Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I was originally going to put this link I found on paid links in my weekend entrepreneurial links post but then did some digging and decided it needed some separate post attention!

I found an interesting article on one of my semi-regular blog stops OsWorld.biz that glared out at me with the title The Death of Paid Links. Yep you read it right and it isn’t just an eye catcher.

As I dug deeper into what sparked Oli’s post I found a few sites that discussed the topic of Google using others to combat paid links as a way to boost PR and not traffic. (How the hell are they going to do that is beyond me) But the post in question is from Matt Cutt’s blog, the leader of Google’s webspam team, where he casually brings up the fact that there’s an easy way for webmasters to report paid links.

Well that casual blog post sparked a huge uproar that has 523 comments and counting!!!

Comments range from WTF to more sane comments that are really trying to understand how the system won’t be abused and how an algorithm will be able to figure out if the link was bought strictly for boosting PR or for traffic purposes.

I for one am clueless as to how they could possibly trust a reporting system that is utilized by the very people who buy links to take over the spot from other webmasters. Won’t webmasters report links that may not even be paid for links simply to lower the ranking of the both the sites, in turn making their site the higher ranking site.

Does this list go on and on with the flaw in what is being proposed here?

I’d also like to point out the Matt several times says he is just trying to widen the dataset for testing purposes. Although he doesn’t say it isn’t being counted this may mean that they’re just trying out their cracked out idea. Also mentioned, here and responds to a lot of good points here.

The most intriguing comment of the first 150 that I got through was one by Scott Fish (I’m assuming the DP regular) who brings up the clearest thoughts on the subject here discussing how they’re going to know.

Also of interest to a lot of you out there is probably this post at weblog tools collection about sponsoring themes.

I’d like to finish with a little advice. Try and use real SEO techniques noted in this Calacanis challenge update.

What do you all think?

About two months ago I wrote about feeling the digg effect where I talked about the great feeling of getting your article to the front page of digg and then quickly seeing your shared server plan crash to ground.

The residual effect of getting to the top of digg is immense. Although if you feel the effect and your server crashes that is a bummer in the short term, but all the links you get will help your page rank, your site promotion, and boost your readership (so long as you keep up the writing.)
Based on what the surrounding hours were receiving, the time I was down cost me about 30K visitors for the 3 articles I had dugg to the front page. Ouch!!!

It even prompted me to switch servers and plans.

I recently came across a interesting niche hosting idea started by this guy and another called SurviveDigg.com. A great idea, especially if they can keep up with staying true to their name and get to the top of Google’s search results for hosting plan that can survive digg (that should help ).

I don’t know how many times I searched for that on Google as well as all the forums I could find. It’s a tough subject because it seems like everyone has different answers about the same hosts and the same hosting plans. (ie it’s a crapshoot)

But the idea is definitely a great niche to go after and a product that I would have thought about trying had it been launched back when I was mulling over the decision to switch hosting plans because of the digg effect.

One comparison that is so obvious but often needs to be explained is that SEO can be thought of as free advertising.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which for those who don’t know means that you use techniques to optimize your website and the links coming in to rocket yourself to the top of search engines. The main one used to model techniques after is Google. Get to the top of search results and traffic comes.

Now if you have all the money in the world or connections to some of the top blogs, then who cares about SEO. You have other means to get your traffic to your blog. You can pay to advertise on the big blogs or you can get your buddy to help you out by mentioning your site once or twice a week.

But if you’re not working with a large budget you can think of SEO as free advertising. You don’t need to go to TLA and buy links. You can hang out in a number of forums, contact site owners, and trade trade trade like crazy as many links as you can muster.

Think of Google as your best friends site but the only way to get to the top is not by walking them home in a drunken stuper, but getting others to link to you, a lot.

Like advertising, your site might not always be at the top of the page in the best spot. But if you keep after your SEO techniques, you’re more likely to get to the top more often. Once you get a few more visitors coming you are more likely to get more links and feel the snowball effect.

SEO should be viewed as the poor mans advertising. If you have the money, spend it on advertising and build content.

The upside to SEO over advertising is that SEO can last a long time where as advertising is only good for that contract period (we’re talking banner space.) You’re SEO campaign could payoff by keeping you at the top of Google for a while. Now if you’re smart you’ll buy a link or banner that also helps you with SEO, but that’s a whole nother post altogether.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned in building my blog network is that I should really listen to what I read. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve browsed a blog post that says “Follow these steps to sure fire win SEO,” or something like that. Even if these bloggers were just writing what they read somewhere else I should have listened.

