All over the Internet you can find guides and tutorials that will teach you how to make money by creating and selling eBooks. This looks like a good idea indeed. However, what I’m going to suggest is that you create a good eBook and… give it away. Yes, it means you won’t make money immediately. No, it doesn’t mean you won’t make money later.
Why should I offer my eBooks for free when I could be selling them?
There’s a good reason for this: by giving high-quality info away you’ll generate backlinks for your site or blog. (more…)
Preserving your site or blog’s credibility is much easier than you may think. I’m going to illustrate this with two personal examples:
1. After writing my recent article on StumbleUpon traffic, I took the time to review it and compare it to the sources of information it was based on. I thanked myself for doing this: I quickly spotted some inaccuracies in my post. All I had to do afterwards was to correct the wrong bits of info, rebuild some sentences and add a few others. Of course, I took these simples measures before hitting the “publish” button. Then I reread everything again and compared the fixed article to my sources one more time. I only published the post after making sure that there wasn’t a single piece of info in it that I couldn’t claim to be true to the best of my knowledge. (more…)
Now seems to be a good time to try to drive more StumbleUpon traffic to your website. It’s been announced on the StumbleUpon blog that the old 200-friend limit will be lifted. Moreover, stumblers will be able to subscribe to someone’s stumbles without becoming a friend.
Why should you care about StumbleUpon’s friends limit?
At StumbleUpon, whenever you stumble and review a page/image/video, the link and your comment are displayed on your friends’ homepages. Therefore, having a large amount of StumbleUpon friends can help you spread the word about your own sites and/or sites that belong to your partners or friends. This is why you want to be added as a friend by as many stumblers as possible. However, StumbleUpon used to have a 200-friend limit for all accounts. Such limit obviously harmed StumbleUpon’s networking potential.
Now that the limit is about to end and stumblers will be able to subscribe to as many people as they want, you can add everyone and everyone can reciprocate. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone should subscribe to you, nor that you should reciprocate all subscriptions. (more…)
In a previous article I discussed the importance of niches for a site or blog’s success. However, many people build their sites without having a niche in mind, because they either don’t know any better or they simply don’t care much for the consequences. While some of them will eventually modify their content in order to fit it in a niche, others will still prefer having a general/miscellaneous site. If you belong in the latter category, you may be wondering what you can do to drive traffic to your pages.
Well, all is not lost. Here are some tips to help you get some search engine love, retain visitors and increase pageviews:
1. Pretend that each page on your site is a sort of mini site on a specific niche — and optimise it accordingly. Make sure that the page’s title is highly optimised and relevant to its topic. The description meta tag, the alt tags and the written content should all contain related keywords. If you want to cover a different subject, create a new page for it, instead of cramming it into an existing one. (more…)
When Google started displaying search volume numbers on its famous AdWords Keyword Tool, I thought things could hardly get any better. It seems I was wrong though.
This week Google announced the release of a brand new tool. It’s called Google Insights for Search.
How is Google Insights for Search like?
I see it as a sort of Google Trends on steroids. This is due to the fact that with Google Insights for Search you can not only analyse regional trends — which are shown in maps for easier visualisation — but also view other data, such as related search terms and rising searches. Besides, this new keyword popularity tool lets you choose the desired comparison criteria: search terms (the traditional option on Google Trends), locations or time ranges. (more…)
I know it’s hard to believe, but for a long time I thought Google didn’t like blogs.
Some years ago, I read on an Internet marketing site — I can’t remember its address — that blogs were falling out of favour from Google and wouldn’t rank well, if at all. That piece of (mis)information had been written by a man who looked like an authority in site traffic, so I just assumed he was right and, unfortunately, I decided to ignore blogging. How silly I was.
Misinformation on blogging is still spread on a regular basis
Nowadays, just when you’d think blogs have gone mainstream, you’ll still stumble upon articles meant to classify blogging as a major waste of time. Their authors will tell you to avoid blogs if you want to succeed on the Internet. What’s worse: most of this (bad) advice is directed towards business owners. (more…)
It doesn’t take much browsing across Internet marketing sites to realise that having a niche is mandatory. This is the piece of advice that you’ll find everywhere you go: choose a niche for your site or blog and stick to it.
Why having a niche is so important anyway?
1. Niches help your visitors find what they want
When you give too many options to your readers, they may get confused, bored and eventually leave your site. People don’t have much time; they want to get things as fast as possible. They want to arrive to your blog and make sure that its topic is interesting to them. So, stick to a niche and help your visitors stay focused. Don’t distract them with pages on ten different, unrelated subjects.
2. Search engine optimisation is much easier with niches
Build your site around a specific subject and you’ll automatically help Google identify your content as relevant to all related search terms. It’s that simple. Now, I don’t mean that this is the only thing you need to do in order to rank well. Search engine optimisation is a process that involves several steps. But picking a proper niche for your site is one of them — a very sensible one. (more…)
Did you notice that Google and Digg have been sharing several headlines lately? Take a look at blogs, news sites and forums on our industry and you’ll find several references either to Digg’s acquisition by Google or to Google’s experiments with a Digg-like SERP interface.
Despite the fact that Google gave up on the Digg deal (for good or only temporarily?), the googlesphere is still excited about this topic. But…
Does Google need Digg?
Is Digg an essential tool for Google’s Internet dominance arsenal? It doesn’t seem to be the case.
* Google is already used by the vast majority of websurfers. Digg, despite its popularity, still looks like a small club dominated by a few privileged members.
* Digg lacks diversity; most links on it are of a geek-oriented nature. Google, on the other hand, can lead users to any type of site they want to see. This efficiency is the reason why it rules the search engine market.
Do Google users need Digg-like features?
How would those impact our search experience? Would such features give us the power to find more (good) sites in less time?
* Perhaps Google intends to use our own votes as a basis to bring us more customised results over time. However, isn’t it what our search history is for? At least, this is what’s been implied by a post at Google’s Official Blog.
* If you think a social voting system could effectively reduce manipulation of search results by suspicious webmasters… forget it. All social media sites are manipulated in some way (bury brigade anyone?). Why would a “social Google” be different?
Let’s see how the whole Google-Digg (or “Giggle,” as suggested by some good-humoured guys out there) case will evolve — if at all. Whenever I find any substantial news on this thought-provoking subject, I’ll write more about it.
While researching for the blog on PageRank I was about to publish in place of this one, I landed on Patently-O, a patent law blog that had this post: The Death of Google’s Patents?
It would be interesting to know what you all think about this development.
For the longest time, traditional news wires have been the preferred choice when it came to disseminating information. They can send releases where it matters – newsrooms, trading desks and websites – quite fast. But although they may be efficient, they can also be costly. Calls for alternative means have been getting stronger in the past few years, thanks in part to the rapid development of the Internet. Just recently, the US SEC has finally responded. Companies may now solely use their websites and blogs to meet public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure), as long as they follow a new set of guidelines to be released by the commission. Chairman Cox has this to say: (more…)
