Jamdo Marketing Blog

Just thought I would share a quick trick that I sometimes use when I need urgent help with some coding issue or geek problem.

Pretend to be a girl.

I am sure you have noticed how pathetic most geeks are. I mean, they just have no damn self respect.

This is nowhere more prevalent than in internet forums - especially ones to do with coding.

Now, when “Bob Jones” shows up in those forums asking for help with coding in PHP or whatever, he will most often be rudely met with a response of “Use the damn search function, noob” or some other geek witicism. (Of course, I would also suggest you use the search function of forums or Google too, but sometimes you just don’t even know what the wording or vocabulary of what you need so that’s also quite difficult.)

You will also notice that the exact same question when asked by “Mandy” and signed off with:

Kisses,
Mandy
XX

… seems miraculously to get some very helpful responses.

So what should Bob Jones do?

Easy!

Be Mandy.

It won’t work every time and you still won’t get away with askinng TOTALLY dumb questions, but you will get a lot more slack.

Technorati Tags: geeks, forums

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Is there something a little inane about the “Buy Me a Beer” donation plugin that seems to be doing the rounds of most blogger’s plugin lists of late?

I mean, it’s a nice little idea for a plugin and all, but there’s something about pretending to buy someone a cyber-coffee that just bugs me.

Who in their right mind would go and buy a beer or a coffee with their paypal funds anyway?

So I though I would put a little honesty and humour back into that plugin by coming up with some more realistic scenarios.

1) If You Think This Post Makes Me Look Insane, Buy Me Prozac

2) If You Think I Make Flickr Cry, Donate to My Plastic Surgery Fund

3) Screw Beer - Buy Me Johnny Walker Blue Label

4) Ninjas Killed My Blog - Help Me Buy Kung Fu Lessons

5) Need More Advertising Space - Help Me Buy an Extra Collumn for My Blog

6) If You Think I Make Gilligan Look Like The Professor, Buy Me an Online Degree

7) PornoTube Made Me Blind - Buy Me an Optometrist Appointment

8 ) Tom Laughs at Me - Buy Me Friends

9) Adsense Shut My Account - Need Money to Assasinate Larry and Sergei

10) Need Directory Listing - Donate to My DMOZ Bribery Fund

That should do for starters!

Technorati Tags: blogs, plugins, wordpress

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There are a lot of little jobs with blogging that seem to eat up your time. The thing is a lot of them are repetitive and don’t take a lot of brain power or effort… just time.

Unfortunately time is one of your greatest assets - you should be using it to create even more killer content for your blog. Here are a few things to consider farming out so you can free up that finite resource.

Directory Submissions - probably of more and more decreasing importance, but a link is still a link. You don’t want to get too many too quickly, but a steady build up of directory links can help establish a good, long-term linking profile for your blog or site. Luckily, there are plenty of cheap guys around who will do this job very well. Remember to use a few different titles (ie. anchor text) and spread the link building out over time (the guy I use does 3000 submissions over the course of a year for $200 which is hard to beat - contact me if you want his details).

MyBlogLog Friend and Community Adding - MyBlogLog is a great little way to build your blog’s profile and readership. Just by adding interesting new people to your contact list and joining new communities you will get people interested in the topic of your blog. Of course, taking the time to find interesting new people who are possibly interested in your niche and new communities in your niche to join can be a little time-consuming (even though there is a 15 per day limit on each). It can add up if you have a few different blogs with different accounts though. It’s a fairly easy job though, so why not outsource it?

Forum Posting - You don’t want to outsource the posting as such (unless you can find someone you trust with your brand absolutely), but there are plenty of regular posters in big forums who are more than happy to rent links in their signatures for as little as $5 per month. If the forum is right and the potential traffic is well targetted, then this can be a good investment.

Blog Comments - Be careful with this one, but there are plenty of cheap writers available who will visit other blogs to comment constructively and enter your website address as that of the commenter. You want to REALLY trust whoever you get to do this one, because your brand is in their hands, but it can still be had fairly cheaply. This will help you build traffic to your own blog.

