Why Counting Links Is Not So Easy

Knowing what a link is… that’s SEO 101 right? Think again! It’s one of the most fundamental parts of SEO, but when we really asked ourselves the question, we found there were many different ways of counting links. We use both Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO and decided to see if we can get a common census between the two tools. (Full disclosure: In case you didn’t know, one of the authors of this post is the Marketing director at Majestic.)
Firstly, let’s get all the confusion out the way about the different terms that are used to describe this one key word. "Backlinks", "inbound links" and "in-links" and "links" are different words but they have the same meaning. Namely, they are incoming links to a webpage or the entire website.

Open Site Explorer tends to have used the word “links” – but this can be ambiguous as it might also apply to outbound links from a page. (It doesn’t, in OSE’s case, but user perception is reality.) By contrast, Majestic SEO tends to use the phrase "backlinks", but again the user might reasonably ask whether a backlink is still a backlink after it has been deleted (since Majestic keeps the row of data, but just flags it as a delete link) or if a link from within the site should be included (as Majestic drops these).

Both SEOmoz and Majestic SEO realize that terminology is important and both tools have agreed to work towards a common language moving forward where we can. Certainly – when you use both tools, you will invariably get different answers as to “how many links” there are to a site or page. There are loads of reasons – but even if there weren’t, getting a methodology just to count them is pretty hard. So let’s look at an example (bring on the infographic. Full size here)…

 
Problem 1: Handling  the two (blue) links from Page A to Page B:
Have you ever seen a “Link count” between page A and Page B that is more than one? I haven’t. So how does one account for two links between page A and Page B with different anchor texts? They are obviously not the SAME link, but saying they are TWO links would be simply inviting trouble. Even the lowliest of hackers can create 1000 links on a free blog page all linking to a target page and call them 1000 different links in this case.  We are pretty confident that Google only take the first link and anchor text into consideration at this time – if that’s any help to you.
Problem 2: Does an Internal link count as a link?

Look at Page A. It has three inbound links and three outbound links. So is that three links or six? OK – 80% of you will say “3” even though technically the 20% would be right. Let’s take it a step further… what if Page A links to itself? Oh GOD! Here I think we have a difference between OSE and Majestic.
Majestic currently drops any links from internal pages (sites within the same domain), so that last example would not apply… but it is not true to say internal link don’t have link value. It is just a lot of extra data that Majestic doesn’t store as there are tools available for free that let you analyse internal links. OSE, by contrast, did seem to be able to keep a track of internal links last time I checked.
Problem 3: 301 redirects
You will notice that there is a third way a user can get from Page A to Page B with one click – via a 301. So are there two links from Page A to Page B or three? If you say “three” then you are also saying by the same logic that there is a link from page I to page B, which passes through the same redirected 301 page. Now that’s a problem. Is there a link from the 301 page to Page B? Or do would you say that the 301 page should be transparent?
Well I can tell you that Majestic (and I believe also OSE) counts the link from the 301 page as one link. Both sites mark it as a redirect link, but neither one will add in the links from pages H and I in their link counts. Technically – Google does though! At least sometimes. That’s why so many people buy up expired domains and 301 redirect them to other pages. They have a chance of getting link juice as a result. In recent years we have seen a bit of a downgrade in the effectiveness of 301s –but they remain a vital part of the web infrastructure. OSE shows you that the link is a 301, which should give you a good clue. In MJSE the link is flagged as a redirect, but you would need to pick up your “clue” from their ACRank on that link and if you wanted to investigate further, you would need to actually analyse the url that returns a 301.
Problem 4: Other Redirects
If either OSE or MJSE were to try and “act like a search engine” in making your decision that 301s should be effectively invisible, the problems simply multiply. Spam links would appear to increase, for a start, but what do you do with 302 redirects? In theory, Google does NOT treat these as invisible – although some .NET sites use 302 redirects in their menu structures, so goodness knows how Google handles that bad piece of programming. What happens on a multiple redirect? A 301 onto a 302 onto a URL which 301s onto the landing page and – itself – has 100 inbound links? No – it all gets a headache – so a link from a 302 or metaredirect page simply HAS to be a single link, even if there are hundreds of links going into the redirection URL. So how do the different systems actually keep tally?
Majestic SEO says there are 4 links to page B. One from page A (oops) and one from each of the three orange redirect URLs.A Search engine obeying the official line on handling redirects would probably count 5 – but they would be very different links. One from Page A, one from each of pages H and I, one from the MetaRedirect page and one from the 302 redirect page.
How many does Open Site Explorer count? I don’t want to speak for OSE but hopefully they will be able to say.
Note from SEOmoz - At this time, Open Site Explorer would count 2 links from the diagram above, one from Page A and one from the 301 redirect. Although you may see both H and I in an Open Site Explorer link report, redirects do not share or include their totals with the targets of the redirect. We continue to evolve our measurement and reporting as our knowledge search engines continues to expand.

In Summary
Counting backlinks is not a straightforward logic. Whatever logic you choose, Google sometimes counts 301s and sometimes doesn’t. It may be that Google takes the Juice but not the context of a redirect. So if you are building a technology like OSE or MJSE we need to either give you data OR give you opinions.
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Testing the First Link Priority Rule

This post summarizes the results of a recent internal test conducted to understand how a website’s navigation menu affects the ‘First Link Priority’ rule. A method for avoiding the consequences of this rule was also tested with positive results. While these tests were in no way exhaustive, they do add to the body of evidence available on the subject.
Optimized anchor text has long been an important aspect of search engine optimization because it helps the search engines determine the relevance of the target URL. And while a good SEO link-building campaign can help you achieve better optimized anchor text, a natural backlink portfolio will often be less than ideal.
For this reason, internal linking is crucial. It allows you to tell search engines what pages you want to rank for a certain term. In order to make your internal linking effective, there is one very important yet often overlooked rule you should be aware of called the “first link priority” rule.
The “first link priority” rule is Google’s way of making sure a webmaster doesn’t add hundreds of anchor text links into the content of their website. Basically, when the search engine spider crawls a page on your website and comes across two links pointing to the same page, it will only consider the anchor text of the first link and disregard the second. While this rule has been well documented by many SEOs, there seems to be some confusion on whether or not this rule applies to the navigation menu of a website.
On the vast majority of websites, the navigation menu is located above the majority of content when viewing the source code. As a result, the spiders end up crawling your navigation menu first. This creates a problem because most navigation menus do not use fully-optimized anchor text. For example, if I sell bunk beds, I might have two tabs in my navigation menu, one labeled “wood” and the other labeled “metal”. Of course those are not the keywords I am optimizing for, but “wooden bunk beds” and “metal bunk beds” don’t always look good in a navigation menu.
As a result, many professional SEOs have assumed that Google will still count an internal link’s anchor text within the content of a page. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

I created a test a few months ago on www.christiangreiner.com, before I redesigned the website. I made a page using 15 randomly generated letters with no search results (christiangreiner.com/zjjiurzcfccylco/). I then linked to this page twice, using other randomly generated letters. One link (pbnrnqdmzbeloxd) was in the navigation menu, with another (cxelwjgqaajlost) in the content of the homepage.

In the search results shown below Google ONLY considered the anchor text from the menu in ranking the page named zjjiurzcfccylco. Results were the same in Bing and Yahoo.

