I quite like some of Alex’s products, I have been critical of most of Jared’s and I suppose I am neutral on Brian’s as I have never bought any.

Hyper lazy affiliate banner

In theory it is like a simplified version of Zemanta with an additional option to check to see if a reciprocal pingback link has been published.

There are lots of options to get rid of most footprints the problem is people are lazy and leave the defaults.

Thus you get nice footprints like this

<p><!-- pingbacker_start --><br />
<h4>Related Blogs</h4>
<ul class='pc_pingback'>

The other problem is people are greedy.

Rather than choosing the most related posts they add as many as they can – a numbers game, and may or may not keep the links.

I am referring to extreme greed.

• Is the plugin legit? It is just a tool
• Can it be abused? Most certainly
• Are idiots abusing it? Without a doubt
• Is it blackhat? Not necessarily

If you want to test the plugin you get it as a free download from an exit pop sequence if you visit the site via the banner above.
I don’t think as a tool for finding relevant links it is a bad thing, and if you are automating content aggregation in some legitimate way then those receiving (genuine) (relevant) (followed) links aren’t going to complain too much.
With a lot of creative thought something like this could be turned into a very crude Techmeme clone built on WordPress.

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.

Google Reader still:-

• Doesn’t support simple HTTP authentication so you can use RSS for private stuff
• Doesn’t provide a mechanism so content producers can restrict sharing stuff

This is important… if you want to provide premium content from a membership site in a form that is most accessible for your subscribers.

It is even important for anyone using stock photos with a contract/license limited to a certain number of views for which you are personally liable. If you allow people to share blog posts that contain stock photos, it is a significant financial risk… but I am not a lawyer.

But segmentation? Not unless every subscriber had a unique feed… Feed Magic had it

In theory you could also segment private feeds provided by membership software such as Your Members, but that is complex customization.
And of course you would want your multi-modal marketing efforts – RSS, Twitter, Email, Video etc to all be somehow within. the same interface so you could segment based upon various content interaction.

If you have 5 different people who shared a segmented RSS feed, which was personalised, you would be in all kinds of problems – the viewing and click data would be useless… plus there are privacy concerns.

I Am About To Hammer My RSS Feed

I am sorry, blame Google
Blame the people who supported and evangelised sharing of RSS rather than exploring ways that it could be used to make it more personal, valuable and ultimately important in people’s lives.
RSS could be more than just reading blogs… there is no such thing as RSS spam – it is opt-in only.

There will be a percentage of my readers that will appreciate what I will be reviewing extensively over the next week or so, Stomper 999, including offering a significant bonus as soon as the site goes live.

Stomper 999 isn’t just about training… there are some nifty new tools as well, plus a few old favorites.

There are also likely to be 1000s of people looking (via search engines) for solid information about what is on offer, and I believe I can give some significant insight whether or not they feel my bonus offer is the one they are going to pounce on.
Syndication of my RSS feed helps people find my content.

You may have already seen something about the Stomper 999 launch – it has been spammed all over twitter, there has been chat on a number of forums, and a few people have already been hammering their mailing lists… at least those who don’t segment their email lists extensively.

If you haven’t.. it is worth checking out, and you will hear a lot more over the next few days, and that will include multiple blog post form me, many of which will contain useful insight.

I am also going to intersperse a few rants and unique tips for variety.

I apologise in advance if you are someone who believes everything should be free – information, tools, consulting time etc, or if you can’t budget to invest a little more in your business (I am a strong believer in only investing profits in your online education). If you can’t really afford something, don’t buy it… or do as I often do and be highly selective in where you invest your money.

If you have seen rumours about the new Stompernet pricing, the rumours are true, and it is a lot more affordable, and in many ways the offer at the new significantly lower price point is better than when you had to invest $800/month.

It will be a Mafia Offer – an offer too good to refuse, and one I can’t think of anyone who can honestly compete with it.

No I am not going to tell you how much just yet… affiliates have been asked not to reveal pricing, though I am not going to be the one leaking it.

It is a significant step, though not as many seem to think unusual.

Afterall, Google started as a search engine, then monetized search, and finally introduced their own publisher program Adsense.

Lots of discussion related to the often reappearing Microsoft Yahoo deal mention that display advertising is highly lucrative, and Technorati are in a prime position to serve advertising to a very specific demographic of publishers – bloggers.

Technorati know exacty what bloggers are talking about on a day to day basis, so in aggregate they can offer publishers targeted display advertising, at least in theory.

Also it is important to understand that instead of selling the vast amount of data they have, they are using it to provide an added value service.

From the official announcement:-

Our first step was a private beta. We assembled a core of like-minded sites, founded to provide community and services to bloggers and to surface the best of blog content to consumers, and were successful in attracting advertisers to the network including: T-Mobile, Toyota, and Verizon.