Product Reviews - I have one or two blogs that have a category for product reviews in their niche. Each of the product reviews is in exactly the same format as the others and they are easy, but time consuming to write. Now, I wouldn’t trust a hired writer to write the main content of most of my blogs, but I would happily trust them to write these product reviews for me as the template is very straight forward and quite easy. My guy charges $6 per review which is fine with me and I am very happy with them (contact me if you want their details).

The main thing about outsourcing is that it is difficult to find someone who is up to the standards you expect. To be honest I have had a few bad experiences with outsourcing. But I have also found a couple of gems in a sea of coal and they make my life a lot easier.

Technorati Tags: outsourcing, blogging

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An interesting problem for bloggers is that product blogs are largely monetised in a different fashion to content blogs.

A recent guest post by Wendy Pierall over at ProBlogger brought my attention to the fact that I had had a similar conundrum recently and tackled it in a quite different manner.

Her problem?

regular blog visitors came to my main site for content (and not to shop), it made sense to create a separate blog just for the products and services that they would be interested in.

Wendy made the realisation with the help of Jeremy Shoemaker, that she might like to seperate the content element of her blog from the product element. A “content post” is a post where you can wax lyrical about your niche and write
linkbait articles etc. A “product post” is where you write about a specific product with the intent of making an affiliate sale. Their solution to marry the two was to create an entirely new product blog at Shoestring Smarts quite seperate from the original content blog at eMoms At Home.

That solution is fine and I think she will be successful.

However, if you have a content blog and you don’t want to start another site, then I would like to propose another potential solution - one I used myself recently.

A few things first though - this is basically how I see some of the main differences between a content blog and a product blog:

Content Blogs

• primary goal is any type of monetisation
• Adsense can take prominence
• Kontera is a good monetisation option
• cpm is a good way to monetise
• mass traffic is the goal - the more visitors the better
• giving free links to other relevant sites and resources is good
• easy to write linkbait which is good for SEO

Product Blogs

• primary goal is to make an affiliate sale
• Adsense is not ideal
• cpm is a distraction
• Kontera is a distraction
• targetted traffic is the goal (ie. traffic looking for something specific)
• the fewer (non-affiliate) links on a post, the better
• difficult to use linkbait for SEO

Firstly, on my blog, I planned to have both content posts and product posts on the single blog installation - a quite different solution to that used by Wendy, who went for a whole new site.

So, I wanted to figure out a way whereby I could keep the single blog, but have adsense, CPM, MyBlogLog widgets, Flickr widgets etc on the content posts where having page link leakage was not such a problem, and for the product posts have no leakage such as adsense etc.

The monetisation strategy of the two types of posts is fundamentally different so I needed two distinct post templates all from within the one blog installation.

Basically what I came up with was this.

Firstly I made seperate categories for the products that I was going to write about. Then I installed the Wordpress Category Visibility Plugin. This allowed me to NOT display any product posts on the main page - they would be shown only on their category pages. That way I was able to not upset the regular readers with constant product posts (regular content blog readers want tips, how to articles, stories, pics etc - not product descriptions).

That sorted the first issue which was to take care of the regular readers and maintain the visage of a content blog.

Next, I installed the Post Templates by Category Plugin. This allowed me to alter the post template according to specific categories, thus allowing me to remove all of the link leakage from the product posts that appears on the home page and content posts. While the content posts are monetised and made richer with adsense, CPM, Kontera, MyBlogLog, Flickr etc, the product posts have none of that and can concentrate on directing the visitor through the affiliate links of the product, much like a good sales letter.

The main benefits of this solution as I see it are like this:

• product posts can have the advantage of the link profile of the content blog
• a content blog can continue to linkbait better than a product blog alone, and therefore increase overall site SEO
• I can be more confident in using PPC to direct paid traffic to the product posts without worrying about link leakage so much
• regular readers don’t have to be subjected to comparatively boring product pages
• product pages can do very well in search engines

Now, this was a little mucking around and it did take me a while to figure out how I wanted to do it, but in the end I managed to monetise the two different sections of the site with two different strategies.

If you have a content blog like eMoms At Home and you want a product blog like Shoestring Smarts, then I suggest that the way I laid out may even be a superior strategy to building a whole new site as it allows the product section of your site to have all of the SEO benefits of your content blog without upsetting your regular readers.

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Getting recognition (or possibly a backlink) from the big guns in your niche can be a pretty cool feeling. If you get a mention on their blog then it gives you some readership, a nice backlink and the recognition that you deserve!

Hell, even just knowing that the pros are taking what you say seriously can really keep you motivated to keep producing.

So how do you go about attracting their attention?

There are several things you can do.

Most people are egotistical.

I know I am.

Now, I don’t mean that in a nasty way, but people like recognition from their peers and that is driven by ego. Almost everyone who is well known certainly is egotistical to some point (it is possible to be successful without others knowing about it so if someone is well known it is usually because they have actively sought some type of fame or recognition). Hell, Darren Rowse can’t even recall all the times he has spent talking about himself! As I said, that is not an insult that is meant in a nasty way, but simply an observation that can be taken advantage of.

Blog About Them

The first way to get on the radar of an egoist is to talk about them. They like it. And here is a tip. Any well known person who is into new media (like blogging) and is a self promoter will almost certainly have a “Google Alert” set up for their own name. That way Google will email them every time someone on the internet mentions their name. If you want to get on their radar, then the first thing to do is mention them specifically.

Google alerts are also comonly used to keep up with mentions or specific sites and even particular niches. That means you should also be mentioning sites by name and URL if you can. This increases the chances that you will show up on the radar.

Join Their Community

The second thing is to do is to regularly comment on their blog. Become an integral part of their blog community. I am not talking about saying, “Hey, nice post” - I mean contributing significant quality content to their comments section on a regular basis. They will notice and be grateful. When you then email them with some great content you have on your own blog, they will know who you are and you will have a better chance of getting a positive (or any) response.

MyBlogLog is a great tool to help you with this. Create a memorable avatar for yourself to help you get visually noticed (even better if they display MyBlogLog avatars in their comments). Start commenting and commenting well.

Meet Them

The other way to get on their radar is to actually go and meet them in person. This is basically how Tim Ferris got so much play in the blogosphere when he was recently promoting his new book (obviously he also prepared what he wanted to talk to them about and the action he wanted from them too). He went to conferences and meeting where he knew the people he wanted to meet would be attending - then he bribed them with lunch. Once a few A-list bloggers started talking about him, then a lot of other people did too. And guess what! It got him a NYTimes bestseller without the aid of offline advertising or markteting. So do a bit of research and find out where your favourite bloggers are going to be. Meeting people face-to-face really opens doors.

Now, these tips should get you accross the line. Just decide whose radar you want to be on, plan how to do it with the above tips and execute your plan. It isn’t rocket science and there can be a whole world of rewards in doing it.

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For many bloggers, Google Adsense is going to be one of the primary ways of monetising a blog - possibly the only way.

While Adsense is a great system and has been the entrepreneurial blogger’s best friend for a few years, it is still not a perfect system and can be improved with a little human help.

There are a couple of things that a blogger needs to be aware of with Adsense and needs to adjust for in order to maximise the profit potential of their blog.

Adsense Smart Pricing

Having low quality advertisers on your site (ie. in Adsense) can be a big problem for a blogger.

When a reader clicks on the Adsense ad of a bad site, there is a much higher chance that they will immediately hit the back button on their browser.

While this is not your fault, if it happens too often, the Adsense system may think that you are sending out junk traffic.

The way Adsense combats junk sites running contextual advertising is to “smart price” them. That means that for the site sending the junk traffic, the payout per click will be reduced.

That can obviously impact your earnings.

Beat Smart Pricing

Luckily Google offer a fairly easy remedy to this problem.

The “Competitive Ad Filter” in your Adsense account is your best friend in this situation. It allows you to block up to 200 advertisers from advertising on your Adsense blocks.

But how do you know who to block?

Luckily, many other people have experienced this problem. Many lists of low quality, low paying Adsense advertisers have been found and put on appropriate black lists by bloggers and site owners.

There’s a good list compiled by Mark Cook for example.

Just log into your Adsense account and go to Adsense Setup >> Competitive Ad Filter and copy and paste the above list. Hit save and you are good to go.

Now, you will want to try to keep that list up to date from time to time by adding to it yourself and finding other lists (they are regularly mentioned in discussions about Adsense on webmaster forums for example).

But doing this simple thing will stop most of your worries about this problem and also maximise your earnings from Adsense.

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, smart pricing

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