This post was originally posted Nov 7, 2006 – I have added a screenshot as the original subject site is no longer online – it is still just as relevant today as it was over 3 years ago. In places I have added some additional commentary or expanded on original ideas.

References to PageRank should be looked on as synonymous with Google Juice & overall site authority, and not just green pixels in a toolbar, though that can be a good visual indicator at times.

How a Blogroll can kill your PageRank

I followed a link from Digg a few minutes a go, read the story, and as I frequently do on any site I visit, I snooped around a little.

I actually do exactly the same every time someone writes a blog post referring to me and pings my blog. It is the polite thing to do, and maybe I can add something to the conversation. It also allows me to relate any comment to the person who is writing about me, either positively or negatively. Everyone is entitled to opposing views. What is often important is why they have an opposing view, and it isn’t always obvious.

Now about the site in question:

1. I have only read half of one article there, so I don’t know much about the site contents
2. The reason I am linking through to the site is purely from an SEO point of view
3. This is a very common problem, very easy to make, and honestly not too hard to correct.

With that said, here is the site Kerry Fox Live (Archive.org link – the site seems to have been offline for 2 years.)

Initial Site Analysis

So the first thing I notice is that it is a PR3 site.

The internal categories are mainly PR2

The archives are mainly PR2

The individual post pages are generally PR1 or unranked

A large proportion of the content is duplicate syndicated content from services such as Associated Press, without any wrapping

But the site has been around for 16 months

You can make a splog, chuck duplicate content at it, and get a PR4 or PR5 after a few months.

So what is wrong with the site?

Take a look at the sidebar

At a guess (I am seriously not going to count them all), only 20% of the links on any given page point to an internal page. (yes that sidebar is on every page)
There are 2 blogrolls, one of which seems to be websites and blogs he likes, and the other is a whole load of press related sites… news sources.

Every single one of those links is a live external link leaking PageRank to other sites. Those other sites are not reciprocating in any way.

Now I am sure someone is likely to point out that those links provide a service for visitors, and maybe add a little authenticity to the site.

What visitors?

We are looking at a news site with an Alexa rank of close to 2M – not 2k, but 2M

Now there are times you want to sacrifice a little page rank to other sites, especially if they are reciprocating, sharing visitors, or in the case of my blog, I like visitors commenting and joing my “community”. You might also do it in a carefully controlled way from a mininet to one of your own sites.

Solutions

Get rid of the blogroll on all internal pages. It is giving away too much traffic to other sites, not to mention PageRank.

Add nofollow to all the blogroll links that are not reciprocating, or you don’t want to be overly friendly with. (Update August 2010 I would probably tend to use javascript in some way)

Increase internal linking to compensate for all the leakage.

How to Increase Internal Linking

• Recent posts – 10 links
• Top Posts – 10 links
• Recent Comments – 5 – 10 links
• Tagging + Tag Cloud – 50+ links
• There wouldn’t be a need for as much internal ball linking if there wasn’t so many external leaks. The site is gaining very few comments.
• Related posts – 5-10 links
• Related reviews – 5-10 links
• Glossary links

Emphasis should be placed on the links you wish visitors to traverse

External Linking

The site has 2 visible external links to the front page. I am not sure how many to internal pages, but even if it did have external links, any PR given would immediate leak.

Just syndicating one article will generate loads of backlinks, far in excess of what you can achieve with a single blog post (unless you have 100k+ readers). Based on my analysis of “A” list bloggers, their average blog post might normally generate around 10 backlinks (showing in Google).

(update August 2010: – whilst many of the bloggers I analysed in 2006 have 10x as many subscribers by RSS & email now, the number of links they receive, other than from splogs & social media probably hasn’t increased)

Conclusion

It is not rocket science, just simple maths.

If you have 100 external links on every page of your site, you need lot of internal links to retain some (hopefully most) of your PageRank, and it would certain help if those people you give a link to on your sidebar reciprocate in some manner.

(please note that includes me – don’t put a link in your blogroll to my site – sure I appreciate the links, but I would much prefer just an occasional mention in your blog)

If you can’t get a reciprocal link, use nofollow, (August 2010 – blocked external javascript), or stick them on their own seperate page so they don’t suck your own site dry.

And finally… this site structure plagues a huge proportion of blogs. Other blog owners who do not have this problem, quite likely don’t even realise why.

Further reading:

Revenge of the Mininet | 3rd Party content | Blog Comments | No Follow

Update: whilst I am still a fan of article marketing, I no longer recommend any service that doesn’t provide a way to have unique passwords for each distribution site.

I even promote his launches sometimes without using an affiliate link just because I feel like it such as his recent launch of The Twitter Method.

He has also finally overtaken me in the SERPs for the rankings for the predecessor of the course he is now running, Social Power Linking – I still get search traffic on that term.

He effectively gets that traffic for free as well as I just didn’t get around to changing the links.

Such is the longevity of blog content.

Jack currently has the latest incarnation of his blogging and social media training launching – he is a damn good teacher.

This is a raw affiliate link to Jacks course… Blog Success but I want to discuss this affiliate link with you a little.

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=blogpost

This is an Infusionsoft tracking link – a while back they introduced a way to have a redirect script on your own domain, but very few affiliate launches use this method.

The parameters

w=product code
p=affiliate ID
a=advert

Now the advert part is very interesting

In Infusionsoft it looks like you have to manually define these one at a time, but in fact you can define them on the fly

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=keyword1

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=keyword2

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=nUFFggh4hbdbheh5

However ideally as an affiliate from a blog or landing page you would want to use a much cleaner link such as

http://andybeard.eu/Recommends/BlogSuccess.html

http://dedicatedaffiliatedomain.com

Lets add to the confusion that you might also be driving traffic to a blog using Speed PPC as I wrote about earlier and it is obvious there are some technical hurdles to getting effective tracking working with blogs & landing pages.

Paid or Free Traffic Source
>> Landing page
>> Set cookie based upon keywords
>> Modify page using SpeedPPC using keywords
>> Modify cloaking page to read cookies or parameters if cookies are off
>> Write data to custom database
>> Create tracking link with tracking software on the fly based upon parameters used
>> possibly still have a fully cloaked paged rather than just a redirect using iframes etc.
>> potentially jump through some double meta redirects, javascript & iframes to hide traffic source or other funky stuff.

This side of things is relatively easy, the problem comes with Infusionsoft when dealing with multiple products, multiple sales paths, different prices and quite frequently 5-10 different landing pages for one launch.
The tracking can become a royal mess, and there is no current way to export the data for affiliates.

Back To Jack & The Buzzworm Earth Blog

I have no idea where he came up with the name of that blog from, just another demonstration of how creative Jack is.

That is a screenshot from 1 of 4 free training vidoes you can watch right now without even having to give jack your email address.

Notice in the screenshot Zemanta – they have recently opened up their service to more blogs, which is going to make Jack’s system of generating $9000/month turbo-charged.
I have no idea how typical thoughs results are, but I regard Jack as an atypical trainer.

Here is another affiliate link

All affiliate links in this article come with 99.9% uptime SLA to take you through to Jack’s offer and potentially make me some money.

p.s. Jack has a $1 for 7 days trial

Update

Here is a direct link to the free training resources Jack provided in a run up to his relaunch of Blog Success

I have just been joking a little with Jack Humphrey on twitter about outranking him for his own product.. yet again, and toying with the idea of making it a double listing.
The first thing Jack did when he read my post was promote it to his Twitter followers.

Link building within a niche isn’t hard if you build a relationship with other bloggers, and if you can’t send a significant amount of traffic with a link, you can always resort to social media such as Stumbleupon, especially if they have linked to you as then you can build up the value of that link.

Another blogging friend is Alex, who just relaunched his Expert WordPress training and Blog Installer.

I have had access to his site for the last year along with access to regular webinars, something I encouraged him to do when he first launched, and I was also lined up to take part in one but life (my adopted son) overtook a large chunk of my online activities. That is an obligation I mean to correct in the future.

Alex’s blog package is a solid offering (it is free) and the installer looks to be a real time saver. I haven’t tested that aspect as I don’t currently have any hosting using Cpanel. It includes not only the usual SEO tweaks, but security as well.

With Alex’s Installer he can fully install a WP blog with a load of plugins and security fixes in 3 minutes.

If you find the free installer useful, don’t forget to give Alex a link and start building a relationship with or without an affiliate link (I chose without)

Now things are a little settled I have had some time to go back through correspondence I read whilst travelling, but didn’t have time to take action on – the idea of “touch once” broke down for the last couple of months – the “to do” list grew.

I am glad I took the time to revisit previous correspondence, Carl’s list of 32 things he has learned is priceless.

There are multiple reasons why I have supported PayPerPost and similar programs so strongly, and yet at the same time have never reviewed a link buying / selling service.

I have mentioned link buying and selling in passing, and also a couple of WordPress plugins, but those plugins generally allow you to sell links which have a nofollow.

My emphasis both in editorial about services and in the few reviews I have myself written is to encourage the writing of quality content with editorial links. Compensation in whatever form should be based upon the time involved, expertise, and possibly the size and influence of the audience, and not based upon any SEO benefit to a site or service being reviewed.

Encouraging The Selling of PageRank?

It is my belief that I don’t advocate the selling of PageRank, especially considering how I also discourage excessive blogrolls and sitewide links. If you have links coming in for your every utterance, I suppose internal linking structure is less important to you than acknowledging sites you respect (who might also reciprocate), or possibly those you sell links to (if you do) but in general for niche marketing blogs I tend to avoid leaks in the sidebar.

Comments on Sphinn and even here in the comments recently suggest there is some kind of disconnect between how I regard paid review services, and possibly how they are regarded, used and abused by the SEO community at large, and possibly Google reacting to that attitude taken by SEOs and not that taken by the review services, or the reviewers themselves. I think it is important to point out that PayPerPost was created by a marketing company, not by an SEO or link selling company.

Rather than single out individuals for the comments they have made, I would rather answer a specific question asked here on my blog by Lisa Stewart

Hi Andy- thanks for the excellent and well thought out post and arguments FOR services like PayPerPost.

To play Gevil’s Advocate- If a site (like PPP) is offering a fee to post and the fee is based entirely on Page Rank (and sometimes Alexa traffic) then why can’t it be interpreted as paying for page rank?
A post coming from PPP on a PR3 site may cost advertiser 10.00 and the SAME post on PR5 is 50.00.

Why wouldn’t Google seeing this as gaming PR?

Now I should point out that at this time Google is interpreting this as gaming PageRank. I personally feel this is the wrong interpretation, but then my own interpretation could be extremely biased. I have been penalized by Google, even though I believe I don’t sell PageRank.

Advertiser Or Client Intent

Every potential client who has requested a review and I have considered for a review, when told that specific link text is not a possibility, and that any link I give would be for editorial purposes, has responded favourably.

It seems people are not necessarily ordering reviews for SEO purposes at all, though I do give SEO friendly links to things I highlight as part of the editorial process.

Many corporate advertisers have a different need to fulfil, that of creating a buzz about a new product and feel that blogs are an interesting avenue to explore. They will most likely get different feedback than they would from traditional reviews sites, because a reviewer whilst being a consumer, would also spend more time doing it.
In the attention age we live in, gaining feedback from consumers whilst increasingly vital, is also becoming increasingly more difficult – sure consumers might make a passing comment, but constructive feedback is less likely, unless they feel aggrieved.

Google, Microsoft, and even most startups have rank upon rank of staff members and shareholders to “get the message out” about a new product or service, but in many ways those too are paid reviews that don’t mention competing products or services.
Other large companies don’t have such an extensive and influential online presence amongst their staff and investors, thus they look to other alternatives.

• Internal PR – the largest firms retain their own public relations specialists, often with shared ties to advertising personel – this isn’t a cheap undertaking.
• PR Firms – expensive but have access to key influencers
• Press releases – wider distribution costs money, though they are less effective for companies that aren’t monitored continually, and information is less likely to trickle down to niche markets – I have seen a number of popular websites hosting paid press releases
• Focus groups – Google themselves pay $75 per hour for people to test their services, and are probably paying the person monitoring them even more – from this they gain private feedback, but I wonder how many people also write about the experience.
• Product sample giveaways – quite frequently these do not have to be given back, so a blog owner can keep them, or give them away to readers.
• Special events – I have attended special events by major Fortune 500 corporations launching products where many of the exhibitors (including me) had flight, room and board funded, along with display space, and the same was probably true of the press.
• Paid reviews and buzz marketing

For some reason there is a disconnect between paying a blogger $10 to $200 for a post, and paying a staff member $100 per hour to chase a group of bloggers to write something for free, feed them with drinks, sponsor their events etc.

Social media optimization might be looked on as successful if a $5000 budget garnered 50 to 100 links, but paid reviews can garner many more links for a similar budget, and could also be used in conjunction with a social media campaign.

Paid blogging is a way of grabbing the attention of a blogger to consider looking at a product or service and sharing their experiences about it in public.

There are obviously some companies that use it specifically for SEO purposes, and some bloggers who are willing to write something purely for SEO purposes. Then again have you never heard of “SEO press releases” and “Article Marketing” where the content is provided 100% with links just to copy and paste.

I don’t think Hewlett Packard, Ford, or major movie studios really care that much about whether links count for search engines, but they probably do care if links are clicked. If you use nofollow, to a percentage of readers who see the link, the fact that you use nofollow suggests that you don’t trust the service you are writing about, the intent of nofollow.
The same is true for any redirects which suggest affiliate links and commercial tracking.

It is quite possible that 30% of my readers, and possibly more than 50% of my regular readers can see when I have used a nofollow on a link, because I encourage them to use the Search Status plugin for Firefox.

When Google and Microsoft employees start linking to their employers using nofollow, that is when I will start using nofollow on paid reviews and linking to consulting clients.

Leading People Astray

It has been suggested that my coverage of PayPerPost, Paid Reviews, and PageRank is in some way leading people astray, and thus the “Pied Piper” connotation.

My firm belief is that my readership is extremely mature and intelligent, and quite capable of making their own informed decisions.

Many do sell advertising in various ways without the nofollow attribute value, and would choose to use that advertising or not without my intervention, as they chose to use it in the first place without my input.

When half your family income comes from a few links in the sidebar on a few blogs, it is a very difficult decision to remove them just before Christmas, especially if you have long-term contracts.

If I was to denounce PayPerPost, it would have very little effect on the decision process each would make as an individual.

Alternative Metrics For Authority

There is a pay scale in many aspects of every day life, the time of different people has a different perceived value.

Advertisers, companies doing market research, and those looking for a little consulting need some way to determine a suitable pay scale.

• Traffic metrics

  Alexa and Compete are not very relative to niches, and not enough people install Quantcast code on their site to get a real measure.

• Technorati

  easily gamed with WordPress themes and widgets – eventually Technorati do kick sites out of the Top100 but the APis will still send high ratings. Competitions and “review my blog” have also been looked on as a good way of boosting Technorati rankings, and then we shouldn’t forget memes and link chains.
  Technorati really need to move away from counting anything in a sidebar, including blogroll links.

• Feedburner Subscribers

  You would hope that this would be accurate, but due to the problems with default feed packages, and cross promotions of alternative reading platforms, the real number of subscribers could be anything from 30% to 90% of the number shown… and of course that doesn’t mean that people even open their feed reader.

• Comments

  How much can your blog actually stimulate discussion on other blogs, and in your own comments. This is a measure of influence.

• Clicks From Feeds

  Lots of people subscribe to content but don’t read it, or take action by clicking through to an article or referenced site. Feedburner do offer some tracking, but it is hard to use this as an external metric, and to get good results you have to use their tracking URLs which then reduce the numbers of links counted by other metrics such as Technorati. People make linking mistakes.

• Social News & Bookmarking

  Most sites provide some kind of API access, thus allowing you to judge the quality of a page based upon social factors and popularity. These are also gamed to a certain extent. Stumbleupon need to provide an API. Eventually something like the Social Media for Firefox extension might be looked on as more useful than other metrics.

• Meme Trackers

  Meme trackers try to track what is a hot story right now, such as Techmeme and Megite. The nearest thing they provide to an overall measure of influence are compilations of statistics such as the Techmeme Leaderboard. It is a very small subset of sites.

• Custom Metrics

  Scripts such as Blogstorm can give an indication of popularity, but require server side access, and for a blog owner to care about being listed.

• PageRank

  Proving to be too easily gamed (WordPress themes and funny redirects), and the visual representation provided in the Google toolbar is now being adjusted with manual PageRank penalties with arguably commercial considerations. It hasn’t been very meaningful for search results for some time, and now it is no longer a metric of social influence by anyone that understand these things. Unfortunately Google mislead their Google Toolbar users.



• Argus Is Coming

  I am excited about the potential of whatever Izea (PayPerPost) come up with for their Argus project which promised to provide a comprehensive metrics service for both bloggers and advertisers.

  I haven’t seen it, am not on the alpha test, and might not get early access to it because I am not going to be at Postiecon or Blog World Expo.

Examples Of PageRank Used For Ranking

The Google Directory
The Adage Power 150
The Top 25 Blogs About Blogging
The Top 100 Make Money Onine Blogs

The of course there is the PayPerPost Direct – it is an advertiser marketplace and PageRank is used as one of the indicators of authority or influence, but you can’t search the database based upon that field, and it is just one metric offered and soon to be removed.

It is quite possible Google just took that database of sites for its penalty list, without realising that whilst PageRank is used as an indication of authority, bloggers are free to set their own criteria in private discussion with someone requiring some kind of review service. Bloggers are quite able to specify that they will nofollow the links, or use redirects. they are also able (as I do) to insist that all links are editorial..

I know bloggers on that list who have never written a review for PayPerPost.

Techcrunch Crunchies

In closing, Techcrunch along with a number of other technology blogs will soon launch what appears to be an award ceremony for technology startups.
If there happens to be a monetization or blogging category, I know who I am going to nominate, and encourage people to vote for.
In something as serious as an award called “The Crunchies”, I am quite happy to try to influence any results.

Update

I just want to highlight why I don’t support paid links and this is the kind of review I really wish Sebastian had been paid for.

If Sebastian was giving that type of advice in private, it would probably cost someone $1000 or more… seriously, Sebastian knows his stuff, just as he demonstrated with the Blogcatalog redirect problems in the past.

This is actually part of a blog improvement meme just started by my long-time online friend Dane, and whilst I haven’t taken part in any kind of meme for months, I believe this to be a really valuable one which has the potential to give lots of value to readers, though I am twisting it slightly by trying to ask the people I am pinging to also give me an answer to what I want to change.

I am also going to tag some big hitters, and hope they will respond.

Headline Formatting

For a while I have been puzzling over something as to the best approach in formatting headines, but so that they appear differently on a blog, and in an RSS feed.

Here is an example from Copyblogger

The original article was about high impact content above the fold, and headlines make a huge difference, especially how they are formatted.

Notice that the first line is quite short? That isn’t normal wrapping, it is centred, but also includes a “BR” in the headline.

<a href="http://www.copyblogger.com/writing-for-stumbleupon/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Writing for StumbleUpon:&lt;br /&gt; High Impact Content “Above the Scroll” in Four Easy Steps">Writing for StumbleUpon:<br> High Impact Content “Above the Scroll” in Four Easy Steps</a>

But the sneaky thing is that that BR only seems to appear on the page, and not in feed readers or search results. I have tried just including it when adding a headline to a post in the past, and the headline looked horrible in feed readers, and when people submit your post to Digg, the ugly “BR” can appear in the title… oops.

I can think of a number of ways to do this, such as using a custom field for the headline on the page being displayed, but I would love to know how it is being done on Copyblogger.