Over the past three months I’ve begun to organize and focus my efforts of SEO and you might not be surprised but, it worked. Not only do I have time working on my side (older domains do better) but I am actually seeing results with the keywords that I’m targeting. Some of my blogs are the number 1 Google search result for those keywords. Even blogs where all I was doing was link building instead of content creation. Tops!

Then one day I happened across a manual being freely distributed over a Digital Point. This isn’t a new eBook (at least I don’t think) but it’s a very detailed look at several methods to SEO. It gives tons of information that I wish someone would have printed out back when I started building blogs online and smacked me over the head with it.

I’ve written a little blurb similar to this over at Blogging on Empty and instead of redirecting you there to read the post I’ll just give you the direct link.

SEO Made Easy PDF by Brad Callen.

If I had to make a list of things that I would suggest you do with your SEO plan it would be the following.

Then just hammer on this. The book talks about determining where the top sites in Google search results have their links to but I found this to be difficult at first. I focused on good sites with a high PR that have been around a little while and seemed to do just fine.

Give r’ a whirl.

I’ve been told personally by several prominent bloggers, as well as read countless times that the easiest way to launch another blog or website is to have an audience. Of course this is quite obvious, and of course I didn’t follow the advice.

Launching Blogtown Press would have been much easier had I really focused on building the traffic to this blog first. Instead, I decided to spread myself thin write on 5-10 blogs at a time and get mediocre traffic to all of them, then launch the blog network, then get minimal traffic to all blogs in the network.

Since then I’ve revamped my thought process and along the way built several of the blogs in the network to good traffic. I’ve followed good SEO technique to rank higher in the search engines, hired bloggers to increase content generation and allow me to spend time on promotion, and I’ve slowed down on launching new blogs.

Next launch I’ll have an audience!

The proper way to launch a website can be seen from the video I have embedded below. It’s a clip from some tech show, The Screen Savers, that Kevin Rose, founder of digg.com co-hosted (or have a spot on or something).

In this short little clip you’ll see Kevin Rose use his current position at this TV show to weave into the show a little segment about social news and bookmarking websites out there at the time (2004 the video says) and their shortcomings. He then goes on to talk about this new social bookmarking site that solves some of these shortcomings.

The website he mentions just happens to be digg.com which he leaves out the part that he founded. Now whether or not that was semi-shady to use his position of what looks like all knowing geek power or not. It’s a pretty slick move and no doubt helped him get the word out. Pretty sweet move Kevin

I recently told of one of Blogtown Presses articles getting dugg all the way to the front page. I was, of course, super psyched and was able to track the progress through digg’s interface and our stats.

It was interesting to see that over the first 10-12 hours of it being crazy dugg there were 1000-1500 uniques per hour. (That’ll give the network traffic a sweet boost). Then, as the article slowly made it’s way down the pages of top articles and slowly out of the entertainment section, the traffic went down with it. We’re almost back to normal traffic levels for Aloha Update.

But another long term effect is that out of all those diggs the article also got picked up by some bloggers around the world in various subjects. They wrote about Dog as well as Aloha Update. Hopefully that will give us some good Google Juice when the next run of Google PageRank updates hits.

Thought I would share some exciting news. Blogtown Press had it’s first article to make it to the front page of Digg, all news! The article is from Aloha Update and is about Dog “The Bounty Hunter” Chapman and his recent back and fourth with the Mexican authorities. You can see the digg article here and vote or comment. At writing this it’s been Dugg 1,234 times and commented 233 times.

The article was briefly at the top spot overall, stayed on the front page of all topics for a few hours, and now is slowly working it’s way down the top all news. It’s still on the front page of Digg-Entertainment News and the screenshot above was from earlier this morning (HST) where we were the fourth.

Many people have top digg articles all the time but for Blogtown Press it’s a first. We were receiving about 1200 hits an hour and that’s slowly tapering off to the mid 100’s. Every once in a while the server gets a little bogged down but not too bad.

I’m anxious to see what this does to incoming links. We’ve picked up on about 3 or 4 trackbacks so far and there are over 45 comments on the article alone.

Just thought I would share some excitement with everyone else.

I recently sent out my monthly traffic report to the Blogtown Press bloggers and was able to report some great news! Ever since I launched the network with my link-baiting contest and hired bloggers I’ve been able to promote and create more incoming links, which I am happy to report has helped immensely.