These sites form the base of the Technorati network’s vertical content channels and reach an audience of 17 million (with that audience increasing very shortly with several other sites about to sign). Over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals. Here’s some of who’s in so far:

• blogtalkradio
• Blogcritics
• blogcatalog
• BlogTV
• GeekAlerts
• GPSMagazine
• NerdApproved
• Technabob

The site itself is a little short on real information, so I thought I would try to pry some out of Tony Berkman from Blogcatalog. I was aware of some of the details at the beginning of March, but it has taken far longer than I expected for the news to finally emerge.

Andy: Hi Tony, thanks for taking the time to respond to my request to chat about the new Technorati Advertsing platform. Whilst I knew you had a deal with Technorati some time ago, it was felt best not to discuss it in detail.

Tony: My pleasure Andy

Andy: When did Technorati first approach you about their new advertising platform?

Tony: Around the beginning of January was when we started discussions. They started running ads on BC in February.

Andy: Up until that time Blogcatalog was primarily monetized using Google Adsense. Did you find Adsense was providing enough income to meet your growing development and hosting needs?

Tony: Exactly. AdSense was our primary income source. We do have a number of other sources such as premium membership and directory category sponsorships. For the first year of operation AdSense and these other sources of income enabled us to pay for hosting and developer costs. Around November 2007, BlogCatalog’s traffic exploded and bandwidth costs started to eat into the portion of income that we were using to fund development. At that point I started looking for ways to monetize the site that wouldn’t ruin the user experience.

Andy: So you decided to test Technorati Advertising?

Tony: Exactly. We entered into a relatively short term agreement so that we can see if it is beneficial and whether they can deliver on their promises. The contract term expires in November. It is really too soon to say whether we will continue after that time, but we will give them the chance to prove they can deliver.

Andy: When did you start displaying Technorati Advertising on Blogcatalog, and does it appear in all sections of the site?

Tony: We always want to avoid obtrusive advertising for our members, thus we currently display light advertising in the following sections

1. Directory Categories
2. Search Pages
3. Blog Detail Pages

And if you are a premium member, which costs $6 a month, all ads are removed from the site.

Andy: Can you elaborate a little on their performance?

Tony: The first few months were nothing to write home about as the Technorati team was getting their infrastructure together. During this time we were only displaying one vertical ad on each directory page. Recently though we have seen a move to higher paying ads that are more targeted to our audience – a win / win situation for both advertisier and publisher.

Andy: Whilst Blogcatalog gains very little mainstream coverage, it is quite a high traffic mainstream internet site with over 4M monthly pageviews. I assume that means Technorati are giving you a fairly decent deal?

Tony: We have a favorable split. Mainstream coverage is rather limited, however we certainly get a fair share of internet traffic. Traffic – BC is now closer to 9M pageviews though not all of those views are available to Technorati. For now, provided they continue to improve their offerings, Technorati is a great deal for us, and makes sense as we are able to monetize the directory withouth having to build up a sales infrastructure.

Andy: No yardsticks? Ah well… the other important aspect for any publisher is communication. Do they respond to emails?

Tony: Personally they are outstanding to work with. Their support has been first class. Though at the end of the day it comes down to whether it makes sense to have them representing our ad units, or whether it makes more sense for us to hire an ad team. There is always a balancing act and a desire to concentrate on core competence.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, it is good to have some direct feedback from someone who has already been using Technorati’s new advertising platform for some time.

My Take

At this time I don’t intend running display ads (on this blog anyway) unless it is in the form of some specific sponsorship, though it might be more interesting for some niche sites.

Display advertising is much more suited to more mainstream sites with broader topics.

On the advertising purchase page for Technorati I also noticed the following:-

You can also enquire about Technorati Conversational Marketing, the next step in entering the global conversation on the web.

That could be PR service targeting bloggers, or maybe something akin to Social Spark.

Disclaimer – I do a little consulting with Blogcatalog

When to a huge amount of disbelief I blocked some of my high ranking paid reviews with robots.txt, and hinted that syndication would be a perfect loophole in Google’s penalties, no one fully understood what I meant – many SEO experts thought I was bonkers.

This is what I meant – widespread syndication with editorial control

The Limits of Traditional Article Marketing

Article marketing is all well and good, but is extremely limited

• You can only use a fixed number of links in a post
• Article directories are quite inflexible over affiliate links even if you have created
• HTML formatting is frowned upon because the articles are often intended for email use
• You can’t use pictures
• Most of the articles end up on very low value sites that have no readers
• Whilst they often use categories, tag support is limited

Jonathan Ledger has come up with what at first glance seems to be the perfect service for submission and syndication of quality blog articles.

Article Submission

• You sign up and add your blog – If you are smart, you will create a new user on your blog with username and password with low level privileges – don’t enter your admin username and password – I trust Jonathan, but even large websites get hacked, why take the risk?
• You make sure your blog is posting full content feeds
• You add an entry to your ping list, so that when you update your blog, your article is automatically added to Share-A-Post
• You use Technorati tags as normal, though only the first 5 will be used – that avoids tag spam
• You can add multiple blogs

RSS Article Syndication

When you are short of content for one of your blogs, you can visit Share A Post, search for an appropriate article, and have it posted either as a draft or published article directly to one of your blogs.

The service uses XML-RPC to connect automatically, just like popular blogging software such as Microsoft Windows Live Writer, but that does require a username and password – hence why I suggested precautions when setting up.

The other advantage is that when you are posting a guest article on your blog, because it is posted as a different user, it can be given different emphasis, maybe a different symbol etc.

Duplicate Content

Lots of people will be worried about duplicate content due to syndication

Syndication is a good thing, and Google does a fairly good job of determining the original author, and the link that is being given back to your post will help – it even has good anchor text – at least I think a link is given back to the permalink – to be sure, you should probably use an RSS footer plugin, and maybe even create a smart looking author byline for each article that includes a link.

If you want some assurance that syndication is a good thing, one of the most authoritative I can think of is Vanessa Fox, who until recently was working for Google on Webmaster Central at SEO and Webmaster conferences. If the “book” we follow are Google’s webmaster guidelines… guess what? She helped write it!

Recently on her personal blog she wrote a great article on how to rank as the original source for content you syndicate

With Jonathan’s system you are not going to be able to ensure that content gets blocked with Robots.txt, and that has a negative aspect as well, because the links wouldn’t count… you do want links don’t you?
You are also not going to be able to ensure a different version of your article is published, unless you somehow specify in a license that your articles can be modified, such as a Creative Commons License that allows derivative and Commercial use or better.

Hopefully you will always get a link, but just like with article marketing, that can never be guaranteed

You will find situations if you have a new blog with not much authority that Google makes mistakes – that will most often be when a high authority blog picks up your article.

In a situation like that… just be happy, you will get great links, and your content will be exposed to 100s, or 1000s of new readers, and if enough blogs pick the article up, you will get more authority quicker from all the links, and hopefully lots of traffic and new subscribers.

Proof-reading

Just like article marketing, you are going to have to use just a little bit more care before you post, as any errors you make might not be fixable if your articles get syndicated.

Hopefully anyone syndicating an article will check back with the original blog to ensure the article is up-to-date, and I suggest they do that anyway, as you want to always ensure you are promoting content from what is a reputable blog that is well established.

Competitors?

It is so obvious… but none really

• Well ok, I know Stompernet has some kind of content syndication network
• I know Jack Humphrey used to syndicate his clients article content on a network, but not blog posts
• There are various services which syndicate spun articles, but not blog posts
• There are services that have their own blogs, where you post snippets of articles
• Portal feeder has something similar for articles, I am not sure what is in Traffic Kahuna
• There are plugins which feed articles from article banks to WordPress blogs

So whilst the idea is simple, you have to have confidence in content syndication and how duplicate content works before you think of doing something like this, which is why someone probably didn’t do it before.

Powertip

If you are using standard tagging plugins, they will probably output tags in alphabetical order. That isn’t a huge problem for the 5 tags that will be used to catalogue your post, but it is a factor for your backlink, because the anchortext used will be from your first tag.

The easy answer? Add a manual tag somewhere within your article

If you look closely you will see that I have linked through earlier in this post to my “syndication” tag on my blog, and I have manually added rel=”tag” to the link.

Hopefully when this article is posted, the backlink to my blog will be “syndication”. That is fairly powerful stuff.

OK Andy, How Much?

Jonathan says the following:-

BETA TESTERS WANTED
===================

This service is now up and running, and I’m looking for beta testers
to create free accounts and try it out. I need folks with blogs
who want to syndicate their content to super-charge their link
building, and I need folks who need top-notch content to post to
their own blogs.

As a beta tester, your account will always be 100% free. Syndicating
other folks content will always be free anyway, but I’m working on
a business model that MAY charge a monthly fee for being able to
have your content syndicated in this way. Or it may stay free
for everyone, I haven’t decided. :)

At any rate, as a beta tester, you’ll never pay a dime for the
service.

So why not go give it a try right now?

I hope Jonathan keeps it free

If he doesn’t, I am sure there will be competitors who will do it for free, so it is much better keeping it free and advertising supported. If needed, get some VC money to cover operations, but that is unlikely to be needed.

This is beta, I haven’t yet tested everything, I am going to see if I can find a guest post on Share A Post to try out.

Another Reason To Applaud Jonathan

I think anyone else who would have launched this, other than maybe myself, would have included some kind of spammy “viral” link back to the blog article syndication directory, in the footer of every article.
I have just seen my first article syndicated on a blog, and there is no link to Share A Post – that is a cool move.

Please don’t syndicate posts without minor editing to at least remove all the related posts – whilst I love receiving 10+ links every time one of my articles is syndicated, I am not going to approve 10 pingbacks – I will just flag them as spam to avoid the annoyance in the future.
Single pingbacks are fine (I don’t have nofollow on pingback links), or even to each editorial link within an article – you give me a link, you get a link back.

Sign Up!

If you sign up to Share A Post, you will find this article in their library – an easy way to share Share A Post with your readers is just syndicating this article.

Special note from Andy: To add some additional incentive to try out Share A Post, if you have written a very high quality paid review recently that would be suitable for my readers, I will gladly syndicate it on my primary domain as well – oh, and I won’t be nofollowing any of the links, as it will be an editorial decision to publish it.

Here are some important notes

• The headline was chosen to be a little more appealing – it wouldn’t have affected people reading a full feed, or receiving my content by email (even though that was switched off), but it would affect links from social media and other blogs, and also platforms that only show headlines, such as Blogrush, Technorati Favorites, Alltop etc.
• I was sneaky – I didn’t have a suitable graphic, and a syndicated copy of the video wasn’t possible so I grabbed a screenshot from the video, which I also included in my excerpt on the front page
• I didn’t spend anywhere near as much time on the post as I did with the WordPress SEO software – there was nothing really to test – I watched the first 15 minutes of the video, knew it was a cracker, and started writing with the video playing at the same time. Sometimes it is important to get a post out fast.
• The Stompernet guys used a reverse squeeze page

Squeeze Page vs Reverse Squeeze Page

With Jeff Johnson’s WordPress SEO software, there is a classic squeeze page. In some ways I limited the effectiveness of the squeeze page because I went into detail about what you could expect when signing up. Most of the mailings I have seen so far for Jeff’s launch haven’t mentioned that he has created a hybrid WordPress installation, they have just stated that it is new SEO software.
I am sure by doing so, and leaving some mystery, they have achieved a higher number of opt-ins, and in affiliate marketing opt-ins are important because that means that the visitor has entered the sales funnel.

With Stompernet they take a different approach, with what they term as a reverse squeeze. I am not sure whether they pioneered the method, or Jeff Walker of Product Launch Formula.

The idea is that you provide a massive amount of compelling content on the front end without requiring an email address, and that those people who want to receive more similar content will hand over their name and email address to get updates on more content.

The Stompernet guys are great at providing free content, not only when they are launching their own products, but also as affiliates.
As an example recently they were promoting Shawn Casey and Tellman Knudson’s Listbuilding course, and Andy Jenkins wrote 2 cracking posts on the Stompernet Blog about listbuilding.

• A List Is Not A Bucket – Your email list are people, it is not just a machine to print money
• The art of the >>squeeze<< – here Andy went into detail about the difference between squeeze pages and the reverse squeeze method that they use.

I actually play an active roll on the Stompernet blog when I have something valuable to add to the conversation, and one of the reasons I can do that is that I subscribe to their email. It is great to leave valuable comments, but even better to be the first to comment on a new post.
I realise there are also tools such as Comment Sniper or Desktop RSS Readers that allow you to do that with RSS, but that can have a significant effect on your general browsing if you are polling 50 or 100 feeds every 5 minutes. Email once you have signed up is a push technology, and sometimes it is worth being interrupted.

Here are 2 examples.

• Stop Getting Links – this is one for the comment spammers out there to really read a few times and learn from. There is a vast difference between comment spam, and taking part in community discussion – notice I made the first comment – my comment was 299 words and added real value to the conversation.
• Stop Getting Links – Part 2
  – this time around they covered article marketing and approaching people to publish feature articles – I again left a comment, the second comment on the blog post (I was a little slow), 303 words – again adding value because linking to original articles on your blog is something rarely discussed

Is Reverse Squeeze More Effective?

From my experience as an affiliate it is… different, though it is very hard to measure if it is more effective.

By sending someone to a squeeze page I am cannibalizing my subscriber list, handing them over to someone for a free or cheap product. They then possibly turn into sales for that primary promotion, and for people with a long-term affiliate program over multiple products, it is possible I could also receive sales of other products further down the line.

At the same time, people who were only interested in the freebie would also have signed up to the list, and they may be less interested in the products or services being offered – they may however be warmer prospects for other affiliate products, but because those people are now on someone else’s list, they may buy through their link and not mine.

In the case of some marketers (I am confident with Jeff Johnson this is not the case), once signed up through a squeeze page they would be bombarded with offer after offer with no real valuable content in between.
Whilst a squeeze page can be very effective in generating more signups into a sales funnel, it is often best to be careful and in some way pre-qualify people. I gave a little more information than I needed to on the free seo blogging software – that was a pre-qualifying process.

