Maybe it was these five reasons, but some people are putting an end to the whole “numbers in the post title” madness. SMM decided to quit, Patrick Altoft followed suit, and some others probably did too. (I doubt Lyndon Antcliff will join in, though.)

But if you want to join in, here is a list of the top 10 ways to ditch the numbers from your post title. We’ll start with a “top 10″ list and switch it up so it’s no longer a “top 10″ list, but instead, a great article.

Numbered title: “Top 10 Ways to Get More Blog Comments”

To make it fit the latest non-numbered linkbait trend, try these titles instead:

1. “How to Get More Blog Comments”

In this case you just drop the number and use “How to” instead. It’s a time-tested, classic headline.

2. “The Ultimate Guide to Getting More Blog Comments”

Who needs a numbered list when your post is the “ultimate” guide?

3. “Little-known Secrets to Getting More Blog Comments”

Someone might already know the top 10 ways to get more blog comments, but they certainly don’t know the “little-known secrets” for getting more blog comments.

4. “Get Tons More Blog Comments - Here’s How”

Another way is to take the “how to” aspect and place it at the end of the post title.

5. “Boost Traffic and Get More RSS Readers By Increasing Blog Comments”

Now we’re getting serious. Instead of focusing on just increasing blog comments, throw in a few benefits of getting more blog comments to make a really appealing title.

6. “Want To Get More Comments on Your Blog?”

Form your headline into a question where the obvious answer is “yes” and the reader won’t be able to resist. This idea works best when you’re targeting people who watch Jeopardy.

7. “How to Coax Your Blog Readers Into Leaving More Comments”

You don’t just get blog comments out of thin air, so add in a little something about the blog readers that will be leaving the comments.

9. “Encourage Blog Commentators By Making Simple Mistakes In Your Post”

Make some sort of mistake or spelling error and some people will comment about it to show how they are far superior since they caught something you missed.

A great example is posting something like “Google updated PR today” and you’re guaranteed that at least one idiot stops by to say “Actually, Google constantly updates PR. Today was just a toolbar PR update.” (You know, like they’re the only person that realizes that…)

10. “An A-List Blogger’s Guide to Getting More Blog Comments”

Add in an expert’s name to show that your ways to get more blog comments are better than the average post about getting more blog comments.

There you go. A good ‘top 10′ list to tell you how to quit doing top 10 lists!

The question is, will you actually quit writing “top 10″ lists?

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

What you see above is not a screenshot of a Beta version of Digg or Newsvine. And believe it or not, it’s not a crappy knock-off script either. It’s actually a site called Newstin, and now, as usual, I’d like to make fun of the website talk about how useful it is and how we can make money with it.

OK, I can’t resist… What’s with the design? Is a mix of light, medium, and dark gray supposed to be appealing? Or am I colorblind after being subjected to so many grotesque internet marketing sales letters?

What is this thing?

Newstin seems to be yet another type of news site. The thing is, it could be pretty advanced. The home page offers customization of the top stories, quick translations into various languages, and some Java Applet for formatting a navigation web/map/tree thing.

Could I get any of it to work? Nope. At least not to my liking. And if I wasn’t a sleazy internet marketer looking to exploit sites for personal profit, I’d leave now. (Since I can get the latest news I want and set things up perfectly on my iGoogle homepage without any learning curve.)

Back to basics.

Let’s take a break from making money and just get the latest news on the Presidential race… I click on Elections and get a list of news stories ranging from “Presidential race moves to Ohio, Texas” to “Thousands protest over Armenia election result.” You see the problem?

See, Newstin is based in the Czech Republic. They probably care about international headlines. But I’m an ignorant American who has never heard of the town “Ohio, Texas,” let alone Armenia. I want to read about how Bush is very successfully implementing foreign policies so I can feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

On to the money.

There are three ways to make money here.

1) Find all the breaking news stories. For this I suggest the Advertising and PR and Marketing categories. Watch these categories for good stories and then announce the news on your blog and hopefully capture some of the people looking for the original story.

It’s pretty easy since there are RSS feeds for each topic, and feeds include aggregated stories from Google News, Yahoo News, and others. The drawback is the fact that some stories come from places like EzineArticles, meaning there are useless spam stories in there too.

[It’s funny if you think about it - you’re trying to repost news from other sites (i.e. spamming) and you’re finding a bunch of self-promotion articles (i.e. other people’s spam.)]

2) The Ever Popular Autoblog. Instead of monitoring the RSS stories, just use them to popular your autoblog with a wider variety of ripped-off content and watch your black hat SEO fantasies come true.

3) Spam the community. Now I don’t see member profiles yet, but a site like this with any sort of Web 2.0 functions is bound to start a community of users sooner or later. (Note to anyone from Newstin that might see this - build in some anti-spam features!)

Anything else?

I think so. White I haven’t found the site to be a shining example of usability for the general public, there is something there. Whatever they’re doing to categorize news by topic and manipulate the data could be extremely useful for a big business looking to stay on top of the industry, for a well-funded startup analyzing trends, or perhaps for a PR firm.

It’s worth checking back later to see if they have started Web 3.0. (Or at least Web 2.1)

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

If you’re reading this blog, chances are that you, at one point or another, asked someone to Digg or Stumble your site. No big deal, everyone does it.

