It was a rush.  Really.  And one that this blogger appreciates.

When John Reese launched BlogRush in late 2007, you couldn’t avoid seeing email after email arriving in your inbox, telling you about the awesome new service.  Thousands of people joined immediately.  In many ways, BlogRush was awesome, offering a simple widget that you could install in your blogs that delivered syndicated headlines from other blogs of related interest.  Conversely, your blog titles were being delivered across the network of blogs, giving you a chance to get extra visitors.

I used BlogRush on several of my blogs and got a few clicks, quite a few referrals, and collected “credits” of over 10,000 that sort of hovered at the same level for several months but were never served due the volume of blogs in the network that had similar credit levels.

Over the last year, BlogRush allegedly delivered over 3 billion blog titles to blogs throughout the world.  It was truly a philanthropic service from Internet extraordinaire John Reese, who felt that it would help bloggers increase their traffic.

Unfortunately, the service had to be shut down.  Reese writes that due to a number of issues, “from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected,” BlogRush was not living up to its potential.

I can only imagine the expenses Reese has put into his free service, from programmers’ fees to bandwidth charges.  Like many in the Internet community, I am grateful for his contribution.

Click the image to visit the Scoutle blog . . .

Check Out Scoutle

There is another free service that can be used on any blogging platform called Scoutle, which has been well-received in the technical community and may be more effective than BlogRush was.

Among recent developments, Scoutle is now supported at Profilactic, a social media aggregator/lifestreaming service that pulls together just about everything you and your friends create online.  Scoutle is a Dutch startup company that opened its services to the public in May 2008.  After running a beta version for awhile, Scoutle performed a major update to its services in September.  I reviewed Scoutle here — and some of the folks from Scoutle commented on the review, too.

My traffic has been increasing slowly but surely with Scoutle and quite frankly, I think I’ve seen more traffic from Scoutle than I had from BlogRush.  It’s totally automated and the service links into a handful of other social networking services that you select within the member area.  Not only have I received blog traffic, but have corresponded with some other bloggers within the Scoutle community who have some interesting insights and blogs.

If you’re lamenting the demise of BlogRush, be sure and check out Scoutle.  You’ll be pleasantly surprised!

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Pinging services come and go.  A couple years ago, I would add dozens of ping sites to my blogs and would see some good results.  Using the ping logs reported in my copy of the MaxBlogPress ping optimizer, I’ve now whittled the list down to the following which do not report errors:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php

http://ping.amagle.com

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

For the Non-Technical People

If you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, “pinging” basically refers to your blog “telling” announcement services that it has just been updated.  This in turn invites search engines to index your blog.  Because of their pinging capabilities, many webmasters find that having a blog included on their sites or elsewhere helps deliver Internet traffic.

When you install WordPress, the software automatically includes http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in its ping list.  To add additional pinging services, you do the following:

• Go to your administrative dashboard and click “settings” (the link is in the upper right hand corner of the page).
• Click the link that reads “Writing.”
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see a section called “Update Settings.”
• You can insert additional ping services in the “Update Settings” form box.

Pinging works great — but you might be spamming the ping services without realizing it.  That’s why the plugin from MaxBlogPress is so useful.  Visit MaxBlogPress for more information.

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Experts agree:  Article marketing is one of the best ways to get traffic and authority for your website, and with articles, you can get a lot of unique links pointing to your site so that it will rank much higher in search results.

Ezine Articles is by far one of the most established, powerful places where you can publish your articles.  There are several other highly ranked publishing services, such as Go Articles.  If you are serious about generating web traffic and strong search engine rankings, you need to submit unique articles to more than just two publishers.  This can get time consuming.