Results of this test and others that have been performed show that webmasters should re-examine the internal links of their website. If you have a link within the content to a page that is also linked to in the menu of your website, then the anchor text used in the content is most likely not being considered by Google because of the first link priority rule. However, all is not lost because there are a few ways you can still get your desired anchor text.
There are a quite a few technical ways to avoid the first link priority rule, some of which are demonstrated in a post by Giuseppe Pastore from Italy. However, I wouldn’t recommend all of these since some could be seen as misleading by the search engines. Instead, the following are three “best-practice” ways to avoid the consequences of the first link priority rule on your website.
1. Place the menu below the content in the source code of your website
If you have a static website this could be a great option. By using DIVs and absolute positioning it is possible to place a side navigation menu below the content in the source code. When applicable, this is a great option. Google considers any anchor text within the content first, and only when there is none does Google go on to count the links in the navigation menu.
However, before you get too excited you should know that this is difficult to do with a dynamic website, or any website using a CMS. It requires a smart developer, since one little tweak could ruin your absolute positioning and throw your website into a tailspin.
2. Internal link to deep pages only
Most of the time it is best to simply link internally to the deeper pages of your website, instead of duplicating links to pages already linked to in the navigation.
This is probably the most common solution and you see it used a lot by major news outlets. For example, I have never seen a New York Times article with an internal link to the “Sports” page within the content of article. Instead, they link to other articles with optimized anchor text. The result is a deep-linking strategy that is beneficial in getting deep pages read and indexed.
3. Use a hashtag for multiple internal links
The final option is a little trick that involves using a hashtag within your internal links. A hashtag is used within a link to bring users to a specific part of a page and is very common on websites like Wikipedia. Because only part of a page may be relevant to a user clicking on the link, Google treats a hashtag link like a link to a separate page, and therefore will consider the anchor text of multiple links.
In fact, the hashtag work-around works even when the link doesn’t bring you to a specific part of the page. For example, after the first link in the content (cxelwjgqaajlost, which was ignored by Google), I created another link with a hashtag in it (http://www.christiangreiner.com/zjjiurzcfccylco/#1) and gave it another random 15-character anchor text (mtqqjatxxwjfkod). Sure enough, as seen below, Google (but not Bing or Yahoo) considered the anchor text used when ranking the page it links to.

Even though it worked in my test, I wouldn’t consider this method to be a “best practice,” since it is essentially adding links which do not benefit users for the sake of manipulating search rankings.
However, if you do have an H1 tag that contains your keyword, and use an internal link with the same anchor text to bring users directly to that H1 tag on the page, this could create a good user experience and solve the first link priority problem at the same time.
This was not the first test to learn more about the first link priority rule, nor should it be the last. Instead, it is simply meant to help us better understand how Google crawls a website and what it considers.
It is also important to note that having internal links within the content of your website (even when the menu already links to the same page) can still be beneficial as long as it creates a positive user experience. The point of this post is not to discourage internal linking, but to discourage internal links that will hold no value for a visitor or the search engines.

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A New Perspective On Link Building

Dictionary.com defines a link as "anything serving to connect one part or thing with another; a bond or tie." Interestingly, the given definition for a relationship is "a connection, association, or involvement." From a semantic point of view, these two words seem to be synonyms. Yet from an SEO point of view, all too often they are mortal enemies.
Let's be honest, link building is not the most glamorous task out there. We all know it has to be done. We all know search engine algorithms heavily weight link metrics. But no one ever looks forward to sitting down and building links.
I believe this paradigm is self-defeating. If you don't want to do something but still do it because you have to, how can you expect to be successful? In sports you hear phrases like "the other team just wanted it more" or "they didn't show up to play" or something similar. When athletes are just going through the motions it is pretty obvious. What would make link building any different?
I think it is time to offer a new perspective on link building. Let's start thinking of it as relationship building instead. Please bear in mind, I'm not talking about low level linking tactics like social bookmarks, directory submissions or article publication. No real relationship is involved in acquiring these links.
However, for those who like to leave blog comments, request link exchanges or email webmasters, it's time to get your head in the game.
Building A Relationship Online
I'm not talking about eHarmony here. I'm talking about the relationships we can build with webmasters, which in turn naturally play out in their websites and ours. Let me start with a personal example.
I started a college football blog a few years ago. After about a year of the routine link building tactics, I decided it was time to start building relationships. For those of you familiar with the BCS, I am aggressively opposed to it. I did, however, know of a blog or two that favored it.
I decided to reach out to one of these webmasters. I suggested that he first post an argument in favor of the BCS. I would then respond on my blog and reference his original argument. The debate ended up going back and forth over a few months and several blog posts.
Naturally, I followed his blog and he followed mine. I linked to his blog and he linked to mine. My readers visited his blog and his readers visited mine. All the good things you are supposed to get from a successful SEO campaign naturally came to both of us through that relationship.
What would have happened if I was just another link in his blogroll? What would have happened if he was just another link in my comments? Perhaps our rankings would have improved slightly, but we both would have missed out on the extra visitors and subscriptions.
A Case Study: Danny Sullivan
If you have been in the SEO industry for more than a day you probably know who Danny Sullivan is. Suppose you have a new blog about search engine marketing and really want a link from Search Engine Land. Is the best way to do this to simply scan the blog for an hour and then email the webmaster, asking for a link exchange?
Probably not. You probably want to build a relationship with Danny, which would in turn do more for your blog than that one link anyway. So how could you go about doing this?
First, find as much information as you can about Danny without being a creepy stalker. A quick Google search could tell you he runs Search Engine Land, has a personal blog at Daggle.com, has a Twitter and Facebook account, uploads photos to Flickr, answers questions on Quora, shares stories on Digg, posts videos on YouTube and even has a Wikipedia entry.
This can take all of 10 minutes and in that superficial research you can learn a lot about Danny as well as see other connections he has in the industry which could benefit you as well.
After doing the research, you should start engaging Danny in various ways. Some obvious methods would be to comment on his blog posts at Search Engine Land, interact on Twitter or reply to his answers on Quora. After a few weeks, Danny may start to recognize your name when he sees it.
The next thing I would try would probably be pitching a topic for SMX. If you write to Danny, who by now has a general idea of who you are, and come up with a great pitch for a great lecture at SMX, there's a good chance you could present in front of hundreds of people in your industry.
Which do you suppose is more valuable, a link from Search Engine Land or a 15 minute introduction and presentation in front of other industry experts? Not to mention at that point you will have interacted directly with Danny as a result of being an SMX speaker. An aspiring SEO blogger would do well to have one of the most influential people in the industry as a friend on Facebook and follower on Twitter, don't you think?
Finding Relationship Opportunities
Most of the time our existing relationships are what lead us to new relationships. You may not know Danny Sullivan or Rand Fishkin, but do you know someone who works at Search Engine Land or SEOMoz? The best relationship opportunities can be found in our existing relationships. Networking can be a very powerful tool in building new relationships.
One of the best books I've read in a long time is called The City Of Influence. I highly recommend it for those looking for more information on the value of relationships and how to network in order to build new relationships.
Another easy way to build a new relationship is by looking for guest blogging opportunities. For example, I just did a Google search for 'finance + guest + blog' and found several websites that publish guest posts as well as tips for being a guest blogger. If you were in the finance industry, these could be great relationships.
Bloggers seem to be the most open to making new connections, so another technique is to simply Google your keyword + blog. Look for blogs in your industry and find people you can reach out to. Another method would be to search Twitter for your keywords and see who you can connect with.
Speaking from personal experience, I get emails all the time from people looking for links. I ignore them. Every once in a while I get an inquiry from my personal blog, or a direct message in Twitter, or an email proposal that doesn't involve links at all. I pay attention to these and other webmasters do too.
Conclusion
Rand Fishkin has a brilliant slideshow that explains the history and future of Google rankings. Evidence is pretty strong that social media is starting to have a big impact on organic rankings. In other words, relationships, not links, are poised to become the top ranking factor. Search engines openly say they calculate a users authority and trust. A tweet, like, citation or mention from an authority user is going to go a long way in the future of SEO.
So remember, links matter now and you need to have them to be successful. Don't stop looking for link opportunities. But I would stress that the link building of the future is going to be relationship building. People are going to influence rankings more than links do.
So let's stop focusing on the link building and start focusing on the relationship building. I believe we'll all be better off for it.
P.S. Don't miss Rand's great post Head Smacking Tip #20: Don't Ask Sites for Links. Find People and Connect that he wrote after this post was initially written.
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Optimize the Most Underutilized Page of Your Blog

