I hope so. Have you tried the digg button creator I posted about the other day?

I tried it out, and, as suspected, I can’t easily add it to a blog post. The code just gets stripped out. I figure I can easily add it to any of my static web pages, though.

So I can’t complain too much, but I had to mention this just because I put the digg button post in the “good” category, as opposed to the “this sucks” category where most stuff goes. I don’t want anyone thinking I’ve gone soft!

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

So you have a little link on your blog entries to submit the article to Digg - but how can you make it easier for people to digg your article once it is already on Digg?

I have found the answer!

All the credit for this goes to Alex Bosworth as far as I know. I actually found his article through Digg, so there’s proof that this works! Basically you are allowing people to Digg your article without leaving your website. Very cool.

Read the whole story and see an example at Alex’s blog. After reading, be sure to check out the Digg button creator and make your own buttons for your stories!

Be on the lookout for this in my future blog entries!

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

After seeing the numerous bloggers who had integrated “Digg this” and other links directly into their blog posts, I became a bit jealous and pissed off, as you could expect. I need all the help I can get, so I set off in a search for how to put these infamous little icons on my blog…

And luckily I found a site telling me how. It gave me the code and everything. Turns out you just put some code in your single.php or comments.php file and then it does everything automatically after that!

The post is from a while ago at exploding-boy.

So I opened up my files and pasted the code in there. And guess what - it didn’t work! So I tweaked the code a bit to no avail…

Luckily though, some other bloggers were there to save the day - people had posted comments like “thanks for the tip, I’ve used it on my blog.” Great! I can check out how they did it and I’ll be all set!

To my surprise, these bloggers tricked me - none of them actually had the code on their blogs! At least not on the ones they linked to, so it did me no good. So much for the friendly blogosphere!

I had had it, and decided to draw on my very own php coding skills to figure it out. (By the way, I have no php coding skills…)

But luckily I do have some mental reasoning ability and figured out how to tweak my links so they work! Well, it looks like they work…

Want to know how I did it?

1. I used the proper html linking tags, with proper quotation placement. (The very basics.)
2. I changed the & to its html equivalent in the links themselves. (More basic html.)
3. I added a question mark to any > in the php code that didn’t already have one. (This was the key step.)

I think that was it.

Oh yes, one last tip: Add this code near the bottom of your theme’s single.php file or the top of your comments.php file, depending which file is present in your theme. (Sorry if you aren’t using Wordpress!)

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

Still paying less than $10 per click in your Google Adwords account?

Either you have landing pages that Google happens to like, or they haven’t gotten to you yet! Apparently Google is on another one of thier rampages to improve the quality of their website by destroying the businesses of its paying customers. It’s no surprise to see this “Google Slap” as many have called it.

I’d be surprised if you haven’t heard about it yet. But basically, if your Adwords landing page is not up to G’s standards, your minimum bid will probably go from $0.03 to $5.00 or more!

What are people going to do?

Build MFA sites!

No, not the numerous “made for adsense” websites, these are the next breed - “made for adwords” websites! Complete with extraneous content and longer, uninteresting sales letters. And of course, no more squeeze pages with nothing more than an opt-in form, which were becoming very popular.

Although this may be a good thing for searchers if it works, we have to wonder how long it will take to work. It wasn’t long before I saw articles about how to slap Google back. These articles and reports show you the special tricks that will allow you to get your same ads back into Adwords on the cheap. These are the kind of tricks that will just force Google to do more work to achieve quality results.

Or maybe Google has something else up their sleeves…

They are rumored to be launching a new CPA network soon. Perhaps they want you in that instead, which could give Google a bigger percentage of your revenue…

By the way, here is some more info I found on slapping Google:

I Gotta Tell You

Googleicious

And a piece about the new CPA network:

ValueClick Killer

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

How many ads have you seen for Ewen Chia’s Super Affiliate Cloning Program? Ten? Twenty? Ok, I don’t think I saw that many either, but I did take notice. But not because of what the course can do.

Because of…

The name - Ewen Chia. I remember it because I signed-up for his Secret Affiliate Weapon private blog a while ago. It must have been over a year ago. I get emails from him all the time, but I rarely look at them. For one, I only paid $10 since it was a special offer, and two, most of the info I had seen before. Plus, half the time it was just an offer.

