Gov’t Mule and Allman Brothers

Want to get a lot of writing or building done?  Try what’s playing over and over on my pod right now:

Gov’t Mule  - The Deepest End Live Album

Allman Brothers  -  Hittin’ The Note

Did you know you can drive the entire Arizona/New Mexico border region with Allman Brothers playing and never have a need to play another disk?

Just seems to go with the territory.

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Don't Miss Out On Free Traffic!
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Social Power Linking - Social Bookmarking - Potato - Potata!

This is an excellent article by Mark Doust from Site Reference.  If you are looking to tap into something new in your Power Linking campaign, social bookmarking is very much worth a look!

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Social Bookmarking for Traffic by Mark Daoust

A while back I wrote an article commenting on Yahoo’s public declaration that they were effectively conceding to Google in the search market. The point of the article was that Yahoo was not necessarily giving up as a business, but rather focusing its efforts on more modern forms of search. And what are these more modern forms of search? In a word, social networks which includes social bookmarking and variants on social bookmarking.

What is Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is one of the flagships of Web 2.0. The basic concept behind social bookmarking is that when thousands of people get together, bookmark their favorite pages, and apply descriptive tags to each page that they bookmark, certain websites will rise to the top as being more popular. The result of this is that surfers will be able to see what websites are currently popular among users.

The idea of social bookmarking seems to have been originated by Del.icio.us back in 2003. Just by visiting the front page of Del.icio.us you can see the social bookmarking in practice. On the right hand side of the page there is a column labeled ‘Popular’. These are websites that currently are receiving a lot of attention from users under specific keywords and phrases. These websites are listed under common ‘tags’ that users have given.

Digging for the News

Del.icio.us is not the only Web 2.0 flagship that relies on the power of the collective people. Arguably one of the most successful Web 2.0 enterprises is Digg. Digg is a news website which presents headlines from across the Internet. Unlike practically every other news website to date, however, Digg does not rely on editors to determine which news stories are worthy of their front page and which news stories they should ignore. Rather, Digg relies on the input of their users.

The system behind Digg is simple. Registered users can navigate their way to “Digg for Stories”. Here everyone can see all of the stories submitted to Digg. If a user likes one of the stories, they simply click on the “Digg It” link. If they do not like the story they can either ignore the story or report it as being lame, a duplicate story, or outright spam. If a story receives enough Diggs in a fast enough amount of time, it gets promoted to the front page.

The system seems to work fairly well. Digg has been smart enough to put into place anti-cheating devices which do a fairly good job of catching manipulators of their system. And if someone does break through these barriers, Digg users (often referred to as Diggnation) are usually pretty quick to point out the offending users.

Why Should I Care About These Services?

This is all fine and interesting, but you might be wondering why you should spend your precious time reading more of this article. The answer is simple: websites like Digg and Del.icio.us represent the opportunity to get a lot of new traffic as well as quality links to your website.

Digg and Del.icio.us offer the absolute best type of web traffic: viral traffic. Business owners know that the most reliable prospects are the prospects that come from the referral of someone else, and Digg and Del.icio.us offer just that. In order to get seen on a large scale from any of these websites that rely on a community of users, your content must be good enough to meet the approval of enough people to warrant the elevation of your site to the front page. This, in effect, is like one great recommendation for your website.

So how much traffic are we talking about? Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net noted that when a post of his reached the front page of Del.icio.us, he saw around 8,000 visitors that day from Del.icio.us alone. This does not take into account all the bloggers and website owners who discovered his site from Del.icio.us, posted a link to it on their site or in a forum, which would in turn generate more traffic to his site.

Tech-Recipes, a relatively common website on the front page of Digg, wrote a great post on what the digg effect is like. The traffic numbers they post are quite astounding. From being featured in Digg, they regularly see 5,000 – 10,000 visitors per day. This is not unusual either – websites that are featured in Digg are often subject to what has been dubbed the “Digg Effect”. It is quite common, unfortunately, for a dug website to receive so much traffic that it brings down the server.

Now both Del.icio.us and Digg users do not tend to be very active users. This has been pointed out by more than one person. Typically they do not click on ads, they do not comment on blogs, and they do not register for an account with you. But the name of the website marketing game is always going to be free exposure, and social bookmarking services like these are great ways to get a lot of free exposure for your website. In addition, these sites will often have secondary and tertiary effects which you may not be able to link back directly to your initial exposure on them.

I’m Sold – Where Do I Sign Up?

So you are now sold on just how great it can be to be featured on sites like Del.icio.us and Digg. The natural question to ask here is how do you get featured on these sites. I am pretty sure the answer I am about to give is going to be one that you do not like as it is a tired phrase:

You need good, unique content.

Sound familiar? If you follow SEO at all, you undoubtedly have been told that good, unique content is the best way to get to the top of the rankings. The same thing holds true, but even more so, for social bookmarking websites.

In order to be featured on these sites, your website does not have to meet the approval of an automated bot that is scouring the web for information. Instead, your website needs to meet the approval of actual human beings who are going to look at your website, determine whether they like it or not, and then tell you the honest truth.

In the past, web pages that have been successful in being featured may have the following traits:

They are usually unique
They often have useful content, such as a tutorial
They may contain breaking news or an exclusive report
They are sometimes particularly humorous
It may be free content for downloading (free wallpapers have done well with Digg)
It will rise to the top naturally – without manipulation

After I wrote the article on Yahoo I received an email asking how one would optimize their site for social bookmarking services. The response to that would have to be simple: optimize your site by offering some great, free content that anyone can access.

A Word to the Wise – Don’t Cheat

As a quick sidebar, it is important to note that those who try to cheat the systems usually find themselves worse off than they were to begin with. It is very tempting when dealing with a system like Del.icio.us and Digg to try and manipulate the system to artificially get your website to the top.

The problem with this is simple: if you do succeed in manipulating the system, but do not have the content to really deserve a featured placement, you will undoubtedly turn off more visitors than attract. If your content is deserving of a featured placement, it should rise there naturally.

Social Bookmarking – The Future of Search?

The point of the article which I referenced above was not to state that Yahoo was washed up, but rather that Yahoo was on the cusp of a new Internet and a new form of search. They recognized that Google would not be beat in the search market; however, this does not mean that they can not beat Google by creating a market more effective than search.

Social bookmarking is already becoming a very effective way for experienced web surfers to find the latest information on a particular subject. Do you want to see some of the latest video’s to become popular? Just goto http://del.icio.us/tags/video and you can see what others are discovering and bookmarking as valuable. Want to find some rather obscure guide on Ruby on Rails? Lookup the common tags for Ruby on Rails and search through these resources.

Social bookmarking has the great ability to reach where search engines cannot: by using viral marketing and popular opinion, social bookmarking has the ability to discover what is important before any bot can spider the site and rank it among the thousands of sites available. Granted, social bookmarking will never replace search completely, but as it grows in popularity, web users are quickly discovering a whole new way to discover web pages that they would never discover otherwise.

So take the time today to examine Digg and Del.icio.us. Take a little more time to find new social websites like Digg and Del.icio.us (they are popping up all over the place) and learn what seems to make users on these sites click. Social technologies are here to stay, and they are only going to grow in popularity. Right now is a golden opportunity for you to gain great exposure for your website if you simply learn how to use these services.

About This Author:
Mark Daoust is the owner of Site Reference.
 

Tags: website promotion

Test Results for New Advertising Service That Actually Worked - Really Well!

I just tried a mailing to a list I recently built through a service that I wasn’t expecting much from.

You know how it is when you are testing things that look too good to be true.  Just in case…lol.

Most of the time I confirm my hidden suspicions that it is not worth trying.  This time I was pleasantly surprised.

The service is called Free Ad Depot and is run by respectable, long time marketers who know what they are doing.  (I have always respected these guys, but this site they created that I am sending you to?  It had some things to prove to me first!)

I sent that email out to 7500 of their members and got a FLOOD of traffic and a 35% optin at http://www.jackhumphrey.com!

And they are still coming.

So do I recommend grabbing a free account over there? 

Very much so!  Go get your account set up and see all the kinds of advertising you can do.  It really gets results!

(How do I know I am getting exactly 35% optin rate as of right this minute?  Easy!  Click Here!)

Tags: list building, website promotion

Marlon Sanders Free Amazing Formula 2006 PDF

Marlon Sanders is one of the only guys who has consistently sold his marketing book for longer than I have sold Power Linking.  FAR longer.