With reverse squeeze pages, the content provided up front is the pre-qualification process.

Only people who watched Dan’s amazing video and were interested in improving their PPC campaigns would have signed up for the list to get access to previous videos (even though those videos were not all about PPC with Adwords)

For an affiliate that is both good and bad – good in that my subscriber base isn’t cannibalized, but it reduces my chances of a sale, especially with Stompernet offering a lot more than just PPC training.

As an example I know that they have some new software coming out this week. I know it is going to be SEO related, and a great fit for my audience.

From Click To Lead

If you do any kind of affiliate marketing, one of the aims is to convert traffic into leads. Some forms of affiliate marketing through CPA networks actually pay purely on the leads generated, whereas most of the affiliate marketing I do the only direct reward is based upon sales.
I don’t actually gain any direct financial benefit from encouraging people to sign up to the Stompernet mailing list, other than the possible chance of a long-term conversion. Not everyone is ready for Stompernet – if you throw in all the free conferences they have each year for their members it isn’t expensive, but there is a significant capital outlay.

Many super-affiliates in the information marketing niches won’t drive traffic to a sales page if it has any kind of opt-in form. They are not worried about reduced conversion from the prospect not being added to the list, but of longer-term list cannibalization, especially with lower priced products through Clickbank that are being sold purely to build a list of paying customers, but with no backend reward for the initial list owner.

Yet Another Poll

I will share that the number of clicks through to view the Stomper video, whilst possibly less targeted (not everyone is into Adwords) was higher than for the WordPress SEO software.

Based upon that, and the information I have shared above, how many people, after watching the Stompernet video subsequently signed up for updates?

The following poll you will again have to click through from your feed reader to complete.

[poll=6]

It is well worth signing up to the Stompernet mailing list. I believe their next video will be introducing some new SEO software. I haven’t been given any more details. Whilst they haven’t done this in the past, I really wouldn’t blame them if they restricted access to only those who have signed up to their mailing list.
There is only so far you can “move the freeline” without some form of reciprocation… even if it is just an email address.

His SiteBuildIt system has created many successful online businesses and was doing this long before WordPress became popular.

In his email to affiliates today he announced a new sales page attacking blogging head on.

Blogging has reached lemming status. Without even thinking, many small businesses equate blogging with having a Web site. This is obviously wrong for small businesses with something to sell (ex., services, e-book sellers, etc.).

But it’s also the wrong choice for infopreneurs (ex., those who earn affiliate and AdSense income, without selling anything directly to customers).

How and why has blogging reached “lemming epidemic” status? How do bloggers actually do FINANCIALLY, where it counts? Should YOU blog? When? How do blogs compare to Theme-Based Content Sites, performance-wise in the short-and-long terms?

Where did the misleading promise of blogging come from? Why do folks buy into it, despite all the evidence of failure?

Remember that “Where’s the beef?” commercial. Well, the “beef” of blogging vs. building is all here…

In some ways I have similar reservations about blogging, after all not too long ago I did write that blogs suck.

Part of that is from what I learnt from Ken in my early days online.

So what is the best option?

• Use something like SBI which already exists
• Turn blogging into SBI

In many ways I am attempting to do the latter

When I first discovered SiteBuildIt I am sure I spent at least 2 days reading all the different sales pages, case studies, and the tons of free ebooks they provide.

It is a good learning experience even if you do ultimately decide as I did that it isn’t quite what I wanted to do.

SBI seems like an expensive option compared to cheap hosting and free WordPress, but then you end up buying lots of additional training materials, keyword research tools etc, and what seemed cheap very often costs a lot more.

Blogging evangelists are going to love ripping into this new sales page attacking blogging.

What I want to impress upon you is… if possible… you should endeavor to confine your selling efforts to…

Players With Money!

Why? First of all, it is easier to sell something to someone with money. It’s an obvious fact that person has the money to buy what you’re selling. If you’ve got a $500,000 house for sale, it doesn’t matter how appealing the house is if the family you’re pitching it to has a pitifully low total income.

But there’s another fact you mustn’t overlook. People with money usually means they also have an important character trait most of the “sheep” out there don’t possess. Namely…

They Have The Ability To Make A Decision!

And… without talking it over with their spouse, their lawyer, their CPA, or their mommy. Usually, people with money got their loot because their lives are filled with independent thought and movement. These people with a high Halbert Index also possess another rare commodity. Namely… the ability to recognize true value. In other words, yes, it’s true these people are easier to sell than Joe Average but… only if you offer true value!

Reflect, for a moment, on what I sell. This would include a high-priced, rather arrogant newsletter, expensive seminars, expensive videos, audios, printed information packages, client services, etc. Who won’t buy my material? Basically, stupid, lazy people who relate its value to how much it weighs and how much “bulk” they receive. Who does buy my material? The answer is easy…

Players With Money!

