable now, but hardly made any money before the company website had any SEO.

2) SEO is like a check and balance on the “power” of the search engines.  If we let the search engine companies have all the power is ranking, personal bias leaks through. It is impossible to be 100% objective when making judgement calls because everybody has bias. The ability to work to deserve a higher ranking displaces the authority of search engine companies.

3) The author accused SEOs of allowing companies to just “buy their way to the top”.  Um…all search engines do that anyway with paid search listings.  People who are interested in meeting their target market without “buying” their way to the top use SEO, even though there are costs for SEO services.  Natural search rankings can either be given by chance or by design. SEO services allow it to happen by design.

Anyway, SEO services are great and do a lot of good for both customers and companies.  Like all things in life, the system can be abused, but whining about it and concluding that “everybody would be better off if SEO was dead” doesn’t solve that problem and only makes you look like a little kid who cries because he’s too little to play on the high school football team. “Everybody would be better off if the football team was dead!”  I can hear that little boy crying now, exploding with jealousy of those who are able to run plays on the gridiron while all he can do is watch.

So my web site rocks one day and sucks the next, then rocks again. It really is tough to know whether this free traffic website has Google’s “divine” approval or not. I understand full and well how a site should be optimized to become more Google friendly, but it really pisses me off when this site bounces between the top 20 site for the phrase “free traffic” one day then the next ranks #857 for the same phrase.

In this situation, Google is a lot like a neurotic girlfriend. Did you ever have one of those? (or boyfriend…) It’s like today they love you and tomorrow they don’t give a damn about you. It’s a tough situation to be in because you’re a imprisoned in the relationship. You want in, but you don’t know if you qualify. You’re stuck in limbo, watching, andwaiting. It’s more irritating than the chirping birds that eat the box elder bugs in the tree in my back yard (one day I’m going to shoot them all…)

So what is a guy to do? Well, I update, I build links, I re-examine my site’s structure and content. It’s like in the cruddy relationship where you do all kinds of cross-examining of yourself trying to find the defect that’s messing things up.

But I think, in this case, just as in a neurotic dating relationship, the fault is with Google and not with my site. My site is playing clean ball, no cloaking, no automated content generation, no doorway pages, nothing that should give Google a reason to distrust my site. The relationship brings so many benefits, however, that it’s worth hanging in there a while longer. I can always try to seduce a little Yahoo or MSN love, but in the end, not even the both of them combined give the benefits of being Google’s favorite.

So for now, Google, we’re still together. Thanks for all you do for me, but let’s try to open up a little communication or something babe.

There are a lot of issues with education that I have beef about. One of those issues is standardized testing. I remember taking the AIM tests in elementary school, state testing later, and the ACT in high school to try and get into college. I never took the SAT but that’s because the ACT is more popular in the western U.S. where I lived.

Do standardized tests really show how smart you are? I don’t think so.

Do standardized tests show how well you take tests? Yes they do. But that’s about it.

The other beef I have about the standardized tests that are given is that the problems are so impractical and my score on the ACT (a 29 average out of 36) has absolutely zero impact on my ability to perform in the business world. Or does it… There may be a correllation at best but it certainly isn’t the supreme factor to determine my intelligence.

I dropped out of college with one semester left to complete (I got married and left the country) and I have every intention of going back to finish. I don’t want to finish because the degree is actually going to help me, I want to finish because I’m the kind of guy who finishes what he starts, even though I’m slow to do so…

I do respect, however, trade school degrees where people earn certifications not by writing essays on theory but by demonstrating by their actions that they are an expert. I never went to school for marketing nor did I ever take a course on search engine optimization, but I decided to put my skills up against those who trained to see if I would pass for certification in my field. I went to ExpertRating.com and took their test for search engine marketing. You’ll notice there aren’t any Adsense ads on this blog, which shows I’m no expert on PPC, Adsense, or Adwords by any stretch of the imagination and this test shows it.

I scored 100% on search engine optimization techniques though, and here is my marks sheet to prove it:

I think it’s cool that I didn’t need a course to prepare me for a test, but that in this case the test really shows that I am competent in my work.

I recommend you check out ExpertRating and pick up some certifications yourself if you do any contracted work online, there’s even a certification for typing, so you can apply for data entry jobs. Click the banner below to see what tests are available for your certification:

I wrote about this on this blog before it got destroyed, so I’m reposting with
some sweet new info.