Marlon is a trail blazer and his book “The Amazing Forumla” has sold tens of thousands of copies over the years.  He is a hoot to listen to as well if you ever get the chance to see him at a conference or get on the phone with him!  Everyone comes back in the room when Marlon gets on stage.

He is probably the only guy to ever cross marketing training with a Southern Baptist evangelism delivery style.  It really is a funny, yet at the same time, empowering thing to witness!

Anyway, I grabbed Marlon’s new PDF with a preview of “The Amazing Formula 2006.”  And I have to say, it’s pretty meaty content for a freebie! 

Also, information is included about a free Amazing Formla birthday bash Marlon is throwing with some incredible guest speakers. 

Download Amazing Formula 2006 preview PDF.

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Survival of the Fittest: Hunting For Profits In Packs!

Wolves hunt and thrive in packs.

Bison survive and thrive in herds.

Lions group and form dynasties in prides.

Successful marketers network, joint venture, and also form packs.

People use “the herd mentality” analogy ad nauseum to describe something negative.  Rarely do people make a case FOR the herd mentality, even though herding has proven an effective and necessary survival tactic in nature since the beginning of time, including our human “packs.”

The herd mentality is only a negative thing when the herd does something collectively stupid, like run off the edge of a cliff because hunters are frightening them with fire.

Online, the negative herd mentality is when a brilliantly deceptive marketing campaign drives hoards of people to buy something stupid.  These are not herds though, they are hoards.  There’s a very large difference between the two that people who use the herd mentality analogy get completely wrong 100% of the time.

Professional groups of marketers get more done collectively than individual marketers can accomplish on their own.  This is also proven to be true throughout the history of marketing with hundreds of examples of very successful associations and memberships.

Good groups founded by honest people dedicated to truly advocating and furthering the interests of their members are, by definition, in existence to do something as a group that individuals cannot easily accomplish.

Some succeed at this.  Many fail.  But no failure can or should be used to throw the baby out with the bath water.  It would go against all that mother nature and human nature have taught us.

The economy of scale that groups, memberships, or associations command is far greater than the abilities of an individual.  Unless that individual is already a major success and has unlimited resources, there is no way they can move as fast in their market or pull from a collective pool of resources to achieve success.

To get specific, we can use a real life example of marketers who “hunt in packs” to achieve, both individually and collectively, far more than marketers who depend on scraps of information and resources thrown to them after the pack has had its fill.

For niche website publishers, the most powerful group on the web is hands down the Content Desk Charter Membership.  I say this not just because I am a partner in that effort.  I say it because I know what else is being offered by other “herds” and can say with 100% confidence that we are the alpha pack. 

Heck, we started software assisted niche content site publishing!  Everything that exists outside our pack today related to software assisted content site publishing with was created after we formed and copied from what we started.

In fact, many of the other herds exist because they tried to copy what the alpha pack (Charter Members) have created.  Many have come into our pack, observed what they thought was the reason for our success, and left to try and re-create it on their own.

Our pack has yet to be remotely duplicated elsewhere.  The missing ingredient in all cases of copycat memberships is purely and simply the sincerity of the pack leaders and their dedication to the “cause” of the membership.

For our pack, the cause is creating and profiting from high-traffic, high-value content sites created around specific topics large and small.

There is a lot that goes with this cause.  You need the tools to create sites (which is what most other people copy thinking that is the biggest reason for our success) and you need professional care and training to make those sites successful.

This means constant study and testing of site monetization tactics for optimum profit power.

It means that after a site is built, it is worth nothing until it is also properly marketed.  So a good pack will give its members the ability to turn the sites they create into high traffic sites through professional website promotion tools and training.

It means personal care and support for any member who needs extra help.  No one gets left behind or ignored until they ultimately prove to be a detriment to the pack as a whole.  This makes the pack stronger and more capable of increasing its strength by attracting new pack members who turn out to be assets rather than liabilities.

In the wild, pack members will occasionally wander off to find a new pack if the alpha leaders can no longer protect and lead them.  This happens at times when the leaders are not challenged and replaced by younger, stronger members of the pack.  Online it happens when leaders have obviously stopped putting as much into furthering the goals of the pack.

This disintegration happens to most packs on the web.  There are always other packs trying to attract new blood by making what they offer seem better than the current benefits the weak members of another pack enjoy.