Whilst it’s easy to get excited about crafting your latest blog post it’s far less likely you’ll be kept awake at night thinking about your blog’s Contact page. Indeed many bloggers don’t even bother to add a Contact page to their blog at all—but this can be a big mistake. As you’re about to discover, when contact pages are done right, they can become one of the most important parts of your entire blog…
Image copyright kpwerker, licensed under Creative Commons
A key blogging concept that sets it apart from running a standard static website is the “community” element. Blogs are built for discussion and networking and any blog worth its salt will have a group of like-minded subscribers reading and contributing on a regular basis.
In the same vein, your Contact page is just one more way to interact with your blog visitors. Here are just a few of the many types of email you might get as a result of having a contact page—just take a look at all these benefits.
Spelling mistakes. Grammatical errors. Broken links. Strange page alignments. Despite your best efforts sooner or later a few issues are likely to creep into your blog, either because you failed to proofread your writing before publishing, or because of changes to old posts that you haven’t noticed (such as the removal of photos you’ve linked to, affiliate programs closing down, or linked websites changing their site structure).
Sure, it can be both a little frustrating and embarrassing when someone contacts you to say that something isn’t quite right on your site but would you rather resolve the issue or leave the problem to run for the foreseeable future?
Making it easy to contact you allows your visitors to report any problems they are having with your site. That enables you to not only quickly resolve these, but to really take care of your readers by responding to thank them for the heads-up, apologizing for the situation, and telling them what you’ve done to resolve their problem.
Anyone releasing new products—from publishers to manufacturers—likes to get feedback on new products. It not only helps them make their product the very best it can be, but can also help to make their latest release more visible to potential consumers.
A highly-visible blog written by someone who clearly knows what are talking about can be an ideal avenue for this. It’s not uncommon for the blogger to be contacted in person and offered free products to look at that closely relate to the subject of their blog.
Without a Contact page, you make it very difficult for anyone to offer these to you. You miss out on potentially interesting and unique content, and freebies too!
The most profitable affiliate campaign I have ever run was as a result of being approached through the Contact form on one of my blogs. The gentleman who contacted me was one of the founders of a well-known online company who had since sold it and was setting up a new venture. He’d tweaked his sales process to within an inch of its life and was looking for a few beta testers.
That one affiliate program replaced my full-time income the day I added the links to my site.
And it was all because I ran a visible blog and was easy to contact. Without my Contact form, I’d never have been invited to join this “private” affiliate program and would be literally tens of thousands of dollars worse off.
Ever wonder what your blog visitors really want to read about? Ever spend hours working on a post only for it to get little or no response from your subscribers?
Actually getting out there and surrounding yourself with your readers is one of the very best ways to create a uniquely tailored blog that’s perfectly in line with the interests and expectations of your audience.
And one ideal way to understand your visitors better is quite simply to pay attention to the questions you get asked. Look for common themes that you’re asked about on a regular basis and construct blog posts that specifically target these.
A friend of mine with a small travel blog recently got contacted by an online advertising company which offered her a monthly advertising deal that, by itself, is equivalent to around 50% of the salary from her job. And all she has to do is paste a few adverts into her blog—a job that will take a few hours at most.
A 50% pay rise just for being easy to contact? Yes, contact pages really can bring in some amazing opportunities.
The media constantly needs “experts”—for interviewing, fact-checking, raising awareness, consultancy and so on—and a visible and easily-contactable blogger makes a perfect target for these media professionals.
All these benefits from having a contact page on your blog that’s easy to find and encourages feedback? Hopefully you’re starting to see why you need to overhaul your Contact page! But what should you do to make the most of all these opportunities?
The first step with publishing a Contact page is to make it easy to find. Ensure that anyone who wants to contact you can quickly and easily find your Contact page.
A great service for helping you understand how easy your website is to use is UserTesting, where real visitors who have never been to your website are set assignments (such as “Find my Contact page”). They carry out these challenges on video while describing their thoughts so you can exactly how real-life visitors view your site, and how easy it is to navigate.
A well-designed Contact page doesn’t just provide information on how to get in touch with you—it actively encourages anyone reading your page to drop you a line. Let it be known that you love to hear from your readers, that you’re a real person and that you genuinely value their feedback.
What should your visitors expect when they contact you? Try to improve the whole experience for your readers by giving advice on how long it normally takes you to respond to different types of queries, what type of contact you encourage (and what you simply don’t have the time to respond to), and so on.
Even consider giving tips on how you like to be contacted. For example do you prefer email, phone, Twitter, or Facebook? Do you prefer detailed messages, or short, to-the-point contacts? Are there any essential elements that your visitors need to ensure they include in their message to you?
Too many contact pages simply provide an email address on which you can be contacted. However, if you’re a blogger you’re probably involved in social media in a variety of ways, so your Contact page is another great place to list these profiles, thus offering more opportunities for interaction and growing your social network.
There are two problems with simply providing an email address on your Contact page. The first is that there is a risk your email address will be harvested by spammers who will then bombard you with junk email. The other is quite simply that you make it more difficult for people to contact you—and as a result you will reduce the number of messages you receive.
While it seems like a tiny thing having a Contact form that readers can fill in and send straight from your Contact page will make life significantly easier for your visitors and so encourage them to contact you.
Does your blog have a contact page? Has it helped you connect with your readers, the media, and others? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Find out how Richard Adams generates over 232,000 free visitors to his blogs per year at WordPress Traffic Explosion or visit his lifestyle design blog for tips on building an online business around your passions.

This guest post is by Richard Adams of WordPress Traffic Explosion.
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Increase Website Traffic Through Profitable Alliances

Pinky swear?

