Well this was a shocker for me, I never thought I would hear of Google encouraging search engine optimization but sure enough they created the “Search Engine Optimization Guide” and posted it on the official blog.  This is one of those moves that I won’t completely understand but it does make you wonder; why would a search engine want to teach you how to manipulate their algorithm?

My analysis on this would be that they are fully aware that the sites that rank well in their algorithms are due to people gaming the system, so by logic the most skilled internet marketers will be the ones that rise to the top.  As a result, the best content will typically go with these marketers as all sides are trying to maximize their profits, but they realize this creates a system where it becomes extremely difficult for an average person to climb through the hierarchy.

In short, I view it as a move that signals the start of a trend of decentralization of power as they try to give some of the smaller websites a shot at some of the keywords that haven’t spent as much time building links.  As the ebook is heavily focused in on the various on-page SEO factors I feel it plays into the trend I have been noticing in which Google has started putting far more emphasis on the on-page factors than they have in the past.

One way or another, it was certainly an intriguing move and it looks like it will work out to be a good resource for new webmasters.  Hopefully they add it to their webmaster guidelines so that all new marketers can see it and get a little boost in the right direction.  Since I’m sure you guys would like to read it yourself you can either visit the official Google blog, or download the ebook.

On that note feel free to download my own ebook, which goes into the SEO topics that Google will never share with anyone else.

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Forums are one of the deep foundations of the internet, modeled after the great forums of the ancient days where people could have a frank and open conversation about a range of topics.  The internet forum is a place for teenagers to gather to discuss video games, older people to discuss politics, and for a wide range of professionals to come together to discuss techniques that we can all share and therefore all profit more from.  It is a place where people can say whatever the want and be wantonly disagreeable, or even openly immature, or randomly kind and wise.  It is also a place that all marketers would love to use to grab some well deserved traffic and backlinks.

Forums are a great way to get highly targeted traffic to your website when used properly.  There are forums for every niche, and if there aren’t then you can start one yourself and make a good buck.  The problem is that most people that try to use these forums for their own advantage take it too far, and therefore hurt their own cause and that of their fellow marketers.  Case in point, any forum that isn’t moderated will quickly be taken over by spam bots that simply rifle through the forum posting up their advertisements, actions such as these make it so that legitimate marketers cannot post links.

So, you are now wondering, how do I got about posting on a forum in such a way that I don’t draw the wrath of the moderators?  It is quite simple really, if you read any post on blog commenting you will see that it is basically the exact same tactic except used on a wider range on a single site.  The best way to teach you how to post is by first teaching you exactly how not to post:

• Posting a link to your website in your introductory post to a forum, this sets a very bad tone from the start.
• Constantly telling people to check your signature for further information when your signature is clearly all affiliate links.
• Starting the same thread in multiple parts of the forum because you want to get the word out.
• Pretending to be a customer of your own product so you can give it a good review.
• Using overtly promotional language in your posts, especially when mentioning your website.
• Posting about nothing simply to boost your post count.
• Creating a user name that lends itself to people believing you are a spammer, such as the name of your product.
• Making it obvious in even the slightest way that you are at that forum solely for your own benefit.
• Any other behavior that is related to these, in general this includes: spamming, self promotion, link dropping, trolling, or mass PM sending.

Things that you should do:

• Post threads that enhance the content of the forum in some fashion.
• Respond honestly to questions that people ask.
• Give in depth answers to questions because this will show that you are an expert within your field.
• Use your real name as your user name (I just started doing this myself).
• Post only when you have something you genuinely want to say.
• Give people relevant resources to help them with their problems that are not from your site.

Why do you need to do these things?  Well it is quite simple, on the internet there is always going to be a savvy group of individuals that will pick up on your marketing tactics.  By making it seem like you are marketing a product, people will call you out for and nobody will click on your links, etc.  If on the other hand you never mention your site but you post great information, people will look for resources by you so that they can learn more about the topic.  They will also be much more receptive to any products that you are promoting on your own website.

For this reason I also suggest using your real name as your forum name, this will cause people to be more trusting in what you have to say and to remember that name if they see it elsewhere.  With the internet it is all abut name recognition, and your name is your most important brand.  If you are well respected within a community, you will naturally garner high quality relevant backlinks and traffic.

In summary, using a forum to market yourself and your products is quite simple, do not mention your website or your product and you will be fine.  Just give people good answers to their questions and watch as people within the forum naturally begin to talk about your website for you.  Using a forum as starting point of a word of mouth trend for your site is an excellent way to market your site, and it will be far more valuable than the links from your signature or traffic from your self promotion.  It is also a great way to jump start traffic to your blog for those of you with new blogs.

For more tips and tricks about marketing your website, blog, product, or yourself feel free to check out my free ebook and newsletter on the right sidebar.

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I have been bombarded with emails lately from people asking me how to quickly get a new site in Google, so this post is for those of you with new sites or old sites that need some new love.  Typically when I create a new website I see it indexed the day I post it, and I have seen sites get indexed within 1-2 hours of their creation.  While getting indexed quickly is always fun, just remember that being in the index doesn’t necessarily mean you will rank for any valuable keywords, or even for the name of your own site for that matter.

The first thing you should do once your website is live is post the domain to Google and other search engines.  I have always used AddMe for my search engine submission just because it was the first thing on Google when I created my first website and they have never let me down.  I wouldn’t sign up for the newsletter though, it is basically just all advertisements.

The second thing you should do is create a sitemap and submit this to Google’s Webmaster Tools, this will ensure that all of your content gets included in the index, not just your homepage.  There are plenty of free tools out there to create a sitemap, I typically just use whatever is at the top of a Google search.

The third step is to check your website’s onpage search engine optimization, especially check to see that every page links to another page in some way, try to have as many pages link to each other as possible to give a more thorough distribution of PageRank and spidering later on in the process.

The fourth step is pretty simple, create a robots.txt file for your website.  Without a robots.txt file search engines are not allowed to index your website, and as a result you won’t ever get indexed.  Just create a blank text file that says “User-agent: *” then next line “Disallow: ” named robots.txt and put it on the domain level directory on your server.  Leave disallow blank unless you have pages you don’t want indexed.

The fifth step is the most fun, because this is where you will get your first backlinks to your website.  This is the key to getting indexed in hours.  The way that Google determines when to index your site is either by putting you in a line via webmaster tools, or by finding your site via their crawler.  It can take months to get indexed without any backlinks, so it is essential that you build backlinks pointing to your site.  The way I typically do this is by submitting my site to StumbleUpon, Digg, and Furl then I go onto all of the forums I post on, and change my signature to have a link to my new website.  As a result, I rarely have to wait more than 5 hours to get indexed.  To make this even more likely to be successful, post on popular do-follow blogs as well.

Sixth step is simply checking the results, a day or so after following these steps try typing site:www.yourdomain.com and see whether you have made it into Google.  If you are, congratulations, start working on your content and building relevant links to start ranking for keywords.  If you aren’t wait 3 days and if you still aren’t then start commenting on more blog posts, especially new ones.

With this site, I typically see my new posts indexed within half an hour, I have seen them indexed in as little as 7 minutes before (As a side note, this post got indexed 5 minutes after it was posted).  To get more tips and tricks download my new ebook which is an internet marketing ebook with a focus on blogging, “Blogging 101: Traffic and Link Development Tips”.

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So I was checking my affiliate networks the past few days and noticed that I was only making a couple dollars a day and I found this quite odd.  I couldn’t figure out why my commissions were all so low, so I decide to check Google analytics to see how much traffic one of my websites was getting.  Sure enough, I check it and I am only getting 2 visitors a day instead of 100+ organic search traffic.  At first I think I might have for some reason gotten nuked by Google and Yahoo, but I have instead actually improved in search rankings by a huge margin.  Then I decide to click on my website, and there it is, the moment every webmaster fears.

My website was hacked by somebody that redirected all search engine traffic to a site that downloads a virus and then tries to sell you software to remove that virus, when repairing computers I have run across this Smithren strand of viruses before.  I can’t figure out why I can directly access my site, but any time I type the name of my site directly in to my browser I have no issues.  Then I start troubleshooting to see how to fix the problem, I’ll go through the steps I did for troubleshooting now.

1. Login to your control panel and view when your files were last modified, if any .html files were modified check to see if they added a meta redirect.  Ex: “meta refresh=meta http-equiv=’refresh’ content=’0; url=http://www.example.com/”
2. Check the last time that somebody logged into your control panel (previous to your current login), see if you remember logging in then.
3. Check the last time somebody uploaded something via FTP (Ah Ha!), this was where I noticed the issue.
4. Check if your domain is pointing to your name server, and see if any 301 redirects have been added.
5. Check to see if there is anything weird in your .htaccess file, this was my issue.  Somebody used my FTP server to overwrite my .htaccess file with their own which simply said “if it is any of these search engines: “listed the search engines”, redirect to their website”, I won’t show the actual code because I don’t want to spread the knowledge around.  Once you see that your .htaccess is redirecting elsewhere, simply empty it out.

Now you have fixed your problem temporarily, but what else can you do?

• Check to see if your .htaccess file is public by typing http://www.example.com/.htaccess, it should return a “403 access denied” error.  If it doesn’t, that is a big issue, change it to a hidden passworded file in your control panel.
• Change the passwords for your FTP accounts
• Change the password to your control panel
• Contact your web host to find a way to better secure your websites in the future (and most likely their own servers as well, they will want you to report these things)

Then all you have to do is go around ranting and raving about how much money you lost and how much time it took to fix the problem, and then continue on with your day.

Website security is a big issue, the best place to learn more about it is a web hosting forum.  If your website gets hacked it is very possible that people will report it to spam watch sites and the search engines and you could easily lose all the time you spent on search engine optimization.

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Link exchanges are one of the most popular ways to gain links today, but the thing I do not understand is why people waste their time creating useless exchanges.  If you are going to do a link exchange, then do yourself a favor and don’t make it obvious to Google by creating a “links” page and sticking your partners on there.  The value to your partner from this will be abysmal at best, and will also draw the gaze of Google.  People doing these types of exchanges are also more likely to back out of a link exchange without mentioning it, so make sure to check up on them to see that your links are still present.

So that’s the way most people do it, but what are better ways to create link exchanges?  Well first start off by finding reputable sources in the same niche as you that work as complements rather than competitors.  If you find them by searching for the keyword you are aiming for, then it would be stupid to expect an anchor text that will help you rank for that term.   Do a search of semi-relevant terms, such as when I want links for my “online money making” website, I would look for people in the “paid surveys” niche as the content keywords will match very closely and I get great conversions on my survey products.

One alternative to a direct link exchange is a 3-way link exchange, which are somewhat better received by Google.  These involve you linking to one site, they will link to another site, and that site will link back to you.  For my time, these aren’t worth it simply due to the additional effort in coordinating two other people not to mention finding three websites in the same niche, with similar traffic and backlinks, that will work with you.

Google's headquarters (Wikipedia)

For bloggers, the link exchange world opens up even more.  Links are the currency of the web, and as a result if you find a blog you like, then you can put them on your blogroll then post a few comments on their blog and see if they notice themselves.  This is the informal form of a link exchange, because many times they will give you a link back, as a result you each have sitewide links bouncing between each other as well as related traffic.  While I do occasionally get requests via email for link exchanges, I would prefer these informal gestures, and they are also what I do on my other blogs.  By actually becoming friends with other bloggers in your niche you will find that blogging becomes more enjoyable, and based on game theory it will also be more profitable for each of you to work together.

Moral of the story: play fair with others and it will help your reputation, and if you do nice things online, then people will often be kind in return.

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One thing that I love doing is finding specific programs or products to promote directly, by targeting search engine results for related search terms, such as the name of the product, keywords people would search for to find the product, and anything else that you feel people would find relevant. I had another topic in mind for a blog post and then just before I was about to write it I did a Google search to find a glaring gap in competition for marketing a product that I use myself and many of you do as well.

Unfortunately I am not nice enough to tell you which product I am talking about, but this got me thinking and I looked up related products and all of the products for which I did searches seemed to have a similar lack of competition. This is why Google can be your friend, if you are always on the lookout for an opportunity, you can find a great cash source. A similar thing happened to me last February when I had purchased a product then realized how horribly it was marketed and how the name of the product itself had 0 competition. So, using this knowledge I spent 5 minutes to sign up for their affiliate program, 7-8 minutes to create a Squidoo lens, and then 30 minutes building backlinks for it. That same Squidoo lens now makes me $275 monthly on average.

Finding things to promote shouldn’t be that hard, simply look for things that you would find useful yourself. The yardstick is “Would I buy this product myself?”, and if the answer is yes and they have an affiliate product, you have nothing to lose by promoting it. If in doubt, start small and create a quick Squidoo lens and see how much traffic you get out of it.

I’m pretty excited now, because I see a very large market which has yet to be exploited considering the amount of money that marketers spend on these 3 products, I can say I personally spend about $300 a year for it myself, and no, it is not web hosting.  I’ll probably create a website for it later on this month, and once I do I’ll be sure to post my progress with it.  As an internet marketer that resides mostly within the internet marketing niche, there is always a bigger and better thing to promote, and the same applies to any other niche.

Always think of ways to expand your business and take opportunities when they present themselves, and when you are working on your websites, simply think “If I was hiring somebody, what would I have them do for my websites at this time?” and go by that decision.

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One thing that I find amazing is how many of my return visitors are a result of my wide spread social networking efforts that I began the day I started this blog. When you visit forums such as DigitalPoint you often hear people mention that traffic from social networking and social bookmarking sites are useless and just pad stats. I feel that the majority of you are a testament to the fact that this thought is garbage. If it weren’t for all of you, there is no way that I would be where I am so quickly.

Yesterday I had 52 RSS subscribers, if you check today I am up to 88 subscribers. I have never seen such a massive jump in subscribers, part of which I will assume has to do with the release of my new ebook. To me though, this represents that social networking does in fact create a great base of visitors as well as many great connections. I have been testing this since I created this blog, and I allow my visitors to build my links, submit my site to social media sites, etc. and with the only marketing efforts on my own part being social networks, I have created a stable medium sized readership in only 2 months, of which I only posted for 1 month.

Now you are probably wondering how I did this, and to that it is simple. You will need to find a social network that fits the needs of your blog, for myself that was Twitter, FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, MySpace, etc. as these include many fellow bloggers in search of marketing advice. You should know this yourself, as odds are you came from one of the sources I listed. For the travel niche, you use wayn.com, every niche has some way for you to connect directly with potential visitors, and the more personal your connections are, the more likely you will be to gain a long term subscriber.

For myself, it was quite easy as I am 19 and relatively social, which leads people to think “Wow, wish I did that at 19″, or other similar sentiments. The most important part of making social networking actually work out for you is to enjoy what you are doing, because if it feels like work to you it will look like work to others. If you aren’t always having a good time and giving out useful information, then you will not be able to convince others that you are the expert source that they have been looking for.

Utilizing the power of social networks is very important for a starting blog because it allows you to quickly create connections with people that have never heard of your site, but if you offer them good content they are all the audience that is the most likely to take the time to help promote your site. As long as you continue to make connections with others, and they continue to market for site to their friends and family, you will have a very large base of support and form there you can worry about other factors such as search engine optimization, monetization, and other “zations”.

Thank you all for your support thus far, and feel free to sign up for my weekly newsletter & get my free ebook or sign up for daily updates via RSS.

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After many distractions once again in my personal life I can get back to blogging, much of my spare time was consumed setting up my Aweber newsletter and getting all my downloads in line.  As a result, you can now sign up for my newsletter, the Fourth Floor Marketing Tribune and get my free report by filling out the very simply form on the right sidebar.

I must admit that I am impressed with Aweber (aff) once again as I have gotten the “blog broadcast” feature working and as a result I am able to send weekly wrap-ups directly from my RSS feed automatically on Mondays at 1pm Eastern Standard Time.  I also have a series of tips and tricks already written that go off at various intervals discussing many of the techniques that I implement during my marketing adventures.  One big issue is that for some reason my opt-in email goes to the spam box in Gmail, while in the past my emails with Aweber have always been deliverable but I’ll have to work that out with Aweber and Gmail.

*This morning I spoke with Aweber and they fixed the problem, so all emails should be delivering properly now.

More importantly this means that I can finally find some spare time to not only post on this blog but to actually churn out a couple of websites that I have been eyeing in a few niches as well as I have 7 Squidoo lenses to make this week as I have found a few openings in the search results for some new products that are surfacing.  Always remember to be on the lookout for opportunities when you see an affiliate program, for myself I know that the main reason I make as much as I do is not from using the major affiliate networks but by finding all of the in-house programs that nobody has ever heard of yet people buy those products.