Article Marketing Automation — or AMA, for short — makes the article writing/submission process 200 times easier and faster.  The beauty of AMA is that there are over 2000 sites that accept articles and it is anticipated that there will be 10,000-15,000 sites that will publish AMA articles.  AMA’s ultimate goal is to have at least 60,000 sites accepting articles, which is mind blowing!  The system is proprietary, so I can’t give you screen shots, but here are some things that I observed when submitting articles:

• The system is easy to use.  You can either type or copy/paste your article into a simple interface that looks like the “write” feature in WordPress.
• There are hundreds of different categories, meaning that your article will not appear in a “general” type of slot full of spammy content.
• The spinning function will help you automatically publish unique content — What this means is that when you write an article for publication, the published versions of your article will not be exactly the same.  It will be changed a bit, depending on your spin work, so that each published version is slightly different.  The spinning function is easy to use — you can either inset “delimiters” or save your article as a draft, and then rewrite up to 10 different versions of each sentence using the handy visual guide.
• You can include up to three hyperlinks in each article, and the anchor text is spinnable.  This is great if you’re using keyword research.
• AMA gives you statistics about how many times your article was published.
• You can set a distribution limit on your article, or pause its publication.
• Articles are distributed organically, meaning they won’t blast out to hundreds of websites on the same day.  Organic link building is essential to good article marketing!
• AMA provides a lot of tutorials and help, making the system useful for both newbies and article marketing pros.
• You don’t have to publish other peoples’ articles in order to submit your own content.
• You can submit an unlimited amount of articles.

Read the testimonials to discover how powerful AMA is.  The Article Marketing Automation system is only $47 a month and if you don’t like it after your first 30 days, you can get a refund.  $47 is a very small investment if you are serious about getting traffic to your site and search engine results.  This membership is definitely a “keeper” in my personal Internet tools portfolio.

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If you have a blog and are desperate for content, there’s a free service that will enable you to receive articles automatically.  It’s called Article Marketing Automation, and like I said, it’s absolutely free.

The system is proprietary so I did not include screen shots to help explain how it works.  Here are some general pointers:

• While articles are sent to your blog automatically, you don’t have to publish them on demand.  The system allows you to review and either accept or reject the material that you receive.
• You can also specify a daily submission limit.
• If your blog concerns a tightly-defined niche, you can make sure that the articles you receive are topic-specific by identifying keywords that you will accept.

An Example Blog

I set up a WordPress blog two days ago for the express purpose of testing the network to see if it was complicated and to test the quality of article submissions.  The test blog is set up to receive articles on virtually every topic presented in the Article Marketing Automation (AMA, for short) program.  As you can see, there are some pretty good articles that have come in so far.

Nothing to Install.  Nothing to Program.

Enrolling your blog into the AMA system is fast and easy.  You do not have to install special scripts or plugins, which is great because WordPress and other content management systems are frequently updated and there can be compatibility issues with old scripts or plugins.  Everything is done online within the AMA interface.  Quite frankly, this was the easiest content delivery program I’ve ever worked with.

The only time-consuming part with enrolling a blog into the AMA system was mapping the AMA categories with the categories in the blog.   It is easy to do it, but it’s time consuming if you are accepting all article topics.  For a niche blog that has just a few categories, the process will be a lot faster since you will be accepting only a handful of AMA content categories and will thus have less to map.

You can get set up within the next few minutes to receive articles on any of the following types of sites:

• Self-hosted WordPress blogs (WordPress 2.0.x and later)
• Any Drupal site (must have the Drupal XML-RPC API enabled)
• Any Joomla! site (must have the Joomla! XML-RPC API enabled)
• Any other site that has either an XML-RPC API or an Atom API.

Blogs that are hosted on free platforms such as Blogger cannot receive content.  Your static html pages such as those created wtih xSitePro will also not receive content.

Some Benefits for Receiving AMA Content

Here are just a few benefits that you, as a blog owner, receive if you become an AMA publisher:

• Your blog will be fresh because you’ll be receiving content.
• You’ll get more traffic to your blog because the search engines like frequently-updated content sites.
• If you’ve monetized your blog with Adsense, Chitika ads, Shopping Ads or other advertising networks, you can make more money because you’ll have lots of new posts created on the fly.
• You won’t be receiving the exact same content as every other publisher in the network because the writers can “spin” their articles within the AMA system.
• You set the timing – receiving just one article a day or 100.
• You don’t have to struggle with constantly writing something new.

Conclusion – You Have Nothing to Lose

Becoming a site owner with AMA is free and easy.  It’s an excellent way to get fresh content.  Check it out – you can always quit if you’re unsatisfied.  And if you’re looking for backlinks and more traffic to  your websites or blog, consider joining up as an article writer.  We’ll explore the benefits of the article marketing system tomorrow.

