Have A Great Memorial Day

For you readers who are not U.S. citizens, thank you for your patience and please indulge us who are here. Today is Memorial day for us and it is surely recognized by us. It's a day where we as a nation, take a moment and thank the men and women who have given everything for our great country. It is often times easy for the true meaning of this day to get lost in the excitement of Summer starting along with picnics and cookouts. But please do not lose sight of the day's real meaning. Most of the things all of us enjoy today, we are doing so because those before us made selfless sacrifices. Today I am posting some words by Father Dennis Edward O'Brien below that says it all.

Happy Memorial Day

WHAT IS A VET?

Some veterans bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb, a jagged scar, a certain look in the eye. Others may carry the evidence inside them: a pin holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg - or perhaps another sort

of inner steel: the soul's ally forged in the refinery of adversity. Except in parades, however, the men and women who have kept America safe wear no badge or emblem. You can't tell a vet just by looking.

What is a vet?

He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons a day making sure the armored personnel carriers didn't run out of fuel.

He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber than five wooden planks, whose overgrown frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times in the cosmic scales by four hours of exquisite bravery near the 38th parallel.

She or he is the nurse who fought against futility and went to sleep sobbing every night for two solid years in Da Nang.

He is the POW who went away one person and came back another. Or didn't come back AT ALL.

He is the Quantico drill instructor who has never seen combat but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and gang members into Marines, and teaching them to watch each other's backs.

He is the parade-riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a prosthetic hand.

He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals pass him by.

He is the three anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose presence at the Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor dies unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in the ocean's sunless deep.

He is the old guy bagging groceries at the supermarket palsied now and aggravatingly slow who helped liberate a Nazi death camp and who wishes all day long that his wife were still alive to hold him when the nightmares come.

He is an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being, a person who offered some of his life's most vital years in the service of his country, and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs.

He is a soldier and a savior and a sword against the darkness, and he is nothing more than the finest, greatest testimony on behalf of the finest, greatest nation ever known.

So remember, each time you see someone who has served our country, just lean over and say Thank You. That's all most people need, and in most cases it will mean more than any medals they could have been awarded or were awarded.

Two little words that mean a lot, "THANK YOU."

"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag."

Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC

A Couple Of Videos & A Wordpress Plugin

Today I ran across a couple of informative videos from Sean Donahoe and his Firestorm SEO project. I believe his strategies program is available for sale on June 1st. When you opt in to get the free videos though instantaneously, you will kind of get a sense of what the tactics he teaches in them. I will say that regardless, you will learn some useful information in the free videos. The first is an interesting slant at uncovering some keyword phrases using the Google Adsense tool and the Google SKTool The second video covers training and use of the SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 Wordpress plugin. I must admit that I have not run across this free plugin before myself, but it has some interesting uses.

Only So Many Ways To Say Some Things

The old duplicate content argument is starting to resurface again in relation to ranking in the SERPS. When dealing with product descriptions, you will often see the same stock description show up on several retailer sites. It is not uncommon to even see them on Amazon. Is it OK to use this duplicate content on your site? Sure, I guess, as long as the original source is allowing it. Which most do. If you were to build a complete site though with all duplicate content, it will be very hard to stand out in the SERPS ranking wise. I know there are only so many ways to say something is black and goes 55 mph. If you must use stock product descriptions, try to add something else unique to the page as well. Perhaps also a video or some product ratings. Try to make the full contents of the page be different than any other page out there. Yes. Even if it all is duplicate content. Tons of sites make a living off of aggregating content. Take Mahalo.com for example. I will say though, you stand a better chance the more unique you are. Even if this means spinning something with the Best Spinner. Try to put together pages of content that can not be found elsewhere and yet give the surfer what they are looking for. It is not so much the duplicate content that kills you, than it is the fact that no pages on your domain have uniqueness. Get creative, even if you are using SOME duplicate content. In all honesty though, the more original content you have on site, the better it is for all involved.

Incansoft 50% Off Memorial Day Weekend Coupon Code

Many of you have heard me mention the software of Michalis "BIG Mike" Kotzakolios and his company Incansoft. I own several of his products and for the next 3 days you've got an opportunity to grab any products in the Incansoft catalog for 50% off the retail price...until midnight Monday. To obtain the discount, just visit the catalog and enter coupon code HONOR in the text box above the Add To Cart button. As you add each product the discounted pricing will appear in your shopping cart. After you complete your transaction, you will receive an email with the download instructions and Registration Key. If you buy anything, buy the GFX Video Writer. It is a great program for newbies to veterans.

The Perfect Amazon Product

Let me start by saying this is no way scientific. It is merely a surface observation I have done from my own sites that I sell products from Amazon. It by no certainty mean you still can not color outside the lines.

The sites I have the most success with sell products that are in the $50-$150 range and those same items can not be found down at the local Wal-Mart. How is that for a broad range? Also based on 4% earnings per product sold, you can see that it does not take many sales for a site to earn it's keep so to speak. You will also find that most of these type products are easily shipped as well in this price range.

Does this mean you still can not sale hand held hair dryers because you can find them at Wal-Mart? Absolutely not. Research the niche. Some woman prefer a certain watt or brand of hair dryer. Just do your research, the answer is there.

Most people complain about the short Amazon cookie life, but I am here to tell you that if your site shows the product the surfer is looking to buy and it is the right price, you will have no problem converting them. This goes for most any product and any affiliate program. Some businesses do a better job closing the sale then others, but as affiliate marketers it is not hard to track who those are if you monitor your clicks closely.

Sometimes You Get Surprised

A while back I built a site using the Commission Ritual method and used a niche that I was sort of suspect about. Now let me say I did enough research on the niche to know it would be a moderate constant earner, but had no idea it would catapult into one of my top 10 monthly earners. The site has only 10 product pages and 5 articles. It was built as I said using the Commission Ritual formula, which is just one of many ways I build niche sites. The backlink building was a modest effort and the site only has 3 keyword phrases ranked in the top 3 Google results according to it's stats. What the site does do is convert. Mostly through Amazon using the PHPZon plugin. The site also shows 3 eBay results per product, but most shoppers seem to fine with being shipped off to Amazon. The site converts nearly 25% of it's Amazon clicks. That is an unreal conversion rate for sure. I plan on devoting more time to it now and go back and add about 20 more pages of product and content over the next 2 weeks. It just goes to show that some niches you think will be golden egg laying geese, lay modest scrambled eggs, while some you think may be marginal, blow the roof off. You don't know until you build it. The beauty of this business is you are only 8 bucks away from your next site. Ain't it great!

Great Content Still Gets The Best Kind Of Backlinks

It is a lesson that needs repeating often. So many try to avoid it, but the fact remains that great content will get your site the best backlinks in the shortest amount of time. Through the revamping of several of my own websites recently, I have focused on thickening up thin sites from the early days with great original content. Of course after adding this great content I promote the hell out of it through whatever social media I can in order to try to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. Many times it results in backlinks given unconditionally on like sites. Not all the time mind you, but more times than not. I target low hanging keyword fruit as well, which makes MOST of the articles easy to rank.

I can speak from experience that it does not take long for these type of backlinks to boost you tremendously in the rankings as these links usually come from more authoritative types of sites and carry heavy weight. It could be a forum post link or blog post. Regardless these links can juice a whole site inside and out. If you struggle with building backlinks unnaturally, concentrate on adding more great targeted content to your site. I promise it will not hurt you and only help in more ways than one. It has been proven time and time again, but many choose to ignore it as fact.

Niche Competitor Finder Tool

I came across the Who I Compete Tool last week and had it on my list to post about this week. While it is not the end all, do all of tools, it is quite useful. Instead of typing out what it does, they have a great video you can watch before registering a playing with the tool.

