Categories
Back Links

Self-promotional backlinks – which don’t annoy

Photo Credit: PoppyKay
Photo Credit: PoppyKay

For important new developments at todaydotcom check out my update : is today a scam?

The importance of backlinks we have discussed before. Many sites allow you to link to your own sites – two that I use are hubpages and today.com which are sites which pay you to blog. Today particularly require that to earn their payment per post the content must be original and not self-promotional. This appears to confuse people – and yet although many of my posts promote other sites I have none have them been flagged.

1-Feb-09 Update – today has now tightened up and will not pay the per post fee if you have a link to any site you own or to any article on hubpages , AC and similar sites.  You still get the traffic payment.

What’s the secret – write an original article, related to the same topic – add a link somewhere – not an obvious one – just a link with the text that you are are trying to rank for in Google. There’s a link in this paragraph which is relevant to the broad topic of making money blogging but this post would get approved if I had a blog on the theme of making money online at today.com

Approaches to avoid :

  • quoting content – even if you wrote it and can do so legitamtely – and saying something like “read more here” or “for more information click here”;
  • disguising links by hiding them in a full-stop (period) or linking in a misleading manner i.e. using a misleading anchored text – this is against Adsense’s TOS anyway;

You must provide original and complete information for the reader without them needing to leave the site that they are on.  I generally write about topics I know well on these  blogs I find know well.  Every post on my two today.com blogs has been approved and here are some of examples of promotional posts which are acceptable:

Christmas in Australia

Underground in Coober Pedy

Child Star in Australia

Note too that not every post does have promotional backlinks – the overall pattern matters too. Sometimes I don’t link out at all – sometimes I link to authority sites such as commercial businesses

Basically every post stands alone if you have an interest you can read it from start to finish without needing to click. The link is vaguely related to the content matter though – which makes it a valuable backlink to have in Google’s eyes  – the links to my sites in this post are less valuable because this blog isn’t really about travelling or Australia!

What’s a Backlink?

Now just to take a step back –  I’ve been asked more than once in forums and elsewhere “whats a backlink”.  The answer is simple people, its just a link to another place – a piece of underlined text (usually) – which when you click or hover your mouse over it shows another web-page.

3 Simple Steps to Create A Backlink

An example is easiest:

  1. type in the worlds “Baby Boomer Gear”,
  2. highlight the words and then click the chain (link) in WordPress (or most other on and off line writing packages these days including hubpages)
  3. it asks me for the url – if I then copy or type in http://www.cafepress.com/babyboomerbuzz
  4. the end result will looks like Baby Boomer Gear and Maren has an anchored backlink for her Baby Boomer store!

Thanks for the question Maren – the only dumb questions are the unasked ones you know!

Categories
Online Business

2009: The Year I Make it?

balls_prioritesWell this is my New Year’s post – we had a great holiday and no  I didn’t run out of things to do or find any stunningly cheap internet – so no work got done.  Time to take stock:  the back story is here if you care from when I started this blog in April. What have a learnt in the last year.

Biggest challenges of the year:

  • “getting” the marketers mindset.  Understanding that I am in the business of selling things – but reconcilling that with not wanting to rip someone off. BTW I just noticed someone bought a Asus eeePC from one of netbook review hubs – that made me smile – because I love that little notebook!
  • focus – I keep on getting distracted and I need to balance where I want to get to and new ideas which keep on coming from left field!

Biggest Wins of the Year:

  • managing to make some affiliate sales and being able to sleep at night. I have decided that   I will only promote on this blog what I use myself and find useful and explain why  I use it and why. This does seem to convince the occasional person to buy from me – I thank you 🙂
  • finally being able to rank a site based on the keywords I wanted to rank for – it doesn’t sound like much – but trust me it was the “proof of concept” I really needed  – sometimes you just have to do it yourself to understand that it will work for you – dumb but human I think.

So 2009: what is happening going forward.  I am torn, and have been for 6 months, between being an internet marketer, a freelance writer, and more recently a blogger. Unfortunately I am instinctively more comfortable in the social role of blogging or the contractor/employee role of writer  – but where  I need to be is an internet marketer.

Internet Marketer

I have learnt a few things over the year  and now have several sites developed and slowly starting to make me money.  There is money to be made, though at the end of the day its not content which is King, but links and search engine rankings.  That said I still try to make my sites to have some useful content in them, and so far  I have not had any issues with them being taking down as spam so  I think I am doing OK there.

Freelance Writer

Ironically I have made around 60% of my online  income by writing for other people. This was an unexpected development as I never thought of myself as a writer  but like any skill the more the do you the better  I get, and understanding something of how search engine works is definitely an advantage in this area. At the end of the day  Freelance writing is hardly passive income   – as any writer will tell you. Instead I am using it as a way to buy leverage for my main business that is sites and yes content too.

Blogger

I got involved with today.com, initially anyway, because I thought that I could get some easy backlinks to other sites and make some money on the referrals.  I was right on both counts  – but also found that I quite enjoyed the interaction and given that  I was being paid for traffic directly  I could play with some of the social networking stuff such as Entrecard.  Both blogs  I started in November are now PR3 Australia News is more a trends blog while Travel Over 30s is turning into a general travel flagship/social blog.  Basically the idea with both of them is to use them to not just get backlinks but maybe attract a few would be entrepreneurs over to this site or to my hubpages cotent.

Goals for the first 1/2 2009

  1. Get more organised and focussed on the important stuff so that I can achieve the following:
  2. Develop at least 10 more niche sites developed and promoted and ranking in the top 10 for my keywords
  3. Develop at least 1 e-book out a month  – to be also promoted via my own website which involves learning a few technical bits and a hard thing – how to write a sales letter!
  4. Maintain this blog, Passive Income on a regular basis – sorry can’t promise better than that –  I try not to post unless I have something to say – or a question to answer – so if you want more posts ask more questions 🙂
  5. Maintain my two today.com blogs – trying to blend social blog with trends to get a lot more search traffic to them – and do some entrecard dropping at least in the short-term.
  6. Uses AMA more frequently to support my money sites and other blogs.
  7. Maintain and diversify my freelance writing income – probably to replace the part-time, real-world job I have, which is looking very shaky at the moment – mineral exploration anyone?

Hell that’s rather a long list!  The bottom line is though –  I need to start making a decent income – which around here is at least A$1000/week and I am not close yet! But  I will be!

Categories
Online Business

Some New Year’s Resolutions!

It must be Christmas , I am tired, frazzled, stressed  and I don’t do Christmas and I don’t have kids! Its not a good place to be quite at the moment – and for a least a week I have been trying to get to this blog to update it!

Lis stiding into the future, or at least the end of Busselton's jetty
Lis striding into the future, or at least the end of Busselton's jetty

It is, as usual, my own fault. I forgot the rest of the world doesn’t take a three weeks at Christmas and we just had week away so out of 5 weeks I only have 1 week at home! So I am frantically scheduling posts in advance for the paying blogs! Well to be honest I am lucky to have the paying blogs so thanks Mark Knowles for your faith in me.  Mark is funny writer with an eye for a funny photo: he is a self-confessed atheist and seems to like semi-naked women – check out his blog but you have been warned LOL!

Needless to say I have done very little work on my actual passive income sites and I am definitely going to be doing something about that in the new year. In fact I took Monika’s advice over at The Freelance Writer and bought a (paper) moleskine diary to manage my time.

That’s as far as I have got so far but I am going on our road trip across the Nullarbor with the knowledge that I will have around 3000km of thinking time to work out my to do list for 2009 – if I find a solar-powered, wind-up satellite-phone Internet connection which costs less than $10/minute I might even update this blog sometime in the next few weeks!

Categories
Article Marketing Back Links

Article Marketing Submission Software: Update

What’s the future of article submission software? When I was originally looking for a solution to the bulk article submission problem and I wasn’t impressed by the results I saw.

Internet is a series of tubes
photo credit: eirikso

I used to be a Business Analyst and I one thing I find on the internet that some of the standards of software and services offered are, quite frankly, amateurish. I am actually quite happy to pay for software as I know enough to know it takes a lot more time and effort to develop reliable software.

The hardest software of all to develop is software which needs to interact with a 3rd party that the developer has no control over.

This is the reason that software for article submission is particularly difficult. Every directory is slightly different and even the smallest change to the submission process means that the submission software will An alternative to automating submission is creating a service which employs people, presumably in lower wage countries, to do the work itself. This approach has issues too, anyone who has run a business with staff knows that management is no easy job – and of course even more difficult if the workforce is in another country..

One of the reasons I started with a service that submits to blogs I knew that is was fundamentally an easier piece of software which only had to interface with one other piece of software – WordPress – and that software is open source so that the inner workings are available who can understand what they are reading – which certainly isn’t me!

I noticed over at The Keyword Academy, Court is also interested in the concept in his recent Article Marketing Update post and is having problems with the service with the submission service he has been using. I’m afraid I am not terribly surprised because I think managing a workforce long-term really is beyond 99% of internet businesses.

Categories
Freelance Writing Online Business

On-Line Income Cash Flow is King

Since February I have been working 3 days a week for a small mineral exploration company. They have some great prospects but as of about a month ago we had to cancel drilling because of the inability to raise money anywhere off or on the stock exchange. My hours were cut from 3 to 2 days a week.

