Alexa Shuts Down Redirect Nonsense

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Alexa is a web statistics company that counts traffic from a number of sources, primarily its toolbar userbase. Alexa rankings have become increasingly important lately as Izea’s Text Link Ads brokerage uses Alexa rank and Google Page Rank to set the price on text link ads it brokers.

Webmasters looking for a boost to their Alexa rankings had been using a loophole in the Alexa system to get clicks on links to their blog counted in Alexa’s traffic counts. By adding “http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?” ahead of their actual URL, Alexa would redirect the surfer to their site and count one visitor in the process. This had picked up speed in recent weeks, including a fairly good sized faction of EntreCard users using the Alexa redirect as their EntreCard URL.

Because Alexa extrapolates web traffic numbers from its toolbar users, a single visitor count is multiplied a number of times. With many of these EntreCard users seeing a couple of hundred clicks a day routed through Alexa, which Alexa would count as a few thousand visits, websites that don’t abuse the system have seen their ranks dropping the last few weeks. (Several of my sites that have actually doubled or tripled traffic in the last month have had a drop in rank.)

In the last few days, Alexa has shut down the loophole. Many of these abusers haven’t fixed their links and their potential visitors are getting 404 error pages returned by Alexa instead of ending up at the sites they expect to visit. The savvy web surfer can, of course, go to the browser bar, delete out the Alexa redirect and proceed to the actual URL. Most people won’t bother. As a webmaster who has used real content to achieve search engine and Alexa rankings for years, this fills my heart with a bit of glee.

[tags]Alexa,redirects,abuse,spam[/tags]

Not-a-Carnival: Getting the Most Out of EntreCard

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The latest rage among bloggers is the EntreCard, a social network in the form of an online business card that you can “drop” at the sites of other member bloggers. The card appears on your blog as a 125×125 pixel ad with a “Drop Yours” ribbon underneath. When you visit another member site, after logging into EntreCard’s site, you click on “Drop Yours” and the site owner sees your card in his inbox. You also get credit for dropping your card which can be used to purchase the 125×125 ads.

There are a lot of bloggers raving about the traffic potential of this system – and it does have that. I’m equally excited because for me it’s brought back a lot of the social interaction from the early days of blogging, back when I could leave a comment on an one of the ultra-A-list blogs and actually get responses and other readers visiting my blog to see what else I had to say. This system of hopping from site to site and getting to know other bloggers makes Web 2.0 “social networking” sites seem almost Web 1.0 static by comparison. So, clearly I’m excited about this new toy. But it’s meant to be more than a toy. “EntreCard” comes from the words “entrepreneur” and “card,” and as such is very business oriented. So, how can bloggers get the most out of their participation in this new network? With a few weeks in, I have some ideas.

Spending your 300 Drops

Each blogger is limited to dropping his card 300 times a day. Now, for all but the most serious professionals, visiting 300 sites even for a few seconds is a serious proposition and may even be more than you’ll normally achieve. So, whether you’re going to hit the limit or limit yourself to visiting 30 or 40 sites a day, how do you get the most from those visits?

  • Bookmark the sites you really like in a separate folder or folders as you go. Getting the most of your visits means you should be getting something else besides “credit” for a card drop.
  • Visit the latest sites page and check out the newest sites. The new members will remember who greeted them first. Jean Costa and Scott McKinnis dropped cards on me and Scott purchased one of my ads in my first few hours on the system and now their blogs are on my daily visit list.
  • Get outside your niche. Take advantage of the directory and the ads themselves to learn something new, entertain yourself and have fun. Find something unusual and go back from time to time.
  • Become a top dropper. Pick a few blogs and visit them every day. People notice their “top droppers” and there’s a meme going around where they link to them. You can’t be everyone’s top dropper, so pick blogs you really like and that match your own in some way.
  • Use BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee and similar widgets. If you’re pressed for time and you can visit a blog that uses these or one that doesn’t, visiting a blog that has these widgets gives you another chance to let the site owner know you visited plus a chance to get your icon in front of her site’s visitors. Bookmark these sites in a separate folder for when you want maximum bang for your buck.

Give something to the sites you visit

When you drop your card, the site you visit gets a credit, but if you really want to have an impact try to leave something else. This may be something visible or it may be intangible, but try to do more than just click and leave.

