Monday Power Linking

Found some neat stuff tonight I wanted to get up on the blog for your morning coffee.

• Lynn Terry has a great post on Social Networking that really does a better job than I’ve ever done breaking it down to basics without getting as technical as I tend to get.  Great read for beginners and pros alike.
• Walt Breuninger has a thoughtful piece called “I feel guilty about not clicking on more ads” which is about how you can pay for the great content on the blogs you read.  It might be seen as risky business but if you think about the idea for a moment it makes perfect sense to click on ads that interest you.  After all that’s all the advertisers are hoping you’ll do.  Then it’s up to them and their product whether they get your business or not.
• The Blog Joint has a great list of top Wordpress plugins you should add to your favorites.  I’m a sucker for a good linkbait piece especially if it is on plugins!
• Still stuck on this RSS thing?  Peter Lenkefi gives you two really nice RSS how-to resources including a video by Robin Good and Lee Lefever.
• Finally, from Marketing Soapbox comes more news on Firefox “The COOP” development and what it is going to do for those of us with too many irons in the Web 2.0 fire to organize everything.  Very informative look into the future of staying organized in Web 2.0.

Tags: power linking, rss video, social networking, web 2.0, wordpress plugins

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Who’s Digging You?

Here’s a cool way to easily and quickly catch up on who is digging your submissions over at Digg.com.

“Who are you digging, and who is digging you? I’ve written a little script using Digg’s new API to show who is digging whom and to browse around the giant Digg social network.”

read more | digg story

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Meet My Longtime Friend And Kick Boxing Trainer Jason Calacanis

Most of my readers are completely unaware that Jason Calacanis and I are life long buds.

We met in Brooklyn, Jason’s native land, in 1987 at a World Poker Tour tournament. Most people know Jason as the former GM of Netscape, but he’s also known by the “in crowd” as a former Editor of Silicon Alley Reporter.

(By the way, Netscape is pure genius.)

These days Jason is busy writing ground-breaking pieces on his blog like this one on linkbaiting, probably the most important piece ever to be written on the topic and sure to go down in history as the missing link in the quest for blog supremacy.

He does it all with his trusty bulldog Toro by his side.

It was last week that cemented Jason as the most forward looking, deep thinker on the web of our time. We were sparring in the ring and as he threw a blistering fast roundhouse that nearly took off my head, he mentioned his latest post on Fatblogging.

The depth of consideration of the major issues facing humanity in that post alone speaks volumes about my friend’s uncanny ability to take normally mundane issues and put them on a world stage to blow people’s minds around the globe.

Laying on my back in the ring I looked up at Jason and thought “He would make an incredible Ambassador to Ecuador if it weren’t for his penchant for double-dipping at parties!”

After fully regaining my wits after the third knockout of the day (I’m sure Jason didn’t see me struggling with my mouthpiece and looking in the other direction when he landed what could only be called the most perfect uppercut ever thrown) I realized that I was possibly the luckiest guy on Earth to have Jason Calacanis as a friend, mentor, and AA sponsor.

I know this weekend I will raise a glass to the man, the legend, the only person to ever win back-to-back World Bear Wrestling championships.

Tags: jason calacanis, linkbait, linkbaiting

Blog Promotion Tools

I am convinced if you manage your blog research with the proper tools, (Google Alerts, RSS readers, etc.) you can’t have too many blog promotion resources at your disposal.

StuntDubl has a great list here that should be added to your arsenal.

He’s missing one important blog promotion blog on his list, but no one’s perfect!

Tags: blog marketing, blog promotion resources, blog promotion tips

Base to webmaster: Do you READ me?

RSS is the future.  I hate email, it doesn’t get delivered, it doesn’t get read, it is SO Web 1.0 I can’t stand it.

In an effort to increase public awareness of RSS and the fact that this is how you are going to subscribe to everything in the future, I decided to highlight something most of you have been missing.

It’s been right in front of you on every page of this site, on every visit you’ve made.  Yet I still only have a tiny handful of RSS subscribers.

So the image above should highlight what you’ve been missing all this time.

There’s another world on the web.  It’s the underground.  Full of esoteric things like “feed readers” and “opml files.”

Don’t be scared.  It is only harsh and foreboding on the outside.

RSS cannot hurt you.  It protects your privacy and you can turn it on and off as you please.

And you can get your information 100% of the time without your ISP or the myriad spam filters between me and you stopping your business intelligence collection cold in its tracks.

Click on the icon above, if you can see the little guy, and you will be taken to another world.  A world of possibility and freedom.

You’ll even learn how to subscribe with various feed readers.

Your life will never be the same again!

—

This icon above and the idea came from Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand.com.

If you don’t read Danny’s stuff, you don’t rank.

Tags: internet marketing feed, marketing feeds, marketing rss feed

Technorati Favorite Blogs Exchange

This test has been going around and I wanted to let you all in on it.  The vast majority of FTR visitors have blogs and are looking for ways to get more links and traffic.

One great way is to hit the top 100 favorited blogs list in Technorati.

It’s not as hard as you might think.  Last checked, you only need about 161 people at Technorati to favorite you to get on this list.

Will getting on the list help you that much?

Being more visible in the world’s largest blog search engine is never a bad thing.

But more importantly, doing this exercise will get a lot more attention for your site in itself.  You’ll be taking part in an organized effort to draw more attention to your site.

Here’s how you do it:

1.  Favorite The Friday Traffic Report by visiting my Technorati page and adding me to your favorites.

2.  Come back here and post your blog URL and your Technorati username in the comments area below.

3.  I will favorite you in return at Technorati.

4.  Watch the list below grow and start adding participants to your favorites.  Everyone will be doing the same for you.

If you want a link from the Friday Traffic Report, just do a post on your blog about Technorati (fit to what your readers are interested in) and do a trackback to this post.

I will post your trackbacks as well, giving you another high value link.

Let’s see how this does for everyone.  It certainly will not hurt!

(This idea stolen from Dosh Dosh - a great marketing blog!)

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List Building: Let’s Hear From The Grandmaster!

Building a list is essential to get the most out of the traffic you get each day.

Think about it:  you do all the work you do to get targeted traffic… don’t you want to get the most out of that traffic you can without having to constantly generate brand new visitors?

A lot of people just slap up an email form and hope for the best.  I assure you none of those people have very large lists they can sell to over and over again.

My list is crucial to my business.  And I learned a lot of what I know about list building from one man:  Mark Hendricks.

He is the Grandmaster of list building and he has a lot to teach you on the subject.  Which is why I am writing this post today.

I thought “what if some of my readers picked up what Mark is teaching, put it into action, and profited greatly from it?  I’d look like a hero!”

Well, that word is thrown around a lot.  Maybe people will think of me as simply a great resource and someone who doesn’t recommend junk.  I will leave the hero stuff for our troops who actually deserve the title.

Mark has a course called very simply “How to build and profit from your own lists.”

His testimonial list is a mile long and he can add this one to it anytime:

“Mark’s course will teach anyone with a website how to build a profitable list better than any list building course out there hands down.  I’ve read them all and this one leaves nothing to chance nor does it leave anything out.  It’s what a how-to course is supposed to be.  I wish more people would model their courses after Mark’s.  The IM world would be a far better place!”

You ready to check out what it’s like to send a message to several thousand people and watch orders pour in?  It’s about the most fun you can have in online business I assure you!

Download Mark Hendricks’ How to build and profit from your own lists! 

Tags: email list building, list building, list management, optin list building, optin visitors

What’s Your Page Strength?

I just stole today’s post idea from our forum at Authority Site Center from one of our top members.

He won’t mind, I hope.

Today’s cool tool is “Page Strength SEO Tool” from SEOmoz.org.

It will very quickly give you a ton of information on any page you point it to regarding search engine optimization, link strength, keyword rankings and more.

As Bill said in the ASC forum “The more you find out about your site, the more you can adjust the little things, that will make you The Authority Site among all the others out there!!!”

Tags: page strength, search engine optimization tool, seo, seomoz

We Melted Our Servers Again Yesterday…

Every once in awhile I will see forum posts in different places about Authority Site Center where people remark that our servers must not be very good.

If you tried to visit The Friday Traffic Report last night and it wouldn’t load, you might think so as well.

Actually this site and many of our members’ sites are hosted on a server that is the top of the line server from LiquidWeb.com.

It has 4 cpus and 4 gigs of ram!

You can’t get a better server than the one I am on.

So why the downtime yesterday?

In one word: Traffic!

This site gets about 4500-5000 visitors per day. There are a few sites on this server that get far more than that.

And the average ASC site on this server is getting 200+ visitors per day minimum.

Most members are still wondering why they are getting so much traffic with our system, but they aren’t complaining about the mystery. They are just happy they’ve finally found something that works as promised.

Members are driving targeted traffic because of the SEO friendly and proprietary software we’ve developed over the past 2 years.

Another comment that is common in forums outside ASC is that “ASC is just Wordpress and some fancy plugins. And I can do that on my own without signing up for a membership there!”

It’s probably our fault that misconception continues to linger. Somehow we’ve not communicated just what it is that makes the above statement 100% wrong.

Partially it is because we don’t want corporate spies trying to get ahold of the secrets, and part of it is because our sales material buries the facts in the overall explanation of why and how we can generate results for our members that no one else has been able to touch.

That’s why we attract a whole different crowd of people to ASC. And we like it that way.

You have to become a mature, business-minded person to succeed on the web. While everyone is tempted in the beginning to get into “too-good-to-be-true” fluffy “business opportunities,” there comes a time when men separate themselves from boys and get real about what they want out of life.

Those in the small percentage of people who “get it” are members of ASC. They are workers. They have their own ideas for their online businesses and don’t follow crowds and fads (anymore) that always end up watered down and fruitless for everyone involved.

The most successful sites on the web are owned by people who split off from the pack and did something, as Seth Godin would say, Remarkable.

That’s why when people follow trends and fads where everyone is encouraged to jump aboard and do the same thing as everyone else, whether MLM or spam sites, thousands of people without the benefit of any business experience whatsoever get duped and get mad.

You see, if you have any business experience at all, you know that there are rules involved in success. Most people selling business opportunities and schemes are breaking those rules knowing most people will fall for them.

You never EVER get something for nothing.

You never get true secrets to success and wealth for pennies on the dollar.

People who come to us at ASC are tired of all that and are doing something for their future that cannot fail to pay off for them if they work and learn from the professionals who build true asset-oriented authority businesses online.

When’s the last time you heard of anyone who sells traffic driving software, training, or coaching actually blowing up the most expensive servers in existence?

You don’t hear about it because it doesn’t happen. No one follows up and tells the public about the thing they sold months ago actually working today.

Let alone something from a company that’s been growing for over 2 solid years! That is ancient on the web for a successful system of any kind!

Well, I am here today to report that our members are happy, thrilled, that they are finally building a business that works because they are finally realizing that the one main secret of success: It is buckling down and learning from people who know how authority site building is truly done.

We are buying more very expensive servers today.

Some of our members now have to get on their own dedicated servers because they are too big for shared hosting.

A note wil be going out to our highest traffic site owners to let them know the “bad news.”

That they have been so successful at what they are doing that they need to move to a shared dedicated or full dedicated server account so we can handle the bandwidth they are using!

How would YOU like to get a note like that someday?

Anyway, that should dispel the mythology floating around out there from people too scared of success to actually come in and try it out risk free. It’s not like there’s any risk whatsoever to find out first hand if we are legit or not.

(You’d think after 2 years and very public promotions, that if ASC was some kind of scam it would be easy to find credible evidence and testimony to that fact!)

What it really is is that some people are freaked out that this might just actually work, and if it does, their lives will change.

“Many people prefer to have a slick marketer blow in their ear and flirt with them, promising the moon and the stars.”

Others are simply tired of the pick-pocket circus that is internet marketing and want the truth.

The truth is that there are some honest people on the web showing others how to build and grow true, high traffic authority sites with access to one-of-a-kind software (not just wordpress templates for god’s sake) that makes the process so easy a child could do it.

Time to take the pill Neo chose and wake up to the truth. The sooner you do the sooner you can start making your move on those goals you have listed somewhere on your computer right now.

Tags: authority site building, authority site center, authority sites, jack humphrey, site building

Squidoo Traffic Power Review: Get a lot of traffic with this tactic!

How incredibly rare it is these days to stumble upon a targeted traffic-driving tactic (that actually works) packaged up and sold for a miniscule fraction of its value!

What Does Squidoo Traffic Power Cover?

It’s all about using one powerful Web 2.0 tool called Squidoo (founded by purple cow Seth Godin, no less!) to get in front of more people in your market through increased exposure, higher search engine rankings, and techniques author Rena Klingenberg has honed using trial and error and endless testing.

If the Authority Black Book is the massive overview of the possibilities and actions you can take to get more Web 2.0 traffic, Squidoo Traffic Power is a pinpoint accurate, thorough road map on how to dominate with one and only one very important Web 2.0 tactic.

About Rena

I couldn’t be more proud of the work. Rena is an Authority Site Center member who is putting her learning to work building authority sites and has now even gone as far as teaching authority site marketing tactics in her new book.

Total Exposure Web 2.0 Marketing Tactic

The amount of exposure and traffic one can generate with the tactics in Squidoo Traffic Power make owning a copy compulsory. Why would anyone throw away an opportunity to get in front of people they aren’t reaching now or increasing their search engine rankings and direct traffic?
I use it, I’ve seen the results first hand, and you can put your hands on it for pennies on the dollar.

An SEO firm would charge minimum $5,000.00 for this as a service in developing the lenses at Squidoo, the content and links, and everything else Rena shows you how to do in her book for 20 bucks.

I’m not stretching that at all. If you want to hire our firm to do it for you, we’d be glad to for no less than $5,000.00.

So, yes I am excited about this book. 5 stars all around. Rena did a super job and she is going to be responsible for millions and millions of visitors coming to hundreds or thousands of sites in 2007.

There are people on the web who would have put this detailed report out for no less than $97. People you know. People you’ve bought from before.

This report can help you generate untold thousands of extra monthly visitors and it costs $20.

Grab Your Copy of Squidoo Traffic Power Here.

Tags: reviews, squidoo, squidoo traffic power, targeted traffic, web 2.0 marketing

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