Freedom!
Freedom!

You know what my reaction was? I was pleased that I have more time to work on-line – I’d rather be building my business than trying to look busy at a company who is in trouble for reasons that neither I nor the directors can do a lot about at the moment.

Sure the loss of income just before Xmas when we are about to go on an expensive income and my partner won’t get holiday pay is inconvenient. But I immediately turned around and started replacing that cash flow with freelance writing.

It made me realise that I have so many more options than I had a year ago. I have finally learnt not to be dependent on a employer but discovered, at least to a small degree, how to make money online in a recession.

The trouble with building an online business: it takes time and quite a few skills – its not going to pay the mortgage this month- and maybe not even in 6 months.

So what are the quickest ways to make money in a recession?  Now these aren’t about building a business – this is about money NOW!

  • If you can write you can write articles: and developing this skill will help your online business anyway. Check out Monika’s list of on-line writing resources to get you started;
  • If you have web design or other technical skills you can also get paying work.
  • Sell stuff! Selling on eBay or other online auction sites is a full-time business for many whether you sell the junk in the spare room, haunt the local garage sales, or even drop-ship.

None of  these approaches will build your passive on-line income, you are effectively getting paid for your time but it will give you predictable cash flow NOW rather than in 6 months time – and that can be a very good thing!

BTW the image I loved – but it came via one of those email chains – if anyone can give me a source I’d gladly acknowledge it!

Categories
Freelance Writing

Freelance Writing Really Taking Off

Is it just me or are there are freelancing writing jobs all over the place at the moment? I just picked up another on-going writing gig. In fact its my first as a “normal” ghost writer ie. I am given that article’s title and write a piece based on the title.

Writers Block
Writers Block

Its a lot easier than coming up with new blog posts all the time and making sure I am not repeating myself or neglecting part of the topic area of the blog!

Again this was a job I got not from advertising or via my under-developed portfolio site. It was someone looking for writers at HubPages. The initial job wasn’t that exciting pay wise but I have since got better paying work from the same person.

Getting paid to produce a service be it writing or something else on the internet is the same as in the real world. If you can prove your ability (in my case I have nearly 100 hubs at HubPages) but possibly even more important prove that you can communicate and deliver then you will get work and you do NOT have to work for 1c/word on the crappy freelance bidding sites.

How do you prove you can deliver:

  • respond promptly and clearly to emails;
  • either accept the job as given or negotiate the price;
  • communicate clearly as to the turn around times and meet them;
  • if there is a problem – let the agency or buyer know – don’t go into your hole and not communicate.

Its not rocket science but I suspect that its done often very badly on the internet. It seems that a lot of writers really have poorly developed business and social skills. You don’t have to be a fantastic Writer to make money freelancing – I am proof of that. You do need to know how to write for your audience and behave professionally and it seems to be paying off for me!

Photo Credit

Categories
Online Business

Yes: We moved! Welcome to the new url

Now I think I have brought everyone with me – I hope! There is a redirect on the old blogspot site which should bring you straight here – but you may want to update your bookmarks anyway: Journey of 100 Sites is now at https://lissowerbutts.com All the posts and comments came across easily, the WP import feature really does work! The RSS was find too as I already was using feedburner so you RSS Readers won’t see anything different.  The redirecting the individual posts and of the high level domain is all thanks to Blogger Bloke’s excellent tutorial on how to move from blogger to WordPress

Why did I leaver blogger? Well they annoyed me and broke the comment feature on the theme I was using. There just isn’t the depth of independent developers for blogger: and its probably because blogger (Google) can change anything they like on a pretty random basis and it leaves the developers scrambling. Even finding how to redirect the posts was hard because that seems to have changed completely in the last few months: Blogger Bloke’s code works because he uses .htaccess rather than mucking with Google’s code.

Also I am kinda feeling the need for a flagship blog – and I guess this must be it because some people actually seem to stop by and read it LOL, and even odder subscribe to it! I had the domain lying around doing nothing so this seemed the logical thing to do with it!

I know it doesn’t look very pretty around here at the moment but I am tired with fiddling and need to get some work done: this is a very cool theme – but it has a whole lot of options which I don’t know how to use yet!

Categories
Blogging

Technical problems: comments

Its seems that the comments function isn’t working – thanks for Mike at Retire Young and Wealthy for pointing this out to me! It seems blogger has changed something that’s broken the theme – I like the theme so I am going to give it 24 hours to see if someone knows more than me can fix it. In fact the site I got theme from Blogger Buster has the same problem – I can’t comment there either – I had to send them an email!

I am using firefox – so if anyone CAN comment please leave comment saying what operating sysem (Widnows etc ) and what browser you are using! That will help the techies narrow it down.