If you’re doing anything blackhat or sneaky, or if you just have the good sense
to wanna protect your personal information while you’re online, you gotta use
proxies.

If you know nothing about proxies, please consult Wikipedia
here: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy

A proxy basically allows you to use the internet through a remote server from anywhere else in the world. Some are nothing more than IP addresses with available ports, others have sophisticated scripts for surfing via their server. Two examples of these kind of proxies that I’ve successfully used are:

xfunnel.com
hidemyass.com
cantbustme.com
the-cloak.com

The best way I’ve found to use the internet via proxy, however, is to download TOR
and privoxy with the plugin for Firefox. You can get it here:

http://tor.eff.org/download.html

Once you install the proxy pack with the firefox plugin, there should be a little
button in the bottom right of your firefox browser with Tor Disabled. Just click
it to enable Tor and your surfing becomes safer.

All of your applications that use the web can be configured to use Tor
as well once you have it running on your machine by pointing them to
“localhost:8118″ or to “127.0.0.1:8118″

Using a proxy protects your personal IP address from being identified
or banned from sites you may want to abuse, such as social networking
sites and such.

Most of the available proxies in the public don’t work very well.

I’ve been researching on how we can find better proxies. The
truth is simply that you have to have a tool that can check how
good the proxy is before you go to work with it. I finally found
a freebie that let’s us do that.

Click Here to Get the Free Proxy Checker

You have to opt-in to the developer’s list to see the video on how
it works and stuff, but it’s worth getting.

Man I am so sick and tired of hearing about “bum marketing” and all these lies that “all you have to do is submit a bunch of articles about your niche with your link and you’ll start making sales…” Do sales happen from traffic that articles bring? Yes, I’m not saying people won’t buy anything if they came to your site via an article. What I am contesting, however, is the idea that it will bring thousands of targeted visitors desperate to buy from your website.

Just to get one thing clear, I think any traffic from articles is just a bonus. I write articles purely to get more keyword-rich backlinks to my site, which is why I use Article Marketer to submit and distribute my articles. I’m interested in speed and quantity. Quality happens when the article is written, so that’s not the issue here.

Everybody knows that the author box is where you stick an ad for the site you’re promoting right? And according to outdated marketing methods, these articles will bring you lots of free traffic. That’s not really the case, but here are a few tips to get a lot MORE out of your article marketing.

#1) Make the title of your article match almost exactly a commonly searched long-tail phrase.

Not really black hat, but it changes the motive behind your “creative writing”. Use a keyword tool like WordTracker to find a really long keyword phrase and then make that keyword phrase the title of your article. You may just take the #1 spot once you get your article into ezinearticles.com

#2) This is the big one. Put the conclusion of your article inside the author’s box, not the body of the article.

Have you ever noticed that there’s no seperation between the author’s box and the article body when you article appears on ezinearticles.com ? Take advantage of that. Make your conclusion a really short paragraph of it’s own, and include a keyword text link there, making it look like you are linking to an authority site that isn’t yours.

Be sure to include a second paragraph with links as your “author’s box” though so the paragraph with the keyword link looks like EzineArticles approved your link to an “authority” site. You’ll get way more visitors that way because people won’t see your link as an advertisement!

Happy New Year to everybody out there! I wish you all prosperity, health, wealth, and happiness!

-Tyler Ellison

So I was having some serious issues with my last hosting provider.  Ipowerweb is not officially blacklisted as far as I’m concerned.  I’d been having problems with them for a long time and their support is friendly and does their best but my issue is with their actual servers, not the service.  I think their machines are overextended and they have no business selling more hosting because things on my site seemed to work one day and the next day they wouldn’t.

I’m OK with starting over though. This will be a fresh start for my blog for 2008.  I have some big plans for the coming year.

1. No more scraped articles.  I’d been using this blog to simply post articles I got from other places - articles that were GOOD, not automatically posted or anything like that. I won’t do that anymore, however. From now on, this blog will only have 100% original stuff from me.

2. I won’t be posting tons of ads to programs like I was before. I was experimenting with stuff and didn’t really give this blog the attention it deserves. I plan to make this a resource worth bookmarking.

3. More videos. Video blogging is the wave of the future, and I’ve decided to embrace it. There will definitely be more videos on this blog. All will be hand picked for quality so only the best stuff will show up here.

So with that being said, I’ll go back to work to customizing this bad boy.