So first up I am pinging Brian Clark or Chris Pearson to give us some insight on the best way to handle this. Chris did Brian’s design and has covered similar stuff such as image handling in RSS in the past.

I think improving how headlines are displayed is important, so would make a perfect article on either site. I would also love to know what they would prefer.

Subscription Options

I have been experimenting with quite unique subscription options on this site for a while, and wrote about how I did it.
The aim was to raise the headers up the page a little on the single pages and offer something totally unique, and in many ways it has worked.
Some people might be happy to double their subscribers in 3 months.

It has however totally failed in one regard. My email subscription rate has absolutely plummeted.
I am not sure if this is to be expected, and that RSS usage really is increasing, or because I am just attracting a more sophisticated user, but I suspect it is because it is hidden.

I would make it a lot more prominent if I was able to offer an incentive for signing up with a managed email solution, but such a solution would need to

1. Allow me to send a full content daily digest automatically
2. Support integration with membership sites
3. subscription management (such as moving from a prospect to a customer list, and not sending out multiple emails to people subscribed to 2 different lists)
4. Subscriber numbers are addictive – I need them reported to Feedburner

I want to extensively test email subscriptions on blogs, but I need the content to go out in the emails once per day. Some days I publish 4 blog entries, other days nothing at all. My record was 10 blog posts in a single day. If someone received 10 emails from me in one day, they are going to unsubscribe before they have read the 6th.

The nearest to the functionality that I am aware about is Aweber, but I believe I can only select a number of posts to send in a batch, or immediate sending.
So I am going to ping the guys at Aweber about this, but I would also love them to write something on how to increase email subscriptions on blogs.

There would be lots of ways I could offer incentives for email subscriptions, but I don’t want to frighten my list if I have a busy day.

Messing With WordPress Loops

In the new design I will most likely use some kind of featured post format, but I am not sure about the best way to do it for server load.

I have read 2 very good solutions

• Use Daniel’s plugin, Homepage Excerpts or modify it as needed – this filters the output of the standard loop
• Dane’s single wordpress loop code which does some counting to determine what to display
• Using 2 or more WordPress loops

I will probably have to use some multiple loop code anyway in various places, and this will mainly be used for categories, but I would love to know which method is the ideal one to recommend to people.

So I need to ping a WordPress Guru who knows how these things work, and might also have helped implement similar things on a few high traffic sites. Aaron… help!

Aaron has actually been doing some pretty hefty changes to his own blog, and I noticed that the front page has been optimized to drive subscriptions very much to other team B5 blogs.

Also, in the comments on Digg recently for the article I linked to I noticed lots of comments regarding performance issues. Were they WordPress 2.3 related?

Just 3 For Now

There are lots of other things I am going to be improving, but I generally know the answers for those. I am actually going to experiment with a wide 2 column theme (60/40) with a complex footer.

I have been using tagging to determine related posts and WP2.3 probably won’t have that available for while.

And so gentleman, I would really appreciate your answers, and maybe you would also like to discuss what you would like to change on your blogs, or try to shoehorn some answers out of other people.

However so many people are making critical mistakes with Blogrush, I thought it would be a good time to give them a few tips and clear up some misconceptions.

1. Don’t Scare Your Readers

   I have seen a number of negative reviews of Blogrush by people worrying about privacy, data collection, what happens to data collected etc.
   Let’s face it, your ISP sells your user data
   Advertising companies are collecting data all the time
   Whatever widget or image you place on your website, quite often some smart person is collecting data

   It is worth evaluating the ownership of a widget, for instance if they are a direct competitor, possibly they are a blog network, but as far as I know, John Reese is moving away from the massive number of niche sites model and has been for the last year.

   My evaluation of the Blogrush privacy policy? I am not a lawyer, but it seems the intent of the data collection is for internal use, plus they may issue reports or use the data to highlight hot stories currently in the network.
   Lots of widgets and social network sites for bloggers collect the same data, and use it in the same way, where is the problem?

2. Blogrush Won’t Bring Much Traffic

   How useless is social media traffic? You get 10,000 to 100,000 visitors to your site, and very few leave interesting comments or subscribe to your blog.

   Blogrush promises targeted traffic – not just category based – how good the contextual algorithms work is yet to be proven, but the hope is that the traffic will be more focused.

   If you can convert 100,000 untargeted visitors into 1000 targeted, that is actually quite valuable and worthy of consideration.
   If you gain a few referrals, things get really interesting – I now have an incentive to Stumble and Digg the people who signed up under me, because that will give me traffic even if they didn’t link to me directly.
   This introduces a totally new level of cooperative traffic arbitrage.

3. Not Including Blogrush On Every Page

   Are you scared of leaking readers? Maybe your blog isn’t set up to retain interest and encourage people to read more content.
   Blogrush gives you circulation credits for each time the widget is displayed.

4. Prominent Positioning

   There are huge long-term benefits in referring people to Blogrush and having the widget prominently displayed on your blog will help referrals.
   If you don’t use it yourself, how can you recommend it?