From the archives of the great Gary Halbert, in a letter titled “The Halbert Index“

Powerful thought provoking stuff that precedes what many top level online marketers aim to achieve today, though many were themselves students of the great Gary Halbert. Do take the time to read the complete article, in fact you could spend days insides Gary’s archives.

I can’t resist one further quotation

I think the original letter was written back in 2003 – the idea of internet marketers promoting high ticket items is nothing new.

Some of the traits of higher ticket products

• Higher customer satisfaction
• Lower support costs
• Higher retention
• More repeat business

What Does It Take To Get There?

• Research A Niche
• Keyword Research
• Research Potential Products
• Create Products (preferably using outsourcing)
• Setup an effective sales funnel
• Generate traffic
• SEO
• PayPerClick (PPC)
• Buzz marketing and Linkbaiting
• JV Partners & Affiliates

Alex Goad has been a reader of my blog for about as long as I have been writing it, and I have a great deal of respect for him. He has achieved phenomenal success over the last 12 months with a number of successful Clickbank products that have become successful not because of hype, but quality. I actually had a chance to be part of one of them in the past, but it would have been hard to condense things whilst still provide the depth of information I felt obligated to provide.

That being said, I still wanted to see what Alex created before considering a mention here, let alone encourage people to buy it.

I believe I am one of the few who have actually had access to a large chunk of the materials, though many were still in draft form.

One important segment that Alex has included is on Traffic Funnels or more importantly Sales Funnels, and he has written one of the best explanations I have read about why a traffic funnel is important, and how they should be set up.

Well at least in part…

I have monitored almost every major product launch over the last year, and even the experts are leaving a huge chunk of their potential subscribers and profits to chance.

As for bloggers, there is a gaping hole in the sales funnel, and it is not at the end where the sales are made. Even if you manage to gain a minimal commitment in the form of an RSS subscription, hot prospects quickly turn cold.

I am one of the worst offenders

Technological Hurdles

Basic list building on a blog isn’t too technically complicated, but there is a lot more that can be done to enhance the process and build fanatical readers and boost income, though many of the tools such as membership scripts often need to be jury rigged to achieve any level of back-end coordination.

Even the most experienced pros effectively separate the list building mechanism from the blog. Whilst that might be suitable in the internet marketing niche, there are better ways of doing it.

Players With Money Bonus

Over the last few months I have been designing what I believe will be the “perfect funnel system” for blogs, whether for conventional bloggers looking to boost their subscriber base, for affiliate marketers, and yes… it will also add a totally new dimension to major product launches.

I have spent a lot of time ensuring that it is the right product for the market

During the next week I intend the development to start… I might need more than one full time programmer working on the project, and I intend it to be sold on a recurring membership basis.

Anyone who orders Players With Money and joins the program for at least 2 weeks will be entitled to free membership even if you eventually decide that it isn’t the right product for you and ask for a refund. That is the level of trust I have in Alex’s product.
It is a Clickbank product, so the refund period is a lot longer – you will have absolutely no risk

At this time it will only be for WordPress, and I am going to try to make it affiliate system neutral, so whether you are dealing with Clickbank, Paypal, PayDotCom, IDevAffiliate, InfusionSoft, 1ShoppingCart or other system, either as an affiliate or as a product creator, you will be able to benefit.

The aim of the system in a nutshell

• More links
• More traffic
• More subscribers
• More sales
• More profit

One of my biggest negative traits (other than possibly fulfilling Alex’s requirements in the video) is that in some things I am a perfectionist – it has taken me a long time to finalize the design, but hopefully that will ensure a premium product.

p.s. As an added bonus, you will also get to be in on the initial beta test and become launch partners. It is a beast of a system, and intended to be insanely viral.
p.p.s I am going back through historical affiliate transactions and also including those who have supported me or trusted my advice in the past (those I can track to an individual), though I feel you will also benefit from Players With Money, I do know how to treat my customers and future affiliates like gold.

Terms

I am going to get there in the end, but I currently can’t fix a delivery date. It will be a major undertaking – if you qualify as a “Player With Money” based on the definition from Gary Halbert and repeated in Alex’s video, this won’t concern you.

Also to conform with Clickbank terms (how many affiliates offering bonuses even know these rules, let alone comply with them)

1) The bonus offer is not the responsibility of ClickBank or of the seller of the primary product.

2) ClickBank will not honor any refund requests that are based on non- delivery, quality, or functionality of the bonus materials.

3) I have always listed my contact information and any issues regarding bonus delivery, bonus functionality, or bonus quality must be addressed with me, not with ClickBank or the seller.

