Tag Archives ⇒ traffic

Social Bookmarking – Digg

· Brandon Hann

Digg is a very popular site that brings together the top stories in just about every subject matter you can think of. It also allows people to recommend websites, links, videos, pictures, etc. The service accomplishes this by using a recommendation tool called a “digg”.

Websites and blogs all over the Internet have the ability to include a button or link somewhere in their written text that allows a user who likes what they see to digg the site simply by clicking on the link. This click then takes the user over to their Digg.com account and allows them to post the content on Digg.com for everyone to see and search through.

Digg Advantages

As a web publisher, Digg gives you the ability to allow others to rank your content. The more people dig your stuff, the more it’s seen. This gives you the opportunity to promote yourself even more. Here’s how you can use Digg to promote your site:

  • Publish original content – When your content is original, it’s more likely to be included in the directory because when Digg sorts data, it checks to see if there is similar content already on the site before including any new submissions.
  • Digg buttons – Use a button that links to your Digg account on your site so users can cast a Digg vote right from your site. If you’re using WordPress, you’re already at a slight advantage because there are plenty of plugins that support Digg!
  • Digg others – Your account can be viewed by every other member and if you create a name for yourself by consistently recommending quality resources, people will view your profile page. This can cause more people to see your own content and drive traffic to your site.

My two cents

Digg is just one of many similar services out there that can maximize your content’s reach. If I were you, I’d get signed up with all of these services and start plastering your content everywhere you get a chance.

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Earn Money and Build Your Reputation As A Freelance Writer

· Brandon Hann

Building your blog takes time. In most cases it also takes actual writing skills and dedication to your craft to start pulling in traffic. In the meantime however, there are ways to get your content in front of viewers to use as a platform for promoting yourself and/or your website.

Think of it this way: imagine you had a website and you want to build your reputation rather fast. You come across a website that allows contributions from outside writers and you submit an article. This article is now accessible on an already existing website with a large traffic flow. When people read your article, they see your name (and profile). This information then leads to your own blog or website and instantly you become known in the blogosphere!

Ok, so maybe it’s not as easy as it sounds! But the point is, if you know your content is good and you want to get it in front of people relatively easy, this is one sure way to do it. Check out my Associated Content profile to see how people will view you.

AssociatedContent.com


AC is touted as “The people’s media company” and it is essentially a collection of over 2 million articles written on almost every topic you can think of. The best part is that these articles are written by people like you! That’s right. You are a contributor to a growing collection of content and at the same time, building a name for yourself.

To sign up, you simply need to head on over to the AssociatedContent signup page and fill out the required information. Afterward, you’ll be sent a verification email. Once verified, you’ll be taken into your account and you can start publishing content right away!

How does AssociatedContent work?

Once logged in, you’ll have access to your dashboard. It’ll look similar to this:

From here, you can do a number of different things like publish new content, check messages, edit your public profile and connect with other writers. Once you get going, this is generally how the site works:

  1. Pick the format you want (Text, Video, Audio, Images).
  2. Pick the topic that the content is about.
  3. Answer some copyright questions about how you want your work distributed.
  4. Choose a payment method.
  5. Publish your content!

Within your dashboard, you can also see a number of previously established assignments that you can choose to fulfill if you’d like. Don’t worry about writer’s block either! Associated Content will provide you with ideas if you’re stuck.

How much do I get paid?

The main payout option is Performance Payments. The rate is $1.50 per 1000 pageviews. This amount can be upped to $2.00 after certain requirements are met. This is the description of Performance Payments as outlined on the website:

Performance Payments are payments based on the traffic to your content and allow you to earn unlimited cash from your text, video, slideshow and audio submissions long after they have been published. You earn money for every one thousand page views your content generates (PPM™ rate). The baseline PPM™ rate is currently $1.50 – meaning if you generate 30,000 page views, you’re paid $45.00 in Performance Payments. As your library of content grows and your total page views accumulate, your Clout level increases. When you reach Clout 7 and beyond, your PPM™ rate will gradually increase up to a maximum of $2.00 per thousand page views. Check out the quick stats (under total payments) on your Account dashboard to see your current estimated earnings, and track your page view statistics per piece of content from the Content page. Click here to read more about the Clout system.

Another payout option is Upfront Payment. Your content is subjected to a review by the site editors and based on its originality and quality, you will receive an offer. At this point, you can choose to accept the offer or not. There are stricter rules for submitting this kind of content.

More Information

There is a LARGE amount of information you may want to peruse through before you get started, but if you’re interested in becoming a freelance writer and/or build your reputation along the way, you will love this site. For more information, please see AssociatedContent’s FAQ section.

To sign up now, go to AssociatedContent.com!

List Building – Landing Pages

· Brandon Hann

I’m sure that you have seen quite a few landing pages throughout your Internet travels, but maybe didn’t know what they were called. Or maybe you did, but didn’t understand the importance of these pages.

What is a landing page?


Simply put, it’s a page you land on after clicking a link. This sounds easy enough, but deep down, every little detail you incorporate (or don’t) will affect the quality and performance of this page. So what are they for? When an advertiser is promoting a product or service, they will create a static page on the Internet somewhere that showcases this product or service and is essentially the make or break presentation.

They are commonly used by affiliate marketers as a means to send their visitors to the advertiser’s website to gain a referral bonus. Here’s an example of a successful landing page.

Why is a landing page important?

From an advertiser’s point of view, your landing page should be designed to sell. Unlike a face-to-face sales pitch where you can gauge things like emotion, customer response and even overcome objections, a webpage is a one-shot deal. If you customer lands here and loses interest, they leave the page and your sale is gone forever!

Just like creating effective advertisements like Google ads, banners, etc. you want to keep people interested and above all, you want to make them want your product when they’re done reading the page.

From a visitor’s point of view, your landing page should be straight forward. It should sell the product well and sell it fast. Pre-answer everyone’s questions up front and add just enough visuals to keep people interested.

How should I design this page?

The design should be non-intrusive, but visual enough to maintain interest. For content, some people will tell you that you shouldn’t use a targeted landing page (see below) to promote or discuss anything other than what product your selling. Others might tell you to use landing pages as opportunities to upsell other things you might be offering.

Types of landing pages:

  • Targeted – These pages may be part of your website, but they look nothing like your site because they are only there to promote one item. The entire page is written only for this item and does not contain any other links, pictures or “plugs”.
  • Dynamic – This type of page can be mixed with other types. Essentially a dynamic page, much like any dynamic webpage, will allow you to create custom content based on a referring site or affiliate link. An example would be in the landing page made references to the site you came from, so it appears as though that site heavily endorses this product.
  • Static – This is your average landing page and it can be a page build specifically for a product, or it can simply be a static page located within your site that helps promote the product. Using this type of page may detract a little form your intending purpose, but it could open doors for promotion of the rest of your business.

My suggestion is to go with a page that only focuses on one thing. The reason for this is that you’ll be advertising this page through a PPC network and the traffic generated from these networks is very targeted toward a particular niche. So if you landing page was selling auto-blogging software, you would only be targeting web traffic that was looking for auto-blogging software and therefore you would not want to fill this page with information on other software you’re selling.

Getting started

The first thing you want to do is gather your ideas. Think about what you want to accomplish with your page, who you’re advertising to, how they are able to buy your product and what would make them interested. Once you have these basics down, you should have a clear understanding of how to setup your page.

Just keep in mind that the goal of landing pages is to convert sales quickly. The people that will be clicking through are not there to see your site. They were advised by someone else to click on that link and you need to be there to present them with a valid reason for staying.

Increase effectiveness

Here are some tips on how to increase the overall effectiveness of your landing pages:

  1. Create concise text without being too short. Find that perfect balance so you’re not overdoing or underdoing it.
  2. Add a FAQ to try and answer questions you might already know will probably be asked by your visitors. This way, they don’t need to take time to find out how to contact you.
  3. Keep the content search engine friendly and make sure you’re not using duplicate content on multiple landing pages.
  4. Make sure the page loads fast. Nobody is going to wait for your page to load if it takes longer than 5 seconds.
  5. Consider adding a video clip of the product in use or you explaining your service. Even a video of you reading the same content that’s already on the page will be highly effective.
  6. Add some social media links to increase your exposure. Use sites like Twitter and Facebook so people can readily find you if they’re really interested in what you offer.
  7. If you have a few customer praises about your products, put them on there to let people know what others think of you.

Testing your landing pages

In researching this topic, I found a great site that talked about testing landing pages. Originally I wasn’t even going to mention it because it’s one of those things that webmasters usually do naturally by reviewing page stats and click-through ratios, but this site brought up a really good point.

Michael Bloch from TamingTheBeast.net mentioned that to test a landing page, you should send 5 of your friends to the page without telling them what the page is about and have them look it over for about 5 seconds. When they’re done, instead of asking them “Does it look good?”, ask them what they remembered about the page. Don’t get too specific with the question. Just have them spit out key things that they remembered.

If they can’t even tell you what you were selling or what the page was about, then something is very wrong! Their input might be able to help you pinpoint areas of the page that need improvement.

Further testing is easily done with the web statistics I mentioned, but don’t just look at counters. Look at how long your visitors are staying on the page. If you read your own page from top to bottom, how long did it take you? Are your visitors staying for at least that long?

Further reading

This post was just to touch some key points on landing pages and is in no way intended to be 100% thorough! There are countless possibilities to creating, promoting and using landing pages and your results will vary greatly based on your industry and web skills.

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Breaking the myth about "turnkey" websites

· Brandon Hann

I was in the middle of writing a completely different article and I decided to check the status on one of my eBay items and for some reason I just decided to search for domain names for sale. I’m always curious to see what kind of junk is being sold out there for ridiculous prices.

It was right then that I noticed a “turnkey” website for sale and I must say, I was quite impressed with the ad. I mean, this thing went on and one describing every single element to the site and how it worked, etc., etc. It was laid out so nicely that I almost got sucked right in. Why not? The price was only $81 with 2 hours to spare and according to the ad, if I had 5000 visitors to my site and a 15% CTR, I’d be making about $54,000 per year!

Say what?!!

What is a turnkey website?

The concept of a turnkey…anything is simply that of a website, business or some other operation that’s all ready to go. You just jump right in and keep it going. You can equate this to opening a McDonalds–you have a large corporation that essentially sells itself and all you need to do is manage the day-to-day. Sounds easy enough, right?

Well, it is and it isn’t as anyone who runs a business will tell you! The problem with turnkey websites is that a website can looking phenomenal online, have tons of content, videos, links and blog posts, but not be exactly what it claims. This is more true than ever before thanks to software like WordPress, Drupal and other CMS packages.

With this software, you can build a great looking site in literally 7 minutes (the 5-min WordPress install, plus 2 minutes to upload a theme).

Misleading ads

Like I mentioned above, this guy’s ad covered everything:

  • Professional design
  • Fully automated and maintenance free
  • Valuable domain name included
  • Established website
  • The site store updates by the minute
  • Profitable income streams from AdSense, Amazon and ClickBank

That last one is the one I really want to draw attention to. Whenever you tell someone that the thing they’re buying has “profitable income streams…” and you ad posts projected numbers without so much as saying these results are not typical, you’re misleading your customer.

In my opinion, you’re feeding off desperate people. Maybe the bad economy has hit some people really hard, so they’re out there trying to make some extra money. They come along and see this and get the impression that this site is already making money and because it’s “turnkey”, all they have to do is promote it a little bit and off they go!

The truth

This particular ad is nothing new. I’ve seen these pre-made sites for sale for many years. But if you were to calculate exactly what you’re getting, you may think twice about bidding. Let’s break it down:

  1. Professional design: Listen up folks…WordPress is FREE and there are THOUSANDS of free themes out there that can make your site look “professional”.
  2. Fully automated: How can anything be fully automated? Even running an autoblogger takes time to manage and maintain! The best part is in the very same ad, this guy tells you all you have to do to make this site work is to promote and advertise. So much for fully automated.
  3. Valuable domain: This of course falls within your own opinion. The domain in the ad I’m referring to is: CookingAndRecipeInformer.com. Valuable? Not in my opinion.
  4. Established website: Doesn’t this imply that the website is already operational? Of course it’s online, but the way I take it is that it’s already doing what it claims to do: make money.
  5. The store updates by the minute: This is an easy task given that the store is nothing more than an Amazon store imported into your WordPress theme. Anyone who’s an Amazon Associate knows that this task is much too easy.
  6. Profitable income streams: This is a loaded statement because it doesn’t mean this site is actually profitable, but that it can be. But, this is so obvious it’s funny! Anything in theory can be profitable if promoted correctly. In fact, this portion of the turnkey site is by far, the hardest. If you run a website, you know how difficult it can be to get traffic.