   Don’t be worried about sharing a little traffic

5. Ultimate Incentive

   John Reese is counting on these widgets to remain on blogs, so he is going to do everything he can to ensure that the smaller bloggers get some traffic from it.
   There is a whole load of excess inventory “above the pyramid/matrix” that needs to be disposed of – 10% is sectioned off for Blogrush to sell. It is my hope that this inventory is distrubuted “flat rate” or at least “flatter rate” to all publishers, not pro rata their existing credits in the system. This could prove to be the great leveller.
   Based upon 1% CTR on Blogrush currently (it is really hard to pin down), $1 CPM for the advertising adds up to an awful lot of money, though I would hope it will be as low as $0.20 because CTR will drop.

   The critical mistake – people are thinking that for some reason only the big bloggers are going to benefit

6. Titles Maketh Traffic

   Short, possibly controversial titles are going to perform better than titles that aren’t topical within your niche but you certainly need to test and track

7. Traffic Analysis

   Use your normal tracking software and see where the traffic is coming from, and how it is interacting with your site.

   Blogrush is already referring more traffic to me than MyBlogLog, Bumpzee or Blogcatalog, and I have a fairly broad network in each of those communities.

   You might think that my best performing story on Blogrush was my slightly controversial story on John Chow Reviews, but my analytics prove otherwise, with more people landing on my Gmail story from Blogrush.

   Content is being very widely distributed on Blogrush already, in fact half of the sites that have sent me traffic I have never even heard of.

   Blogrush allows you to reach new sites you may never of heard of, and have never heard of you, that are highly relevant to your topics, it has nothing to do with who referred you

   Whilst you might think that the “blogging A list” are going to benefit the most, lets face it, a high percentage of people interested in content on Problogger within the blogging niche already read it. The big bloggers might get more credits, but they will likely have a much lower CTR.

   The biggest benefit for the more prominent bloggers will be if/when they will be able to use credits towards other sites they wish to promote, such as in Darren’s case using credits to promote his photography blog or other B5 properties.

Click On It

If you see something interesting from an unknown blog shown on your site, click on it. Not only might you find the story interesting, but if the blogger also uses some tracking, they will see where the click came from, and possibly come and pay you a visit.
Many widgets clicks don’t really mean very much, because they can’t be seen as coming from your related site. Hopefully the stats Blogrush create will also help to highlight this, as not every blogger uses tracking effectively.

Blogrush is not just an advertising tool, it is a discovery tool

Bonus Tip – don’t add Blogrush to a blog that doesn’t have any content – lots of people are adding it to new blogs that just have the first “Hello World” default post. They end up on my permanent block list.

p.s. I have been going around stumbling the people who wrote about Blogrush and who mentioned they signed up with me and linked through to my initial review. Even if you haven’t linked through (with a trackback/pingback), let me know – I will be setting up some ways to help promote your widgets and content in various ways in the future and I would like to help you gain more referrals.

Blog bling, blog community and blog traffic widgets are becoming quite a conjested marketplace, so what makes Blogrush, the newest contender something to take note of?

John Reese

I have a lot of respect for John Reese. People talk about The Digg effect, John Reese can send Digg like traffic to a site just by sending an email, and what is more important is that he sends qualified traffic, buying traffic.

Funding

I am fairly sure Blogrush won’t have any need for immediate funding. They have launched on a cluster of 8 servers for scalability, there is no intention of starting this off small.
John has a team of programmers working for him, and established support personnel. Blogrush is apparently just one small piece in the puzzle which is Income.com, which he has been building up to for over a year.

Viral Concept

Blogrush is designed to encourage people to promote it with a 10 tier referral program. It hasn’t been specified how the breakdown works on each tier, but the benefit of viral referrals will be substantial for early adopters.

That will be one of the keys as with any program of this type. To get maximum benefit from Blogrush, you are going to have to sign up early and promote it… hence why this is going to explode.

The Blogrush Widget

The Blogrush widget looks par for the course, as they have lots of competitors. It is lacking a lot of the technology of similar widgets. Many widgets for instance have built in browsers for RSS feeds or to stumble through content that is being displayed.

What John claims is that Blogrush has advanced technology to match what is displayed on the widget with your blog content… that it is in some way contextual rather than just category based.

This hopefully will make a significant difference with click-through rate, though as far as I know traffic ratios are based upon impressions rather than clicks.

Hopefully we will see improvements in the future.

Free Traffic Potential?

If you look on your screen real estate as a way to generate more traffic by various means, Blogrush is going to be of interest. I believe it has more potential than many similar widgets, simply because it will gain so much attention over this launch period.

Get people signed up early to benefit from the viral effect.

If you have a lot of traffic already, then that will be leveraged into more traffic on the network.

If your screen real-estate carries high value advertising, you might have to think differently, either about including the widget at all, or positioning both now, and when it is more mature (harder to get new users)

I wouldn’t expect to get a 1% CTR from other sites displaying your content, it is going to be far less based upon what I have seen from competing widgets of this type.

There isn’t a community feature which might encourage repeat visits when someone bookmarks your content, thus you have to value the widget based upon its one click traffic potential.

You are going to have to test and track to see if the amount of traffic you receive is enough to justify the space the widget takes up. Initially you will benefit from viral referrals, but long-term you might be better using the space to generate revenue, and then investing that revenue in other traffic.

Lets Get Viral

Despite my long-term reservations, as it has just launched just hours ago, now is the opportune moment to sign up and promote it. It will grow exponentially for a few weeks.

Test and track, if you are gaining possibly 10 new visitors for every 1000 times the widget is displayed, that might be looked on as a reasonable return on screen real estate unless you have very effective monetization, or cheap methods to generate traffic.

Think about traffic arbitrage – I believe there is going to be a way to specify which sites benefit from your traffic credits. Get cheap traffic on one site, use the traffic credits to promote a better monetized site. You might be able to turn Digg and Stumbleupon traffic into higher quality traffic from another site – well, unless it turns out traffic credits are based upon clicks, but even then some headlines are going to generate more clicks than others ;)

Bugs

There were a few problems in the first hour of launch, but they are working around them quickly. Email delivery for registration was the biggest problem.
I had a problem registering with a .eu TLD (top level domain) so I had to use another URL which redirects here with a 301 redirect. That resulted in me not winning a free copy of Traffic Secrets 2 on launch – I would have won it.. honest.

John is promising some more launch competitions over the next few days, and I am sure they will be well worth entering.

My suggestion is to sign up, add the widget to your blog, and give it a little promotion. test and track and see if it works for you. That is what I am going to be doing.

Update – Full List of Categories

To avoid confusion, this is not just a widget particular to one niche such as blogging or internet marketing, it is hopefully suitable for all niches giving relevant content, and delivering your content to relevant blogs – I suppose if you have the only blog in existence on a particular subject, it is only going to be traffic based upon the categories.

Anyway, here are the available catagories

• Automotive
• Business Career & Jobs
• Celebrity
• Computers & Internet
• Education
• Entertainment
• Environment
• Finance & Investing
• Food & Drink
• Health & Medicine
• History
• Hobbies
• Home & Garden
• Humor
• Law & Legal
• Lifestyle
• Marketing
• Music
• News & Media
• Parenting & Family
• Personal
• Diary
• Pets
• Philosophy
• Photography
• Politics
• Real
• Estate
• Religion & Spirituality
• Sports
• Technology
• Travel
• Writing & Literature
• Video Games

Update 2 – Power Tip – Filtering

If people are reading a review you have just written about a product, you might not want them to click through to read someone else’s review, no matter which niche you are in.

Now in the case of this review, I want people to click through to read the site and sign up, not click to someone else’s site writing about Blogrush.

Blogrush provides a useful filtering mechanism based on either keywords or URLs, or both if you are that way inclined.

Yes, I am blocking the keyword Blogrush at least for now – it seem to be case insensitive.

This might seem a litle mean, but if you are writing good content, and then someone clicks away to a very poor review, but then buys a product using their affiliate link, that isn’t rewarding you for creating good content.

I would advise blocking keywords if they present a leak, though if you are running a golf blog, you might not want to block a keyword as broad as “golf” as then the widget wouldn’t offer any useful content for your readers.

Disclosure: I do some minor consulting with one of the blog community widget sites, Blogcatalog, for which I might receive some monetary compensation if they ever manage to flip the site. I try hard not to let that involvement affect my judgement of other similar sites

Its Not The Quality Of The Product

I have experienced some of Jacks training in the past, and it is always phenomenal, he gives so much valuable information and presents it in a way that is easy for anyone to understand.
I have absolutely no doubt that Social Power Linking will be no exception to the rule.

It Is Not Philosophical

Jack and myself currently have the same philosophical approach to building websites, and in fact I am fairly sure with his Authority Site Centre that he built and promotes with his partners he uses many of the same plugins as I do on a regular basis, only his team sets up the blogs for you on their own servers.

It Is Certainly Not Price

This is a physical product that will be shipped to your door

• 6 Hours of Video on 8 DVDs
• PDFs of the Slides
• PDF Fast Start Guide
• 3 CD of the same material to listen to in your car

Now most “online gurus”, most of which have half, or even less, of Jack’s 10 years of online experience (and often propose some shady tactics) would start off with a short term promotion of their product for $497 or more, and quickly raise the price to the best part of $1000

Now don’t get me wrong, some of those more expensive packages are worth their weight in gold, because they come from people with a similar level of experience to Jack, and honestly I am sure Jack’s latest offering is worth far more than the measly price he is charging.

Quite often these days you would be expecting to pay $67 for an ebook, with the price raising to $97 within a few days for something that might take you 1hr to read. Sometimes again that is worth it, if you already have a successful business, and one tip could make an existing traffic funnel profitable, or allow you to use a new one and make a profit.

This is a steal for only $149 plus $20 for shipping anywhere in the world… yes even to the Far east, Australia, or to me in Poland.

Take a look at Social Power Linking for yourself

I Don’t Know All Jack’s Strategies

Whilst Jack has a very similar philosophy for site building, I am sure I would pick up a few tricks that would make a total cost of $169 worthwhile.

It Not The Sales Letter

Jack has been known to have some pretty long sales letters in the past, but this one is only about 4 or 5 pages, tells you exactly what you get in Social Power Linking for such a small purchase price, and gives a quick overview of the contents of each CD.

There is not a testimonial in sight

Why? Jack honestly doesn’t need them, he has been in the business so long and is so highly respected. He is also quite sure that his offer is so compelling combined with the feedback his affiliates will give him in reviews such as this that any testimonials will just be unnecessary fluff that will scare away potential customers.

Jack knows full well that in some niches PPC is just not a viable consideration unless you have massive profit margins only suitable for those who have already learnt how to play Google’s Adword’s fiddle to perfection.
Fortunately there are ways to capture free traffic from search engines, and Jack is a master at not only gaining traffic, but teaching others how to do it in whatever niche they are in.

No Problems With Payment

There was a time that many residents of far-flung countries didn’t have the possibility to pay for products using Paypal but times are changing. Paypal makes it easy and if you haven’t got an account then there is always a credit card.

(note: in the past Jack used 2checkout for one of his programs I was a member, and I had some problems – Paypal really does make a difference for me)

Guarantee – You Had Better Believe It!

Not only do you get your money back, they will also pay you a little on top, though actually this is a little confusing.

They don’t refund the $20 shipping charge, but they do pay you $22 on top of the purchase price of the goods. You would only actually gain $2.

On top of that you would also have to pay for the goods to be shipped back, so if you do feel compelled to ask for a refund, you might actually be a few dollars poorer, but that is the same with any product you purchase mail order or over the internet.

So Why Am I Not Buying?

No it is not what you are thinking, I am not looking to get a free copy, I really would part with my cash right now.

I am an unusual rare case, and even if Jack offered it to me for free, including free shipping I would refuse.

Part of my old job in the computer games and software industry here in Poland used to be import/export. I have been through living hell with Polish customs so many times the very thought of having to handle what is now minor import paperwork, and then only sometimes, just gives me the shivers.

When I started my online business, one of the primary reasons was to get away from some of the mundane and sometimes highly stressful aspects of international trade.
My wife working for her father’s apparel business still goes through this almost daily and although things have greatly improved since Poland joined the European Community, I still have what I can only look on as “import phobia”

Thus I am only interested in digital products

Don’t Let My Reservations Stop You

Honestly, my phobia is my problem, not yours.

Physical products are shipped around the world daily, and if they are for personal use they most often sail straight through without having any customs paperwork or charges even here in Poland, well unless you are buying an $80,000 car, a motor cruiser or $4000 hifi system (yeah I still get requests from family friends to help with such purchases, and more often than not I avoid it, even though it would pay well just to make a few phone calls)

$169 Flat Rate (including shipping) = no brainer?

For some people yes, for others who are not making any money online and things are a little tight financially back at home, Social Power Linking is not for you. I would in that case suggest you read Jack’s Authority Black book, and Michelle’s Web 2.0 Traffic guide that I mentioned just a few hours ago.

I actually deliberately wrote about the free alternatives first so that I could link through to them in this post.

I deliberately wrote this as a separate post because just like Jack, I know a little bit about traffic generation and how well I can rank for products that I discuss that I believe are of value to my readers.

Hopefully I can persuade Jack to make a digital version on Social Linking Power available for fellow “import phobia” sufferers as I am sure I will learn something new.

Yes, I did deliberately use “Social Linking Power” instead of Social Power Linking” and I suppose I should also mention Socialpowerlinking.com – there are currently around 2000 references to this product in Google, I wonder how I will rank in the SERPs for “Social Power Linking“

Today they have written a little about content theft, it isn’t a great article, and doesn’t really go into many of the problems, or link through to any authority sources.

I don’t worry about content theft, I license all my content under GPL, and I gain lots of low quality backlinks, or sometimes great backlinks from authority sites that syndicate my content.

I often include lots of internal linking in every post to maximise the benefit, and it helps to establish ownership of the original article (Google might have fixed some of my previous link attribution worries)

Don’t Link To The People You Are Crying About

The biggest blunder from the article on Download Squad however is they linked through to the offending sites and articles, with a real SE followable link.

Nofollow Has A Purpose

I strongly advocate not using nofollow in comments on actively moderated blogs, but it is the easiest way to tell search engines that you don’t vouch for the content on a site.

Giving a good link to the search engines from the same domain as content has been stolen from is just idiotic. It makes the content more authentic, and if you are worried about someone stealing your SERPs, the worst thing you can do is give the stolen content credibility.

Note to DownloadSquad: Add rel=”nofollow” if you link to people syndicating your content

Nofollow can also be used in many ways to optimize your internal linking structure.

Note to DownloadSquad Part2: Damn the links you use to other people are terrible. Please make my blog linking mistakes article required reading for all your writers.