Below is a quick recap over the past few months of the effects the contest, hiring writers, and focusing more on link building and site promotion has had on my network. The graph below displays only the 12 main blogs within the Blogtown Press Blog Network and doesn’t include this blog “Board Shorts and Business Suits”.

As you can see the increase, percentage wise is very large. My numbers are still relatively low compared to other Blog Networks, but the possibilities to grow are noticeable. From the Novemeber Blog Network Launch to the end of last month Blogtown Press has seen a 393% increase in pageviews and a 480% increase in uniques. (Sounds much better than 3.9 and 4.8 times more visitors don’t you think )

As for this blog, I’ve increased my unique visitors by 293% and my pageviews by 265% since November. I really feel like I can get my pageviews up with a few quick tweaks and more internal linking, but that’s another subject altogether.

I’m going to continue to push forward with the techniques I’m using right now as well as some new ones that I inevitably learn along the way.

Blogs are great, that we know. They organize information and personal stories chronologically and in categories. They are relatively easy to develop. You really don’t have to know anything about the Internet or about coding to even get one started. Heck you can set one up, throw some ads on it, write your life story, and make money, for free! (Minus of course the painstaking hours it takes building content, and even that you can find for free at places like wikipedia and article sites.)

But blogs can be so much more than just a place to easily organize your life story that people may or may not want to read. If your building a news resource, unlike newspapers, your readers have the opportunity to comment right on your article in real-time. There’s essentially not waiting for the “write to the editor” editing process. Those people that write on your blog post in real-time can become your community.

But what are you doing for your community in return?

First off, hopefully you’re providing some sort of useful writing, be it inspirational or entertaining, or just providing some inside knowledge you have to help them build a skill they’ve always wanted to build. This is the first step to giving back to a community that may or may not be giving back to you.

But you can do so much more than just providing useful content.

I was recently tipped off to a great idea over at Flee The Cube about showing off your top commentors and letting their html links, if they choose to provide one, be linked through their names. Although I couldn’t get the widget he used to work on my blog I was able to track one down via Google that does essentially the same showing of top commentors.

What this does is encourage your readers to leave feedback and comments and build a dialogue after your posts by providing them with great Google juice from the link and also traffic juice if you receive enough hits on your site.

Of course at first you’ll need to have some commentable posts that people care to read and leave feedback on. However, once you get going, and enough people are inclined to leave feedback on your blog and read your posts, and leave more feedback, you’ll begin to see conversations within your post comments that may or may not pertain directly to the post. Either way, it allows thoughts to flow and it provides your readers a service.

And you can do even more for your readers….

Not only can you show off your top commentors by giving them good visible link spots, you can also join a service that is really beginning to take off in the blogosphere. It’s called My Blog Log and it helps you automagically build a community around your blog.

Some of you may have noticed recently in the far right sidebar I’ve added a box that displays pictures of people who are “Recent Readers” of Board Shorts and Business Suits. Those pictures are of people who also have My Blog Log accounts and profiles. Every time they visit my blog their picture gets moved to the top. If they view it enough times they are automagically added to my My Blog Log community of readers.

Or, even better, they can join my community by going to my profile at My Blog Log and joining right away. Something I encourage all of you to do.

By having people join my community they’ll then have it noted on their profiles that they are in my blogs community giving me just one more opportunity to attract a visitor to my blog. In return my readers get their profile and thus a link to their profile in the top every time they visit.

Lastly, don’t be a spectator!

What I mean is don’t sit around and watch your readers leave comments. If you do they won’t stick around very long leaving comments. They’ll read what they want and peace out. Of course if you have a massive amount of traffic your readers will just leave comments to get a free link back to their own site. If this was the case you probably wouldn’t be reading a post about building a community.

So comment back. Even if the comments aren’t directed towards you. Join the banter. The great thing about blogs is there’s a relatively easy to get a hold of person on the other end of all the writing and if you make an appearance in your comments section people will feel a connection, no matter how small it is, and want to come back. They’ll feel you care, and you should care!

Blogs are expanding from just an easy way to organize and publish content to a way to build a community on the web. You don’t want to get left behind so help build your community by using the free tools that people make available to you. You’ll be happy you did.

The first winning coconut went out in the mail and here’s a sneak peak at the beauty. Straight from Hawaii to your doorstep, you could win it. All you gotta do is enter the contest! (PS all you have to do is write one post with a few links)