Call it what you want: alliance, partnership, JV – all roads lead to Rome.
The topic of the day is to find ways to increase your website traffic through alliances with other bloggers that benefit all parties involved.
This works no matter what stage your blog is in, how much perceived authority you, as a blogger, have, how big your readership is – the only thing that matters is VALUE.
You don’t think you have much value to offer to other bloggers?
Well, what about your readers? Do you provide value to them? There you go.
We all have something we do better than the other blogger, know more about something than the next guy – we all have something to offer that someone else might want or need.
And if you still think you have nothing, then, quite honestly you’d better close up the shop and go home now.
So, working together with other bloggers to achieve the greater good…
Why would you want to do that to begin with?
1.   Gain access to a new audience
Ideally, you want to partner with someone who has some fresh ears to hear what you have to say.
For instance, if you take a look at the comment section of a potential partner and you see all the same people commenting on their blog as on yours, this might not be the most productive “traffic borrowing” partnership.
2.   Promoting each other
Whether it be social networks, each other blogs, lists, promoting your partners and being promoted in return is a huge benefit not to be overlooked.
3.   Promoting products
Word of mouth advertising has always been the best endorsement you can get for any product.
Partnerships can be a powerful way to spread the word about your new product.
Profit sharing, as in affiliate marketing, or giving your partners’ audience a special discount works even better.
4.   Creating social proof
Being connected with influential bloggers will cement your reputation as the one to pay attention to.
Now that we know that the potential benefits of a partnership are huge, it’s time to learn what exactly we can offer to each other to create a win-win for everyone involved.
1.   Links / Mentions
One of the easiest forms of collaboration, it happens to be one of the most effective ones as well.
It increases website traffic by exposing your links to respective audiences and creates quality in-content link building.
Not to blow my own trumpet, but you can see the examples of me promoting other bloggers and you, my readers, all the time and quite honestly, I love doing it.
I’ve benefited greatly from it through creating more traffic from the mentioned blogs, as well as more comments – at the very least from the bloggers themselves , from being mentioned on their blogs in return, from referral business even, like consulting clients, blog audits, etc.
2.   Promoting in a post
Every once in a while, I like to highlight specific bloggers and the interesting projects they are currently working on like I recently did with Alex Whalley’s 30-day Unique Article Wizard Challenge in this post:
I didn’t do it to get Alex to write about me – truly, but what it did was created an even stronger professional bond as well as built up a personal friendship, not to mention that Alex does mention me a whole lot in his fabulous scribbles on his popular blog.
3.   Guest posting
Yes, I can hold this note for a long time.
Imagine you’d like to network with a blogger who seems to be simply unapproachable because of his/her strong reputation in the blogging community. The kind of blogger you really would love to get to know better, in other words.
You can’t and shouldn’t just send them an email, however nice it might be, introducing yourself and letting them know you are after a piece of their attention.
Of course, not.
But submit an awesome blog post, start commenting on their blog, and sooner than later they know who you are and you are on an email basis with them. Sweet spot to be at.
4.   Introducing each other
That happens all the time.
You know someone I want to know? Requesting an introduction is in order, assuming, of course, that I already networked with you, linked to you, and am on a first name basis with you.
Twitter is great for that, by the way.
Just recently Gail Gardner from Growmap.com thought that I should definitely be introduced to Donna Anderson from WhiteHatWriting.com, and within minutes of that idea the following tweets were sent out:

Now, thanks to Gail, Donna and I have become each other’s fans – who knows where that relationship will take us in the future!
5.   Swap ads
Simple enough, yet with a twist.
Find a blog with an untapped audience!
Don’t just go to a blogger you are already sharing the readership with. Find someone whose content doesn’t compete, but rather compliments yours.
Then approach them with the idea to swap ads and “exchange” traffic.
6.   Offer your freebie as a bonus
Know someone with a great product and think your freebie will make a great bonus to it?
Everyone loves a good bonus and as long as it’s not in competition with the product – naturally, this should be an easy deal to make.
7.   Co-registration
Get some bloggers with great newsletters together and start promoting each other on a thank you page your new subscribers will see right after they sign up to your list.
“…I think you’d really love to check out these newsletters I subscribe to and know to provide tremendous value:…”
8.   Product co-creation
Yes, everyone wanting to make any serious money online needs their own product at some point.
Having hard time with that idea? Have no clue how to even approach it?
Partner with someone who is in the same boat – two heads are better than one.
Better yet, find someone who already has an idea or is in some stages of development of a product, but needs your expertise to make it complete.
Think outside the box on this one.
Great example of that:
My good friends, Mavis Nong of AttractionMarketingOnline.com and Phill Turner of PhillTurner.com, who happened to meet on my blog, have recently co-created a great product called “Underground Blogging Secrets“.
Did I mention they met on my blog?
They obviously kept their eyes open for opportunities to expand their businesses and when such presented itself to form an alliance and build each other up through co-creation of the “Underground Blogging Secrets“, both Mavis and Phill were ready.

Needless to say, I am very proud of both of them and happily demand a management fee for introduction.
Seriously though – the product is great and I highly recommend you check out “Underground Blogging Secrets” today.
9.   Special discounts
Have a product already?
Offer a special discount to the readers of a particular blog.
Exclusivity is still a hot commodity and will guarantee to bring you red-hot traffic ready to buy.
10.   Run a contest.
This one is definitely better done with a partner or two – less work, better results.
The really hard part is attracting some strong sponsors; connections are the key here. However, if you’ve done the initial steps listed above and already positioned yourself as an authority figure in your niche, that shouldn’t be a problem.
The best part about blogging contests is having the contestants promote YOUR blog to THEIR followers and readership.
As you can see, the benefits of alliances and partnerships speak for themselves.
No blog is an island and your networking abilities are simply crucial to your ultimate success as a blogger.
These 10 ways should give you plenty of food for thought.
Just remember to think outside the box and be smart about how you approach the “unapproachables”.
What did I miss? Comment to show me that you’re alive!


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How to Make Google Crawl Budget Work in Your Favor

Keep your Google crawl budget uncut...

As I look at many blogs on a daily basis during my blog audits and other consulting services I provide, I run into the problem of bloggers squandering their precious time with Google bots on all sorts of links that shouldn’t be on their home page to begin with.
In order for me to explain what I mean, we first need to address the way Google crawls any website and how they determine how much time they would spend there.
The way Google bots first discover and consequently index and rank your blog pages is by following the links from other sites and within your own blog.
This is how Matt Cutts describes the process in one of his interviews:

“The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank. So if you have a lot of incoming links on your root page, we’ll definitely crawl that. Then your root page may link to other pages, and those will get PageRank and we’ll crawl those as well. As you get deeper and deeper in your site, however, PageRank tends to decline.”

I need to remind you here that there’s a difference between the PageRank displayed in your toolbar (visible PR), which is updated every once in a blue moon and is obsolete the minute it’s updated and actual PR that Google updates on an ongoing basis.
According to the green bar, Traffic Generation Cafe has no PR, yet Google crawls my blog on a daily basis – a sure sign that my PR is higher than Google would like to show, for whatever reason.
Learn more about the difference between real and visible PR in this post:
So, Google follows links from other websites to your home page.
As they crawl your home page, they discover other links that lead deeper into your blog. But since Google bots won’t follow all those links to the infinity, wouldn’t you want to make sure they definitely crawl the most important pages first?
And that’s precisely why what you link to from your home page and other important pages is so vital for you to maximize your face time with Google bots.
Now let’s talk about some to the links that I often see on the home page that really have no business of being there.
Do you have that little link at the bottom of your blog that says “WordPress Admin Login“?
Sure it might be useful to you as far as logging in to your dashboard from any page on your blog, but what if I told you that this is one of the most linked-to pages on many blogs I see?
Do you really want to waste your crawl budget on an admin page? I know, rhetorical question…
Plus, now WordPress gives you an option to display an admin bar on any page of your blog without it actually being shown to your readers.
It’s an option you can choose under Users ==> Your Profile:

So how do you get rid of the link?
Your theme is what you should look into.
I use Thesis theme on my blog and with Thesis, I would go under Design Options ==> Display Options ==> Administration.
If you are using any other theme, just poke around to see if you have a similar option.

I had no idea this was an issue until very recently when I started seeing these kinds of most linked-to pages on different blogs:
http://www.YourSite.com/page/2/
As I did a little digging into, I realized that my blog had it as well, and it all stems from using a plugin that would display page numbers on your home page for all the posts you’ve ever written as opposed to just giving you the default “Older Posts”, “Newer Posts”.
What happens when you use a plugin like that is that you are essentially adding more and more links to your home page, sending Google bots all over the blog, as opposed to strategically showing them the posts you’d like them to crawl.
So get rid of any plugins that create pagination like that and stick with the default Wordress way to separating your blog posts into pages.
You can find this option under Settings ==> Reading.

Just choose the number of posts you’d like to show on each page and you’ll be all set to go.
By the way, the same goes for comment pagination.
When you choose to break up your comments into pages, not only do you create the extra clicks your readers have to navigate if they want to see the whole discussion, but also create a bunch of useless pages with DUPLICATE content on them.
To learn more about duplicate content and its effects on your blog, read the following post:
Getting rid of comment pagination is pretty simple: go into Settings ==> Discussion, and make sure your “Break comments into pages” box is unchecked.

Even though duplicate content is a common problem that you can find on pretty much any site with more than a couple of pages, there’s a good reason to be aware of it and how it affects your face time with Google bots.
Here’s another excerpt from Matt’s interview:

“Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We’ll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that’s why it looks like it has less good content. So we might tend to not crawl quite as much from that site.”

The duplicate content post above will give you all the info you need as to how to avoid the issue of duplicate content on your site as much as possible.
This is one of the most overused blog structuring techniques I see on so many blogs.
Somehow many bloggers decide that the more categories and tags they use, the better – not quite sure why.
Your categories and tags determine your basic blog structure as well as the theme of your blog.
The more categories you use, especially generic ones or the ones that are not really related to your blog theme (see the screenshot below), the more diluted your overall blog theme will appear to both your readers and particularly Google bots, which might in turn affect your search engine rankings.

What is the benefit for your readers to see a category “focusing”? Or “success”?
Look at it from the search engine perspective as well. How are they supposed to theme your blog with generic categories like these?
My suggestions on categories:
Keep the focus as narrow as possible – I’d suggest to stay within 5-8 categories. I know it’s an arbitrary number, but it’s a good one to keep in mind, IMHO.Use your KEYWORDS as category names. Take a look at mine in the navigation bar below my header – these are my categories and I would love to rank for each and every one of those keywords.Don’t dump each post into every imaginable category; pick one or two only.Don’t link to categories from your home page UNLESS they are well-researched keywords and are highly related to the theme of your blog.
TAGS:
The same goes for tags.
Tags are nothing but well-researched keywords you assign to each post hoping to rank for them at some point.
To learn more about tags and how they can affect your rankings, read this post at Kikolani.com:
Here’s also some additional reading on how to correctly structure your blog:
Whether it’s big or small, they are still links, and your page rank will be leaking from your main page to the tag pages.
It’s smarter to have your page rank flow to your individual posts rather than tag pages.
I would definitely remove the tag cloud, if you are still using one.
More on the topic:
Affiliate marketing is how many bloggers make their money online, including yours truly.
So of course I won’t tell you to get rid of your affiliate links on your home or any other page you’d like to display them on, but at the very least, NOFOLLOW those links! Plus, make sure they open in a new window to prevent your readers from leaving your blog.
Let’s face it: we all feel pressured to display all kinds of social media icons and widgets in our sidebars.
Their positive effect on getting connected with our readers in social media realms is debatable, yet their negative effect as far as leading both our readers and Google bots away from our blog is obvious.
Once again, I am not going to say you shouldn’t have them, but use common sense as far as how many different widgets and icons you choose to display: once again, this is the case when more is not better.
ALWAYS nofollow those links though and make sure they open in a new window as with affiliate links.
Personally, I would stay away from displaying various networks that are not widely used by most of your readers, as well as widgets that display Twitter feed, etc. Not too many of your readers find any use for them, trust me, yet they add the amount of links that lead away from your blog.
I am definitely a big fan of displaying one of these widgets in your sidebar, but only one.
To me, popular posts widget, which is determined by the amount of comments each post has, makes the most sense to display.
If you choose to show recent posts, you are just duplicating what your home page already shows, plus it’s easy to find that info by clicking over to home page from anywhere else on the blog, whereas getting to most commented/popular posts is impossible without the widget.
This is how you can easily improve your rankings for the posts you are trying to rank for.
Create a sidebar widget where you simply link to your best cornerstone pages using keywords as anchor text and you instantly gain some great internal backlinks leading both your readers and Google bots directly to those pages.
Take a look at how I do it on my blog (you can see the widget towards the top of the sidebar):

Displaying hundreds of links that send your visitors as well as Google bots on a wild goose chase looking for your best content isn’t a great way to go, as you can see.
I would strongly suggest you strategically narrow down the number of links you display on your home page that will be beneficial to your overall linking strategy.
Don’t be afraid to give your visitors fewer choices. Clean, uncluttered look definitely shows to convert much better and decrease your bounce rates, providing for easy navigation that makes sense.
Can you think of other links I forgot about? Comment to show me that you’re alive!

Image credit: TheChive.com


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Top Google Ranking Factors of 2011: The 60 Second Tour

It’s not every day that the world’s leading SEO experts get together to collaborate on a project of this magnitude: coming to a relative consensus on what presumably are the most important ranking factors in Google algorithm right now, how they changed in the past 2 years, and what Google has for us in the future.
That’s exactly what Rand Fishkin’s of SEOmoz.org 2011 Search Engine Factors report is all about.
It contains the findings from 132 world’s leading SEO experts and their collective opinion represents what the SEO world perceives to be the most important factors to organic search engine rankings.
The report itself is quite lengthy and requires a lot of digestion, so I decided to present it to you in a more concise manner and the goal of the post is to answer the following question: how does or should this report affect how you do (or should start doing) SEO for your blog.

1.   SEOs believe that the power of links is declining, although it still represents 43% of all the deciding factors (down from 67% in 2009).
2.   Diversity of links outweighs pure quantity. (Link Building Mixology: Your “How To Do It The Right Way” Guide)
3.   Exact anchor texts appear to have slightly less significance over partial anchor texts. (Your Ultimate Anchor Text Tutorial – from Basic to Advanced)
4.   Domain authority matters when ranking pages (the more authority your domain has, the better your posts will rank).
5.   Presence of nofollow links is important to good search engine rankings.
6.   Among the most important on-page factors are the title tag, preferably with your keyword as the first word, URL (see my post on What’s in a Slug? for more on that), and H1 tag.
7.   Content is EXTREMELY important: the freshness, the uniqueness, the length – longer posts tend to rank better.
8.   Long titles/URLs are still likely bad for SEO.
9.   Social sharing factors appear to have a fair significance in rankings, i.e. get more retweets/FB shares! (PageRank, Meet SocialRank: How Does Going Social Help Your Search Engine Rankings?; also, check out this helpful post on social bookmarking tools.)
It’s important to remember that these are just opinions, but since Google is not telling, these opinions are the closest thing we get.
Have an opinion? Comment to show me that you’re alive!



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But What If Google Thinks YOU are an Internet Marketer?

