Bloggers Go Mainstream

Blogging used to belong solely to people ranting, gossiping, letting us in on their (usually) mundane, unremarkable lives and views on politics and myriad other topics.

Big bloggers were simply the guys and gals who did the same kind of thing, but gained a large following, usually due to better writing and being more insightful, provocative, and calculating with their content.

But now there are bloggers who get paid big time for their opinions, rants, remarkable, and unremarkable observations.

In this month’s Business 2.0 magazine, the cover story “Blogging for Dollars,” really puts a head on the current evolution of the blogosphere. Bloggers were once the outcasts. The news maker-wannabees that mainstream news media loved to make fun of and ignore.

Now no one can ignore the blogs. They are even a core part of news aggregation on major news shows like The Situation Room on CNN.A growing interest also comes from corporations looking for better, more effective advertising outlets.

And they are finding them on blogs. Not your average [tag]blogs[/tag], mind you. But blogs with following and huge readership.

The difference between TV and radio advertising and blog advertising is obvious: A blogger with following and respect with ads on their blog can trump a cold TV ad any day of the week. Both in price and in conversion.

At least that’s what advertisers are banking on. Bloggers with following and high traffic flow have people who are clearly swayed by and interested in what their favorite blogger has to say.

Therefore advertisers can take advantage of the relationship and tie their brand to thousands of subscribers favorite online personality.

Business 2.0, September 2006 highlights several bloggers-gone-mainstream. One of which is Michael Arrington, the brains behind TechCrunch.com, a high-traffic, high-revenue blog reportedly earning over $60,000.00 per month in ad revenue.

Not bad for a [tag]blogger[/tag]. And all you need is a following.

So how do these guys get their dedicated readership?

Here is how Saheli S.R. Datta puts it in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers” Business 2.0, September 2006:

1. Focus intently on a narrow niche
2. Set up your blog so that each post gets its own permanent URL
3. Think of your blog as a database
4. Blog frequently and regularly
5. Use striking images in your posts
6. Enable comments and interact with readers
7. Make friends with other bloggers

Datta goes into detail about each of those habits in the article, but I am going to MAKE you read the article and grab a copy of Business 2.0 because you simply must read the whole thing.

If you are a blogger who aspires to do great things and turn your passion into a full-time big business, there are formulas to follow and technology beyond what you get with a basic free blogging account that can help.

Purists will say things like “sell out” and “mainstream” and “suit” when describing profitable blogs. But going mainstream and making money with a blog is part of the original spirit of blogging: “Screw the establishment, I’m doing it MY way.”

The only difference in this case is that [tag]blogging[/tag] itself is the establishment and people who make money with blogs are simply rebelling against poverty blogging.

Tags: blog advertising, blog promotion, blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogs, business 2.0, tech crunch

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Content Desk Announces The Internet’s First Extreme White Hat Authority Site Building System

Richmond, IN, (PRWEB) August 29, 2006 –- Content Desk announces a new website building system that claims to please Google, Yahoo, and MSN with high-content, pre-optimized publishing system.

The days of spam site generation seem to finally be over, and the last nail in the coffin of spam generators, spam content, and scrapers is Content Desk’s “Authority Site Publishing System.”

“We created the software and tactics for these high-performance content sites and yet I still cannot believe how well they pull traffic. One advantage is no one has to try and hide their sites from Google using our system,” said Jack Humphrey, Managing Partner for Content Desk and Co-Founder of Content Publisher’s Alliance. “The other big advantage is the sites are self-optimized. Just add content.”

“We’ve finally accomplished what every spam generator programmer always wanted their software to do: Build high-traffic, real content sites that grow in value over time and are perfect for short-term profits and a real exit strategy when it’s time to sell,” added Humphrey.

The sites are real and the content is highly targeted and relevant to the niches of the sites built on the Content Desk platform. These are definitely not spammy sites. They have the look, feel, and performance of sites like About.com.

Mark Braunstein, a partner in Content Desk, says “We cracked the code. It seems obvious now, but we simply are giving the search engines exactly what they have been asking for. Problem was we never trusted they would reciprocate and rank us for it. Now we know they do and they put us in front of competitors using static sites and old publishing methods more often than not.”

Content Desk is planning a more “plug and play” software suite that will be 100% newbie friendly. At which point their expansion plans are dramatic.

“Right now we are looking at around $1,500,000.00 in revenue for this year, which is $500,000.00 more than our first year. When we release the new site building software suite as a pre-installed component of the hosting, our membership numbers will be headed to higher levels than ever before.” said Humphrey.