Ok, so now that I got that all cleared up, lets total it up:

Domain name ($9.99) + WordPress software ($0) + Pro Theme ($0) + Amazon store ($0) = $9.99

This auction is worth about $10 and that’s even if you thought that domain name was worth the registration fee. Think about this before you get lured into purchasing a domain name with a turnkey website. Also, remember that you have to host the site somewhere, so you can figure about another $10 per month.

My two cents

If you think your winning bid is worth having all this set up for you, then by all means, purchase it, but don’t think you’re getting some established business. Always read the fine print and do some Google searching first. Look for keywords in the ad that might pinpoint how theses sites are created and see if you can create something yourself without having to spend a lot of money.

Lastly, if you’re really interested in purchasing an established website, you’ll want to check out Flippa.com. They offer legitimate businesses for sale and they can prove their worth by showing you traffic results and income reports. Good luck in your business ventures!

Web 2.0 – Hash Marks

· Brandon Hann

If you don’t know what a hash mark is, it’s the ‘#’ on your phone or SHIFT+3 on your keyboard. You may also call it a pound sign. Right about now, you might be asking what does this little symbol have to do with websites! I’m glad you asked because I’m here to tell you.

#?

This is a more advanced article regarding the usage of the hash symbol as a means to reduce duplicate content for the search engines. As mentioned much earlier, you never want to have duplicate content. This not only means copying content from other websites, but providing duplicate links from within your own site.

Let say for example you we interested in tracking ad results so you created three different ad links all pointing back to your site. Maybe the first ad was from Facebook, the second was from MySpace and the third was from Google AdWords. For tracking purposes, you would have setup three different URLs so you can see which ad generated the most traffic. These URLs might look something like this:

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

These links by themselves are not causing any problems, but when a search engine begins indexing your website, it’s going to find and index all 3 separately. The problem is that all of these links point to the same exact page. If the search engine views these 3 different links pointing to the same page, it’s very likely that your site could be penalized for duplicate content.

Another problem this creates is that it spreads any link juice you might have over all 3 links even though they are still pointing to the exact same page! You don’t want this!!

To solve this, you would replace the “?” with a “#” to make the URLs appear like this:

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

Search engines will stop at the hash, thus making your 3 links appear only as 1! Confused yet?? I don’t pretend to be the expert on this matter and therefore, for further reading, check out this page all about URL referrers.

My two cents

I recommend that you decide up front how the links to your website will be organized. Besides the information on this page, there’s a whole slew of problems that can arise from improperly linked webpages. It’s important that once you have a link structure in place, you stick with it and don’t change it.

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Web 2.0 – Tribe Marketing

· Brandon Hann

Tribe marketing is more of a descriptive title rather than an official name. In a sense, being tribal just means that we as a society take our cues from the group (or tribe) that we most relate to. For example, if you’re close to the entertainment industry, you’re more likely to follow trends that current celebrities are following or creating.

In terms of websites and/or blogs, it’s important to know what tribe you belong to or what tribe you’re creating. For a website example, lets look at my site. The most closely related tribal group I can relate to would be business owners, bloggers, website developers and Internet marketers. What this means is that my content will strike a chord with people in these groups and they’re more likely to respond to my offerings.

What is tribe marketing?

As with any marketing, you want to focus your attention on your niche group(s). Although one of your primary goals is to get as much traffic to your site as possible, what good is a bunch of visitors looking for ways to soup up their hotrods when your site is based on search engine optimization? Your site however, would be of some use to the person running a site about hotrods.

Because people are “tribal” by nature, they are looking to fit in with people who share the same interests and want the same things in life–as well they should be. Your goal is to maximize your site’s potential using these groups of people.

Ways to market

In the next few sections, I’ll be exploring ways to accomplish this goal, but here’s a quick snapshot:

  • Create a forum – Using a forum (message board) allows you to interact with your visitors as well as letting them interact with each other.
  • Blog comments – Allow visitors to comment on your posts to create dialog.
  • Use groups – Use web groups all over the Internet that group similar people together to promote your website to.

If you have passion about your website, you’re probably already doing these things and understand the value of them. Think about it this way: if you went to an online store that sold something you can’t buy anywhere else, how much better would it be if you went to the product page and right alongside the standard description, you got to see other people’s opinions on it, some forum posts about how to customize that product and even a live contact link straight to the owner!

Not only would this make you feel better about the product, but you’re likely to come back and buy other things as well.