Another Great Free Ebook Especially For Beginners

I came across another great ebook for those just getting started in the make money online business or those that have been doing it a while by just winging it. The book is by Paul Myers who is a moderator on the Warrior Forum evidently and entitled, Need To Know (What You Must Know to Achieve Real Success). The ebook is free and you will have to of course opt in to get it. Myers has been working online for over 10 years and shares some basics of what it takes to make it in this business. The ebook is 112 pages long with 16 chapters. Below are the chapter titles and it is a read you can knock out in a night or so.

Chapter 0: The Starting Point - Becoming Unstoppable
Chapter 1: The 5 Things it Takes to Succeed Online
Chapter 2: The 7 Things You Must Include in Everything You do Online
Chapter 3: Cover Your Assets
Chapter 4: Become a "Model" Citizen
Chapter 5: Revenge of the Psycho-Billy Cadillac
Chapter 6: Gimmick, Toy or Tool?
Chapter 7: Of Wombats and Men
Chapter 8: The Most Important Skill
Chapter 9: "Where's the Party?"
Chapter 10: Winning The Content Contest
Chapter 11: Are You THAT Boring?
Chapter 12: How to be Interesting in Print
Chapter 13: The "THUD!" Factor
Chapter 14: The World is Your Playground
Chapter 15: Ramp it Up!

Niche Rummaging Will Turn Up Ideas

I am closing in on finishing up some site rebuilds that were long overdue. In June, I plan on focusing on a new site and have started doing some research of what niche I want to be in. Now let me say, I am more concerned about if I think the niche can make money and find as many keyword openings as I can. I have talked about using Amazon.com and Shopping.com to look for popular items and searches, but sometimes I just like to rummage through niches to see them in action and start a list of keyword phrases to run through Micro Niche Finder and Market Samurai. I will often just blindly wander through Commission Junction and Google Affiliate program dashboard for a bit to see if anything sticks out at me. I do not just jump into a niche these days with out tons of research and merely rummaging through these affiliate sites really gets my mind jump started with different ideas for my business plan. Make sure to have Notepad, Excel or Word open so you can jot down specific products and keywords to help you do bulk research on another day. Makes for a great mental exercise when tackling a new niche site.

A Lesson From An Old Friend

So while at the doctors office today, I run into an old friend from 15 plus years ago. We get to talking about what we do and after explaining to him that I build and maintain niche sites for myself full time, he explains he too is a hobby webmaster. He proceeds to tell me about his website that revolves around a hobby of his. Fast forward and I look it up when I get home and find one God awful website. Looks like it was built in the old AOL member-pages days. The SEO was non existent as well. To my surprise the site has a PageRank of 3 and after looking at his exposed Sitemeter stats open to the world, gets a healthy, healthy dose of daily traffic and ranks very well for several short and long tail keywords. I am not going to link to the site out of respect, but it just goes to show that true passion shows through. The site has about 90 pages and is full of original and duplicate content. It is monetized with the basic Amazon copy and paste ads, but I am sure it gets some sales.

What I am getting at, is you do not need to be an accomplished webmaster, you need a passion and the want to get it out on the web. Sites that fill a need get found and linked to. It is that plain and simple. Judging by this site, my friend has a ton of passion for what he does.

Value Of Great Content Debate

I am a bit under the weather this evening after a busy day at the doctors office. I wanted to point you to a post or debate so to speak on SEOMoz, regarding the value of content in relation to ranking well. Rand is now sharing a debate that occurred between a number of CEOs in the search marketing industry and himself in regards to debunking some SEO myths. The CEO's are Stephan Spencer, Gord Hotchkiss, Thad Kahlow, Eric Enge, Chris Baggott, Richard Zwicky, Lawrence Coburn and Will Critchlow. Hotchkiss has a view point that intrigues me. More of a popularity measure and "human" based signals in future rankings. Of course we will never know the true thinking of Google, spamming comes in every shape and size. Every time you or I manufacture a backlink that does not happen naturally, it really can be regarded as spam. As always, the best type of backlink is the one that is giving naturally because of someone linking to you because they think the site is worthy. This though usually is because of great content. You can see the chicken and the egg argument going on forever with great content and ranking.