But recently I took a look at this site - http://ewenchiaexposed.com. From its sales pitch, Ewen sounds like a crazy good super affiliate. And that reminded me, the numerous ads for his new course made him sound pretty amazing, too. There’s more BS over at superaffiliatecloningprogram.com if you are in the mood.

I’m not sure what to think now. Should I be kicking myself for not paying attention sooner, or should I be suspicious because this is the first big thing I’ve heard about him? I mean, I’ve seen numerous affiliate contests and been subjected to a ton of lists of guest speakers and such - but I’ve never seen his name. And his sales letter says he is always at #1 or #2 in the affiliate competitions… Hmm…

I’m tempted to look into this some more, but here’s what’s holding me back - it seems a bit fishy. And even when internet marketing gurus seem credible, there is usually something fishy going on - so when it seems fishy, it can’t be good!

I could keep a better eye on his private blog, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Why? He has a new course out so he’ll just devote his time to that instead, and simply use his private blog to advertise his new stuff to us. It’s great how that worked out.

Here is what I will do: Go look for other stuff that sucks, and write about it!

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

These days it is all about creating buzz. It’s a simple fact that you need to create buzz around your product or offer, but it has been a recent phenomenon among internet marketers with their big product launches and such. I don’t remember exactly who did the big product launch course, but you can probably thank them for all the “launches” these days.

But today we’re not talking about those launches, we’re talking about something that has created at least a little buzz around here. The topic at hand is Dan Raine and his $15k Challenge. Dan took on a challenge that he could not make $15k in 30 days starting from scratch. We don’t know if that’s true or he made up the whole story, but either way, it’s a neat thing he’s doing.

Dan is letting you in on what he’s doing to earn the money, and he’s detailing it all in his blog (which you find out about after giving him your email address, or by guessing that the secret URL is http://www.15kchallenge.com/blog/.)

There are two things to keep in mind here: the lesson you learn from his craft-related site promotion, and the lesson you learn by watching how he is promoting the challenge itself. You can learn a lot from each one if you keep your eyes open. You could also get taken for a ride if this guy is a spammer, but I think he is pretty legit, at least amongst the usual internet marketing crowd.

What I think is really funny is the forum discussion that has ensued. A few people realize how they can learn from this, while most just start bashing the guy. I just have to laugh at these people. They are either jealous or just have too much time on their hands.

Here’s a thread at Digitalpoint that is pretty good:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=133627

Which brings us back to the topic of creating buzz. If everyone thought this was a great idea, it would not be getting so much attention! I can see people telling their friends, “Hey man, this guy is doing something stupid. Yeah it’s such a gay idea. Look at this 15k challenge thing.” And just like that, he has people talking about his site…

There’s also some buzz around the $30k challenge which is quite similar. At first I thought if would just be a copycat, but it may be interesting to watch, too. There’s always something new to learn.

We’ll save the issue of copycats for another post…

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

As much as I love Revenue magazine, I just had to bring them up after reading one of their articles about podcasts. The magazine is great, and this is probably going to be a trend either way, but please don’t advocate catering to the search engines instead of visitors!

Here’s what is going on: podcasts. They’re getting more popular, and eventually search engines will be able to index them based on audio content. (Pretty cool, huh?) But how will the search engines rank the podcasts?

Supposedly by keywords in the content, just like regular pages. Which will lead to keyword stuffing, so that when search engines can analyze the audio, they find the right keywords in the proper density.

You know those crappy articles that read like garbage due to being written solely for search engine rankings? Well, it looks as though podcasts may start to sound like garbage!

Well, they will if people take the advice of Mike Moran who wrote the column in Revenue. (See pages 28 and 34 of the July/August 2006 issue.)

He says something along the lines of choose the right vocabulary for the podcast to match visitors’ search terms. While vague, it sounds like a subtle reference to SEO techniques if you ask me! Personally I would prefer podcasts that use whatevery vocabulary fits in naturally.

C’mon Revenue, don’t turn into a magazine for search engine spammers!

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend