Big Foot Web Marketing

1. Hands down, www.woot.com if you are unaware of this site, it is a site that sells ONE thing a day. For really cheap. Often entertaining sales copy as well. I scored a Dyson vacuum there for 249.00 and a Microsoft Zune for 79.00. I have a SERIOUS woot addiction and sometimes can;t go to sleep unless i check it at midnight. I will never forgive myself for missing the “Bag O ‘Crap” deal Christmas eve.. when I forgot to refresh my page.

2. I can’t believe I am sharing this- but there was a month or two this when I had a mild obsession with www.PerezHilton.com. A GOSSIP site. We were ion the middle of a horrible move and I tell myself I went there to escape. I also use this tactic to explain my Insaniquarium “problem” 3 years ago.

3. In an effort to redeem myself- www.cbc.ca Canadian news and radio. You must agree to listen to this min 4 hours/per week when you apply for passport.

Honourable mention: Sirius radio site

About to go and tag Ruud of Ruudhein.com

Tags: Internet Marketing and Blogs by Lisa Stewart
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This question was posed by on Jonathon Fields Blogging blog.

“If you are drawn to write on a broad variety of topics (3-5) even if there is a remotely common thread, are you better off doing it on a single blog or creating several niche blogs for each one?”

Excellent topic. He polls top name bloggers on the question. Please read this post as it will give you lots to think about. You may not agree with everyone but they are lots of golden nuggets here.

I was surprised at the number if people that thought you should stick to one blog and that you couldn’t possibly maintain more than one blog “well” . I suppose that depends on what you define as “well”.

Saying that one person can only do 1 niche blog is like saying they couldn’t love more than one child. I am ( I hope!) a multi-dimensional person and have passion and interest in MANY things. When I am on the Internet I look at MANY things and many topics, regularly.

I will not feel passion and enthusiasm for the same thing day in an day out. here is an example of 2 totally different blog working well simultaneaously:
My husband recently started two blogs- one for his love of motorcycle riding and one for his audiophile obsession. He tinkers with his motorcycle, plans his routes and talk with other bikers in Spring and Summer. When cold weather hits he starts building tube amps and doing weird EXEPENSIVE things to his turntable.

He has very little desire to write daily on his motorcycle blog- and not many people who reading motorcycles are reading his blog, either. There is a very discernible rhythm

I have 3 blogs that I work really hard at and about 10 that I do so-so stuff with. The other blogs I use to experiment with different methods like Chitika or Kontera which I don’t place on sites using Google AdSense.

I can pretty much cover everything in my life, WELL with those 3 blogs. They are the 3 main passions and interests in my life and I can spin pretty much anything into one of the three niches.

I think the question Johnathan was asking was if it was better to take 1 topic and break it down into smaller part or have 1 blog that was less niche. For example- This blog, www.bigfootwebmarketing.com could be broken down into 3 different blogs- and SEO blog, a Blog about Blogs and a Blog about making money with your blog. Was it better to have the one or 3?

Most of the “experts” thought one blog was enough. I think it could go either way. For some people- i.e. those people that have no relationships, live eat and breathe the Internet and sleep 4 hours a day could do quite well with 3 or 4 blogs… For the rest of us- keeping one niche blog with a wide scope ( if that’s not too contradictory) works best.

There is so much overlap within a niche. Having 3 similar blogs would mean getting 3 times the backlinks, etc and I think you are better off and will get more bang for your buck sticking to one.

Getting decent backlinks is HARD work. Getting good links for multiple blogs is harder. Spend your time developing one solid blog within you niche and as you get better at it branch out. I have 3 blogs that that make about 75% of my online income. The other 20 I just play with.. or maybe will pick up and DO SOMETHING WITH THEM when my kids are grown and my photo albums have been been put into chronological order.

Tags: Blog For Money, Blog Start Up by Lisa Stewart
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I have been out of loop for a bit- one of my children has been seriously ill. First time I have had a chance to look at computer in a a while.

I have stated many many times now that Google is facing increasing problems with their algorithm and flailing about trying to control the Internet with Page Rank. They are REACTING and pro-acting to their self-made problem of passing page rank and buying/selling page rank. I have come back to a scary proposition the idea Google is floating around that ALL links within a sponsored post should be nofollow.

Clear As Chocolate

Looking over PayPerPost – IZEA Blog I had to give my had a shake. Am I reading things right?

Mat Cutts (who is an unusually nice guy and very approachable if you ever get a chance to be at an event with him) did in fact approach Ted Murphy of Izea/PayPerPost as outlined in his blog post here.

Ted spoke further with Matt about nofollow links, etc and then they have exchanged emails.
This is the part that has thrown me for a loop:
Matt Cutts:

I think quoting me as saying “ALL links inside of any sponsored post should carry the no-follow tag period, regardless of whether they are required, not required or even link to the advertiser paying for the post” is different than our conversation. I believe that I said that adding nofollow to all links in paid posts would certainly be safe. Then I asked if you were going to require nofollow on required links, why not put them on all links in paid posts? I think you replied that your business model didn’t support that, but I may be misremembering.

Ted Murphy

I may be misremembering our conversation, but this is what you said in an email to me: “Google (and probably all search engines) will consider all links in a paid post to be paid. If a link were truly editorial, someone wouldn’t have had to pay for a review to get that link–the PageRank seller would have made the link on their own, without any payment involved.” This email response is what prompted me to gain further clarification on the subject at PubCon as it left me confused. I think my recount of the conversation and the above email snippet are aligned.

This has enormous ramifications for all bloggers. The implication is that links in a post cannot be compensated- and if there is one link in a post then all must be considered “paid”.

What Does Google Consider Compensation?

The biggest challenge is what is compensation? On several of my sites I OFTEN link to Amazon when mentioning a product, book or movie review. I get big fat Amazon affiliate cheques every month from Amazon. I am getting commission on sales leads. Is this compensation? Must all Amazon links be nofollow? I do routinely add nofollow tags to Amazon links but on we on the ay to affiliate links being nofollow links?
If I work in an SEO capacity on a site- and then in one of my blogs I mention the client’s product or service with link to it- is this compensation?

if some one signs up to be a Google Adsense publisher through one of my site links and I get 100.00 referral fee- is this compensation? Should all my links to Google Adsense now be nofollow?

I am not being tongue in cheek- I really think this is getting murkier and murkier.

I may be repeating what’s all ready being discussed- I have not had much time to really delve into the issue but these are my knee jerk reactions.

I see Andy beard is on similar wavelength and gives a long list of conflicts and compensation scenarios in his post, Google Dictating Nofollow For ALL Links From Compensated Content.

I just read a great post by Rob Watts, Paid posts are the devil incarnate according to search engines at Yack Yack SEO outlining the problems Google is facing and how the best way to deal paid links as a blogger.. is to..well .. fly under the radar and hope for the best.

Google is really missing the ball here- and creating more and more confusion for bloggers with every clarification!

Tags: Google by Lisa Stewart
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Google Webmaster Central Blog Supplemental results are officially dead. Back in August Google announced that the results would no longer be displayed to viewer. Google not really explaining how they have dealt with he problem. Supplemental results existed as a place to dump pages Google suspected were URL’s that were suspect i.e. duplicate content, not original content, superfluous content, etc. I believe that supplemental results exist because having to deal with all that data poses a significant resource problem and being able to dump “suspect” let Google get away with dealing with that content less often and using less resources.

From a user perspective, this means that you’ll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.

Hidden behind this are some truly amazing technical feats; serving this much larger of an index doesn’t happen easily, and it took several fundamental innovations to make it possible. At this point it’s safe to say that the Google search engine works like nothing else in the world. If you want to know how it actually works, you’ll have to come join Google Engineering; as usual, it’s all triple-hush-hush secrets.*

Many site owners with badly built sites were prey to dreaded supplemental results pages hell. I once battled for months on a mess of a site that the owner and builder kept defending.

It really would take some kind of huge engineering feat to successfully crawl and index ALL THE WORLDS information so I suspect they are treating URL’s that would have been labelled as “supplemental” in a similar way but calling it something else.

Tags: Internet Marketing and Blogs by Lisa Stewart
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