However, while it’s common practice amongst internet marketers to ask visitors to submit your pages to various social media sites, I found a good example of why you shouldn’t transfer this practice to other niches:

First is an excerpt where the blogger openly asks visitors to stumble his site.

No big deal? Well it was to one user who got pretty pissed!! And he let the world know how he felt…

Let this be a warning for the bloggers who (thankfully) write about something besides making money online - don’t ask your readers to do your work for you!

[All usernames and URLs have been replaced by non-identifying information since I prefer not to make fun of bloggers outside the overcrowded ‘make money online’ niche.]

However, I always point out examples in the internet marketing niche. So I’ll point you to some experiments by AdTracker who did a marvelous study of Stumble Trolls!

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

I know that my ebook is so good that I don’t need a sales letter to convince me, but others won’t know just how good it is. That’s why I had to use this landing page to explain just why you need it.

And it has worked handsomely! I’ve sold as many copies as I’ve had printed! That means my ebook sells out! I can’t even keep the shelves stocked! (I have printed a grand total of 0 copies, and I might not even have an ebook, or shelves - but you can’t argue with those stats!!)

But Skellie obviously didn’t consider my success in this landing page advice.

My bright red and blue text, with plenty of capital letters, exclamation points, and quotation marks thrown in, is the cornerstone of my ebook sales. It’s closely followed by repeating the same hype over and over.

And my testimonials bring it home. Sure, I made them up, but what good internet marketer doesn’t?

Photo Credit: soundfromwayout

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

This just in! Breaking news from MyBlogLog!

To maintain their status as the top social network/widget/blog whatever service, MyBlogLog is launching an exiting new feature. It’s called “New with Me” and will be a new part of your profile that displays aggregated updates from you and your friends’ online activity.

In a couple weeks, we’ll be launching a new feature called New with Me. This feature will use the URLs on the Services tab of your MyBlogLog profile to aggregate your latest activity on sites such as Twitter, Last.fm, Digg, and YouTube. As a result, your profile page will look different - publicly available updates from the services you have listed will be merged with your existing information. Your latest Flickr photos, Last.fm tracks, and YouTube videos, will all be in one place. Updates from your contacts on MyBlogLog will be merged and available as well. Simply put, the New with Me feature will transform your static profile into a dynamic one.

(Quoted from a recent email.)

In other words, it’s an exciting new feature!……. that Facebook did a long time ago.

But unlike Facebook, MyBlogLog is actually alerting users to the upcoming change and allowing us to opt-out if we prefer to keep our privacy. At least they learned something from the Facebook fiasco…

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

Shortly after Al Gore invented the internet, uber guru Michael Campbell invented internet marketing.

That’s right. I was never sure who did it, but in a recent email from, you guessed it, Michael Campbell, he reveals how when he told you to do something, he was copied by everyone else. And it’s been going on since 1999.

For example: “in 1999 I told you to focus your sites on product makes and model numbers. In 2001 I told you to go either ahead or behind the retail curve. (It’s called the Long Tail now.)”

Yes, there is complete proof that he developed the concept of making a website that does not focus on just one generic term.

Until 1999, websites only focused on a topic such as “cars.” Then once this dude came around we started seeing the sites about cars expand to include more pages, such as “Toyota Corolla” and “Dodge Viper.” I don’t know how anyone learned about new models of cars prior to Michael Campbell releasing his strategies, because websites only used the term “car” and nothing more specific.

Another example is how his innovative “mininet” idea (which amounts to linking related sites together) has been copied and called many things, including virtual real estate.

‘Start with a generic home page, link it to targeted category pages, which link to highly focused make and model number pages.’ (Which - depending on who you talk to - are now called virtual real estate, spokes and nodes, themeing, silos or pyramids.)

So “virtual real estate” is only applicable to these so-called “mininets?” What about a company like Gawker that owns multiple website properties? (In other words, they own virtual real estate.) I certainly wouldn’t call their website network a “mininet” that can only be attributed to some guru’s ebook.

Moving on…

Building landing pages targeted to items like “xyz phone model” and doing PPC to them is better than bidding on generic terms like “cell phone.” It’s because they’re “buying phrases.” Wow, no one ever would have thought of bidding on terms other than generic ones like cell phone, web host, car, mortgage, etc.

Google should send this guy one hell of a Christmas present for enlightening people to the fact that they can bid on specific phrases. (Surely Google picked up on the idea thanks to him. It’s not like they have any talent working there…)

Campbell’s mininet concept also apparently includes the concept of categorization. He says to link your homepage to broad category pages which then link to specific pages grouped in that category.

Holy crap! Just think how hard it would be to navigate BestBuy.com if they didn’t use Michael’s brilliant concept of “categories.” E-commerce never would have developed!

Not to mention the internet marketers that wouldn’t ever think to use anchor texts that actually apply to the pages. Everyone would still be linking using lists of “link 1″ and “link 2″ etc for all their uncategorized pages.

This man deserves an international holiday!

Just think if you put together this mininet concept with some sleazy Adsense tricks… you’d be a gazillionaire!

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

If business meetings took place on blogs…

Part 1:

Part 2:

Hahahaha!

Thank you College Humor!

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend