This Month’s ASC Newsletter Available for Download

Did You Know About Authority Buzz Newsletter?

Authority Site Center has a great free monthly newsletter call “Authority Buzz!” Myself, ASC staff, and members write for it and it has great articles on blogging tips, social marketing, SEO, PR, and other important topics.

Grab a copy - it’s free - no email required.

In This Issue of Authority Buzz:

• To Monetize or Not To Monetize Your Blog?
• Going the Extra Mile
• Website Monetization and Knowing Your Niche
• 19 Tips for Creating Killer Blog Content
• Strategies for Finding the Right Niche
• Web 2.0 To Go Corporate
• Blog Categories: Use Them and Don’t Abuse Them

There are also some more surprises in there, but you’ll have to download the newsletter to find out what they are…

Tags: authority site center, blogging tips, free marketing newsletter

Don't Miss Out On Free Traffic!
Subscribe to the FTR RSS feed or our email list so you don't miss out on real, traffic driving tips from Jack Humphrey!  Thanks for visiting!

Free Teleseminar This Wednesday With Some Powerful Marketers

How to get more traffic to your sites by becoming the recognized authority in your niche…

Edit:  The call was awesome and it’s available here for download.

Join me, Dave Lakhani, Elsom Eldridge and Howie Schwartz on this content-rich call to find out. I’ll be moderating the call and squeezing every strategy, tactic and technique out of our guest speakers.

I know for sure that…

Dave will be talking about easy methods for using the media for influence: how you can drive traffic to your site with effective public relations.

Elsom will be talking about positioning yourself as the obvious expert in your niche. Experts always get paid more and have more opportunities.

Howie will be talking about web 2.0 traffic strategies- specifically, how to be the top 100 of Google. Yes, you read that right- not IN the top 100 but, actually THE top 100. This means that the first 10 pages of Google will be all you!

And just for fun, call your SEO firm on the phone and ask how much they’d charge to get you in the top 100 listings for a keyword in Google. I know companies that would pay millions - yes millions - for the chance.

Don’t believe me? Look how much Coca Cola and other companies paid to be in Second Life. With a grand total of no significant traffic whatsoever, despite the Second Life devotees who don’t even seem to use the system themselves, companies are doing nutso things trying to increase their exposure and brands. (See this month’s Wired Magazine article on Second Life and the ridiculous advertising money big companies are throwing at…nobody at all.)

If Coca Cola wants to take over a deserted virtual reality world, what do you think they’d pay to OWN the top 100 spots in Google?

Find out more about all this on this free call…

Topic: Becoming an Authority
Date: Wednesday August 1, 2007
Time: 8PM Eastern / 5PM Pacific
Call-In Number: 712-429-0700
Pin Code: 312286

You’ll be eligible for some free bonuses just for showing up to the call. Lines are limited, call in 5-10 minutes early to secure your spot. There will be NO RECORDING available for this call until much later, so don’t miss it. Look forward to having you there!

Tags: Dave Lakhani, elsom eldridge, free teleconference, howie schwartz, jack humphrey, seo

Website Stats - ROMLet Widget is Coming!

I found a cool beta widget today that will allow you to boast your top referrers to your blog.  It will let you show the people sending you the most traffic and make it easier for people to vote for your site, nabbing you more traffic and popularity in the social sites, according to a review on Pronet Advertising blog.

By doing this you are creating two effects. First, by displaying how much traffic you are getting from all the various sources you are showing to your audience and your prospective subscribers that your content is appreciated all over the web and that they should become regulars. Secondly, because you are displaying your referrers, you encourage more people to refer to you because they get to be displayed prominently on your site and might even get some traffic from you as your readers’ curiosity with respect to what the referrers are saying gets the best of them. -Muhammad Saleem, PronetAdvertising.com

The widget is not out yet, still in beta.  I want to use it though so I am trying to hurry the developer up by sending him traffic!  (Hope it works!)

On the home page it asks you for your email to get on the alert list.  If it looks good to you, get on the list to be one of the first to sport the latest killer widget.

My goal is to get top referrers other than Google involved so other sites can compete for those prominent spots and get linked from my site, sending them back some traffic.

Tags: romlet, social stats, social traffic, website stats, wordpress widgets

Authority Blogger Forum

I got a tip from a friend about a great forum called Authority Blogger. It was created by Chris Garrett.
I really recommend you check out Authority Blogger Forum. It’s a young community but is sure to grow very quickly and it’s already a great resource for networking and learning some great blogging tips from fellow bloggers.

Tell Chris Jack sent you!

—

UPDATE: I made a stupid mistake in this original post and totally mixed Chris Garrett and Brian Clark in what I wrote and linked to. Sorry guys - no more half-asleep posting for me!

Tags: authority blogger forum, brian clark, chris garrett, copyblogger

Google Toolbar and Pagerank Update

If you ever wondered who tracks Google Toolbar and Pagerank updates, I have some links for you.

Of course Pagerank doesn’t matter, right?

Wrong. If you sell advertising, pagerank is all the majority of advertisers care about. Since people cannot see your live log files, it’s really all they have to go by in determining if you might have enough traffic to justify advertising on your site. They can go and check your backlinks, of course, but that takes time and people make snap decisions based too much on the Pagerank that shows on their Google Toolbar.

That’s the way it is. We know Pagerank has nothing to do with traffic, but advertisers don’t. They use it almost exclusively to determine whether to advertise on your site or not.

Given that one factor alone, Pagerank means something. So it’s good to get good pagerank for that reason if you sell advertising.

To keep up on what Google is doing and where they are with Toolbar updates, check out these resources:

• SEO Company Page Rank Update
• Rusty Brick’s Page Rank Prediction Tool
• Rank Alert - Helpful during a pagerank update to predict where you are going to land when the update is complete.

Share your favorite Google Pagerank update tools below in the comments area!

Tags: future rank, google pagerank update, page rank tools, pagerank checker

Rand Fishkin Video on Link Building

Here’s a good video from Rand and SEOMoz on link building.

I love the low tech white board thing. Who says you can’t go low budget and still get your point across!

Tags: link building video, rand fishkin, seomoz

Custom RSS Feed Wordpress Plugin Released!

Create unlimited, custom rss feeds for your Wordpress blog on demand!

Today we are letting a big mean cat out of the bag. It’s something no plugin does for Wordpress bloggers and it is a taste of the powerful apps we have running behind our Authority Site Center publishing system.

And it’s Free!

It’s called PheedPress and, until today, no one outside ASC has been granted use of it in any form.

What PheedPress Does

• Grab total control over your Wordpress blog and pull out TAGGED, custom RSS feeds by keyword!
• Gives you the ability to create “channels” your visitors can subscribe to (like just your podcasts or just a certain topic you write about without all the other things you write about mixed in!)
• Gives you the ability to “reach out” to engines and show them your content in a denser keyword format.
• Gives you more rss feeds to promote in the RSS directories.
• More ways for engines to spider your content DEEPLY regardless of when it was posted - last week or last year - as long as it fits the keyword of the Pheed, the engines will find all your content on that channel subject (if you are just using your basic Wordpress RSS feed, the engines are only grabbing your latest stuff you’ve posted when they spider that one, limited feed!)
• Advertiser supported in free version, but extremely unobtrusive!
• Create as many feeds as you like - if you have 5-10 posts on a keyword topic you can and should turn it into a Pheed.
• All feeds are perfectly validated AND properly TAGGED so you don’t have to worry about your feeds not being indexed by the search engines!
• All feeds are live the moment they are called, no waiting for cron updates.
• Create a feed directory so your visitors to subscribe to recommended feeds.
• Extremely easy install. Keep your personal FTP program closed - we upload and format this sucker for you with a custom installer!

Free Version: Advertiser Supported (small ad at bottom of your Pheeds - your content shows first!)
Paid Version: No Ads, $29.95

Create Multiple, tagged, validated, keyword targeted RSS feeds with PheedPress! Download PheedPress

ASC Version of PheedPress: The version our members get is meatier, meaner, more hard core. But the free and paid versions above will give you far more marketing power than you have right now and there isn’t another competitor on the market. It is the only plugin of its kind on the web!

Tags: creating rss feeds, custom rss feeds, multiple rss feeds, pheedpress

Magic, Traffic Magicians, Marketing and The Prestige

I highly recommend the movie “The Prestige” for a very specific reason: It teaches you about internet marketing.

How can a movie about magic and magicians teach us about business or marketing? Quite easily actually. I won’t spoil the movie for you other than to draw out a couple of points. Then you can “expound on the profound” by watching the movie with those points in mind.

Internet Marketing And Magic Are The Same In More Ways Than One

I come into contact with so many people wanting to start a successful site and possibly make their entire living on the web. This is because I am in the business of showing people how that is done. To the the newbie, I might as well be showing them fire for the first time. Generating an authority presence online and making money from it might as well be, and in some sense is, magic.

The problem for people in my business is the same as in one of the principles taught in “The Prestige.” Namely that once people know how a trick is done, the perception of value plummets and is usually met with “That’s all there is to it?”

Notice I said the “perception of value” plummets. The “tricks” of driving traffic and making money online with that traffic are no less powerful, but the magic of the trick has been lost. Then, for marketers, after all the hype is pulled aside, there’s nothing left to do but work.

The magic of driving traffic on the web is one part secret, one part drive, another part dedication, and two parts willingness to pay your dues and learn. When I show people the “tricks” and how its done, very few actually go on to become “master magicians.”

When a boy buys a top hat and a magic trick book and finds out how tricks are done, 99% of the time he loses interest in magic after a short period of time. Otherwise we’d have hundreds of thousands more magicians in the world than we do today, no?

What I find shocking is that, even when big money is involved, once most people find out what’s behind the curtain in traffic generation and authority site building, they lose interest rather than feel like someone who has just won the lottery. Otherwise my client list would be in the hundreds of thousands instead of the hundreds. You can see the parallels forming here.

In The Prestige it is made clear that no matter how much people beg, bribe, and plead with you to know your secret, you never, ever cave in. Your livelihood is tied directly to the secrets of your craft. What’s more, where magic is concerned, the audience really doesn’t want to know the secret. They want to believe it is magic. They want to believe what they are seeing is supernatural.

Enter the potential big mistake my personal business model makes.

I make a living giving away the secrets. The worst thing I could do for my business is show people how its done rather than do it for them and keep them in awe and wonderment. Once they know how its done, the majority of them not only become disinterested in doing it themselves, despite the money to be made, they become disillusioned (literally!) with web business completely.

Yet I give my secrets away because knowing the secrets alone does not make one a good “traffic magician.” It takes a lot of time to become good at what you do even if you fully understand the principles behind how it works.

Therein lies the biggest plus of my business model:

I show my secrets to find the people who truly want to become proficient in their craft and make a lot of money with their own business. But they can’t do it just by knowing the secrets alone. They still need help. And my business model provides that help in the form of coaching and resources my best prospects cannot afford to be without if they want to be the biggest authority in their niche.

But without that backend, I would just be a magician giving his secrets away and watching as people walk away disappointed that “that’s ‘all there is’ to it.”

How Does This Phenomenon Affect Your Business?

Are you giving too much away without properly providing a backend that completes the “unlocking of the secrets” process? If so, you may be onto something with regard to your lack of sales and low conversion rates for desired actions.

Here’s the worst part: Have you slacked off in promoting and growing your authority presence immediately after finding out a “secret” to online marketing? There’s a better than 90% chance that you are one of the disillusioned who thought making a living online would be “sexier” or truly magical.

Again, the big money is on the internet. Whether it is as fun as going to a water park with your family on Saturday or not is irrelevant if you truly want to whatever it takes to make a lot of money.

This is the tip of the iceberg with The Prestige. You will learn so much about your business and gain valuable insight into how you provide service and products on the web, along with the psychology of selling, by watching this movie.

It so happens that the movie is one of the best I’ve seen, so it’s also very entertaining.

You Have An Assignment!

Your assignment this weekend is to rent The Prestige and keep in mind that, if you are really paying attention, it can actually improve your business from copy to conversion.

What we do online is magic to most people. Buying and selling or getting attention on the internet is foreign territory to the masses to this day. They just don’t know how we do it. When you find out the secrets, don’t blow them off or become disenchanted with your dreams. Even if it is a let down that I am not actually endowed with Harry Potter’s magical powers, that doesn’t change the fact that you can make a lot of money with traffic in a lot of niches, while your competition clings to the idea that marketing online successfully involves real magic.

Tags: buyers remorse, magic marketing, marketing and magic, the prestige

Remember Tag and Ping? We Helped Break That Whole Phenomenon Last Year!

Below is a video from Sean Wu’s Tag and Ping presentation at last year’s Authority Summit in Vegas.

Few people know this but Sean chose us to break him onto the internet marketing scene with Tag and Ping. No one knew him and this was his first product. Then he ends up on the stage at the Summit in Vegas and things have never been the same for him, nor the people he has helped get a lot of traffic.

That’s the spirit of the Authority Summit. Find people who are doing miraculous things, are not necessarily household names yet, but who are on the front lines of authority site building tactics.

Sean Wu is one of those people. Here he is at last year’s Summit…

Get your butt to the Authority Summit ‘07 and do more for your online presence than you ever thought was possible!

Tags: authority summit, internet marketing conferences, sean wu, tag and ping

Top 10 Link Building Sites

…other than the one you are presently reading, of course!

These sites all have something great to offer in your quest to build links to your site for direct traffic and link popularity.

1. Andy Hagans Link Building Service
2. SearchEngineWatch.com 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies
3. Patrick Gavin’s Link Building Blog
4. LinkBuilding.org
5. The Professional’s Guide to Link Building on SEOMoz.com
6. Eric Ward’s Link Building Strategies
7. Network Solutions Link Building Service (Could use a bit more free info IMO)
8. SearchEngineWatch.com Link Building Forum
9. 101 Link Building Tips from SEOBook.com
10. Friday Traffic Report’s Link Building On A Budget Series

That should hold you over until me and Howie Schwartz drop our upcoming bomb on the web.  The guys above are great, but we’re going to show you things you never knew were possible in website promotion and linking tactics.

We call it “Bending The Web” and when it hits, it is going to hit the web with force.  [End of tease]

Tags: link building, link popularity top 10 link building sites, top link building sites

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