Weak members of all packs are the ones who never gain a foothold anywhere, never gain the respect of their fellow pack members, and always seem to need more attention and help than the average pack member.

This is clearly seen on the web as people go back and forth jumping from one thing to another and never settling down to make themselves a successful pack member in any one place for very long.

They garner less respect from whatever pack they’ve joined most recently, because respect is earned and they are either too new or not in the mood to earn anything.

The uncomfortable feeling starts right away upon joining something new because the weak know, deep down, they are going to be gone the next time someone from another pack offers something that seems better.

When strong pack members sense this is the type of person they are dealing with, they shun that member just like packs do in the wild when a member is too hurt to support without putting the whole pack in jeopardy.

Packs want healthy, vibrant, strong members and seek them out actively in order to make the pack as strong as possible.

Once the pack has that reputation among all other packs, more people want to be members there.  For the shelter (from misinformation and scams) and for the comradery and that cherished, sought-after feeling of being in the best place they can be for their business and their family.

For content site publishing there is no stronger pack than Content Desk’s publishing group.  No other pack on the web even disputes this fact.

Our pack’s members are strong publishers who know how to “hunt” down niches and build sites that dominate those niches.  Collectively and as individual pack members, pound for pound, there is no other more successful, better trained association of content site publishers on the web.

We have the highest number of “alpha leaders” who impart their experience and wisdom to our pack than any other content site publishing group on the web.  These are people like John Reese, Michel Fortin, Carl Galletti, Stephen Pierce, Brad Fallon and many more.

So, the lesson in this story is that you need to be in a pack of like-minded, capable professionals if you want the kind of success that comes only from what you can learn and achieve by being in a strong group.

If you dream of owning and maybe someday selling a network of sites (assets) valued at hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, you can only do something like that with the help of a strong pack that can get you to your goal far faster than learning and doing outside the pack, by yourself.

Our pack is called The Fab 400.  We are the Charter Members of Content Desk’s premiere publishing group.  And we are looking for strong, motivated, fearless new members to make our pack even stronger.  And to make you the success you dream about every night.

You can decide to belly up to the kill as a pack member, or wait until the pack has had their fill and come back for whatever scraps are left.

This has been the way of the world since the beginning.

There are two packs I recommend that are at the top of their game in different specialties:

Content Desk Charter Membership for Publishing Profitable Content Sites!

OR

Content Propulsion Lab for Creating and Syndicating Articles and New Media Content for Massive Targeted Traffic!

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Real Link Popularity Has Nothing To Do With Search Engines

Although Google claims to have coined the phrase “link popularity” as a way to describe how they ranked sites in the early days, and still do in some fashion, link popularity means far more to website promoters than a measure of search engine worthiness.

Link popularity as a marketing tool was around long before Google or any search engines existed. Links are the thread that weaves the web together.  Search engines didn’t invent this, they capitalized on it just like all sites on the web have since the beginning.

Your link popularity in a real sense is not a contrived “weight and measure” of your site’s worthiness to be ranked well in a search engine.

Your link popularity is actually based upon how many traffic-driving, visible links you have pointing to your site from other sites in your niche and even from less “relevant” sites than search engines want you to be linked to.

If you can get targeted traffic to your site from another site, regardless of search engine imposed rules for relevancy, by exchanging links or posting on a forum or sharing an article or press release, by all means do so!

Do not worry about people telling you that you are going to ruin your rankings in the engines if you don’t link properly.  90% of the advice out there is from search engine junkies and geeks who rely 100% on search engine traffic.

Without search engines, they couldn’t market their sites to save their lives.  Of course they don’t want to do anything to hurt their rankings, their entire livelihood is tied up in that one source of traffic!

Those people are far different from average website owners.  We take the search engine rankings we can get PLUS all the other traffic from other sites that we can get.  According to our own in-house case studies that’s 80%-85% of the traffic of average sites that have a well rounded marketing campaign!

So it is easy to see why we pay less attention to search engines than the geeks do.  The engines only contribute at best 15% of the visitors to any of the sites in our network.  (And that’s for purposefully optimized sites using all the tricks and tactics the geeks told us to!)

Therefore, nowadays we give search engines no more than 15% of our time and go for real link popularity that includes a plethora of promotion options.

While people who sit and wait on search engine traffic often find themselves getting bored with little to do, we never run out of promotion that we can do for our sites.

There is always something you can be doing to gain link popularity
(link popularity = marketing) every moment you are logged on.

If you find yourself twiddling your thumbs without a clue what you are going to do next to promote your site, there is something wrong with your marketing campaign.  It is deficient in Vitamin Link.

You can fix an anemic marketing campaign by spending more time getting content created and syndicated, adopting RSS as a highly valuable traffic generator, and making partnerships out of link partners.

Get (and give) more than simple link exchanges.  Exchange articles, other content, and get each others’ links in prominent places around your sites.

Exchange newsletter sign up pages (squeeze pages) or allow people to additionally opt in to your partners list after they opt in to yours.

There are far more ways to promote your site and gain valuable, REAL link popularity than myopic and short-sighted search engine marketing could ever give you.

Don’t get caught up in the search engine marketing myth.  There are only ever 10 spots available for your keywords that will get you any  significant traffic from any given engine.

What surprises most people who get far enough along in their real link popularity campaign is that they get great rankings in the engines after all.  Just by marketing to their audience and not to the engines.

Case in point:  A lot of search engine traffic is generated to my blog and other sites from people searching for “jack humphrey.”  But customers and readers KNOW to search for my name from all the other marketing that I do to put my name at their fingertips.  It’s branding as much as link popularity.

The end result is easy search engine rankings for a name that is not competitive but that, because of all the other marketing efforts in my campaign, puts me in the right places in the engines without any more effort than simply increasing my link popularity by marketing to my niche market.

Marketing to your market, wherever they surf and not just where they occasionally search, is a fail-safe way to market any kind of site on the web.  One that lowers the risk of failure (over single-minded search engine obsession) and guarantees longevity and ever-increasing traffic over time.

Tags: Search Engines

Marketing As If Your Life Depended On It!

The number one surefire way to be a success with your online business.

You’ve surely heard stories of miracle feats of accomplishment and even brute strength by ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

Little old ladies lifting cars off of trapped loved ones.  Ordinary people achieving fortune and fame out of dire financial circumstances.

The stories you never hear, because they are too ridiculous even for the tabloids, are the ones about people who do nothing and achieve great things.  For instance, you can read in tabloids (the most wasteful use of trees known to mankind) about 50 pound newborn babies, alien abductions, and people with arms growing out of their foreheads.  Yet you never see stories like the ones being told in many sales letters on the web!

We have been conditioned, through savvy but unethical salesmanship, to expect everything in online business and making money to be easy. 

• “Pop this product into your marketing mix and watch the money roll in!”
• “Imagine, in just 30 days you could be making $20,000.00 per month!”

The people who don’t fall for this are making real content sites, products, and services.  True assets that grow in value and provide solid profits month after month.

With the cheap tools available for putting up sites with professional content, audio, video, producing professional grade products, and marketing your site or network of sites with totally free traffic methods, there is simply no excuse for listening to the hype and avoiding the only thing missing from the success equation:  work!

Those who do and those who talk…

Every successful marketer online has a story.  We’ve heard many of them loud and clear:  people coming from bankruptcy and severe debt to owning successful online properties and buying big cars and houses.  Some of these stories are, believe it or not, actually true.  But the majority of them are heavily embellished in order to make a sale.  In fact, if someone is telling you this cookie-cutter hard luck story, it is probably quite an enhanced version of the truth.

The real Heros (to themselves and their families) are the people who come up against insurmountable odds and turn dire circumstances into their own pot of gold.  And they are too proud to ever open up and tell you just how desperate things were for them before they hit big with their business.

These people all have one thing in common:  They decided in some fashion, in their own way, that their lives depended on their success with an online business.  They were at rock bottom and knew that life would never be worth living unless they at least gave a monumental, all-out effort to their online business idea.

Now many self-help gurus would say that is an unhealthy attitude.  Everyone is a winner.  Stay within your means.  Average is beautiful.  Yeah right!

It is JUST the attitude above that separates the wheat from the chaff.  In this world, the REAL world, incredible feats of strength and resolve are the actions all success stories have in common.  In business and in life, deep down, everyone knows this is true.  Despite which stage off denial they may be in when facing the fact that they are going to have to put forth monumental effort for as long as it takes to see their dreams come true.

I come from a wildlife and conservation background.  I am one of those guys glued to Discovery Channel when the special on African lions comes on.  Life on Earth is designed to be challenging and competitive.  The strong truly do survive and the weak perish in the real world.

Studying nature is the perfect way to get back to your roots and understand on a fundamental level the fact that we all came from a time when our lives depended on our every move. 

One wrong step off a cliff and there was no medevac helicopter to swoop in with morphine and a fast trip to a hospital.  You couldn’t sleep in and let the hunting wait till noon, because that’s when your prey was bedded down and hidden.  Lazy hunters and their families starved to death.

We as a society have gotten punch drunk and lazy and this has shaped our attitudes about independence and financial well-being.  We expect lots of valuable things for free and lots of things to be done FOR us as if we somehow have earned the right to have anything and everything handed to us.

Online business plays by the exact same rules that the lions in Kenya play by.  Kill or be killed.  Eat or be eaten.  You cannot sit around waiting for someone to come up with a magic pill or secret solution to all your pain and worries.  (And you’d better not buy anything from someone promising those things!)

So the most valuable exercise that you will ever do to provide for yourself online is marketing as if your life actually depended on it.

Learning your craft and learning from those who can prove their marketing prowess with real results.  And I am not talking about weekend reading.  I mean LEARN your craft inside and out until you can tell the people you learned from something they don’t even know!

I am talking about at LEAST 30 days of all consuming, obsessive compulsive, single minded, absolute concentration on your business.  It can be your idea for a product, a sales pitch, how you design the perfect content site for a market niche, whatever. 

If someone had a gun to your head, which person’s advice and training would you follow for the next 30 days?  If your life depended on it, how hard would you work on all the things you need to learn to be one of the elite few who make excellent profits online with high traffic sites, stellar product sales, and a growing asset base that has as much potential to sell for profit as your home does.

Doing this exercise will set you up with habits of successful people who naturally market as if their lives depended on it.  Doing this will finally put you in the game and on track for the kind of successful online business that will support you and your family.

If you are lacking in any of the following:

• Ability to use simple HTML to build, control, or modify a web page
• Ability to FTP a site to your hosting account
• Ability to understand JV marketing and build a buzz around your product
• Ability to write well enough to communicate your ideas and the value of your site or product
• Ability to make a popular, profitable site without spending a dime on advertising
• Or any of the other abilities needed to win the game of online marketing for yourself…

Then you need to get straight into study mode and step right up to the training, memberships, and products that are going to help you increase your ability to SURVIVE!

A lion in the wild doesn’t think zebras and gazelles are just going to run across the plains and pop into his mouth.  Nothing is going to land in your lap that will miraculously make you a fortune with no expertise and no work involved.

The only way to cut corners online is to find people who can help you speedily get past all the mistakes you are about to make and teach you how to get on top of a market as fast as possible through their experienced advice and professional tools. 

If you were suddenly turned into a lion and plopped in the middle of a Kenyan wildlife preserve with no hunting skills, what would you do?  Try to learn to track and hunt your food by yourself?  OR would you find some lions to teach you how to BE a lion so you can simply survive?

If you are ready to be a lion and go out there and TAKE what’s yours, then spend the next 30 days marketing as if your life depended on it.  Because it does!

Jack Humphrey is the managing partner for ContentDesk and Content Propulsion Lab.  He is also the author of the Power Linking series of website promotion courses that have taught thousands of online marketers how to get millions and millions of free visitors.  Google:  Power Linking

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World Internet Real Estate Development (WIRED) On The Rise!

Content Site Building Is On The Rise! People are Cashing IN and Cashing OUT with online real estate…

A neat thing is happening on the web.  Sort of an e-renaissance in a sense.  A small but hardy and professional group of internet niche site publishers is picking up on the boom in internet real estate development.  They are becoming WIRED, and it means awesome, content-rich niche sites are popping up all over the net.

Almost every surfer on the web has run into a junky site intended only for them to click an ad.  You know the kind of site I’m talking about…no content, nothing of value to the visitor, and very frustrating to land on.

This is the intention of the developer of such sites.  They WANT you to be in a hurry to get away…through one of their pay-per-click links.

These sites are fast disappearing from the big engines.  This is great news.  What’s even better is the sites that replace them in the engines are starting to look very nice, both in design and quality of content.

More and more searchers are starting to actually find answers to their searches on the first try again!

Rest assured, the people behind these new content sites are not the same people they’ve replaced.  These are folks who actually care about their visitor experience on their sites.  They want their visitors to come back again and are providing enough value to visitors to actually bookmark them and do just that.

What “World Internet Real Estate Developers” have re-discovered is that asset building is far more successful, responsible, grown up, and profitable than building spam sites.

They are starting to build sites that they are proud to show to the world, and the world is responding with great enthusiasm!  Even the engines are treating these developers with the respect and admiration they deserve.

Good content makes good “cents” too.  Of course that phrase has been bandied about so much in the last year that it seemed as if everyone was talking about it but few were actually practicing what they were preaching.

The value of a fairly aged content site with a few hundred visitors a day is very high compared to just a year ago.  Many people invest in one or two of these niche sites that are already in the engines and getting traffic when they find them for sale.

And a good investment it is!  If you can get someone to part with a modest traffic site that is already seasoned in the engines, you are lucky to snag one for anywhere from
$5,000-$100,000+ depending on the niche, products, and income of the site.

The developers of rich content sites are not only walking to the bank with daily income that rivals the corporate salary they replaced, but can cash out of a network of niche sites at very tidy sums.  A fairly large network of sites, from 100-1000 could net the developer millions of dollars in fact.

Who is buying?  Other large developers and even very large Fortune 500 companies along with investors of all kinds who turn the network traffic into gold of their own.

It is very much like the real estate boom after the last world war.  Many many developers lined their pockets by developing new housing all over the country for returning soldiers.

The internet is in dire need of great sites.  The vast majority of sites on the web really, really suck! 

If you think the net is full, you are only partially right.  Combined with some great sites with great information in hundreds of specialty niches from fly fishing to scrap booking, there is also a great deal of junk out there taking up a lot of space.

Anyone who has been on the net for awhile has experienced her fair share of lost surfing time on disappointing, meaningless, content-less sites.

Smart niche site developers are quietly building quality, feature and content-rich sites to capitalize on this terrible “year of the spam site.” We all know content is king, but it is finally starting to pay off for the people who develop content-rich sites in a big way these days.

Hopefully the decline of “gimmick” sites will continue for the good of the entire internet community.  If the developers of these sites are richly rewarded, then more power to them.  They deserve it!

While there is an answer to almost every question a person could ever have somewhere on the net, for most surfers those answers are buried far too deeply on obscure sites to find.

With content sites being developed in thousands of niches with the goal of being found and utilized, surfers and researchers are going to be able to quickly and conveniently find the information they seek on pleasant, rich sites in the near future.

And the people who develop these e-real estate assets are supported by the income these sites generate and any partial or complete sales of the networks of sites that they build.

Sounds like what the internet was supposed to be in the first place!

Jack Humphrey is the managing partner for http://www.contentdesk.com.  More information World Internet Real Estate Development (W.I.R.E.D.) can be found at
http://contentdesk.com/csb

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Top Blog and RSS Submission Sites and Directories

There are far more blog and rss submission sites on the web than there are worthwhile blog directories and rss submission sites to submit to.

As a professional marketer, you strive to eliminate wasted time and resources on things that don’t further your business. Submitting to blog directories and RSS feed directories that have little or no traffic or importance on the web is a big time waster.

The most authoritative list of the top blog and RSS feed directories is Robin Good’s Top55 Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites.

That list is going to save you a major headache over trying to figure out the best places to market your blog yourself.

RSS Submission Software

RSS Submit - I have used this software with great results. I can get links and spiders back to any blog on the planet quickly and easily with this software and do so for my blog here on a monthly basis.

Description: RSS Submit uses a combined method of automatic submissions and auto-filling web page submit forms to automate the process of submitting your RSS feeds, publishing your content, and getting more traffic with proven results. You can grab an additional plugin that will submit your blog to Robin Good’s Top55 Blog Directories much faster than by hand!

Other useful software

Blog Blaster - This software pings over 30 blog directories and can get you faster attention from search engines.

Tags: list of places to submit rss feeds, rss directory of directories, rss submission directory, submit your feed

What is Power Linking?

I wrote the first edition of Power Linking back in 2002.  For 4 years this internet marketing course, now in its 4th major revision, has been sold to thousands of online business owners and publishers.

It is very difficult for internet marketing courses to maintain their staying power in such a volatile, constantly changing “webscape.”  Search engines change their algorithms for ranking sites frequently and new marketing tactics come and go everyday.

The reason Power Linking is still one of the best selling courses on the web is simply because it was conceived from the basic principles that make up the web.  Without which, the internet as you know it would not exist.

Links are what make the web work.  How search engines value links changes over time, but links at their very most basic level are the thread that weave this big web of sites together.

That is the essence of Power Linking.  Many people mistake Power Linking for old reciprocal linking techniques and outdated tactics because it has been around so long.  As if it has not grown with the changes in the current internet marketing environment.

And that is a big mistake to make.  At least 10 people buy Power Linking each and everyday.  The returns are very very low, so something must be working for my customers!

Because my tactics are built upon solid internet marketing mainstays and not fly-by-night theories that pop up on the web seemingly every hour, Power Linking has enjoyed what the vast majority of courses on the web have never been able to achieve:  longevity and staying power.

More importantly it gives ordinary people with great sites the power to get marketing results usually reserved for deep pocket sites dripping with ample venture capital.

Power Linking is a mindset as much as a system for driving website traffic to any kind of site.  I make sure to infuse content into the course that supports the tactics with a certain focus a marketer must have to be successful online.

As you can plainly figure from my free chapter of Power Linking, I don’t put much stock in search engine marketing.  Not that search engine traffic isn’t important, it is, but I really work to bring people down from the clouds and put search engine marketing in its place in a proper, well-rounded marketing campaign.

This has saved thousands of online business owners from the pain and suffering inflicted on their businesses by being reliant on only one traffic source.  If religion is the opiate of the people, then search engine marketing is the opiate of the webmaster.

Far too much lip service is given to search engine marketing and not nearly enough to the rest of what it takes to get traffic to your site or sites.  It is almost like a get-rich-quick scheme the way people market search engine services on the web these days.

And search engine marketing is far from quick - about anything anymore.

Power Linking gives you a passive-aggressive approach to search engine marketing.  I have proven time and again with case studies and testing that if you market online with a well-rounded campaign that targets your very best prospects wherever they surf, the engines will give you what you want.

Google even says the same thing.  Market to your customers and not the engines and the engines will reward you for the content you carefully and thoughtfully provide your visitors.  This includes the content you syndicate as well as on-site content.

The biggest mistake I ever made was the title of the course.  I have reached critical mass with it, so I would kill all my hard work to change the title now.  But the name Power Linking, according to surveys I have done with prospects, gives people the idea that the course is only about a specific kind of linking, like the now-not-so-effective reciprocal linking directories we made a killing with in the early years of Google’s link popularity index.

The more proper name, just far less catchy, would be “This is How Professional Marketers Market Their Sites!”  With maybe a subtitle, equally pedantic, “A complete marketing system of tactics that the best marketers online swear by.”

Finally, Power Linking is for the masses.  It should be required reading for college courses on website promotion.  (I am working on that actually!)  There are no gimmicks or risky techniques that can get you banned from search engines.  And the basic tactics work and work and work, no matter how many times the search engines change their algorithms.

That’s because you can take a hit at Yahoo, go down in rankings, and still be getting plenty of traffic from other sources to keep your website chock full of daily unique hits.

Tens of thousands of websites have come and gone since Power Linking was first released.  And a huge portion of those sites could still be in business had their owners only taken the course!

Many thousands of sites are cranking away with hits and profits because of Power Linking.  It is responsible for untold millions of targeted visitors to tens of thousands of sites all over the web.

Well-rounded, solid, proven (time and again) marketing.  That’s what Power Linking really is.  And unless I simply cash out and buy an island to retire on, it will be here years from now giving students the benefit of realizing their dreams of driving all the traffic they want to their sites.

If it wasn’t true, I wouldn’t waste time promoting something for which everyone would request a refund!  I simply wouldn’t be in business… now 4 years later.

So, grab yourself a copy of Power Linking today and start bringing your site the traffic it needs to make your dreams a reality!

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