  • Take a look around. Especially on your first visit to a particular blog, look at the layout, the posts, the ads. If you see something appealing follow through.
  • Comment appropriately. One great thing about EntreCard is that it’s a great way to say “Hi, loved your blog” without leaving a spammy looking “Hi, loved your blog” comment. 3rdWorldBlogger posted asking for comments instead of just card drops, “Dropping the highest number of Entrecards on my blog without even leaving one comment on any post or joining in my conversation to me is not beneficial to my blog growth on the long haul.”
  • Check out the site’s sponsors. Don’t engage in click fraud, but do take the time to give the ads a read and behave as any other visitor would. This is a business oriented network and in blogging business is largely about advertising, so try to overcome the ad blindness that goes with being online so much.
  • Write about what you find. That’s what this blogging thing is all about, right? Finding content, adding your two cents and linking to it so your readers can share the joy you’ve found. A link when you’ve found something you like is the single nicest thing you can do for a fellow blogger – so do it!

Give something to your visitors

If you hit that 300 drop a day mark and have a catchy ad you can expect 100 or so new visitors every day. That’s huge for a new blog and not bad even for an established one. The downside is that many of those visitors are shooting for 300 drops, so you have very little time to catch their attention and once it’s caught you have to have a strong value proposition to bring them back when they aren’t just clicking your ad. For starters, you should read ProBlogger. It’s a daily read for me. Darren Rowse has literally years worth of posts about how to generate great content and links to the best work of others on the topic. (He also just posted an interview with the EntreCard founder that has more pointers!)I can’t duplicate that here. That said, a couple of points.

  • Original content. Offer something that readers haven’t already seen at 290 of their 300 daily drops. Cigar Jack offers interesting content on a topic that no other member covers.
  • Be different with your ads. It seems like every “make money” blog out there has the “Ads Suck…Ours Don’t” ad from WidgetBucks – even the bloggers who don’t put the actual browser halting memory hog WidgetBucks widgets on their blogs. An ad that you see 300 times a day isn’t likely to make you much money.
  • Be creative, inspired, controversial. When you do cover the same material, offer a unique perspective. Say something new about the same old thing, say the same old thing in a new way.
  • Give the reader something. A contest, a t-shirt, an opportunity to get a link, an invitation to a beta site. At the very least, offer your reader your undying love.

Last bit of advice – have fun with this. Do what you love and the traffic will follow!

[tags]blogs,blog promotion,blog marketing,EntreCard[/tags]

Not-a-Carnival: rssHugger

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The blogosphere has seen an explosion of traffic building schemes in the last few months, including Blogrush and several similar widget programs. One new program is geared to building your blogs RSS subscription base – rssHugger.

rssHugger

rssHugger is a feed directory with a twist (or two). Every feed that is added is manually reviewed to prevent spam and weed out sites that aren’t family friendly. To build traffic, only blogs that review the site or pay a $20 fee get listed. This is viral marketing at its best and it will most benefit the blogs that get in early as other bloggers spread the word.

Aside from the directory itself, the site features a Top 100 feeds page (reset monthly). Here’s another reason for getting in on the ground floor as the directory currently has around 400 sites and it only took 20 views to get in the Top 100 for December.

The directory is very heavy on blog topics like making money online, internet marketing, technology and search engine optimization. For topics like real estate investing, the outdoors and even politics the directory has 5 or less blogs listed.

Disclosure: Obviously since I’m recommending this site, I want my own sites listed. This review fulfills the requirement for listing this blog.

Not-a-Carnival: BlogRush and Titles

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Carnivals are just one way to promote your blog. From blogrolls to link exchanges to linkbaiting to just buying advertising, there are dozens of good ways and quite a few not so good ways to build traffic. One important technique in writing good carnival posts is to write a title which attracts attention. You need to grab the attention of the carnival host quickly to get listed and hopefully get an actual review instead of a one line link. Then your title needs to grab the attention of the reader scanning through 10 to 100 links so the reader will check the review and then click through to your article.

The same advice on titles goes for the first traffic builder in the Not-a-Carnival category: BlogRush. [Referral link. Please use it if you do sign up.] BlogRush puts a widget on your site which streams the RSS headlines for five other blogs in your niche on your sidebar. You get credit for each widget impression and the credits result in your title running on the network. There’s some negative buzz running about BlogRush right now, but my overall impression running it on Financial Options has been good. It hasn’t exploded my traffic, but combined with good Google search results for a couple of good titles I’ve written in the last week my traffic has nearly doubled. (Search engines get about 75% of the credit, BlogRush about 25% and neither would have happened without good titles.)

Some of the negative buzz seems to be related to the one thing you can always expect with something new – people trying to game the system. The owners report that they are working out kinks to eliminate abuse. Another thing that sticks in some folks craw is the fact that BlogRush users get referral credits for people who sign up through their invitations. There’s also a certain sense that we’ve been here before with traffic exchanges. Is this just a newer, slicker version of something we’ve already tried? Maybe. But the biggest problem is probably that people aren’t seeing the kind of traffic that they’d like when they first sign up. I’ll attribute this to three factors.