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Zogby has been polling Americans on their attitudes about the Internet.  The poll has revealed some gems!  For instance:

• The Internet Could Become a “Significant Other” — Almost a quarter of those polled said that the Internet could become a pretty good surrogate “significant other.”
• Regulating the Internet – The older folks thought that the Internet, and in particular, Internet videos, should be regulated by the government.
• Implants – Very few people were comfortable with “implanting the Internet in their brains,” but they had no problem with implanting chips into kids younger than 13 years old so they could track them.

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Have you ever run across a site that is so bad that you leave within a second?  What drives me batty are sites that immediately launch with cheesy music or sound effects that can’t be turned off.  Here’s your chance to share with the world your biggest gripes.  Take the poll and let the novice webmasters know what will make you run from their sites. You’re doing them a service!

To voice your opinion, simply click the bullet entry that is the most irritating and your vote will show up in the tally  … and be sure to add your other gripes to the comments below.

Poll: Irritating Websites

• Unstoppable music or sounds
• Flash introductions
• Hard to read fonts or text
• No clear navigation
• Tons of ads
• Animated images or other effects
• No search function
• No policies or contact info
• Site takes forever to load
• Site scrolls across browser window

Status:

Also want to create a poll? Click here

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Some inspiration to keep on blogging.

I am convinced that mom and pop businesses need to seriously consider blogging as a component of the Internet marketing strategy.  Blogging creates traffic, buzz, feedback and is easy to set up.  But there is a catch:  Sometimes it can feel like blogging is a waste of time and that your posts are floating out to the Great Nowhere.

We all have different reasons for blogging. My reason  for the first year is twofold: To share practical information for small business people who don’t have a lot of computer training, and to see if I have the self discipline to write every day. For the time being, my blogging experience is more of a challenge to myself than anything.  After it’s been established, I have some much stronger goals, including making money.  You might have similar reasons.  Frankly, I think the main reason for anyone to blog is to eventually start making money.

No matter what your reason for blogging, staying consistent and keeping your goals in mind can be a challenge.

How Many Blogs Are There?

Technorati reports that it is tracking 133 million blogs. The key is that those blogs are the ones that are being tracked. Your guess is as good as mine as to how many blogs exist in the worldwide web if we accounted for blogs that are not tracked.  According to Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere report (linked at the beginning of this paragraph), blogs are profitable.  It reports that, “The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.”

What Technorati does not report — and I haven’t been able to find statistics anywhere — is how many blogs eventually fizzle out and die.  Unless a blogger has a clear goal in mind for his or her reason to blog, it is just too much work to blog merely for the sake of blogging.  Also, it is unclear from currently available statistics how many blogs within the massive Blogosphere are simply “splogs” containing spammy content with no meaningful value.

A Dose of Inspiration

Splogs and dead blogs aside, it’s reasonable to assume that there are millions of blogs out there.  Given all the competition, why keep blogging?  Here are some real life examples that should inspire you to keep on keepin’ on.

• Monthly Revenue – DoshDosh published an excellent article, Profiles of Successful Money Making Blogs.  On the low end, the money making blogs are earning around $60,000 a year; on the upper end, they earn $1 million a year. For some huge inspiration, check out John Chow’s blog.  He regularly posts his monthly blogging income.  In September 2008, Chow reports that his blog earned just a little over $38,000.
• Blog Sales – This one is a mind blower:  The Bankaholic blog, written by just one man, sold this past September for up to $15 million, with slightly over $12 million paid upfront.   The John Cow blog is rumored to have sold for at least $25,000 (exact sales price unknown).
• Gain Notoriety.  Keep blogging good content and maybe you’ll end up in the list of the most influential bloggers.

Your Blog Can Turn Into a Full Time Business

Chances are, you’ve found yourself at the TechCrunch blog when searching for something.  TechCrunch, and its rival, GigaOm, started out as hobby blogs, according to USA Today.  They are now full-time businesses.

For those of us who are interested in personal development, Steve Paglina’s blog is a must read.  In fact, Steve shares his blogging success story in an excellent article, How to Make Money From Your Blog. It took about six months for Steve to start earning around $4 a day with his blog.  Four years later, he was earning $1,000 a day (that’s right — a day).  He started his blog with the $9 domain registration fee and achieved his earnings with $0 in marketing.  To really get inspired and to learn the nuts and bolts about how to make money with your blog, I highly recommend that you read Steve’s article.  Keep in mind that Steve did not make his $1,000 a day overnight.  It took years of persistence.