I’m looking for feedback on deliverability of emails, issues downloading my ebook, reviews or it, etc. so if you have some time to spare I would truly appreciate it.  Thanks all for your patience during this process!

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I just finished writing a new free ebook or report, whichever you want to call it, on blogging and how to increase your traffic, backlinks, and make more money per visitor to your blog.  I am also in the process of setting up an Aweber (aff) opt-in list to tie in with it, which will have a series of follow up pre-written emails describing a few tips and tricks I’ve learned throughout the course of my marketing adventure as well as some random product placement for a few pieces of software that I have picked up.

I intend to also try to make the newsletter include a weekly wrap up of my blog posts, I’ll have to see how that works out considering not many things play nice with FeedBurner and I can’t imagine Aweber being one of them.  Although it will include a weekly wrap up I would suggest also staying subscribed to the RSS feed since I will probably leave articles out of my newsletter version from time to time.

The free report is 17 pages long and titled “Blogging 101: Traffic and Link Development Tips”  and it comes with a distribution license, so you may do with it as you wish as long as you don’t do things like taking my name out or other nonsense.  I would suggest that if you have a product on ClickBank or elsewhere that you include a copy of it in your bonuses section, people love free things and especially on ClickBank products it has been shown to increase conversions.  You could also simply take it for the same purpose as I am using it and have it build up your opt-in list for later monetization.

Hopefully you will be seeing it on a street corner near you soon, I plan to post it later today in the upper right hand corner of my blog where the 125×125 ads are now and push those down a little bit.  Luckily Aweber (aff) makes it relatively easy to put the forms up because I am useless when it comes to coding those for some reason.  After it is up and the opt-in list is functional I would love to hear some feedback on them.

The 8 chapters are as follows:

• Finding a Web Host
• Picking a Theme
• Content and Link Bait
• Monetization
• Social Media & Social Networking
• Directory Submission
• Article Marketing
• Opt-ins, Ebooks, and RSS Feeds Oh My!

Thank you and enjoy!  In the mean time feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.

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In one of my first posts on this blog, Using Social Bookmarking Responsibly, I talked about how people far too often abuse the system rather than work with it.  Lately I have been seeing more and more “Digg exchanges” both on Digg itself and various social blog networks such as BlogCatalog.  It isn’t quite to the point it was when DigitalPoint was running rampant with digg exchanges or the glory days or DiggBoss, but it also isn’t a pretty scene.

The thing I always find funny, is that the people that are trying to exploit this Digg traffic are typically submitting stories so far from the Digg base that it is comical.  I wish I could find one that I saw a month ago, because commentary on it would definitely make it to the front page.  It was a post a travel website that was about visiting Puerto Rico that randomly injected “We use Linux for our server and we love Obama AND Ron Paul!”, which at least shows they get the concept.

These are the reasons why your post will NOT make it to the front page of Digg, despite the fact that you would really like that:

• Your post is plastered in affiliate links
• You are a travel agency, cable company, fake rolex salesman, pharmaceutical company, or “mak mone on internet!” website.
• You are far too obviously appealing to the Digg crowd by overstating your love for the current Digg fad.  (I love: Obama, Ron Paul, Linux, Macs, internet meme’s, hacking, microchips, Nader, Google, trashing Palin, sharks [don't ask me, lately that keeps making front page], Nvidia, dissing Fox News, video games, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, anti-creationism, people “fail.”ing).
• You cannot consider your mastery of the English language to even be “conversational” (Kind of like how my roommate speaks “conversational Spanish” on his resume).
• You don’t include one of the above topics.
• You post something with no chance of going viral, you need quality content such as Sneezing Panda
• You are over the age of 60
• You are under the age of 15
• You are part of either: “The Establishment” or “The Problem”
• Your posts all include that really annoying embedded Digg button despite none of them being interesting
• You smell like a Republican
• You can’t recognize any of the top 100 Digg’ers
• You are “too cool for school”
• Nobody cares about what you are trying to get people to Digg, since it is bogged down in ads.
• Most important of all: You actually don’t realize that this post is sarcastic yet true.

So there you have it, if you wish to see 75,000 visitors on your website so they can crash your servers and then point you towards a Digg post on why you shouldn’t use Windows hosting, study this list and make the necessary modifications.

*cough* And on that note: My Barack Obama.

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