I’ve read several accounts this morning in Facebook and across several blogs that lead to the possibility that Google is shutting down content from Internet Marketers, or content believed to be associated with internet marketing. And at first glance, some folks think that’s a good thing, believing that they’re all a bunch of spammers and scammers, so what does it matter?
Well, first, hasn’t that mistake been made before? Franchising was thought to be a scam in its early days, rather than a legitimate business practice. Google didn’t use to like search engine optimization firms, and at one point, it seemed they were at war with them, and anyone who looked like them. Now there’s a relationship between Google and the search industry, to the point that Google representatives will come to speak at events.
When I first came online, I thought internet marketing was all about scamming me out of my money too. Then I encountered the kindness of Allen Says, without whom I would not have made my first affiliate sale. He was very supportive and kind to me in my early days, way back in 98 when people would look at you blankly if you told them what the World Wide Web was.
Then there’s Marlon Sanders, who rescued me from having to retire due to health problems. And Mark Joyner, who I had the pleasure of working with for three months, who has taught me so much over the years.
Now, I don’t consider myself an internet marketer, and never really have. It’s not that the industry has a bad name, or that I don’t want to be associated with it. It’s that internet marketers aren’t my target market, though I get a wonderfully supportive fan base from there. I’ve always targeted other audiences. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love my IM audience.
Still, I’m lumped together with internet marketing as a C-list guru, one of the “underground” players, and I’m okay with that. But here’s what should scare you in this case – it’s possible that so are people who work in social media, as far as Google is concerned.
Because in observing the pattern of what’s happening with accounts that are getting locked or suspended, it looks as if they’re going after a subset of keywords across the entire YouTube site, and shutting down anyone in that family of words, then going back through and manually reinstating people whose content isn’t of the typical fare that’s associated with that area. One site got a note that a mention of YouTube in the title was why their account was shut down.
Darren from Problogger, who later was reinstated, was shut down because one of his videos had a title that included “making money online”. And he’s a YouTube partner.
Some of the visible people got their accounts back but what about people who are as legitimate but aren’t as popular, or don’t have any influence or leverage? What if they come after you?
While I like to think how great it would be to see less spam on YouTube and in Google results, if my theory of how they are deciding is right, it seems like the execution is majorly flawed.
People take what Google says as fact, not opinion. So using the same violation message they use for accounts they’re reviewing and accounts that are legitimately posting “how to scam YouTube views” or “how to make a living online” type of video content is damaging to the reputation of people who may not deserve it.
Where this gets scary is that Google decides, ultimately, who they think is an internet marketer and who isn’t. I’m not an internet marketer, but I have lots of fans from that industry, party due to some advertising and partnerships with some of the more recognizable names.
And yeah, YouTube is a free service, and we should play by their rules to use their service – but that’s not the issue. Go take a look at some of those blog posts. Many of them were not in violation, and I don’t mean that in the sense of “well, technically” or “legally speaking”. If they’re getting booted for bogus reasons, and no one really cares, or automatically sides with Google because “well, they’re Google, they must be right,” then what happens when they come after you?

OH HAI New Person! We love new people.
It would be great seeing you back again, so please subscribe by RSS feed, or get updates by email, before you forget! KTHXBAI!
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How To Use CTL to Pinpoint Your Traffic Sources

Tracking... Now you are talking!

How To Use Campaign Tracking Links to Pinpoint Your Traffic Sources

Chris blogs over at MisterFong.com. He just recently launched Smart Affiliate Links, a link cloaking, keyword conversion tracking Wordpress plugin that will help you improve your SEO and convert traffic into sales.
Many of us use Google Analytics or similar tracking script to see where our traffic is coming from.
This works well as it shows us which visitors are coming from Google, Twitter, Facebook, email newsletters, and any other traffic source our site may get visitors from.
There are times though, it would be more useful to drill down further and see which specific tweet, Facebook post, or email message is sending us traffic, like when you are promoting a product and you want to see which traffic source is giving you the best ROI.
Luckily, Google Analytics and most other popular analytics software support Campaign Tracking links.
By tagging your links in a specific way, you can create different tracking links that will help your analytics software break down exactly where your traffic is coming from.
Ana recently wrote a post titled Does Bribing Your Readers and Twitter Followers Really Work?

In it, she writes about her experiment with trying to bribe her followers to tweet her post and to see if there was any resulting traffic spike from it.
The problem is, the traffic from the tweet is mixed in with the rest of her twitter traffic so she can’t pinpoint exactly how many visitors were coming from that specific tweet.
If she had used a campaign tracking link though, that information would be easily accessible in her Google Analytics report.
So lets see how to create one…
Tagging your links is a relatively simple process.
Basically, it’s just a normal link with few added parameters at the end of it that allow your analytics software to figure out exactly where your visitor came from.
Here’s an example.
Lets say Ana wants to promote her post How to Build a List: Rich Man, Poor Man List Building using Twitter and by sending out an email broadcast. So she could create two tracking links like this:
http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/list-building-tips/?utm_source=list-building-tweet&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=list-building-campaign
http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/list-building-tips/?utm_source=-list-building-email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=list-building-campaign
Looks kind of ugly, right? But let’s break it down.
There are five possible variables that can be used in a tracking url, but the three I’m using in these two links are required. (You can read more about the campaign variables here)
utm_source – Identifies the specific traffic source where the visitor came from (google, hubpages, list-building-tweet )
utm_medium – Identifies the medium (search engine, email, twitter)
utm_campaign – A name to use to group associated traffic sources together (list-building-campaign)
Now all Ana would need to do is tweet the first link and embed the 2nd link in her email broadcast.
Once she starts receiving clicks on her links, she can then look at her Google Analytics report under Traffic Sources > Campaigns and see exactly how many visitors came from her tweet, and how many came via email broadcast.
Now you may be saying to yourself, “It seems like too much trouble to create one of these tracking links by hand”.
… And you would be right.
It’s error prone, and who’s going to remember all these weird variable names?
Thankfully, all you need to do is bookmark the Google URL Builder tool. Then all you need to do is fill out a few fields and it will generate the tracking url for you.
Not only are campaign tracking urls supported by Google Analytics, they also work with most of the other popular analytics scripts out there that I’ve checked, including Clicky, Woopra, and Piwik.
While campaign tracking is a slightly more advanced topic, I highly recommend you use it since it can be really powerful.
By taking advantage of campaign tracking, you can learn all sorts of interesting stuff about your traffic. This will help you to optimize your efforts and allow you to focus on the sources that actually send the most traffic to your site.
Not only that, but try using campaign tracking together with Google Analytics’s Goal Tracking. You can setup different goals on your site and then figure out the ROI for each particular traffic source.
This is super powerful stuff, and it can really increase your profits if you use this data correctly.

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Thinking of Creating an eBook?

Here’s a System to Guide You Through It

If there’s one question that I get asked more than any other at the moment it is about eBooks. In fact there are three main questions that I’m asked on the topic of eBooks more than any other:
How do I create content for eBooks?How do I design beautiful eBooks (covers and internal design)?How do I market and launch eBooks to maximise their potential?
Over the last few years selling eBooks has become a larger and larger part of my business (in fact its now the #1 way I earn a living) and these three questions have been the same three big issues that I’ve had to grapple with time and time again.
To be honest I’m still refining my systems even now after years at it but in the early days the process was very very messy and quite hit and miss.
The learning was slow – nobody had written a comprehensive guide to walk me through the process, so I had to really develop my own way forward.
This week Kelly Kingman and Pamela Wilson have released a fantastic guide to walk eBook publishers through a great system of creating, designing and launching eBooks.

It’s called the eBook Evolution.

Having just reviewed it today I can safely say it is what I needed a few years back when I was starting out – it would have paid for itself many times over by now.
Pamela and Kelly bring some great skills and experiences to this eBook. Pamela is a graphic designer with many years of experience and Kelly is a published author and experienced eBook creator. I’ve been so impressed by Kelly’s previous eBooks that we’re actually working together on a photography eBook to be released in the next weeks – she knows what she is doing!
Together they’ve created eBook Evolution which is divided into 3 areas corresponding with those 3 common questions about eBooks:
Write it – from choosing your topic through to writing your manuscriptCreate it – eBook Evolution gives you some great templates to use to help you create a beautiful eBook. You also get a Cover Recipe book to make attractive covers. This section has some great screencasts as well as templates you can use to do your own eBook design.Launch it – some fantastic tips on how to get word about your eBook out there to the right people to help you promote it.
On top of that you get some great bonuses including a Quick Start Guide, a brainstorming guide to help you come up with ideas and some useful interviews.
The eBook Evolution is available for $147. It comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.
If eBooks are on the horizon for you (or even if you’re already publishing them) but you’re unsure how to develop a system to write, create and launch the – this is a guide that you’ll seriously want to consider.
As I said above – if this had been around 2-3 years ago I could see that it would have returned the $147 investment many times over (all I’d have had to do is sell an extra eight $19.99 ebooks over the last few years from what I learned to make the money back).
Learn more about what the eBook Evolution includes and secure your own copy here
Disclaimer: While I am an affiliate for this product I am also a big fan of Kelly, Pamela and the wonderful resource that they’ve created.
Note: This post has been updated after the initial launch special of this product ended.
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Writing is Easy; Editing is Hard

This guest post is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash.
People regularly say to me, “I can’t write.” Sure you can. The process of writing – getting words down on the page – is mindlessly simple. Transcribe everything you say and/or think and eventually you’ll have something down on the screen in front of you.
Which is precisely the problem.
Any blogger who wants to can bang out a 1000-word post a day. Just write whatever’s on your mind, without filter or organization, and press “publish”. Unfortunately, that’s how far too many bloggers do it.

Greg's computer, after loading one too many uninspired blogs

Taking care while crafting your words is what distinguishes a blogger from a mere muser. Unless you’ve got an extremely captivating story to tell—about how you climbed all Seven Summits or fed starving Sudanese in Darfur—merely sharing your day-to-day experiences with the rest of us isn’t blogging. It’s narcissism.
There are too many homogenous bloggers living lives similar to yours and expressing like opinions for your blog to be noteworthy. Oh, you’re a mother who’s juggling child-rearing with holding a job? Congratulations. No one in the history of the universe ever had to sit in an office all day and come home to her kids before you did. Tell us more about how exhausted you are every evening, and what hilariously precocious thing your 4-year-old said that put a smile on your face and made it all worthwhile.
Yes, you want to find commonalities with your readers, but saying nothing bold or different is no way to build an ardent, devoted audience.
You’ve got to focus your ideas. It means bringing something unique, whatever that might be. (The harder you have to look for it, the less reason you have to blog.) On the mechanical level, it means not relying on phrases that come to mind easily. If they do come to mind easily, they’re likely either clichés (horrible) or plagiarism (worse). And if you’re a native English speaker, but can’t bother to use proper grammar and spelling, why should I spend my time deciphering your ramblings?
Have consideration for your reader. Assume he’ll take it personally if you waste even a millisecond of his time. God knows I take it personally when I’m reading an unfamiliar blog. Trim the excess foliage from your writing, and cauterize the cuts so that nothing useless or repetitive ever grows there again. The form of what you say is at least as important as the content, because no reader’s going to be exposed to your groundbreaking ideas if she has to trudge through a verbal peat bog to find them. Job #1 should always be to present something clean, sharp and interesting.
And do you know what magical thing will happen when you take the time and effort to craft something original, incisive and provocative for your audience?
People will hate you.
Yes. Hate. They want to be comforted, not challenged. They’ll be expecting the simplistic three-chord riffs of traditional blues-based rock ‘n roll that they’ve heard 1000 times before, and here you are giving them the shocking wild feedback and distortion of Jimi Hendrix. Readers are conditioned to understand the traditional way of interpreting the universe: if you dare to go full Einstein, telling them crazy stories about how matter and energy are two forms of the same thing and that space-time can stretch and warp, I guarantee the enemies you make will outnumber the friends.
My own blog illustrates the point. I started my blog with a mission that I thought any rational person would approve of. I wanted to show people how to take whatever money they’re starting with, however modest, and foster its growth by performing certain basic, straightforward activities and avoiding others. And I wanted my readers to comprehend the complex financial jargon that affects their everyday lives, by explaining it to them in an understandable way. When my partner and I began the blog, we thought we’d have millions of people patting us on the back, nodding knowingly and thanking us for telling it like it is.
Boy, were we wrong. Every strong opinion we espouse is met with various commenters telling us we’re mean, insensitive, or unrealistic. A couple of our blogging colleagues—people who run sites more popular than ours—banned us outright for challenging their positions. We were polite in our outspokenness, yet they still wanted us silenced.
But regardless of what anyone wants to hear, the fact is that you shouldn’t blame VISA because your credit card payments are high. You owe zero loyalty to your employer. If you buy a house with an adjustable-rate mortgage, you are playing with gasoline and a lit match.
Virtually none of the blogs similar to ours take the same positions. Instead, most offer the same easily digestible advice that’s resulted in a society of overextended consumers.
What keeps us going is that the readers who do like our blog, love it. They bookmark it, they subscribe to the RSS feed, and most importantly, they actually read it. Our readers know that three times a week, they can come to us for a long, detailed, carefully researched post. And that that post will challenge assumptions, inspire action, and use undeniable premises to reach conclusions that aren’t obvious. Our readers also know that every post will be written in an uncompromising and hopefully interesting style. After all, that’s what I look for when searching for a blog to read.
As I write this, my blog’s Alexa rank seems to have plateaued around 122,000. I still want that rank to improve, but I don’t obsess on it like I once did. Quality and quantity don’t always overlap. Given the choice between having x devoted and demanding readers, and having x+y readers who are just looking for reassurance and nice stories, I’ll take the former every time. If you want your ideas to resonate, you should too.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at greg@ControlYourCash.com.
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Why “International” Bloggers Have an Unfair Advantage

This guest post is by Lucas Kleinschmitt of German Efficiency.

If you’re in the blogging business, not being a native English speaker can be tough. The market in your home country will often be small, there may not be a culture of buying things online, and it can be difficult to find guest posting opportunities in your native language.
Image copyright NASA Goddard Photo and Video, licensed under Creative Commons
On the other hand, blogging in English seems like an equally bad idea at first glance: How are you supposed to compete with an army of bloggers whose command of the English language greatly exceeds your own? Even if your English is really good, you will probably need to pay a professional editor to avoid the occasional English-as-a-second-language errors.
I admit it: all that sounds rather intimidating. But don’t despair! Fortunately, we “internationals” enjoy one huge, unfair advantage for which every American, Australian, or British blogger should envy us. In fact, all the hurdles we must face shrink to nothing when compared to this major benefit that comes with being an international blogger:
I’m a time management consultant from Germany. My surname is as German as it can get—Kleinschmitt—and my blog is called German Efficiency. I teach personal productivity, made in Germany, to people from all over the world.
Is my command of the English language as good as that of the American probloggers? Of course not. But can they teach German efficiency? Of course they can’t.
And that’s my point: As a German productivity coach, I have my unique selling proposition built right into my nationality.
Who would you rather have teaching you about vodka: an Australian or a Russian?
Who would you prefer to learn the Salsa from: a Canadian or a Cuban?
Whose romance blog would you prefer to read: the British banker’s or the Parisian artist’s?
You might be the guy from Switzerland blogging about watches, or the lady from Holland writing about cheese. You could be the Brazilian martial artist teaching us Capoeira, or the Japanese comic book fan keeping us up-to-date on manga.
Every part of the world is renowned for something. The advantage we internationals have is that almost nobody from our home country is blogging about it in English.
Yet, the global community is the one that cares most. I’m far keener to learn about romance from a Parisian artist than another Parisian artist will ever be. To the latter, the former Parisian artist is just another guy teaching romance. To me, he’s a Parisian artist teaching romance! How could I not read his blog?
Indeed, opportunities for us internationals are endless. There’s a giant market gap, and our unique selling proposition is handed to us on a silver plate.
Time to step up, don’t you think?
Lucas Kleinschmitt teaches you personal productivity, made in Germany, at his blog German Efficiency.
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Are Your Personal Stories Turning Readers Off?

