Jamdo Marketing Blog

Keeping track of your projects (blogging or otherwise) is something that is best done on a spreadsheet. Most people use Microsoft Excel, but I have taken a shine to using an online spreadsheet service called iRows.

It has most of the things you would expect in a spreadsheet program. You can lay out information complete with formulas and whatnot and each spreadsheet can have several worksheets etc. Now, if you are wondering if it is compatible with your own spreadsheet
programs then the answer is yes. iRows allows you to import xls files
and csv files which are formats that most spreadsheet programs can work
with. I tested it with some basic formulas too and there were no
problems - you can create them on iRows or import them from your
current spreadsheets.

What I like about it is the fact that it is an online application. This improves its utility for me. I can access my spreadsheets from any computer on the internet with a simple login. More importantly, I can share those spreadsheets with others and have them work on them as well by assigning access levels to specific users.

This really increases productivity for online collaborations. Used in conjunction with BaseCamp, you bassically now have the ability to have a complete online office.

I use iRows for keeping track of the finances of my blogs as well as to-do lists that I work on with my fellow blog co-owners. It is very handy, especially if you don’t want to be worrying about sending email attachments back and forth and worry about who got which version.

Some of the things I have used iRows for:

• Contact Lists
• To Do Lists
• Finance Tracking of Specific Sites
• Collaborating on all of the Above with Blogging Partners

Now, the guys at iRows also back up data everday and save it to several different machines with data encryption. That can give security freaks peace of mind.

As I said, if you use spreadsheets a lot to organise yourself (like I do),  and you would like the utility of being abl eto share real time updates with your colaborators, then this is something worth checking out.

Resources:

iRows
Basecamp

Technorati Tags: iRows, Base Camp, Web 2.0

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Most searches using a search engines do not use a single word. In fact using a single word to find what you are looking for on a search engine is a great way to be bogged down in a quagmire of irrelevant search results.

Ignat over at SEO Blog recently brought to my attention some statistics that reflect these facts. The vast majority of searches on the main search engines are carried out using two, three and four word phrases. Certainly that is a better way to narrow down a search and get some relevant results.

But what does it mean to us bloggers?

A few months ago, I started a blog on a newsy type of topic. It wasn’t a money making venture - more a labour of interest. It is starting to get some nice search engine traffic, but there is something that I have noticed by going through my statistics and logs (I use AW Stats and Performancing Metrics).

I get a lot of searches for people’s names.

In fact, the vast majority of the search engine traffic I get are from people looking for information on the people I am blogging about.

The great thing too, is that because my blog is a news type blog, I have a very good chance of getting to the top of search results for the names of people that I write about - largely because nobody else has written much about them or possibly hasn’t optimised their pages to show up in the search results for those names. That is because it is a breaking news blog - to an extent.

So how am I doing it?

When I find a blog-worthy story about a person, I optimise my post for their name. I will always use their name in the title, the first sentence and liberally throughtout my post. If there is some interesting online information about the person, then I make sure that I link to it, using their name as the anchor text, if possible. I also make sure that my internal linking strategy has links that point to my new post using the name of the person as anchor text. Basically solid blog SEO.

One other thing is that if the person’s full name has three names - like John Adam Smith, then it is easier to rank for the full name rather than just John Smith. This brings in more traffic as most sites will optimise for the shorter version.

Then I forget about it and move onto the next thing.

The great thing is that Google spiders my site daily, because there are always new stories. The indexing of a new story rarely takes more than 3 days and usually my site is in the top three for the name of the person I optimised for.

That’s a very easy way to get a lot of search engine traffic.

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There’s interesting news for affiliates that a company called 10Speed Media is working towards developing a way for merchants to provide video content for their affiliates to use.

This basically involves streaming video from a remote server and placing it on your website. The whole video is a clickable affiliate link. You can see an example of this in action at Chriknudsen’s blog - chrisknudsen.biz

This is very interesting and a very positive development for our industry, however, you will notice that they are streaming that video from YouTube. I am wondering whether YouTube are going to get upset.

On chrisknudsen.biz, for example, the link that would usually point towards YouTube is actually pointing to the advertiser, insidesales.com

At first glance, this would seem to me that 10SpeedMedia (and by default their merchant insidesales.com and affiliate, chrisknudsen.biz) are using YouTube’s bandwidth without any benefit to YouTube, (unless of course they have some understanding or commercial agreement with YouTube).