At $249 per month, this solution is not cheap for the average mom and pop shop. But the results seem to speak for themselves. Case studies show a plethora of top ten results for competitive keywords across the big three and across a wide range of niches.

“Giving people the ability to create sites with out-of-the-box values of $5000.00+ with no traffic at all, this is what our fees are really for.

“Once they experience the cash flow an authority site can generate, the monthly cost of membership is irrelevant to them. For that level of power and profitability, $249 is a drop in the bucket.” remarked Braunstein.

It looks like projections for Content Desk’s growth in 2007 could be right on target, with a major social networking solution geared toward online small business owners (in the pipeline) coupled with the rapid recent growth Content Publishers Alliance has already experienced since launching their new authority site publishing system.

“We are shooting for 1000 happy, profitable members as soon as possible.” Humphrey said. “After a year’s worth of research and development and over $500,000 in hard costs, we are very excited about and proud of this ground breaking authority site publishing tool set.

“We are putting Fortune 500 quality tools in the hands of people who previously had no means to play with the toys the big corporations have. And we have some tools even the big boys would die for.”

Braunstein adds “We have a perfect tool set for real publishers and writers to simply focus on their content, build highly profitable, high-traffic, extreme white hat sites and not worry about SEO. No one has ever done this before.”

###

Press Contact: Jack Humphrey
Company Name: Content Desk, Inc.
Email: email protected from spam bots
Phone: 765-962-4309
Website: http://www.contentdesk.com/csb

Download this press release as an Adobe PDF document.

Tags: authority sites, content desk, extreme white hat, seo site building, site builder software, website builder, white hat

Something Fun and Theraputic

I have this client, Clay Cotton. He is a really cool guy with a history you wouldn’t expect for a client of an internet marketing consultant. Or maybe you would!

Clay is a former Blues/Jazz pianist who has literally played with all the biggest music superstars you can think of:

Jimi Hendrix
Jerry Garcia
Janis Joplin
Mick Jagger
Bonnie Raitt
Santana
Robert Cray
Etta James
Eric Clapton
Boz Skaggs
Taj Mahal
Hank Williams
The list goes on and on…

You can imagine how proud I am of having a client like this! The stories alone are worth a million bucks to me.

I say Clay is a “former” blues/jazz pianist because he suffers from MS and is in a wheelchair now. His greatest gift, playing incredible piano, is forever stifled because of this terrible disease.

But Clay has a CD he recorded before the MS hit and he sells it at CDBaby.com.

He is in a contest right now to get on a Sampler CD that CDBaby is putting out if he sells enough of his CDs in a month.

THAT’S what I am writing to you about. Clay is not paying me a dime to promote this and there isn’t an affiliate program (that I know of) that I will profit from.

I am simply excited for Clay and this opportunity he has to get his music out to as many people as possible if he wins this contest. (Or even places in the top 10!)

You can check out Clay’s CD here…

You can even hear sample tracks to hear how good this guy was - he was what many in the business considered the very best blues/jazz pianoman in the world!

These are actual quotes from the actual stars themselves…

“Truly a crack piano player and a damn good man to boot.”
– Bonnie Raitt, 1993

“Best blues piano man I’ve worked with - ever.”
– Robben Ford ( guitarist with George Harrison, Bob Dylan and many others), 1996

“Clay’s a monster on down-home, boogie-woogie. And he’s with ME!”
– Janis Joplin, 1967

Help me help Clay reach his goal - he isn’t that far away. You can do something great for someone who deserves it 100% and for yourself because you are going to love his music!

40% discount if you buy more than one - which you should since your friends are going to want to borrow it and you know how hard it is to get CDs back from friends!

Support a real musician and someone I am proud to call my friend, Clay Cotton.

Grab “Rough Stuff” here!

Thanks everyone!

Jack Humphrey
for the Friday Traffic Report!

P.S. - if for nothing more than thanking me for NOT sending you a promotion for the latest marketing gadget which you’ve already gotten an email about from 20 other people, grab this CD!

Tags: clay cotton, rough stuff

What the heck is Web 2.0?

Opinions are like blogs, everybody has one.

I love to read the debates in blogland about Web 2.0.

“What it is” depends on which part of the blogosphere cafeteria you hang out in.

The cool kids are all bashing the entire thing. “Why call progress and new technology anything? The web has been changing since day 1!”

The geeks haven’t even noticed. They are too busy creating custom tag cloud scripts by the dozen for corporate America giants who are seeing the opportunity about a year too late.

The media hacks are bouncing the term around without a clue as to what they even mean by it.

Others have adopted the term as a wakeup call that enough “new stuff” is happening all at once on the web, making for such profound and sweeping changes, that it ought to be called something.