My two cents

Utilize the way people communicate and interact with other people. You’d be surprised how much more 100 visitors of targeted traffic is worth compared to 1000 random visitors. Spend your time looking for people that are looking for you and don’t get so caught up with just trying to get your traffic numbers up.

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Web 2.0 – Feedburner

· Brandon Hann

I talked a lot about RSS over on another page, but now we can get into the basics of promoting that feed. When you run a CMS like WordPress, you generally get an RSS feed automatically that will allow subscribers to view your latest updates at all times as long as they’re subscribed to it via bookmark or email. But, now you can do so much more with it!

Feedburner is my choice for web feed management. Since I use Google for all of my online services, it just made sense to use their Feedburner service for my RSS feeds. Google bought the service in 2007 and has since made existing “pro” services free to all users.

Benefits of Feedburner

Using a feed management service is a great way to monitor your RSS activity. If you didn’t use one, you may never know who’s subscribing and how they’re using it. And as I’ve been teaching you, knowing as much information about your users as possible is a key to the success (or failure) of your website.

  • Track subscribers – If you notice at the top right of most of my site’s pages, you’ll see a little orange box that tells you how many readers are currently subscribed to my feed. This number changes constantly, but it gives me a basic snapshot of how many people are reading my site consistently.
  • Analyze subscribers – I didn’t get a chance to use Feedburner before Google took over, so I don’t know if this feature is new, but it allows you to see what feed readers and aggregators your subscribers are using. This can help you optimize your content for specific readers.
  • Google AdSense – One of the major concerns webmasters have about RSS is that visitors can read the site content without seeing ads. Since ads provide your site’s revenue, this is the equivalent of using a DVR to watch tv. However, with Feedburner, you can insert your AdSense ads right into your feed content so your visitors can still click on them.
  • Track traffic – You can also use Feedburner to see what’s being clicked on. Think of this exactly like stats for your website and again, this can help you optimize your site for your RSS readers.
  • Optimize and Socialize – Using the optimizing tools allows you to better optimize your feed content to increase browser compatibility and make it more user-friendly. To help promote your blog, you can add a Twitter account and allow Feedburner to automatically post tweets about your latest updates.

There are plenty of other tools you can use to get the most out of your Feedburner account including HTML exporting of RSS content, merging Flickr into your RSS, etc.

My two cents

You can already tell that I’m a fan of Feedburner, but it just makes sense. If you already use Google for your other web services (and you should be if you’re not!), you can’t go wrong with Feedburner.

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Site Creation – Web Hosting

· Brandon Hann

It goes without saying, but you do need a web host in order to have a website. A web host is a company that provides a server that all of your website’s files are stored on and then served up to the visitors that come see your page. There are literally thousands of web hosting companies out there that range from huge corporations down to the guy running a server in his bedroom. So how do you choose just one?

Most web hosts get their customers through referrals, so if you happen to hear some good reviews about a particular company, you should look into it. However, opinions on quality, speed, price and customer service vary significantly. It’s important that you decide for yourself how these factors rank on your list. As an example, you may find that paying more per month to get better customer support is worth it, but someone else might feel speed is more valuable.

Finding the perfect host

This process is really based on what your site’s needs are. If you’re running a simple blog and don’t expect a lot of traffic (at least in the beginning), you can get away with a hosting plan that’s as low as $4.99 per month. In fact, GoDaddy offers hosting plans tailored specifically for WordPress blogs. The advantage to using GoDaddy is that if you also register your domains here, all of your services will be under one roof.

On the other hand, if your site is going to be serving up lots of content to lots of traffic, you’re going to need something bigger. Here’s a breakdown of some ideal hosting types and their intended use:

Hosting Type Description Selling Points Price Range
Free Hosting Since nothing is free in this world, what few remaining “free” hosts there are, simply add some type of advertisement to your site. This can be a pop-up window, a link on every page, a banner somewhere on your site, etc. Stay away from free hosts if you’re shooting for a professional image! Upside: no costs. Downside: not a professional image None $0
Shared Hosting Shared hosting is the most common way of hosting a website. It allows a hosting company to place multiple customers on a single server, therefore “sharing” system resources with other websites. Upside: the cost of the server is spread over lots of users, reducing your monthly bill. Downside: you don’t have control over advanced back-end features. Cheap, basic, easy $20-50+
Virtual Private Server (VPS) VPS hosting gives you full control of your server. Think of it as a hybrid between dedicated hosting and shared hosting. VPS allows a hosting company to create multiple “virtual” servers on one physical server so each client has complete access to their own private server, but the clients still share hardware resources. Some hosting companies will dedicated certain hardware to each virtual server such as system memory. Upside: shared costs for dedicated access. Downside: shared hardware resources Root access, faster, advanced, flexible $50-150+
Dedicated Hosting If you want to have a server all to yourself, opt for dedicated hosting. This will give you your own server to do with it what you will. A word of caution: this may be too advanced for some users! However, if you run a high traffic site that requires stability and speed, this is the option for you. Upside: no resources shared. Downside: requires routine maintenance on your part. No shared resources, highly advanced, stable, flexible $150-750+
Managed Hosting Having a dedicated server can take a lot out of you if you’re managing it yourself. Most hosting companies offer managed services so you don’t have to worry about day-to-day tasks such as hardware monitoring, backups, virus scanning, etc. Also, if you have any issues, you can get help much faster. Upside: maintenance done by company. Downside: costs more per month. No shared resources, highly advanced, stable, flexible, managed $250-750+
Server Co-location Now you’re one step away from running your own hosting company! Co-location allows you to build your own physical server and install it at a data center. This option provides 100% flexibility and customization while gaining all the features of a managed dedicated server. If you’re running a site that requires this setup, you probably wouldn’t be needing my help! Upside: complete control. Downside: complete responsibility. 100% flexibility, super advanced, no shared resources Custom Quote
Reseller Hosting With reseller hosting plans, you’re essentially purchasing a hosting plan (usually higher end) and the company allows you to re-sell your services to your own clients under your brand. I’d estimate a guess that about 80% of the “cheap” webhosts you find are nothing more than resellers. In most cases, a re-sold hosting plan is part of a larger shared hosting plan. Upside: sell services using your own name. Downside: you have to manage and support your clients. Cheap, various options, start your own hosting business $30-200

The above list is just a sample and is not considered exhaustive.

My recommendation

Since I’ve only hosted with 3 different companies, I can only comment on them. But of those 3, my personal recommendation is MediaTemple.net. There are a few things I love about this company, but the biggest one is that you can start off small (as low as $20/month) and upgrade at any time without upsetting your service. They are also home to some of the biggest sites on the Internet. So far, they’re customer support has been impeccable and the service is great.

Ultimately, choose the host that you feel will serve your website the way you want and don’t be lured in by insane claims such as “unlimited bandwidth” or “unlimited server space”. Stick with a tried and true company.

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Site Creation – Domain Registration

· Brandon Hann

Today, domain names are everywhere and they aren’t always used for a company’s website such as HP.com or Apple.com. Domains are now registered to capitalize on all sorts of things like catch phrases, movie titles, personal names, marketing jargon and just about everything else. When it comes to registering your own domain, you’ll want to ask yourself a few questions:

  • What message will the domain convey to other people?
  • Does it make me sound professional?
  • Is it easy to remember?
  • Does it infringe on a registered trademark?
  • Does it have branding potential?

The most important question is: Is it available? There are millions and millions of domain names out there already, so finding one you like may be a larger process than you anticipated. However, there are plenty of after-market places to buy registered domain names for sale.

How do I decide what to get?

After answering the questions above, you should have a clearer path to finding the right domain. If this site is going to be your personal website, try using your name or nickname. If you’re using this domain as a business, obviously use your business name, or find something generic that relates to you business. As time goes on, more and more traffic will be coming to your site, so pick a domain that you won’t want to change a year from now. Your domain name is also part of building your brand name.

There are also lots of top level domains (TLDs) to choose from. You might know the top three: .com, .net and .org, but there are over 1600 TLDs worldwide! Each country has at least one like the United States (.US), Tuvalu (.TV), Montenegro (.ME), United Kingdom (.CO.UK) and Western Samoa (.WS). Picking your TLD can be a matter of geographical location, preference or necessity. Keep in mind that foreign domain extensions often cost more and might carry specific restrictions.

Where do I get a domain?

To search for an available domain name and register it, I recommend GoDaddy. I use them for all of my domain services and setting up an account is free. The best part is that, compared to others, they still offer the cheapest domains when you consider all the free services you get.