YouTube’s terms of service states:

F. YouTube permits you to link to materials on the Website for personal, non-commercial purposes only. In addition, YouTube provides an “Embeddable Player” feature, which you may incorporate into your own personal, non-commercial websites for use in accessing the materials on the Website, provided that you include a prominent link back to the YouTube website on the pages containing the Embeddable Player. YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the YouTube Website at any time.

It would seem at first glance that the way in which the video is being used in the above example could perhaps be breaking both the provision regarding commercial use and the requirement of a linkback.

The most obvious way for 10 Speed Media to remedy any conflict here would be for them or their merchants to host the video file on their own servers. This however can get very expensive, very quickly and may not be sustainable (which is probably why they have used YouTube in the first place).

Now, I am sure the people at 10 Speed Media are aware of these issues and working on a way to address them.

I hope they get around to a solution soon, because I for one am quite excited about the prospect of being able to put affiliate videos on my sites!

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Gettting incoming links to your site is going to be the lifeblood of your blog - second only to good content. It will bring referral traffic, increase your standing with the search engines and help build your blog’s reputation. The trick is to first find sites that you would like to get a link from. That’s when a bit of research is in order.

The Setup

To start things along, get organised and set up a spreadsheet. You can use Excel if you like, but lately I have been using a very cool online spreadsheet service over at iRows so I can save my spreadsheets online and access them from any computer anywhere.

You will need columns for the following categories. URL, Contact Name, Email Address, First Contact, Notes 1, Second Contact, Notes 2, Third Contact and Notes 3. That’s 9 columns altogether. So, if you were contacting Jamdo, the relevant row would be something like:

http://jamdo.com | info (at) jamdo.com | Rob | July 12 | No response | July 19 | Promised a link from his blog. | July 25 | Success!

If one of my contacts in my spreadsheet has taken the action I hoped for, I then give a green background to that row. If they say no, I give it a red background. It’s just an easy visual so I can tell by glancing at the spreadsheet how I am going.

I only put in three potential contacts, because if you haven’t got them by the third contact then you probably won’t get them.

The Research

Now that you have a way to organise your contacts on your spreadsheet, you can start to research sites that you would like to get a link from. At this stage you will want to fill out the URL, Contact and Email columns of your spreadsheet.

    Competitors

Most bloggers are a decent people. You should probably have a list of competing blogs in your niche - you know - the blogs that inspired you to get into the same niche. Many of them will probably be happy to give you a link to your site if you just ask them. List all of your competitors in your spreadsheet for later.

    Competitor’s Links

If somebody has linked to one of your competitors, then they will probably be interested in the content of your blog too. The trick is finding the people who have linked to your competitors. That’s not really a drama. Just go over to Yahoo! and type in linkdomain:yourcompetitor.com and you will get a list of people who have linked to that website.

Now you need to visit each of those sites and note down the URL, Conact and email of each of those sites.

By now, you should be getting a decent list of sites that will potentially link to your new blog.

    Technorati

It is far easier to get links from other blogger than it is to get links from “normal” sites. Blogs should be one of your primary focusses in link building. Luckily Technorati has taken most of the pain out of finding other blogs and lists almost 50 million of them.

Go over to technorati and type in your main keyword. Click on the “tag” option and it will tell you everyone who has tagged a post with that keyword for one of their blog posts. You should have a mamoth list of blogs. Now visit each one and continue filling out your spreadsheet with the relevant information.

Note: You can also see which blogs are commenting on your competitor’s site just by searching their site URL in the Technorati search - another great source of people who might be interested in linking to you!

    Google

Getting links from the top ranking sites for your keywords is one of the most powerful strategies for ranking well for those keywords. It’s usually also the most difficult as these sites usually guard their rankings jealously. Even so, it’s worth a try.

Just head over to Google and type in your keyword. That will give you a list of sites to visit and get relevant contact details for. Easy!

    Software

If you have some spare coin, then there are a couple of pieces of software that are very good for finding other sites that might link to you. They don’t really do anything you couldn’t do for free, but they do do it a hell of a lot faster. Check out my SEO Elite review or visit their site (aff.) and also take a look at Arelis (aff.) software. Not cheap, but if time is a factor for you then they are worth it.

What Then?

