Monthly Archives: February 2008

31 Niche Websites In March

By Andy Beard | Published: February 29, 2008

March is almost upon us, and for many it is a time for spring cleaning.

It is also traditionally when new life is brought into the world, so it is an ideal time to clean up some niche websites and turn some ideas into revenue streams and to experiment a little.

I am frequently asked by email all kinds of beginners questions

  • How to choose a niche?
  • How to go about keyword research?
  • How to promote niche websites?

    I am going to steal some quotes from Franck

    Taking about John Reese and Blogrush

    1. Release crap (improve later, but start making money with your crap)
    2. Test everything

Posted in niche website | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

PageRank Update – Beware Of Link Exchange Offers

By Andy Beard | Published: February 29, 2008

For the last few days there has been a lot of discussion on places such as Digital Point about a Toolbar PageRank Update that is happening. Barry reported yesterday about links being updated in webmaster tools, but the pagerank fluctuations are quite strange.

Lots of people are reporting strange fluctuations, and PageRank 7 seems to be appearing and disappearing for many sites that really don't deserve it.

I wouldn't have written anything at all, but then I received a message asking for a link exchange with a PR7 site, and knowing what was happening on Digital Point, I thought I

Posted in blogging tips , SEO Blog | Tagged , | Comments closed

Google Reconsideration or Reinclusion Request

By Andy Beard | Published: February 26, 2008

Now Google have changed their wording for reconsideration requests (formerly reinclusion requests), I have filed one for this domain.

I am not going to call this a perfect example of a reconsideration request, but I decided that it was better to be 100% honest about my thought process for both now and in the future, because whilst I am now blocking paid reviews with robots.txt, there are so many things still not specified within the webmaster guidelines that it is a potential minefield, especially for someone who has previously been the target of a manual penalty.

Here is exactly what I sent to the Google webmaster team.

Posted in blogging tips , Google , SEO Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Moving The Free Line But You Want Jam On It Too?

By Andy Beard | Published: February 25, 2008

Chris Anderson in his post today on Wired in the run up to his launch of "Free" and freeconomics provided a great discussion point because bloggers face a frequent dilemma.

Blogging Is Marketing Your Revenue Stream

That revenue stream in my opinion doesn't have to be current, though it is beneficial to at least have long-term plans for revenue.

To quote Fred Wilson:-

If you are building a media oriented business, particularly one that has low marginal costs, meaning you build it once and the cost to serve an additional customer is negligible, then you have the unique opportunity to focus first

Posted in blogging tips , marketing , SEO Blog | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Why TrafficJam.com really…

By Andy Beard | Published: February 23, 2008

Traffic Jam LogoI could finish that title in all kinds of ways

  • does suck
  • is amazing
  • can bring you masses of targeted traffic
  • can be used for market research
  • can help you optimize your titles
  • can be used for discovery
  • is overrated
  • is underrated
  • is useful
  • is a waste of screen pixels

Get the idea? It all depends on perspective and objectives.

Even if you have absolutely no interest in TrafficJam or Blogrush, I strongly suggest you read this post, especially if you are interested in viral marketing techniques that are guaranteed to build you an email list.

Posted in blogging tips , marketing , plugins , wordpress | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Advertising Firesale (experimentation)

By Andy Beard | Published: February 21, 2008

Firesales are a form of marketing that Mike Filsaime is probably best noted for, where you make an offer so compelling, it is pretty hard to refuse.

Normally it is also very important to add something special to the sales message, a compelling reason why you are offering a special offer on the products. There are all kinds of psychological why you would do this, which I am not going to delve into, but if you Google for Mike's free guide "FireSale Secrets" you will pick up some good tips.

Meet Timothy

For the last couple of weeks I have been visiting him

Posted in blog monetization , marketing | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Blogcatalog Give Purpose To The Social Graph

By Andy Beard | Published: February 20, 2008

If you are a devotee of Facebook or Myspace, I have a message for you

There is a World Outside Your Fishtank

Within "blogging" social networks I have been pushing to have a reason to add someone as a friend for a long time. Blog broadcasts, built in feed readers and OPML will eventually provide a reason to join communities.

I know that MyBlogLog are planning to also launch something similar and I have a feeling this will likely kick off more people claiming Blogcatalog is just a copycat of Mybloglog.

I first had a sneak peak at the Dashboard a few

Posted in blogging tips , web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

PPP or Pay Per PDF White Paper

By Andy Beard | Published: February 19, 2008

After Tim posted his findings regarding the indexing of flash websites, I suggested to him that he should carry out similar research on PDFs, because you can't nofollow a link in a PDF.
As it happened he was already running a test, and he has just published the results to his PDF SEO research

Companies already pay for hosted pages, why not pay for hosted white papers or product catalogues?

On the negative side, PDFs when distributed virally might end up pointing to old resources, and it is hard to track them if you use direct links to resources. You should

Posted in marketing , SEO Blog | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Visible Linking And Traffic

By Andy Beard | Published: February 19, 2008

Yesterday Joost linked through to me from a guest post on Shoemoney about Wordpress SEO.

In direct referral stats it didn't cause a shockwave until I looked at the specific pageviews of the page he chose to link to, my Wordpress category.

My category pages rarely figure highly in the most viewed, so I could actually attribute the majority of the traffic to that specific landing page, even if the traffic originated from an email or RSS subscriber.

This takes me back to one of the discussions I had with Joost regarding his Google Analytics tracking from RSS Plugin

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Marketing Conferences I Am Not Attending Or Speaking At

By Andy Beard | Published: February 19, 2008

On a daily basis I have been receiving emails from people asking if I am attending any of the up and coming conferences.

SES London

Lots of people are already there, I am not, even though it is one of the most local conferences to me, only an 8 hour journey with the benefit of free accommodation with family.

Strategic Profits Live Disney World February 23-29

It would have been a great opportunity to meet up with Rich and the rest of the Strategic Profits team I often correspond with by email, some of whom I met at the last event

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