I’m sitting with the kids at that table in the cafeteria. Or maybe alone at the table next to that table.

Here is my opinion on what Web 2.0 is, and some justification for why I use the term regardless of what the cool kids think because that’s how I was in high school. Why change now?

Web 2.0 is the sum of major technological advances in:

• publishing platforms (heavy on the RSS and Blog please),
• search (content may just get to be King after all), and
• linking (tagging, social bookmarking, the people have spoken, junk like that)

These advances are happening in all 6.5 corners of the web from the major players like Google, Microsoft, down to the shiny new social networking sites that pop up every 5 minutes.

I am a marketer, so I enjoy certain powers of insight and foresight that the altruistic cool kids (bloggers with nary a Google Adsense search box on their sites) just don’t get.

When Google is done with its apparent evolution toward letting their visitors help rank sites (ORION) and Microsoft launches Vista and IE7 leading to RSS and autodiscovery capabilities hitting every PC on planet Earth, maybe some of the cool kids will say “Yeah, this evolution of the web DOES deserve some recognition as being a bit busier than usual!”

There are lots of things no one knows. Not even me. The social networking phenomenon, from early file sharing (remember Napster? Power to the people!), to the Diggs, De.lici.ouses, Technoratis, MySpaces, TagWorlds and the like, is total chaos.

It looks organized with tag clouds and people going around burying stories of their arch enemies, but it is utter pandemonium. No one knows where the social networking thing is headed, but it certainly ain’t going away.

We’ve tasted the power our little networks have given us and we ain’t giving up nothin’.

While it’s funny to see the talking heads on CNN read silly little Web 2.0-laden statements off teleprompters, there really is something going on here that literally affects the world of marketing and website promotion.

The internet marketing community is still licking its wounds over Adsense spam sites being thrown out of the engines. And that was over with for all but the geekiest and most financially fortified a year ago!

Therefore, my chicken little battle cry for everyone to wake up and take notice of the changes a’comin’ needs a name!

The sky is gonna fall hard on tens of thousands of people who are building sites and marketing them with, forgive me, “Web 1.0″ technology and know-how.

So here I sit among the cool kids, the geeks, and the mixed bag of nuts who each have their own definition of what Web 2.0 really is and I can’t help but think “Who is actually preparing for the neat and scary stuff coming up in the rearview mirror?”

Here’s another funny one: All the gurus of internet marketing, well ok, the vast majority of them, are leading their flocks over the edge of the cliff with outdated publishing and marketing tactics. And not even Web 1.15 tactics at that!

Here’s some of what’s coming that affects anyone who markets anything online. You can call it Web 2.0 or give it a sign for a name like the guy formerly known as Prince 2.0. I don’t care. Just don’t use the debate to ignore the changes!

• Google is progressing fast and that means, according to real and actual tests, that content is finally getting its crown. Don’t have good original content? Then you don’t have a business anymore.
• And guess who changes when Google changes? Yep, Yahoo and MSN will have to give a damn again.
• Microsoft, love ‘em, hate ‘em, who cares? They are going to put RSS on the map big like and help to make it the backbone of information flow on the web once and for all. Care about that, because your business depends on how you react.
• Squeeze pages are out, relationship building through good content and telling the truth are officially in, although Seth Godin and others have been harping on these facts for years.
• Cheating is over as a viable way to do business. (Wait, when was cheating, black hat, whatever - EVER a viable business plan?)
• White hat is in. I make it sound cooler though by being the first to call it “Extreme White Hat!” (Devil fingers raised to the sky!)

What is Web 2.0? If nothing else it is a red flag to online business owners that something’s up. No one has ever given a name to fast changes on the internet before. That has to count for something.

The caution I throw out to my readers is this: Don’t get caught up in the silly debate about a name. Change, profound change, is happening that very few people I know are actually monitoring and testing new methodologies and strategies for. (Yeah, I ended that sucker with a preposition - deal with it!)

The way we market through information publishing to sell products and services is evolving hella fast. Some people get it and are already tagging their posts and keeping public bookmarks at De.lici.ous. At least they’re trying.

Most, unfortunately, are choosing to believe their gurus will take care of them and come out with a “Damn I Screwed Up” Generator to bail them out of something they could have been prepared for.

Tags: web 2.0

RateItAll: Now this is cool!

So I am completely ignoring the important deadlines I have coming up by pretending I am doing important research, and I stumble on this neat concept located at RateItAll.com.

They simply rate anything and everything and even allow webmasters to put ratings lists on their sites. See below.

You can make money with some sort of profit sharing thingy, but I am really happiest about being able to put something this useful on the Friday Traffic Report. See below dangit!

So if you are busy trying not to accomplish what you really SHOULD be doing right now, go rate some stuff below.  Worked for me.

Tags: blogging tools, cool tools, rate it all, ratings

CSS Optimization: Speed up your site!

Trying to get your blog or regular website to load faster?

The fine folks at BloggingPro.com have done exhaustive research to compare the top CSS optimizers so you don’t have to.

When you have done everything else to speed up your site’s load time, it’s time to look at your CSS files and see if some optimization wouldn’t hurt.

Tags: css, css optimization, slow loading times, slow sites, speed up your site

Blog Advertising: How much is allowed?

Seth Godin brings up some excellent points to ponder when it comes to monetizing blogs.

• How many ads should you run per page?
• What is most effective?
• Do my visitors love or hate my ads?

Seth says, in a post entitled “Promotion, self-promotion and [insert ad here]”

“…the nature of promotion is that “10″ is never enough. You always need to be at “11″. And when the competition hits 11, that becomes the new 10.”

I love it. The man always has a way of speaking the truth more clearly than most.

The idea is to test, of course, in order to know how much advertising your visitors will tolerate before starting to bounce right off your site.

Another consideration is that too much advertising gets in the way of others things, like list building, relationship building, and a search engine optimization tactic that is just coming into its own: [tag]visitor duration[/tag].

Got no visitor duration over 30 seconds showing in your log files? You got a problem.

It could be you are in too much of a hurry to scoot people off your site because you are monetizing too heavily with ads and not enough with reader relationship building.

Tags: blog ads, blog advertising, blog promotion, monetization, seth godin, visitor duration

Free Targeted Traffic: Become A Website Promotion God!

Ever wonder what it would be like to have the absolute power of a God?

Now the last thing you’d probably do with your power is send millions of visitors per day to your site.

I mean, you’d just be able to snap your fingers and plop ten pallets of gold bars on your front lawn, right?

So, for this exercise we need to restrict your new God-like power to to that of a Targeted Traffic God. A God with the power to drive targeted, clicking, buying, bookmarking, unique visitors to your site or network of sites by simply following a simple plan.

Is this truly possible?

You probably have a long line of scams and schemes behind you to prove you’ve been duped before.

In fact, the only thing keeping you here now is probably the fact that it is ME talking about this stuff. Not the no-name hucksters who shined you on to believe that marketing online is as easy as whatever their TGTBT (Too Good To Be True) product claims to do.

The fact is (and this has always been true) if some people really have figured out how to promote their sites like a God they only needed to step up and tell everyone about it.

Lots of “experts” have stepped up and pretended to tell you how they actually promote thier sites and build their lists, but obviously you haven’t gotten the whole story yet or you wouldn’t need to be here now.

(You probably haven’t bought Power Linking yet either.)

Problem is no one but me seems to want to share their personal favorite traffic-driving and list building systems for fear of them being diluted and made useless in a matter of months after word got out.

I’ve been sharing secrets like that for years and I am still in business. I seem to be one of the rare few experts giving away information that others keep to themselves or sell for big money. I should be out of business, right? LATWTTB (Laughing All The Way To The Bank)

Why, then, am I sharing some of my best tactics right here, right now? For FREE no less?

Here’s the honest to goodness truth:

I want a super high traffic, single page that tens of thousands of people link to so I can prove a point. That putting some incredibly valuable, free information on your site can get anyone a boatload of traffic and links with very little effort.

If you put something on your site that is so valuable that people flock to it and publishers write about it and link to it without being asked, you will get some incredible exposure!

The Truth Part 2: I’m going to make a killing on this marketing ploy. A ploy isn’t a bad thing if it helps a lot of people. JackHumphrey.com is a business, not a charity.

Yes, this page is a marketing “gimmick” but it is a damned good one AND this gimmick is going to get a lot of people a LOT of targeted traffic and subscribers.

How many experts have you ever followed who told you the plain and simple truth behind their motivation?

And how many of those people lived up to their promises?

Wouldn’t it be simply amazing if what I am about to show you worked and that everything I show you ends up being far more valuable to your business than any website promotion you have EVER done?

That’s what I am banking on!

Introducing: Jack Humphrey’s Simple Traffic System

Article and Press Release Syndication

You MUST syndicate your content. Get a blog, write cutting-edge content for your industry, and promote your RSS feed to place hundreds of fishing lines out on the web to haul in visitors.

Resources:

Content Desk WP Master - creates marketing blogs with one-of-a-kind quick install and all the plugins created by marketers to turn the world’s biggest “diary system” (Wordpress) into a powerful marketing platform.

Content Propulsion Lab: (This is INCLUDED in the offer above.) Or you can simply become a member directly. The bottom line is, we have a piece of software here that connects to well over 700 article syndication hubs. Use it and watch the links and traffic pour in.

Linking

There are two things you must download right away to understand and master website promotion through linking (NOT reciprocal linking!)

1. Power Linking - this is my course and is required reading, not some fluffy gimmick, for all website owners who want traffic - period.

2. Tag and Ping - Going public on June 2nd 2006, you can only get it here right now! This will be the biggest news in internet marketing for all of 2006, mark my words. If you aren’t tagging and pinging, your not a competitor in your niche!

3. Visit my Free Links and Search Engine Submission page for more linking and syndication resources.

4. The Reese Report: Grab a Free Copy And See For Yourself!

5. Grab a tag at Content Desk’s Top 500.

6. BLOG on a killer system. I post and rank - this post will simply rank. Every post I make has the highest potential to rank of any content in my niche because of the platform I use to publish.

Tags: free targeted traffic, free traffic, free visitors, targeted traffic, website traffic

How To Build An Authority Site 101

What makes a site an “authority site?”

1. Original content: this is a MUST for authority sites. There is not a single website on the web that does exceptional traffic and income without original, high quality content.

2. High Traffic: This goes without saying but one caveat is “the highest amount of traffic available for a certain niche.” High traffic for a small niche will be a far different amount than a large niche with hundreds of thousands of searches per month.

3. Beautiful: Authority sites are functional and elegant in navigation and design. The word beauty, in this example, means simple design that says out of the way of the content and goals of the publisher for visitor interaction with the site.

4. Dynamic: Authority sites today are at least partically if not totally dynamic. Static html is no longer an acceptable platform to run your content on. RSS is a must for subscribers with RSS agregators and for content syndication.

5. Self-Promoting: When new content goes up on an authority site, the web is put on notice through pinging, tagging, autodiscovery, and updated RSS feeds on partner sites. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t have an authority site.

6. Self-Optimized: Authority sites are optimized for the search engines by virtue of being optimized for their visitors. After basic SEO is taken into consideration (and included as a minimum requirement of a good content management system) the publisher of an authority site should not have to actively optimize for the engines other than writing content that speaks to the top keywords (topics) in their niche. Visitor Optimization replaces Search Engine Optimization.

7. Source Material: A good authority site is often cited by bloggers and others because it is the source of most of the good information in a niche. This leads to thousands of voluntary links to an authority site, which leads to higher traffic volume.

8. Obvious Expert: The content in an authority site is seen as expert material by the majority of the market it serves. Authority site content cannot be faked or be 100% 3rd party content syndicated from elsewhere.

9. Properly Monetized: A good site will produce good income. An authority site will produce stellar income. A combination of advertising, affiliate products, and exclusive products and services are the driving force behind most authority sites earning the maximum potential in their markets.

10. Updated Often: Authority sites have new information that is important to their visitors all the time. This information need not be 100% original, but original content is part of the mix that makes authority sites.

Given the above, what’s an authority site look like?

Here are some you probably already have in your bookmarks:

1. About.com

2. Wired

3. Seth Godin’s Blog

4. Drudge Report (TOTALLY breaks the beautiful design rule!)

5. Search Engine Watch

Authority Sites In Training

The sites below are all authority sites in the making. Looking at the future of authority site building gives valuable insight into what people are doing to build for Web 2.0.

Watch the sites below as they take over their niches in the coming months. All the authority site factors are present.

1. Lady o’ Golf

2. Crafty Places

3. Online Security

4. More for Kids

5. Early Sign of Pregnancy

6. Holiday Pastimes

7. Nursing Careers

8. MP4 Soup

9. Travel Volume

10. Anti Aging

11. SurfKooks

Finally, it no longer takes massive investment capital and an in house programming and sales staff to create high-performance authority websites.

As the hyper-complicated tools the traditional autority sites use become more accessible and written for end users rather than geeks, we will start to see more and more sites like above taking over niches riddled with static html sites and yesterday’s content management and marketing technology.

Tags: authority site, authority sites, site building, vre

Squidoo works! Promote Your Blog for Free…

I just got a notice that my Squido Lens is in the top 5000 lenses.

Yay! I have no idea why, but I want to keep it going. One thing is to let you know that if you don’t have a free Squidoo Lens, what are you waiting for?

We could be adding each other to our “Lens Rolls” (Like a blog roll, just lenses linking to each other.)

Check out Squidoo and get another page on the web promoting your stuff!

Tags: blog promotion, blogging, lens, promotion, squidoo

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