At least now I know why no one was talking back for once LOL! Meanwhile if anyone want to follow I have got myself into using twitter

Categories
Blogging Making Money Online

Today Works Well for Trends Blogging

IMPORTANT: Read this update on blogging at today dot com – it still works well for trends though.

Well I am enjoying blogging at today.com more and more. Mainly because I am finding it pretty easy to get my posts indexed and then get search traffic to them. What I am doing is something that is called “trends blogging”. Google has an appetite and the appetite is for whatever people are searching for at the moment. To check out the top 100 queries at Google trends – trust me it usually makes for pretty depressing reading!

I’ve tried using Google trends to blog directly – but to be honest lacking real-time access to US TV is a huge disadvantage – and not caring even less about US popular “culture” is a show-stopper!

So instead I am doing my own version: which is currently around a film which is about to be released. I suspect it might be popular because the sexy photos of Nicole Kidman in Australia hub does pretty well. And the movie isn’t out yet – which is the point – the premier is tonight so I wrote about the Australia Movie premier and the post was indexed with 40 minutes – probably less I wasn’t looking. I was already getting some traffic to an earlier post on the same topic so I checked my stats and made sure I answered the questions to searches I’d had traffic from – some of which weren’t answered in the original post which kinda gave me the hint that I might be onto something. I am now sitting in position 2 and 3 for my keywords in Australia anyway – and of course its not yet today in most of the US – I LOVE the time difference game sometimes (its almost as good as the curency game at the moment for those of us whose currencies have dropped against the US$ ). Now the nice thing about today is that I get paid on traffic not directly on clicks -that’s lucky because entertainment is notoriously BAD for Adsense payouts! But I am definitly getting traffic!

Categories
Marketing Search Engines

Google Reveals SEO Secrets

Google has just released their Search Engine Optimization Guide. Yes the big G itself is finally prepared to answer the most FAQ out there ” How do I get my site to rank in Google?”

Its a pretty scary document: well scary if you are in the business of scamming people out of good money by pretending that SEO is hard to do – its anything but. In fact I suspect none of what is in this guide is new. Its just been finally collected all together in one place so that people can actually find it – now that’s an idea!

The report is fairly simple to understand for anyone who has the rudiments of how a website is setup. The bottom line is excellent for anyone who wants to make money as an online writer because as usual the bottom line is that a website which is attractive and useful for readers will also attract the search engines. Get your headings right and make sure you correctly anchor your backlinks and Google will notice.

I wrote an extended review of Googles SEO Guide an how it applies to HubPages here: SEO How to Do It by Google

One item the Google SEO Guide mentions in passing is that blogging about newsworthy or unique content will get you ranked. That certainly seems to be happening to me on my Australia News blog

Categories
Article Marketing Blogging Search Engines

Getting Paid to Blog

I have been having fun over at a newish website which is offering free WordPress blogs – a bit like the free wordpress.com site really.

But not. WordPress.com you aren’t allowed to make money so you can’t link to evil, wicked money making sites, which means that when you do blogs often get shutdown. But of course some of us crazed money making types are always looking for new place to develop my own backlinks.

So when I heard that a new site was offering not only free blogs but also offering a $1/post I got interested – the rather long review is my blogging for $1/day hub but the short version is:

  • get approved (live in the right country the usual suspects plus Australia/NZ/Western Europe/India),
  • write a post 100 words minimum, original content, not illiterate,
  • get paid.
  • Get second blog, repeat, get paid a total of $2/day. I

It won’t last for ever, eventually you will have to get some traffic to continue being paid but its a nice little business model – from my point of view anyway!

Now $2 is hardly a massive income: but the cool thing is this: the links are do-follow and you can of course anchor them. So far I have not had any posts rejected and have placed up to 3 “self-serving” links in them!

Slight caveat once the post is approved for payment its locked and you can neither edit it or delete it, you loose the rights to your content. If however you post an image they don’t take the rights: only on the words.

As a freelance writer I can trade 100 words for a free backlink and $1 – hell I can even trade 250 words because those tend to get indexed in the big G!

Another thing that is rather cool is that your blog is a subdomain and there are some nice name still available: one of my blogs is Australia Today (check the url).

In the interests of fair play: they do pay for referrals so if you sign up via the flashing thingy on the right or via one of my today blogs (click on the “get paid to blog” on the right) I get paid – well actually I won’t unless you actually put some effort in and do 10 posts – its not hard – that’s a total of 1000 words for goodness sake – I can do that before breakfast! And you have 3 months to do it in. And then I get paid and you get paid – and you get a blog and backlinks and you can do with it what you want. It really isn’t a bad deal.

Of course if you don’t want me to get the commission that’s cool too – I’ll get over it eventually – probably ….. 🙂