Further Reading

My thought process has continued since I wrote these articles, but you might find them enlightening – they also provide some level of proof as to how much time I have already invested in this project.

Why Blogs Suck – an in-depth rant on blog subscription rates and the inefficient sales funnel process they create.

10 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Sucks – damn another rant, but again I delve into traffic and sales funnels.

I am quietly confident that this will be the most valuable bonus offered by anyone for Players With Money but it will require your patience and trust.

Update: Just to be sure

When you arrive on the payment page for Clickbank having followed my link you should see something like this showing at the bottom of the page, with the affiliate ID “Nommus”

If you have any queries just let me know, I am even available on Skype a lot of the time.

I will be monitoring the Clickbank account for transactions, and they provide contact details, but to be sure after your purchase it might be a good idea to forward me a receipt using my contact form.

What Andy suggests is that you write a title to captivate or grab your readers attention, and then using the SEO Title Tag plugin, (though All in One SEO Plugin or Headspace 2 would equally work) optimize the titles further for best SEO results.

Thus you would add additional keywords and possibly change the keyword order.

This is something I have done a few times, but is not a universal strategy.

Initial Scraping and Syndication

For at least a few days after you have written a post, you are likely to receive links from scrapers and people legitimately syndicating your content. Those links are often very low quality, but all the same if they use your post title for anchor text, that is something valuable.

Initial Links From Subscribers

Subscribers often use your post title to link to you, if they can’t think of their own suitable keywords, and that is often better than them just linking random words with little or no meaning.
Having a good weighting of keywords in the post titles is fairly important right from the start.

River Of News

Blogging isn’t email marketing

In email marketing you can split test titles for your emails, segment your list etc. It is possible to do that with RSS as well, though it is rarely used technology and one of the companies I knew that offered it shut down.

50% of my readers use Google Reader now, they are reading most probably using a “river of news” rather than just headlines.

The post title isn’t all you have to work with to grab attention

Social Media

You need to decide between traffic and link value. Many Social media sites will use your post title (not the headline) for a link if the person submitting the content doesn’t adjust it manually.

In the past I have used titles that were not specific to keywords I was aiming for long term, purely for the initial traffic those posts might attract with a little controversy. Whilst that can result in lots of links (if you are insanely lucky or popular), you lose out on the anchor text… big time.

I think it is very important to have primary keywords in your initial posting, possibly with prominent positioning within the title as well.

One of the most important factors would almost certainly be the comments.

What is one of the primary reasons people click through from an RSS feed to actually visit a blog?

Almost certainly it is either to read comments others have made, or to make one of their own. It is not to view advertising… at least for most.

How would a machine, such as Google differentiate between original source and whether a piece of content is valuable to include in its search index?

Factors could include:-

• The content within comments – keywords, language structure, length etc
• The number of comments
• Update frequency of the page (gaining additional comments over time)

Sure there are other factors, such as links

People link to comments on blogs, typically using a #fragment – the link is going to the blog permalink page

How many times have you found the answer to a question by reading a blog comment?

For me it is actually quite frequently – comments quite often provide alternatives to the original content that offer improvements.

A large part of blogging is engaging your audience in conversation

Business blogging is about engaging your customers

It hasn’t happened yet, but soon a blog might become no more than an RSS feed that is read on another domain, and discussed in small communities of friends, sometimes private, sometimes public, but still fragmented conversation.

Sharing In Google Reader

I have probably been the most vocal in my dislike of Google Reader sharing.

Google reader is one of the most effective tools for creating splogs
RSS Readers should provide publishers with a choice as to whether their content can be easily shared further than the original subscriber.
Bloglines have discussed and implemented access control, and Facebook even uses it

Fragmented Comments

I totally understand Paul from Friendfeed in his analogy with films, that he wants to discuss a film with his friends, and that YouTube isn’t exactly the epitomy of stimulating conversation.

But the intent of a movie or YouTube isn’t to stimulate dialogue at the venue, otherwise they would improve the venues. In fact YouTube was purposely designed with viral intention, for the content to be syndicated and for conversations to happen elsewhere. With the YouTube API, Google wants to hand off being the publisher (and their legal problems) in return for advertising $.

Many bloggers on the other hand blog to stimulate conversation on their own blogs, to generate page views, and maybe make a little money from advertising or services.

Engtech @ Internet Duct Tape

As a content producer it’s really nice to see discussions happening around the content I’ve created.

But at least I know how people are reacting… with the explosion of social media / social networking I have no idea what people are saying unless I’m actively a member of those communities.

As a content consumer it’s much more convenient to respond to content on the community where I found it from.

The fragmentation of discussion might be bad for the content producer, but it makes things so much easier for the content consumer. I know which way this trend is heading…

(A smart person would build a social network scraper to reimport the comments from there into their blogging engine software — if you know of any plugins like that then leave a comment)

Nico in a recent comment on my post “How To Add FriendFeed to Technorati”

Thanks for that information. I got everything running now.

I hope it gets me some fresh content in form of comments to my blog posts.

A very simple wish, but the chances of it happening are remote, especially for a foreign language blog unless FriendFeed becomes popular in Germany.

Warning Signals From September

Whilst the writing was on the wall before hand, especially in hindsight, when news leaked about a potential commenting system in Google Reader, there was a fair amount of controversy.

Whilst Google have since implemented the sharing of items with your gmail contacts automatically in Google Reader, nothing has appeared regarding activity streams and commenting.

Isn’t that odd?

The thing is, if Google implement this, there would be public outcry – it is not just bloggers publishing RSS feeds, but also major news corporations.

How convenient that Friendfeed was launched a few weeks later by a bunch of former Googlers

I don’t think there was any kind of conspiracy, as an example Paul Buchheit had been outside Google for over a year, and other founders were also working outside Google on new projects.

Previous relationships would however potentially make Friendfeed a very comfortable acquisition target after it had matured and the public opinion was appeased.

Add Comments to RSS or RSS to Comments?

First off, I expect someone to come out with some kind of Greasemonkey script very soon to work in Friendfeed, so that you can pull in items from the original site without leaving Friendfeed. I am amazed it hasn’t happened already, as there are already scripts for use with Google Reader.

Then think of Flickr – I have already seen this wish from Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter

wish FriendFeed added some AJAX, hover-over lightbox Flickr photo popu action

You could probably do that in Greasemonkey for the early adopters, but eventually add it to the main Friendfeed interface, and people would never have to visit Flickr to see full content pictures.

Alternatively it would also be easy to integrate Friendfeed comments into Google Reader

Disqus Too

FriendFeed are not the only possible solution in town – recently funded Disqus (and a number of others) for instance would make a great replacement for the ailing comment system on Blogger. Blogger commenting stinks.

At the same time why limit Disqus commenting to only blogs that have installed the javascript code? Wouldn’t it make sense to allow Disqus commenting for any blog or RSS content, whether they ran the code or not? People using Disqus would still see it, and possibly trackbacks could be sent to the blog that there is a dicussion just so the author is aware of it, and encouraged to join and maybe switch commenting.

RSS content could also be pulled into Disqus at a later date, it would enhance conversation to have it all tied together on one site… like it used to be, even if it is only as an iframe pulled from Google Reader (why show annoying advertising)

Smart Business… Maybe

Fred Wilson actually wrote a little about Friendfeed as well, I do agree with him on this specific statement

So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog, and twitter, I have to pay attention to whats’ going on in FriendFeed. So it’s gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That’s the way to play the game on the web.

Grabbing attention and content is smart business, but what happens when you have to monitor conversation on 20 or 30 different comment aggregating services, not all of which have an open API (of that I am confident at least some will provide)

Traffic, SEO and Accessibility

Disqus currently have some problems with this – it is javascript, a blog owner loses long tail traffic directly to their blog.
It also poses usability problems for people using non-javascript browsers. They don’t even get to even see that comments exist somewhere – that is likely a legal issue in lots of Europe.

There are benefits – serving comments is a database hit, and a comment being updated changes the cache or part of the cache serving the blog post – comments should really be served as an embed or in an Iframe, with javascript enhancing the content, not serving it.

In general, comment systems are fairly prehistoric, and could actually bring in more traffic. Rather than being extra content to an original article, they could each be treated like a twitter tweet, and then served on a page with its own title, that is also used as anchor text linking to the comment on a permalink page. That would turn a blog post with 50 comments into 51 pages of unique content – some would be a little weak on content, but others would be substantial.

This isn’t new, it would be just like old threaded forum scripts.

If data was stored with timestamps in XML, then it would be easy to integrate it and possibly cross-pollinate the conversation, but would commenters always want an author to know about their conversation?
Thus you would need various privacy settings and discussion groups.

The Race To Kill Blogging

I don’t think in this scenario blogging would really exist – you would have original content producers, but there wouldn’t really be a need for the blog platform. A blog post would purely be the starting point in a distributed conversation thread which would contain other blog posts, or just simple comments – it is just another node in the conversation.

Back to CompuServe, Prodigy, Usenet, FidoNet, CIX and AOL

Fragmented discussions are nothing new – once the fragments are joined back together, it is a bit like a timewarp or things going full circle 20 years.

Actually 20 years ago was so much easier. I was on CIX – you could use an offline reader and “blink” to download your threaded discussion messages – a much more efficient workflow and very little if any advertising or spam.

Sure you would present the data differently – in those days my Commodore Amiga with 4MB of memory was a beast, these days that could be taken up by a single webpage.

Do you really want to go “Back To The Future”?