Incansoft Web20Bot Released

Michalis "BIG Mike" Kotzakolios has released his latest Incansoft tool entitled Web20Bot. This tool was created to simplify account creation and posting to WEB 2.0 properties like Squidoo and Hub Pages. It makes use of Decaptcher.com as well as both public and private proxies to further simply the submission process. Web20Bot presently supports 21 WEB 2.0 properties, with 15 of them offering automatic sign up (the remaining 6 are semi-automatic) - here's the list:

squidoo.com
hubpages.com
blogger.com
wordpress.com
tumblr.com
livejournal.com
blog.com
wetpaint.com
zimbio.com
my.opera.com
webs.com
gather.com
weblog.com
wikispaces.com
sosblog.com
vox.com
knol.google.com
easyjournal.com
xanga.com
multiply.com
advogato.org

The Web20Bot also supports basic Jet Spinner Syntax and Title/Content rotation, so your content is spun as it's submitted to each of these services. It features Submission Reporting, enhanced error handling, and a brand new submission engine. No sales page is available yet, but you can get early for $14.95 by visiting this link. I have bought it myself and plan on trying it out next week on a new link wheel. I own several of the previous bot products offered by Mike and trust it should do as it says. I have no idea how long it will be sold for this low price and when the official sales page will be up.

Wordpress Attacks Reported On Shared Host

Just a heads up if you are running Wordpress on a shared hosting account such as Hostgator. There are starting to be several reports that Wordpress sites on shared hosting accounts are under attack. You can read much more on this here and there is even a PHP upload clean up fix should you get infected. Although I have yet to hear Hostgator named specifically, the initial reports today were restricted to Dreamhost, GoDaddy, Bluehost, Media temple and other places with the common theme being shared hosting platforms. This has even been reported on sites using the latest 2.9.2 version of Wordpress.

Zac Johnson Free Ebook

I have been busy pumping out 40 videos today for niches, but took time to peruse the latest offering from Zac Johnson. I have read Zac Johnson's blog for quite a while now and he just recently released a free ebook entitled Six Figure Affiliate Blogging. You will have to opt in of course to download it, but this ebook is 97 pages and a pretty easy read. He has some Q & A's with other well known bloggers such as Jeremy Schoemaker, Gary Vaynerchuck, John Chow, Brian Clark and Tim Sykes to name a few. Depending on what level you are at in this business, will determine how much you get out of the ebook. It sides on the overview side as far as information goes and a ton of it you will have already seen before or know. Like anything else though, you could stand to have your eyes opened on a few things or get a quick refresher on some other things. Free is free, so I will let you be the judge of the value you get from it. I have to admit though for a free ebook it is well put together.

The Contact Plugin I Use Most

An emailer asked what current Wordpress contact plugin do I use. I have played around with all sorts of Wordpress plugins for contact forms on the contact pages and jumped around quite a bit. Currently I have been having the most success with the Easy Contact Wordpress plugin by Scott Allan Wallick. It is free and so easy to get up and running. You can use the math and/or challenge-based question for Spam reduction measures, but I only use the simple math question myself. I pretty much use it as is out-of-the-box unless it clashes with a certain theme then I just make the necessary adjustments in the CSS. The short code is simple to insert into a post or page and for now this plugin handles my needs for niche sites.

Rand Fishkin On SEO Myths

I have been meaning to point to this for a few days, but it keeps slipping further down my list of things to post. The great Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz gave his opinions on an article written by Stephan Spencer for Search Engine Land entitled 36 Myths that Won't Die But Need To. Both links are great reads and I like how Rand highlights what was said by Stephan then rebuttals with his opinion. Make sure you thoroughly read all attached links in both post as well. You will certainly learn a thing or two.

Doing Something Is Better Than Doing Nothing

Happy Friday, everyone. I received an email from a new reader who disclosed that he was so overwhelmed with information that he did not know where to start and was afraid to do the wrong thing. It has almost paralyzed him completely because of not wanting to fail. Several are not going to believe me when I say that it is easier now to build these niche sites and rank then ever before. I have been experimenting with not even adding description meta tags and concentrating less on SEO to sites to see if indeed Google will rank me for my targets. The biggest key is keyword targeting. You have no business trying to rank for cheap iPods. I have no business trying that phrase as well and I have been at it much, much longer then most of you.

Do not let learning slow you down. There is more than one way to build a great site. You are going to make mistakes, it happens. Build your way through them. A year from now, you will wish you did more work. I still have days were even I do not get what I think should of been accomplished in a day done, but I am always doing something.

If you are getting bogged down with info, just stick to the basics mentioned in the Niche Store Guide. Start there and build and backlink a while. In this business results are most of the time not instantaneous. Just keep building. Just keep building. Doing Something Is Better Than Doing Nothing!!!

Free Textbroker Unique Content Verifier

Got an email the other day from Textbroker announcing their new Unique Content Verifier desktop application for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Not only is it free, but it offers multiple layers of web checking as well. You have the ability to check straight text without a URL by copy-pasting an article into application. to make sure that your content is unique. You can also check posted articles with a single URL or an entire site. The program has a mapping function that automatically creates a full sitemap based on your criteria, allowing you to check an entire site. You now have the ability to protect your own websites from content thieves with the automatic daily plagiarism check function. Watch the video on the site for more clarification.

Textbroker also has great writers as well and I use them in addition to Need An Article for getting articles and product reviews written for my sites. Like all article writing services, it takes a little searching to find the right writer that fits your style, but Textbroker has been around I while and I trust my work to them.

SEO Link Vine Closing Doors To New Members On Friday

Just as I thought, Brad Callen will soon be closing the doors of SEO Link Vine to new members this coming Friday at 2pm ET. The email Callen sent out says that he has reached maximum capacity in just a few weeks. This is not surprising as you may remember me telling you that I missed getting in Syndicate Kahuna before it closed as well. I have been on the waiting list there forever with no luck getting in as of yet.

SEOLinkVine is a blog network. If you need more clarification, you can read my earlier post on it here and watch the videos. Do not join with the "me too" attitude. Join if you intend to use the network and post articles to it. You will be wasting your money if you join to post 2 or 3 articles a month. If you understand the benefits of thoroughly spinning and quality of backlinks from other blogs and intend to post 12 or more articles a month, you will likely get your value of the service. Yes, I use it and it has delivered as promised.

If you are serious about your business, I suggest getting in now. If you are just a part timer or new to all of this, please do not join. There will be other blog networks from Callen I am sure. I just do not know when though. I will keep you posted as anything Callen puts out, I usually buy.

301 Redirects Or Termination By EPN

Not sure if everyone caught the blog post by EPN this morning, but by June 8th, 2010 you better have a fix in that passes both a referrer and a 301 redirect or you risk being banned by EPN. I posted about this briefly the other day from a referrer standpoint and if you are using BANS as a platform, Sonjay has a fix for this you can download here and read about in this thread here.

If you are using PHPBay, Wade has already updated his Wordpress plugin and I highly suggest you download his latest version as well. If you are using any other plugin or platform, I highly suggest getting with the developer to make sure you get a fix in place soon.

Below is the post:

Hi all,

We have noticed recently that the use of temporary redirects (302 redirects) instead of 301 redirects can result in activity that is not compliant with our terms & conditions. We know that often this is unintentional, so we have worked together with a few of our affiliates to identify and prevent the problem. Here is an example to illustrate what can happen:

Many of our affiliates use a redirection page to help collect statistics on their click through to eBay. In these cases, when a user clicks on a link on the affiliate site, they are taken to a URL (redirection page) that logs the click through and then redirects them to an eBay page by using a 302 HTTP return code. The search engine crawler indexes the content it finds at the end of the temporary redirect (the eBay page) to the redirection URL. Therefore, when a user searches for content from the eBay page, the search engine results will contain matches to the redirection URL that link directly to eBay. This type of redirection is not compliant with our terms and conditions. A solution to this problem is to use permanent redirects, i.e. 301 return codes instead of 302. This will ensure that all the content on the destination page after the redirect is indexed to that page only.

If you are currently using a 302 redirect in a method similar to the one described above, please inform us by emailing CS and make the appropriate changes immediately. From June 8th 2010, we will treat this issue as an intentional breach of our terms and conditions and any affiliate exhibiting this behavior will be expired.

The eBay Partner Network team

Either Building, Backlinking Or Buying

My wife asked me what I was working on today during our lunch and I responded, that I am building, backlinking and buying. Isn't that the truth though? Everyday I am usually doing one if not all three of these things. It is very rare if I do not scrape any of these task 7 days a week. Let's break them down real quick as hopefully you are doing one of these 3 things daily yourself.

Building - This comes in various task, but I consider it adding content, monetizing, blogging, coding, installing and etc. Anything work on my own site. Mostly this involves content or blogging unless I am chasing down a error or putting together a new site.

Backlinking - The most hated of all the task, but I consider this to be anything that builds links off site, Twitter, Facebook, article marketing, directory submissions, link wheels and etc. This does not have to be so painful though. It is part of the process and as hated as it is sometimes, it has to be done. Accept it. The medicine goes down much smoother then.

Buying - If you are not doing most of the other two above yourself, you likely will fall in this last category. I still pay for content and some submissions myself from time to time. I budget it into a sites earnings as they roll in. To what degree I outsource though changes from month to month. Sometimes I get on rolls and knock out my own content, sometimes I pay my writers. It is fine to outsource as long as you know exactly what you should be outsourcing and that it is being done correctly.

So there you go. Hopefully you are growing your business everyday by doing one of the 3 B's above. If you are like me, you are doing all 3.

Link Wheel In Action

A reader emailed me recently in regards to a Link Wheel. A link wheel is often better explained when seen in action. If you start here. You can follow the links and get a better idea of how a link wheel works. You can get as creative as you want with the hub and spokes or get as basic as the one you are about to follow. I would try to make each spoke be as unique as possible. This is easily done with the Best Spinner or a simple rewrite. 250-300 words is perfect. You can bring them online slowly as well if you want and go back and slowly link the spokes and hub if you so desire. There is no hard and fast rule. As I mentioned as well in an earlier post, do not be afraid to monetize these either. I do not care which direction the money comes from. Having a wheel with many spokes, makes it possible for several monetization outlets.

Google Analytics Firefox Addons

If you use Google Analytics as much as I do, you need to check out the two FireFox addons listed by Ann Smarty on Search Engine Journal. So far I have only gotten to play with the first one, Google Analytics Watcher and intend to try out the Google Analytics Monitor next week. I like the ability to switch quickly between different Google Analytics profiles as well. As Ann says, the second tool promotes being able to use multiple accounts as well, but she was not able to figure it out yet. This will be really nice as well as I too use multiple accounts and profiles. Firefox addons continue to be more more creative. I have used Firefox for years now and the addons have made it a reason why I stay.

EPN, BANS, Referrers & You

My fellow BANS moderator Sonjay, has put together an excellent post on explaining what referrers are and their relationship to EPN and how BANS handles or does not handle them. Sonjay has been gracious enough to include a fix as well. She does a great job in explaining the whole situation and I highly suggest you read it even if you have moved on from BANS. EPN doesn't want affiliates to send traffic to their site without a referrer. They want to ensure the surfer is coming from a site you own. Great job by Sonjay on this and I encourage you to ask questions in the thread should you need any clarification.

SEO Link Vine Contest

SEOLinkVine is giving away $5,000 in prizes to people who add blogs to their already large blog network. It is free to join and free to add a blog to the network as well. Basically you sign up and submit your login details and content gets published remotely to the site. You can set it up to only take articles from a certain niche, take dogs for example. You can also monetize it as well, say with Adsense. You can set it to post articles automatically or wait for you to approve them. You can add as many blogs as you like.

On a side note, I use the service to submit my spun articles and have been submitting at least one a day. One article I wrote promoted a Click Bank product and I direct linked the affiliate link in the article. That spun article has already generated 4 sales in a short period of time so you are not limited to just articles promoting your niche sites as you can direct link as well. This membership pays for itself in no time flat.

Convert Wordpress Pages To Post With Vice Versa Plugin

If you have worked with Wordpress long enough, you have run across the need to convert pages to post or post to pages. It happens. I recently tackled the vice versa plugin that can make this happen. As always, I suggest backing up your database and files just in case something were to go wrong. I was able to convert pages to post on a whole site I am rebuilding with no problems at all. I would only install this plugin if you have the need for it and remove or deactivate after using as not to clutter things up. I can tell you that it does as it says it will do with no errors on my end and I am using the latest Wordpress version as well.

Get Indexed In Bing Faster?

I purposefully waited a while on a somewhat newer site to see if Bing would index it within 90 days of launch with numerous high quality backlinks. After 90 days the site had been visited by the bot, but not indexed. I wanted to try the Bing site submission page along with their BING webmaster tools section to see if it would get it indexed quickly or not. After 48 hours of doing both, the front page of the said site is indexed. I did submit the xml sitemap as part of the process just so you know. OK, now. Could it have been a coincidence? Absolutely, I did see another crawler, but can not rule out that the site just so happened to be sceduled to be indexed on that day. I will tell you though, that I see no harm in doing this as soon as your site is ready for indexing. I also used the meta tag process for verification in the header. I will get around soon to trying this on another site and see if it can be accomplished in the same time frame. While Google is my primary source for all my sites traffic, I never turn my nose up at other search engines and their traffic. free targeted traffic, is free targeted traffic.

New Keyword Supercharger Tool

I just got around to play time today as I have spent most of the morning and afternoon spinning some articles to go out on SEO Link Vine. I played briefly with the new Keyword Tool Supercharger by GeekLad. I plan on playing more this evening time permitting, but there is a post up on Search Engine Journal by Ann Smarty that goes a little more in depth on the supply/demand ratio. This tool works of course in conjunction with the Google Adwords Tool and they have both a Google Chrome Extension and a FireFox addon.

Build A Wider Earning Web While Link Building

It is quite a task building links, it is one of the most boring processes in ranking better. The more creative you get along with weaving a wider web, the more success you will have. Link wheels are nothing new, I have been using them a while and the same goes for article and blog post marketing. Not many people though, use the two together and many forget to monetize the spokes in the link wheel. The web properties below are just a few of the places you can use as spokes in the link wheels. How many of you monetize these as well? Adsense, Chitika and Amazon are easy to implement into all of the below properties among many other monetization forms.

hubpages.com
vox.com
livejournal.com
squidoo.com
wordpress.com
blogspot.com
weebly.com
blog.com
tumblr.com

Now that you have monetized your spokes in your link wheel, you want to get more air in the tires. Using blog networks like SEO Link Vine, Article Ranks and even Free Traffic System can help inflate these wheels and weave yourself a wider web. All of these allow link rotation through spinning and thus you can easily sling links to these spokes as well as your main site hub. In essence, you are helping all of your properties at one time in the niche and can make money off of the surfer as well should they land on any one them. The focus still remains on getting the hub of the wheel the ultimate landing spot, but the last time I looked, 10 was more than 1. See my direction here? Monetize what you can monetize, especially if you are taking the time to build the spoke in the wheel. I do not care what part of the wheel they buy from, I just want them to buy.

Make Money With A New URL Shortening Service

I am wore slap out today from a Rotary club charity even today, but wanted to pass along adf.ly. Adf.ly is a free URL shortner that you can earn money with. Whenever someone clicks the url, the surfer is shown an ad on the way to the original destination. I am still playing with this, but it is a novel idea. Especially if you use Facebook or Twitter a ton. You earn around $2.00 per 1000 clicks, but if you have a ton of traffic that can add up. It is what it is though, so I would use on Facebook and Twitter until you get the just of what it is and if you want to use it longer term or not.