This guest post is by Ali Luke of Aliventures.

You’ve probably heard that you should put some of your personality into your blogging. And you know that stories are a great way to engage readers—to capture not just their attention, but their hearts as well.
Perhaps some of your favorite bloggers are people like Naomi Dunford or Johnny B. Truant or Pace and Kyeli Smith—folks who write from the heart, who are open and honest, and who make you feel that you know them. You want your blog to be like that too.
The problem is, it’s easy to get personal stories wrong. And a blog that’s too “me me me” can be a total turn-off for readers. They might not even read a full post before getting bored and clicking away.
Copyright Anatoly Tiplyashin - Fotolia.com
If you can’t think of what to post about, don’t just ramble about your life story or write about your day. Just as with any blog post—or any piece of writing—readers will expect some structure and a clear message from your post.
Of course, you don’t have to be the next Shakespeare in order to be a successful blogger—but you do need to be able to write. If your writing itself isn’t very good, then readers aren’t likely to stick around. Conversely, a brilliantly-written piece can be incredibly engaging, even if the subject matter doesn’t seem very promising.
So often, bloggers write personal stories that seem to be nothing but a self-indulgent exercise. These stories might be of interest to the blogger’s own friends and family—but there’s no reason for anyone else to care. The reader feels ignored and sidelined: the story is “me me me” with no acknowledgement of the reader.
The biggest problem with your stories is that:
When a new reader comes to your blog, they probably know very little about you. They might have clicked on a retweeted link, they might have found you via a search engine—chances are, they don’t even know your name.
Of course, personal stories are a great way to help readers start to care—but not if you hit them with too much, too fast. Your reader doesn’t just want to know about you: they want to feel a sense of connection. They want to know that you’re someone who they can like, or admire, or learn from.
If you suspect that your own stories might be putting readers off rather than drawing them in, here’s how to turn things around.
A short anecdote can be a great way to grab attention at the beginning of a post—so long as you don’t drag it on for too long. You’ll ideally either want something so unusual that it grabs the reader’s interest, or so typical (for your audience) that the reader can feel “that’s me”.
(You might want to return to the story at the end of the post too.)
How to do it
Here’s an example:
“I wake up, hit snooze on my alarm clock, and lie in bed. The alarm goes off again—and now I know I absolutely have to get up.  I’m frazzled, and know I’m going to need to rush to make it to work on time.  I scarf down my breakfast and brush my teeth, trying to juggle priorities in my head because I don’t think I have time to look at my todo list—I know I’m already behind schedule.”
(From The 10 Minute Difference Between Stress and Happiness by Sid Savara.)
In some types of blogging, you may have a long, in-depth story to tell. Perhaps you’re a mommy or daddy blogger writing about your kids’ early life, or you’re a personal development blogger telling the story of how you screwed things up in college.
Don’t try to tell your entire story as one epic post. Break it into a series – and make each part have a clear central point.
How to do it
On The Simple Dollar, a personal finance site, Trent tells his story in a series called “The Road to Financial Armageddon”:
“The best place to start is the beginning. I was born into poverty, a family in which both my mother and father had been raised in poverty, too. Both of my parents were used to the concept of living from payday to payday, never having enough saved for themselves to survive more than a week or two. To some degree, this was out of necessity; there was often not enough money to put food on the table.”
(From The Road to Financial Armageddon #1: The Earliest Mistakes by Trent Hamm.)
(e.g. Writing about financial difficulties, early career problems: “I’ve been through it too.”)
As bloggers, we’re often writing about situations which we’ve been through or problems we’ve overcome. We may well have come by our knowledge the hard way. For instance:
If you’re blogging about parenting tips, you might have done a few things wrong with your own kids.If you’re blogging about marketing, you might have had a disastrous launch or two in the past.If you’re blogging about gardening, your early attempts may have made you seem a little less than green-fingered.
Your readers are coming to your blog to learn how to solve problems, yes—but if you present yourself as an all-knowing guru, people may be put off. Readers want to know that they’re not alone, so help them by sharing stories that say “I’ve been through this too.”
How to do it
Here’s how to share the less-happy bits of your story so readers can identify with your feelings:
“I had asked for feedback, and at the time, I sincerely meant it, or thought I did. The problem is, once I consider something finished, I can’t imagine anyone’s honest feedback being anything but “Stellar! Best thing I’ve ever read! I’ve been waiting for this all my life!” So this feedback, even though it was constructive and mostly positive, crushed me. As fried as I was by then, I couldn’t be see anything clearly. I was devastated, ready to quit writing and retreat to my cubicle.”
(From Writing an eBook: How to Get Started (and Finish!) by Cara Stein.)
Sites like “Learn From My Fail” are popular for a reason: we like to read other people’s embarrassing stories. They give us a laugh—and often lift our mood (“at least I didn’t do that!”) They can even provide valuable learning experiences.
You don’t want to overdo it and come across as a bumbling idiot – but occasionally admitting to something embarrassing or talking about a failure can make you more human in your readers’ eyes. They can also gain sympathy.
(Just be careful not to write about any current failures. “My total business fail last week” isn’t likely to win you many new clients…)
How to do it
Here’s an example (with great use of dialogue, too):
“Hi, uh …. Mr. Bruise is it?” No. 1 said.
“Yes, it’s actually Bruce, but thank you, I …”
“All right, what do you have for us today?” No. 3 said.
He was looking down, rustling some outstandingly important paperwork into some sort of crucial order.
“Yes, thank you, I, I’ll be doing a short monologue from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and another from Sean Penn’s turn in Carlito’s Way.”
I heard one of them groan under his breath.
(From Why Everyone Hopes You’ll Be the Hero by Robert Bruce.)
Funny or heartwarming or engaging stories are all well and good—but what readers really want is an “aha!” moment. They want your story to teach them something new, or to shed new light on something they already know.
How to do it
You don’t have to be explicit in spelling out “the moral of the story”, but if it works for Naomi Dunford…
“Moral of the Story: Marketing Begins In Product Development.
When you are building your product, think about the stupidest person you’ve ever met. That person is your customer. Think about what problems they could have with your product.
When you are a wine producer, you want your customers to be well aware of how much wine they have on hand at all times. (Please pardon the pun.) You do not want them at home, trying to bust a move on their wife, setting up candles and massage oils and doing whatever people without kids do, just to find out they’re out of wine.”
(From Moral of the Story: Marketing to Alcoholics Edition.)
Are your stories working for you, or do you need to give more value to the reader? I’d love to hear about your experiences with telling stories, whether they worked or not—the comments are open!
Ali Luke is a writer and writing coach, specialising in helping bloggers to take their writing to the next level. Her ebook The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing was described by Colin Beveridge as “full of the tricks the pros use so that bloggers like me can put together posts and series that look halfway competent.” Read what other bloggers said about it here.
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