If the domain you want is already registered, you might be out of luck unless the owner is holding the domain for the “right price”. Yes, domains are sold as commodities these days and some can command millions of dollars. The best advice I can give in this situation is to contact the owner and see if they’re willing to sell. You can do this by finding out the registrant’s email address using Who.is.

Alternatively, you can search after-market domains on sites such as Sedo.com, Afternic.com, SnapNames.com, NameJet.com, BuyDomains.com, GoDaddy.com and Pool.com just to name a few!

Notes

Use your best judgement when registering or buying a domain. When buying, know that there are a lot of scammers out there that will try to steal your money or make a domain seem worth more than it really is. When registering, make sure you’re not treading on someone’s trademark. This can lead to you not only losing the domain name, but also paying huge lawyer’s fees and fines.

A complete list of domain extensions can be found on Wikipedia.

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What is the "rel=nofollow tag"?

· Brandon Hann

When it was introduced by Google, a lot of people were skeptical of it’s purpose. It is generally believed to have been created for the sole purpose of controlling how a website’s PageRank is shared among external links. As an example, if your website has a PageRank of 6, every external link you have on your site will get a piece of your high score, which means one link from you might be worth 10 times that of a single link from a PageRank 1 site.

Now, I don’t have all the numbers and nobody really knows for sure what the exact formula is, but that’s the general idea. Higher PageRank sites are considered “authorities” on their subject matter and are therefore granted with the ability to make other sites more important in terms of search rankings. The thought process behind this is that the high PageRank site is a legitimate site with actual, helpful information and in turn, they are rewarded for their quality contributions to the Internet. Google then realizes that if these site’s are going to link to someone else, they must be serious about it, so they allow the PageRank to “flow” to the next location.

What exactly is it?

The tag is used in a link such as this:

a href="https://www.ledfrog.com/links/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Click here.

It tells Google that this link can be followed (meaning the GoogleBot will go to that page and crawl everything there), but it does not have to take into account the PageRank score of the referring site. Other search engines take the meaning literally and do not even go to the site. I believe Ask.com is the only site that simply ignores the tag completely.

So, where does the rel=nofollow tag fit in? The first automated occurrence of this tag can be noticed on most blogs out there–more specifically, the comments section. It’s true, if you thought that by running around the Internet, posting comments on other blogs in hopes that all those website links were creating backlinks to your site, you were wrong (most of the time)!

There actually are two valid reasons for doing this to blog comments. The first one is obviously spam. I can’t even begin to tell you how much spam comments I get on my site each day and my site isn’t a high traffic site so far. Spammers in this sense will generate some very generic comments for a random posting on your blog and somewhere within the comment or attached to their name will be one or more external links. The second reason for doing this is that you might not want to be passing on your PageRank to sites that are completely unrelated to your site as this, in time, may actually cause your own score to go down.

My view on this is I don’t use the rel=nofollow tag on my post comments for two reasons. One, spammers don’t get through on my site. I use the Akismet plugin and it stops almost everything! When it doesn’t, the comment sits in queue and waits for my approval anyway, so what do I care? The second reason is that I feel when someone makes a comment on my site, they are taking the time to contribute an opinion of some sort and the sheer fact that they were even on my site usually means they run a blog that’s similar in content, so I give them some credit.

The rel=nofollow tag that was supposed to help with spam and the degradation of PageRank has now become a useful tool in the art of PageRank Sculpting. In the coming days, I’ll be going over more about PageRank and SEO tips to maintain control of your external links.

I recently found a blog post that discussed this topic more in depth, including a blurb about the opposite for no-follow called do-follow. If you want to read more about these tags, check out Jack Nguyen’s blog post.

How do you get links?

Getting those links that will pay out the oh-so-important “link juice” can be a difficult task. I wrote an article describing 10 ways to increase traffic to your blog and while these tips will most certainly pony up the links, one thing to remember is link building takes time. The normal way of doing this is a perfect balance of creating great content that other sites will link to automatically and getting out there and literally trading links.

However, there are services out there that can help you build your links. Professional link building services can save you the time and frustration of having to go out all over the Internet and round up links by yourself. They can also tailor linking campaigns specifically for your website–something that you may not have the time to do. This way you can guarantee that the links you’re getting aren’t simply random, unrelated websites.

Ultimately, as enough time passes by, the amount of links that your website obtains will grow. As long as you keep creating great content and providing services and information that people want, your site will grow as well.