For Those Who Are Serious About Blogging

If you are really serious about making money by blogging, Blogging to the Bank is something you really need to get your hands on.

What you receive is a step-by-step “roadmap” that a college dropout uses to make serious money with his blogs.  In fact, he makes over $34,000 a month just by blogging.  The downloadable ebook is only $47 and backed by a 100% guarantee.

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For those new to Internet marketing, you’ve probably heard the phrase “viral marketing.”  But what in the world does that mean?

In a nutshell, viral marketing refers to “word of mouth” marketing.  That is, people tell others about your product or service.

In 2001, BusinessWeek discussed viral marketing:

“The prognosis for many of these campaigns isn’t good. Sure, there are some high-profile viral success stories. Take Hotmail. By simply sending e-mail, consumers hawked the service because every message contained a Hotmail ad. That helped it grow to 12 million accounts in its first year, 1996. The 1999 hit film The Blair Witch Project benefited from similar contagion. On Web sites and in chat rooms, the film’s promoters hinted that the fictional tale was really a documentary and let the bug run wild. I had never been to a Blair Witch site, but by the time the movie opened even I had heard that it was a true story. I’d been bitten.”

In my opinion, another example of tremendous viral marketing was the release of The Secret. For almost a year before the release of the DVD, people were sending emails giving a link to the pre-release video that was online.  The video was impressive, but did not really say what “The Secret” was, other than creating a lot of intrigue.  After viewing the video, you could sign up to be on the announcement list and could forward the video to other emails.

4 Viral Marketing Triggers

As the BusinessWeek article alludes, not all viral marketing campaigns are successful and in fact, they might be annoying.  Here’s my take on what creates a great viral marketing campaign that people will gladly spread around:

• Your product is valuable and will benefit others, but you’re giving it away or selling it for next to nothing.
• The marketing message creates a sense of intrigue or mystery, and everyone is curious to find out what it is about.
• The message is very funny.
• The ad is shocking.

The problem is, will your ad be so clever that it’s only the ad that is circulated and not the product recommendation? The “value” component seems to me to be the one that will translate into the most customers or leads. The rest may drive a lot of traffic to your site, but it’s unclear whether this traffic will result in leads or sales unless you have a lead capture system in place.

Some Fun Examples from YouTube

Here are some examples of advertisements that have gone viral:

Be prepared – this one for Channel No. 5 is very shocking. After seeing this one, I don’t think I’ll be inclined to buy the perfume!

Another cute one from Nike:

And who can forget these? Long before the Internet, I remember most of my relatives “waiting” for the next Wendy’s commercial because they thought the “Where’s the Beef” lady was so funny:

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Getting links to your site is a key component to Internet marketing.

With the holidays around the corner, you are probably looking for inexpensive ways to get some web traffic to your “mom and pop” type of online business. Getting backlinks — that is, links from other sites — to your web page is an excellent and proven way to make your site popular.

Many small businesses who are relatively new to Internet marketing, however, spend time getting links using methods that will not be very helpful.  Here’s my Top 5 list of things to avoid when getting your links:

1. Submitting Your Website to FFA (Free For All) link services.  Many years ago, submitting to FFA sites may have had some value.  Nowadays, this can be done using automated services and the result is that FFA sites contain thousands of unorganized links, many of which are links to poor quality sites.  You’ll spend a lot of effort submitting links to FFA sites with little in return — except thousands of email ads.
2. Linking All of Your Sites Together.  This is something that I’ve seen quite frequently by webmasters who are just starting out, so I’ll try to explain it simply.  Let’s say that you have a hosting service that will let you put two, three or more domains on one account.  Unless it is used for navigation purposes, linking all of these sites together for search engine purposes will not help you get higher search ranking or help you get more traffic.  If all the sites are on the same hosting account, the search engines see the IP address and are aware that each site is operated by the same person, is at the exact same address, and is basically one site.  You can work around this by placing other sites stored elsewhere as buffers (more of this to come).  For example, let’s say your first site is MyDomain1.com and your second site is MyDomain2.com.  Rather than directly linking the 1st and 2nd domains, link MyDomain1.com to a free blog on Google, or a another of your websites that is stored on a different hosting account.  Use that “buffer” site (i.e., the free blog) to link to MyDomain2.com.
3. Blasting Your URL.  There are services out there that will “blast your ad” or submit your URL to thousands of links.  This is a waste of time and money.  Basically, your site will be submitted to a bunch of FFA or useless classified ad sites and will result in worthless links.  You might also get penalized if the “blast your ad” service is spamming the major search engines.  My advice?  Save your money.  Don’t bother.
4. Indiscriminate Reciprocal Linking.    Some people argue that reciprocal linking is a waste of time; others say it can help.  I tend to agree with Jim Morris, owner of NicheBot, who claims that reciprocal linking can be a powerful tool when used right.  My take on reciprocal linking (which means giving a link to another site on your site in exchange for a link on that other site) is that you’ll see some search engine popularity if you exchange links with sites that are related to yours.  For instance, if you have a health site and exchange with other health sites, your reciprocal link can be valuable.  If you’re exchanging with any site, such as a gambling site, your link will not have much value.
5. Using Javascript Based Programs. There are a number of programs out there that will have you copy and paste a javascript code into your home page.  The code contains links to a handful of other sites.  In return, your site will appear on other pages hosting the same type of code.  This might be okay for some traffic;.  For instance, if you have drafted a catchy link phrase and the code is appearing on a site that’s related to yours, someone might click it out of curiousity.  However, your link that’s in a javascript code will not be picked up as a backlink by the search engines.  All they see is the code, not your link.

In your battle to get links pointing to your web page, consider submitting to directories, submitting comments or articles to blogs, and writing articles.  These all contain “hard links” on .php or .html pages that will be picked by the search engines.

Free Resources

If you are looking for blogs, visit the Blurbosphere and take advantage of the free offerings there.  Instead of merely submiting your home page (i.e., www.yoursite.com), you can get links to the interior pages of your site (i.e., www.yoursitePage1.com).

Submit your home page at the Link Cruncher for an immediate one-way link.

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Looking for a free open source content management system?  WordPress is probably one of the best systems out there, but it has a rival called “Joomla.”

As a small business owner, you can use Joomla to create your entire website.  One of the nice things about content management systems is that they are dynamic — you can keep adding content from an online interface without having to mess around with constantly updating your menus and html coding.  You can “schedule” your articles to be published at some point in the future.  All of your content is searchable.  And you can have other people contribute articles and/or comments to your site without your having to make sure that the coding is correct.  Beyond these basic components, a content management system such as Joomla will let you develop:

• Inventory control systems
• Data reporting tools
• Application bridges
• Custom product catalogs
• Integrated e-commerce systems
• Complex business directories
• Reservation systems
• Communication tools

The best part about Joomla is that since it is open source, it is absolutely free.  As long as you have a hosting service that offers PHP (most do), you can easily install Joomla and get to work on your site.  In fact, many popular hosting services have a tool called “Fantastico” that allows you to install programs such as Joomla with a simple click or two of the mouse.

Some sites that are powered with Joomla include iHop Restaurants, the United Nations’ Regional Information Center for Western Europe, and Outdoor Photographer magazine.

If you construct a website using Joomla, your pages get indexed by the major search engines quickly — meaning that you will enjoy web traffic right away.

How to Set Up & Use Joomla can be downloaded for free.

The downside of Joomla is that it can be a challenge to understand, especially for small business website developers who are not familiar with content management systems.  That’s where today’s free download can help.

How To Set Up & Use Joomla is available for free via the Web 2.0 Marketing Giveway, which closes its doors on November 4, 2008.  The informative ebook will show you how to install Joomla and then how to use it so that you can create as many Joomla websites as you wish, quickly and easily.

Similar ebooks that give you a step-by-step guide for using Joomla sell for at least $14.95 and oftentimes much more.

Even if you have a “main” product website for your mom and pop business, consider adding a second domain that is based on a content management system.  You can use this second domain to write about your special offers and information that will be helpful to your client base.  Use this second website to drive traffic to your main site.  Free systems such as Joomla will help you create your “traffic site” quickly and easily.

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