In most niches, just these simple research strategies should give you a list of several hundred sites that might be interested in your blog. The next step is to go out and start contacting those webmasters!

Further Resources:

Where to get Links
7 Tips on Emailing Other Bloggers
SEO Elite (Aff. link)
Arelis (Aff. link)
iRows

Technorati Tags: links, seo, blogging, marketing

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Getting up to date stats for your blog can be a bit of a pain.

Most stats packages only update once every 24 hours.

Performacing Metrics is great in that it updates every hour which means bloggers can analyse their stats almost in real time in order to take advantage of any surges in blog traffic. That’s especially handy for bloggers because some of our traffic surges only last for a few hours and a 24 hour stats update sequence doesn’t cut the mustard.

But for users of AWStats there is actually a simple little hack that you can use to get your stats updated when you want.

Firstly make sure you have AWStats!

Then you need to log into your site (I use an FTP program, but you can navigate to the correct file from within your CPanel using the tools there).

Go to tmp>awstats>awstats.yourURL.com.config

This is a config file that you can edit using a standard text editor like Notpad (just right click on it and open it using Notepad or your FTP program).

Go to line 155 where you will find something that says “AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=0″

Cange that to “AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1″

Note: Don’t use the “”

Save the file to the server.

Now when you log into your AWStats you will see an option at the top of the page which allows you to update your stats!

Real time AWStats! Woot!

Now for some reason, this isn’t very stable and occassionally keeps resetting to 24 hours but it only takes 20 seconds to fix again, and then you have up-to-date stats.

A nice thing to have for us bloggers!

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I just unsubscribed from 90% of the “marketing” e-newsletters that I generally read.

It’s gotten to the point where I am sick of these idiots whoring their affiliate links onto me without actually giving me any good content or ideas in return. Some of them hadn’t sent me a “newsletter” in months that didn’t contain an affiliate link and I just got fed up. A few months back when that “Butterfly Affiliate Marketing” course was released, I remember waking up to at least 10 emails from the affiliate vultures trying to get me to purchase through their links.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for affiliate marketing, but at least provide a little value to me in the 10 minutes of the day that you aren’t trying to take my money. Do not try to sell to me EVERY time you write to me.

Despite desperately wanting to, I am not going to reveal which e-newsletters I unsubscribed from (doing stuff like that has a nasty habit of coming back to bite you on the ass when you are on the internet), but I would like to share a couple of newsletters that I think represent value in the content and ideas they give me without forcing every two-bit “must-have” internet program down my throat. These are not affiliate links and I have no connection with these newsletters other than enjoying them and thinking the people who produce them deserve recognition, thanks and a bigger audience.

When these guys DO send me an affiliate program I will go out of my way to make sure I have clicked on their affiliate links so they get some commission, if I make a purchase on their recommendations.

Yaro Starak’s Newsletter

Most of you will know Yarro as the Blog Traffic King or from Entrepreneur’s journey. I have been following his blog for quite a while, but he also does a newsletter targeted towards getting good traffic to your blog. It is well worth the read every time and I can’t actually remember the last time he tried to sell me something. Great content, great ideas and a selfless blogger.

It doesn’t come out too often and Yaro has never spammed me with some lame affiliate product that I “must buy today.”

I highly recommend subscribing to his enewsletter.

Gary Bencivenga

Gary’s newsletter is geared towards skillful copywriting. It is not specifically for bloggers, but it is very useful for anyone who likes to learn the skills of writing persuasively. While it might be more geared towards marketers in general, I think a lot of bloggers could learn a thing or two from the ideas in these newsletters.

Gary doesn’t write his newsletter very often, but I always open it because I know there is going to be a good idea on writing in it, even if it’s something I don’t want to apply to my own situation.

The other thing is that Gary does not spam me with affiliate links (in fact I can’t remember the last time he even included an affiliate link in his newsletter). One thing I don’t like is Gary’s site which looks like one of those tacky sales letters, but in his defence, a lot of markters swear by those type of sites.

Anyway, this one is well worth subscribing to.

____________

Now I am sure there are a few other enewsletters that are ok. I am just sick of having things pushed on me and the two nesletters above rarely, if ever do that. They also happily give me a lot fo ideas for free and I see value in what they offer.

Of course, I am open to other enewsletters, but in the meantime I am enjoying my emptier in-box.

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