  1. The system’s new and they are working out the kinks
  2. There are extra impressions built in for the referral levels and those aren’t being used yet by most users
  3. Bad headlines

One key aspect to remember on BlogRush is that the titles have to be under 40 characters or roughly 7 words. This is good advice for carnivals and search engine optimization, too. For carnivals, succinct titles are important to grab the host’s and reader’s eyes. For search engines, a shorter title that uses the most relevant keywords from your article will reinforce those keywords better than a rambling title that dilutes them. More importantly as search engines get smarter, what’s good writing for humans, and good titles is, is good writing for search engines as well. As SnowBoardJohn puts it:

Don’t lie in your Blog Rush headline. People will not only hit the “back” button faster then greased lightning if your story doesn’t deliver on what the headline promised, but they will be FAR LESS LIKELY to click on your future headlines.

I’ve found in the niche where I’m using BlogRush, finance and economics, that the widget is also a good fit for the site. The titles that have been appearing have offered some good added content for my readers. There is also a bit of spammy type stuff slipping in there, but I give my readers credit for being able to discern for themselves how far down that path they want to go. The actual story titles contribute far more to my blog than a collection of static links to blog names like Five Cent Nickel that don’t tell readers much or do much to draw their attention. (No offense to Five Cent Nickel, it’s one of my favorites in the category which is why I chose it.) Perhaps that’s a good thing for me, not sending readers off to other places, but I like to think that having good outgoing links adds to an overall good experience that will have readers coming back.

All told, readers should take away two things from this. First and most important, whether you choose to use BlogRush or not, writing good headlines is essential for bringing eyeballs to any website. Second, don’t focus solely on carnivals as the way to build traffic; there are plenty of options out there. Give them all a try, use appropriate techniques to grab reader attention and build those reader numbers over time by offering good quality content that starts with well written titles.

If you decide you would like to try BlogRush, please consider using my invitation link – click here to join BlogRush.

[tags]BlogRush,titles,traffic[/tags]

Successful Blog Carnival Marketing Starts with Great Blog Posts

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Whether your goal is to promote your blog for its own sake or whether the blog is just a means to promote something else, ultimately success depends on getting enough eyeballs, and the right eyeballs, looking at your site. A Problogger Reader Quick Tip from the guys at Free Money Finance has this to say about getting those eyeballs:

If I had to pick one tip to give new and aspiring bloggers, it would be this: participate in blog carnivals.

That says something about the power of blog carnivals – done right.

So what is a carnival post done right? The place to start is before you ever hit the send button on a carnival email or the submit button on a carnival submission form. In fact, you need to start before you even consider what carnival to submit to. The place to start is writing a great blog post. The great blog post will get the attention of the carnival host, which can mean better position in the carnival. This is vital in the big ones that can have dozens of links. It may even bring a personal endorsement from the host. The great blog post will get readers to return to see what else you’ve written; it’s more likely to get readers to hit that field of “Subscribe” and “Add to” buttons that’s been sitting useless at the side of a dead blog.

So what are some things to consider when writing that great blog post to send to all your favorite carnivals?

  • Have a goal
  • Know the topic
  • Add something to the conversation
  • Be concise
  • Have a hook

Blogging Blog suggests that having a clear goal and a clear topic is “the differentiating [factor] between a good post and a great post.” The goal may be to provoke thought, ask a question or start a conversation. In that case, knowing your topic may simply mean understanding what it is that you want to learn. The goal may be to educate or persuade your readers. In that case, knowing your topic means demonstrating a degree of expertise your readers will find convincing (and not misleading them in the process!).

The great topic and great goal are important, but a great post also needs to add something to the conversation. There are a lot of blogs out there that provide a link and a terse comment. There are perhaps even two great ones that do that. But those exceptions prove the rule that the most interesting writers have something original to contribute. If your post aggregates without adding or worse yet merely plagiarizes with a link, it won’t qualify as a great post, won’t impress blog hosts and won’t invite blog readers to return to your blog. At best, you may encourage those readers to revisit the place that you link to.

Be concise. I hate to drag this point out too much. ;) Don’t use five words where one will do and don’t use jargon or slang when plain English is available. (Or plain Spanish, Farsi, Korean or Hindi.) Carnivals are the center of the ADHD universe we call the blogospere. You have maybe 5 seconds to catch the reader’s attention and once you have it you’ll be lucky to keep it for more than a few minutes. Write with those times in mind. Have I lost you yet?

Have a hook. Give the blog host a reason to recommend you, the reader a reason to read and all of them reason to believe your blog will be worth visiting again later. John Palmer peppers the posts on his eclectic economics blog, EclectEcon, with a quirky, sarcastic humor that makes the “dismal science” considerably less gloomy as in this two line interview with a BBC employee. Consider the goal of your blog and your post when setting your hook. The hook may be humor, it may be great information, it may be irreverence or even outright controversy. You need to not just add something to the conversation, but to add something that enhances the conversation, more than just a blogger’s “Me too.”

[tags]blog posts,carnivals,metablogging[/tags]

Strategy: Submit a Useful Resource

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I run a weekly series on my finance blog, Financial Options, of financial roadmaps. These posts contain a calendar for the week with economic indicator releases, Treasury (T-Bill, bond and note) auctions and announcements, and earnings reports with some of my comments about what’s going to drive markets in the coming week. I submit the latest version each week to a variety of financial and business related carnivals each week. My strategy here is to submit a resource that will be useful for carnival readers, bloggers and the carnival hosts themselves. My goals for the submissions reach beyond the carnivals to:

  1. Point this calendar out as a resource to the financial bloggers hosting and submitting to the carnivals
  2. Gain a few readers each week from the blogs that host the carnivals
  3. Add several new incoming links to the series each week

Let me address these backwards…

Point three is probably the least important and effective as I suspect that links in blog carnival posts are not given much authority by search engines. If nothing else, the sheer number of links in a blog carnival post dilutes the value of any one link, even if the host is a highly ranked site. That said, from a search engine optimization standpoint, if everything else is equal, you don’t want your competitor to have a hundred carnival links while you have none.

Point two is important, but a very slow process. I don’t expect to gain hundreds of regular readers from carnivals. Some of the carnivals I submit this to are very new and the older carnivals have dozens of links or more. Still, this is a high value topic, so if I pick up two or three new regular readers each week through carnivals, after a year that is worth a lot.

Point one is the main reason for this exercise. The bloggers hosting these carnivals are all people who are working very hard to gain recognition for their work in the same field. There’s simply no better way to become “the authority” than to have the experts in the field referring to you as a resource. I want these hosts to refer to my site, and especially this series, the next time they need an explanation of an upcoming economic indicator or the next time that the rapid fire coverage of an indicator on the news leaves them scratching their heads. I’m not shooting for the links in the carnivals, so much as the references and links that these carnival hosts will post later. These submissions have led to links from finance experts writing on sites like About.com.

The strategy here is not to submit a piece on the latest news that will shine for a few days, maybe get a few Diggs. The strategy is to submit one example of an ongoing series that can be a resource for readers and other bloggers over the long haul.

This week’s version is going to several carnivals (reviews of some of these to follow and I’ll link to those that post my link as they publish):

  • Carnival of Real Estate Investing (There are three housing market indicators out this week)
  • Carnival of Personal Finance (“The original money carnival”)
  • Carnival of the Capitalists
  • Carnival of Real Estate
  • Festival of Investing

[tags]blogging,strategy,blog carnivals[/tags]

A short history of blog carnivals

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As far as I’ve been able to confirm, this whole idea of blog carnivals was the September 2002 brainchild of Silflay Hraka, who started the Carnival of the Vanities.

Soon carnivals started to multiply and people started trying to track all the carnivals out there. An early attempt was itself a carnival, Meta-Carnival #1 from Bora Zivkovic’s Science and Politics, which listed over 50 carnivals. The list included several dead carnivals and roughly half a dozen carnivals which had already held over 61 editions at that point.

Leading “metablogger” Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has 53 posts involving blog carnivals at his ProBlogger site, the earliest being this piece titled   “Other Than Search Engines – Where Do You Get New Blog Traffic?”    An indication of how long blog carnivals have been around is Darren’s statement that he didn’t recall who first introduced him to the idea of blog carnivals or when he first wrote about them “as they’ve been around for years.”

Spammers quickly got into the act, using automated programs to take advantage of carnivals much as they take advantage of blog-and-ping systems. The fledgling carnival submission form at Conservative Cat was killed by spammers in September 2006, when it became so severe that it risked “permanent damage to the credibility” of the web server. The Cat suggested the alternative Blog Carnivals Index form, which has since grown to literally hundreds of carnivals.

In early 2006 or late 2005, the Godfather of Blogging Community Building, N.Z. Bear of The Truth Laid Bear, unveiled his ÃœberCarnival, essentially a continuously updated list of the latest carnivals.

[tags]blog carnivals,blogging,carnivals[/tags]