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.

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

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

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

John Reese launched TrafficJam just a few days ago with the slogan – “Speed Read Thousands Of Blogs!”

TrafficJam vs Techmeme & Megite vs Activity Streams vs Feed Readers

Meme trackers are great ways to discover what people are blogging about. I stop by Techmeme on a daily basis and it brings me a great overview of what is happening in technology. It is a little elitist, the blogs and other news sources that get picked up are carefully selected, though the algorithms will also pick up other news sources if the central seed blogs link to them, or if other blogs link through to the lead stories or Techmeme, effectively saying “Hey, I have something to say as well”.

Megite allows you to create personal meme tracks, so I might also stop by the Search Engine marketing meme tracker based upon the Online Marketing Blog Biglist.
Some time ago I also created a meme tracker based upon my Technorati favorites, but because technorati Favorites is still broken and not showing all my favorites, this is proving next to useless and it can’t pick up the “undercurrent” of the z-list

Obviously I have my feed reader, but whilst I have subscribed to 300 or so blogs, I rarely have time to read them – using Google Reader with my current connection is cumbersome and the same would be true of other online readers such as Netvibes and Bloglines – I am currently also experimenting with FeedDemon which was made free not too long ago. It is a good option for those feeds which are “must reads”.

Blogcatalog’s Dashboard – the new activity stream is great, I have actually set it as my home page – my friends need to update their profiles so I can see what they are up to, but it gives me a good overview without getting bogged down. In some ways this is similar to what you can achieve with Netvibes or Pageflakes, but without the need to add all the feeds yourself.

TrafficJam highlights the undercurrent

TrafficJam highlights what is currently hot, without requiring high traffic numbers, a “trained audience” encouraged to click things to bring you more traffic, or anything else.

Clicks are based purely on headlines – if you have a headline that visitors to other blogs find interesting, you are going to gain a few clicks, even if you have a very low traffic blog – Blogrush already favours low traffic blogs in this regard because they gain lots of free credits.
How many free credits? Well I have had my WPPlugins site listed on Blogrush since it launched, and it is a very low traffic site, that hasn’t been updated in a long time, and the headline of the last post is hardly captivating.
The site certainly hasn’t earned many credits on its own – it has however been allocated almost 400,000 credits.

If you imagine the potential for a niche website, with a carefully optimized title being the one appearing within Blogrush, leading to a well optimized page which has been designed with a suitable traffic funnel, a CTR of 1% would give you 4000 visitors.

4000 visitors might not seem very much, but that is probably the equivalent to being linked to from 10 A-list bloggers in the blogging, seo and internet marketing niches with what I would call a “good” link, intended to send readers to look at something.

I know how much traffic I get from such links, and whilst they are not always sculpted to send maximum traffic, and there is an audience cross-over, there are very few sites that have sent me over 500 visitors from a single link in a short space of time.
If I delve into Google analytics and filter based on referrer, there are a few links that over a long period of time bring me more traffic, but those are invariably a well highlighted link in corner-stone content that attracts lots of links in itself.

Blogrush – Poor Click Through Rate

Despite improvements in targeting and improved quality filtering, the CTR from the Blogrush widgets has drastically reduced.

I think this is down to a number of problems

• Public quality perception – if you have moaned about or subjected Blogrush to public ridicule (some Internet marketing sites are very much like Ripoff Report in that respect) then you are unlikely to click.
• Different focus of attention – manual comment spammers are going to be focused on visiting the next blog on their list, entrycard droppers on their next drop zone, Stumblers are just as likely to hit the stumble button.
• Ugly widget – some people still don’t like it
• Poor positioning of widgets – it is an exit point, and people don’t really want to encourage others to leave their website, though to be frank in most cases other than sales pages, they are likely to do that anyway. Obviously many people are also looking for maximum monetization

My hope is that over time these things will be improved, but ultimately Coke tastes better than Pepsi.. right?

TrafficJam Is For The All List

A list like that makes me excited, because half the blogs I had never heard of or visited, and there was some great content to be found. Not all of it, titles alone can be a little misleading, and I am sure could be gamed, but often someone who can write a good title can also write good articles.

Well not quite everyone is an unknown, there is a post from the Income.com blog on the list, as well as from Alice Seba, and one from Lynn Terry @ Clicknewz – they probably have more paying customers than many A-list bloggers have subscribers

Then I noticed Kieron has had some problems with people gaining a front page Digg… with content they ripped off from him – whilst Kieron is in my feed reader, I missed this post because I haven’t been using it as much due to connection difficulties.

I also noticed a couple of posts from Linda celebrating 5 years in the affiliate management industry and an analysis of salaries for affiliate managers.

I am not going to pretend that one link from me is worth the advertising space that Blogrush takes up, but bloggers clicking through on specific content written by other people in their niche has the ability to magnify the traffic.
It doesn’t take many links and new visitors to enhance the effect of social media, and add subscribers.

Before you moan about Blogrush not bringing any traffic make sure you have carried out the following:-

• Read my previous articles on Blogrush
• Installed a plugin to create a custom RSS feed which you can use for testing

Mark was one of the first to offer a decent solution that doesn’t involve manual editing of an RSS feed, and since then a good solution was created by Pawan Agrawal of Max WordPress with his Blogrush Click Maximizer.

Pawan actually released a new version yesterday (22 feb), and even if you have no interest at all in Blogrush, you have to download this new version hosted in the WordPress plugin repository, and go through the activation process – it is a brilliant piece of coding by someone who really understands list building.
If you are doing anything to do with WordPress, whether it is plugins or themes, you have to see how he is doing this. Even better, the plugin is released under GPL, so you could easily reuse his code.

I think Pawan has a snse of humor as well. He said in the update notes that there were small changes made… that trebled the code size. Seriously this is list building artwork.

• Created a custom langing page or optimized your site to maximize conversions
• Actually clicked a few Blogrush links every day since launch – if you don’t use it, how can you expect any traffic from it
• If it turns out to be a good post, Stumble it, bookmark it – I have enhanced friendships and loyal readership by doing exactly that

TrafficJam Teething Problems?

Whilst I am overly positive that this is going to be a very useful service (if people give John and his team a little slack), there are things that should be cleaned up a little.

• Session IDs – for some reason clicking links from TrafficJam leaves ?PHPSESSID=llrg8vvclv49dko9ekp38uf2v7 or similar on the end of the links, and WordPress doesn’t clean that up automatically (and I hope they never do, unless used for other purposes) – this is something that needs fixing as it can mess up some things with social media, and looks ugly.
• Not displaying Blogrush – there are sites still listed that are not displaying Blogrush – I am sure this is because whilst they are no longer displaying Blogrush, they referred a lot of people – I am not sure how to handle this – as an example Linda isn’t displaying Blogrush on her blog, but from memory she was mainly displaying it on her forum previously. I am sure she referred tons of people, and will always have credits from referrals.
• Stats – make all traffic and credit stats crystal clear, and exactly how they came about
• Positioning – TrafficJam could be used as an incentive for good positioning of the widget. If blogs send more traffic due to good positioning, they should in some way have their feeds highlighted. Alternatively or in addition you could just have recent clicks highlighted.
• Design – I would like to see the category choices at the top or bottom, with the right side of the page reserved to highlight more content such as positioning benefits.
• Blogrush Widget – it really needs excerpts and maybe some kind of additional ratings for a post just read. A blog is gaining a benefit from a click based upon a title, but a title has to deliver on the promise +1/-1
• For Blogrush – I want to be able to promote my downline, I don’t really need more referrals, but my readers do

Unlike many, I am willing to give John a chance to make this a success – there is a need, and someone needs to fill it. This is only the second part of Income.com, I am looking forward to the third, and probably largest piece of the puzzle that John started launching over 1 year ago with a small green blob.

Do also make sure you check out Pawan’s plugin – there are actually a few flaws in the process which I am going to suggest need fixing for his next upgrade – it doesn’t seem to work with multiple lists, so I ended signing up to 2 lists of his this evening, when I have been on some for the last 2 years or more, and as it is on WordPress plugins, you don’t know who the referrer was – it would be good if there was a “where did you hear about this plugin” field.

For a long time my blogs have performed amazingly well with Google Blog Search. I always appear in the relevant results quickly, and the results I obtain have some reasonable longevity, even when I am not the original source of a story.

Considering how much competition I often have for certain search terms which everyone seems to be writing about because of common interest, I must have been doing a number of things right.

Bill Slawski of SEO By The Sea a few of days ago broke the news of Google’s Patent Application for Ranking Blog Documents.

SEO Round Table posted a synopsis lifted from the Cre8asite Forums that had been posted by Bill, and seems to be the easiest to understand.

I am going to do a little bit of mix and match here, and inject my own commentary but my interpretation of the patent is actually slightly different to those that I have read so far.

It should be noted I am working my way through the patent itself, and not recompiling the summaries of others.

Relevancy & Quality – Blog | Blogpost

It should first of all be noted that in the patent Google doesn’t differentiate between individual blog posts and whole blogs.

The phrase “blog document,” as used hereinafter, is to be broadly interpreted to include a blog, a blog post, or both a blog and a blog post. It will be appreciated that the techniques described herein are equally applicable to blogs and blog posts.

Later on in the patent, they also mention that feeds are also included within the documents that are compared and rated.

two distinct sets of data are used to determine a score of a blog (or blog post) in response to a search query–the topical relevance of the blog (or blog post) to the terms in the search query and the quality of the blog (or blog post), which is independent of the query terms. The quality of the blog (or blog post) may positively or negatively affect the score of the blog (or blog post)

Relevancy – this applies to the search term, thus Google will analyse the blog page, and they will also in some way determine the relevance to the whole blog.
Quality – this is irrespective of the search term, so think about factors from outside your niche

Google Blog Search – Positive Factors Affecting Search Quality | Relevancy

• Popularity of the blog document

A number of news aggregator sites (commonly called “news readers” or “feed readers”) exist where individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such aggregators store information describing how many individuals have subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document

This patent was first of all applied for 13th September 2005, with Google Blog Search launched 13 September 2005. At the time they were logically not basing this on numbers available for Google Reader subscribers. The Google Reader blog was launched October 21, 2005 with a post saying they had been up and running for 2 weeks.
Maybe there is a coincidence between the 2 events.

So which data were Google basing this part of their patent on? Some services such as Technorati and Bloglines do provide readership data, as does Feedburner, though most services report readership data as they are collecting new blog posts to a service like Feedburner, who aggregate the statistics.

It seems there might be some value is collecting Technorati favorites (my reciprocation policy might be well worth it) beyond limited bragging rights. Google of course through Google Reader now have access to lots of usage data, so maybe other sources will eventually be phased out.

• Implied popularity of the blog document

This implied popularity may be identified by, for example, examining the click stream of search results. For example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Click data from search results, possible from Google Toolbar users.

• Existence of the blog document in blogrolls

The existence of the blog document in blogrolls may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. It will be appreciated that blog documents often contain not only recent entries (i.e., posts), but also “blogrolls,” which are a dense collection of links to external sites (usually other blogs) in which the author/blogger is interested. A blogroll link to a blog document is an indication of popularity of that blog document, so aggregated blogroll links to a blog document can be counted and used to infer magnitude of popularity for the blog document.

Everything I have ever read has suggested that for normal search, blogroll links that are site wide carry diminishing value. Just because it is listed here as part of the calculation does not necessarily mean that everyone should start building up huge blogrolls… well unless they want to game Technorati and have a blog network.

• Existence of the blog document in a high quality blogroll

The existence of the blog document in a high quality blogroll may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. A high quality blogroll is a blogroll that links to well-known or trusted bloggers. Therefore, a high quality blogroll that also links to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Another revelation, links on high quality pages are worth more than links on low quality pages.

Remember that “blog document” can mean both blog page and blog site.

Can blogroll just refer to a list of links on what is identified as a blog. Thus a column of links to related pages might also class as a blogroll, whether in the sidebar or below the content.
Thus a list of links to related documents on the same site could be looked on as a blogroll on a blog document.

Related links plugins are very powerful, especially if you also include them in content that gets syndicated by design, or by sploggers.

• Tagging of the blog document

Tagging of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. Some existing sites allow users to add “tags” to (i.e., to “categorize”) a blog document. These custom categorizations are an indicator that an individual has evaluated the content of the blog document and determined that one or more categories appropriately describe its content, and as such are a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Well some sites do allow you to tag in a meaningful way, maybe Google uses shared tags from Del.icio.us and other sites, but many of those use nofollow extensively.
It is my own belief that self tagging content heavily with plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior helps a huge amount. I have given lots of examples before, but more recent examples include

toolbar pagerank
google reader feedburner
feedburner google reader
compete toolbar
duplicate content supplemental results

Yes, I am just going down the inbound traffic results looking for likely candidates that rank well in both blog and normal search and aren’t totally obscure. These are subjects that sites in my niche have also talked about, with the keywords in the title, and which you would expect to rank higher than my own content.

This doesn’t just affect blogsearch, Google have been using it for some time with the main results as well.
Here are my observations regarding tagging from back in November, especially how they could relate to LSI calculations.

• References to the blog document by other sources

Wow revelation again, god links are worth having either to pages or blog.

• Pagerank of the blog document

Pagerank is still relevant, who knows for how long and how much.

It will be appreciated that other indicators may also be used.

What seems to be missing, at least at time of application?

• Domain age?
• Trustrank?
• Page Titles?
• URLs?
• Growth rate of link popularity

Plus lots more that also factor into it, but general search patents probably also cover blog search.

Google Blog Search – Negative Factors Affecting Search Relevancy | Quality

• Frequency of new posts on the blog document

The frequency at which new posts are added to the blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. Feeds typically include only the most recent posts from a blog document. Spammers often generate new posts in spurts (i.e., many new posts appear within a short time period) or at predictable intervals (one post every 10 minutes, or a post every 3 hours at 32 minutes past the hour). Both behaviors are correlated with malicious intent and can be used to identify possible spammers. Therefore, if the frequency at which new posts are added to the blog document matches a predictable pattern, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Make sure there is some variation when you publish your content for the day, especially with future dated posts.
Most spamming tools are actually fairly sophisticated, thus I am not sure this measurement is very accurate. It most likely indicated a blogger who is very organised these days.

• The content of the posts in the blog document

The content of the posts in the blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. A feed typically contains some or all of the content of several posts from a given blog document. The blog document itself also includes the content of the posts. Spammers may put one version of content into a feed to improve their ranking in search results, while putting a different version on their blog document (e.g., links to irrelevant ads). This mismatch (between feed and blog document) can, therefore, be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

This is actually a very significant and interestingly worded item. Google are stating that they are comparing the content of a feed with the content on your pages to ensure it matches.

Based upon this:-

• Don’t use a content spinner on your feeds to avoid duplicate content
• Allow Google to index your feeds
• If you use related links on your blog, make sure you use them in your feeds too
• Duplicate Content, especially in feeds

Also, in some instances, particular content may be duplicated in multiple posts in a blog document, resulting in multiple feeds containing the same content. Such duplication indicates the feed is low quality/spam and, thus, can be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

I can’t say I have noticed a problem having a lot of straggling RSS feeds on categories and tags.
This could also be referring to things like the large footer I have on each post, though I haven’t seen a problem with that either.

After the last toolbar pagerank update I spent some time studying Matt Cutts’ blog, and also looking at how pagerank was being transferred around my own site. Pagerank is only slightly useful as a guide, and only immediately after an update.
Rather than repeat myself, you can read about my organic garden approach to this site.

• Collective Intelligence

The words/phrases used in the posts of a blog document may also be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. For example, from a collection of blog documents and feeds that evaluators rate as spam, a list of words and phrases (bigrams, trigrams, etc.) that appear frequently in spam may be extracted. If a blog document contains a high percentage of words or phrases from the list, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

Google invest a lot of research analysing spam, detecting various word matching patterns, and use that to identify other documents.

• A size of the posts in the blog document

The size of the posts in a blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. Many automated post generators create numerous posts of identical or very similar length. As a result, the distribution of post sizes can be used as a reliable measure of spamminess. When a blog document includes numerous posts of identical or very similar length, this may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

This might be of special interest to those that use out-sourcing for articles, you need to ensure the article length changes.

• A link distribution of the blog document

A link distribution of the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. As disclosed above, some posts are created to increase the pagerank of a particular blog document. In some cases, a high percentage of all links from the posts or from the blog document all point to ether a single web page, or to a single external site. If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

In some ways this debunks the benefits of blogrolls mentioned as a benefit, but as previously quoted, Google are using blog document in multiple context, and comparing the context, thus it could just refer to multiple spam links always pointing to a single domain within the content.

• The presence of ads in the blog document

The presence of ads in the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. If a blog document contains a large number of ads, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Remember this is just a patent, and Google recently relaxed the rules about having ads from other networks along with Adsense. As long as a page is of a reasonable size to support the adverts, I don’t think there is a problem. If you just have a heading and 5 words, with 10 advertising blocks, you might want to add a few more words.

However they go on to say this

Moreover, blog documents typically contain three types of content: the content of recent posts, a blogroll, and blog metadata (e.g., author profile information and/or other information pertinent to the blog document or its author). Ads, if present, typically appear within the blog metadata section or near the blogroll. The presence of ads in the recent posts part of a blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Thus if you are using blocks in the content for all your ads, you might not rank as well, especially if you use multiple networks. You can probably get away with 3 in the content, or maybe 1 or 2 per post.

• It will be appreciated that other indicators may also be used

Conclusion

The feed stats information is very useful, and looking at the timing, my conclusion is that Google might have been using Bloglines and Technorati Favorites data, with Google Reader in its infancy, or maybe though less likely, when blog search was introduced, they weren’t using that part of the patent

For me the most significant information was tagging, but just linking though to Technorati with your tags isn’t a great idea.

Remember that Google have their own blogging system, and they have archives and labels, and they are not going to create a system to generate duplicate content and then penalise you for it. Google wouldn’t have added such a system unless they intended to benefit from the enhanced data.

You don’t have to build your blogs in a 1990s era tree like structure to rank well.

Subscribers and Technorati Favorites may help you rank.

Basic Optimization

1. Offer full feeds – I am not going to argue about how this is good for subscribers. That argument has been debated almost to death. However if you want reputable sites to pick up your content, you need to give them an easy way to do it. Obviously they are not looking for excerpts. Meme Trackers that work on feeds rather than scraping content from your site will also attribute relevance better if you provide more content.
2. Image Alignment – lots of themes provide CSS for image alignment. It is useless as soon as your content is being read elsewhere. It doesn’t take much code to align an image left or right and wrap text around it wherever your content is being read.

<div style="float:right;"> Image Code </div>

3. Scraping Friendly Theme – You might not realise this, but many meme trackers scrape your content. It is very important to have your article content appear before navigation and various “about this site” text. There are quite a few top marketing blogs where the snippet listed on sites like Megite for their articles is always their “about me”, rather than relevant content
4. Images – Try to include images with every post, but also ensure that the most interesting image appears first on the page. You might need to make an additional thumbnail for the start of your post of an image that appears full size later on.
5. Headings – Please refer to the post I made recently regarding Headings in Feeds
6. Related Content – link through to related content on your sites – not only will you get a backlink to your original article, but also a deep link to something else. Don’t go overboard, and make sure it is highly relevant. You can probably get away with more than you might be able to with article distribution, where self serving links in the body of an article is heavily frowned upon.
7. Unique Format – Here is something I spotted on Megite recently that made me smile, the “Search Engine Twins“.

Obviously there is some prior history there, but both sites were listing relatively the same content, in the same format. I am not sure how they are going to solve that one in the long-term, but I hope their formatting develops in different directions in the future to add some diversity.

Advanced Optimization

Today I spend a number of hours experimenting with CSS and hacking my Disclosure Policy Plugin to do what I wanted to achieve. A couple of weeks ago I was approached by someone who was interested in syndicating my posts, and they requested a picture and a byline. I looked on their site, and wasn’t overly impressed with the way bylines were handled by default. I decided that if my content is going to be syndicated, it needed to have a clear link back to the original article, and maybe a link to my root domain as well, all presented the way I want it.

My plugin didn’t have an option to include the post title and URL, so today I hacked it in.

These changes are around line 70 in disclosure_keywords.php

$dpp_post_title = get_the_title($id);
$dpp_post_url = get_permalink();
$str = $content;
$content1 = $str."<br><br>";
 eval('$content2 = "' . $keywords_div_start . '";');

The first 2 lines above set 2 variables to contain the post name and URL
The 5th line evaluates the first block of text you set in the options, looking for php variables and processing them.

Handling quotation marks with this is a nightmare but here is what I found to work.

In all the CSS used in the options, I used single quotes
For the quotes around the variables to evaluate, I used double quotes.
For the actual disclosure lines that are defined, I use double quotes

Thus the code in the options “Insert Start Div Tags:” looks a bit like this (though it still needs tweaking)

<div style='margin: 0 0 0 0; padding: 0.3em 0.3em 0.3em 0.3em;'><div style='border: 1px solid rgb(184, 184, 184); margin-bottom: 0em; margin-top: 0em; padding-bottom:0.3em; width: 450px; float: left;'><div style='margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 0.3em; margin-top: 0.3em; margin-right: 0.5em;width: 75px; float: left; line-height:1em;'><img style='width: 75px; height: 100px;' alt='Andy Beard' src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/andy75x100-a1.png"></div><div style='margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.3em; margin-right: 0.3em; float: right; line-height:1em;'><a href='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/' rel='nofollow'><img alt='CC-GNU GPL' border='0' src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/cc-GPL-a.png" /></a></div><h3 style='margin: 0em 0 0em 0;'><a href='http://andybeard.eu/'>Andy Beard - Niche Marketing</a></h3><p style='line-height:1em; margin: 0em 0 -0.2em 0;'>
Blog search engine perfomance, WordPress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips</p><p>Original Article:<br /><strong><a href=".$dpp_post_url.">$dpp_post_title </a></strong></p><div style='width: 100%; float: left; line-height:0.7em; margin: 0em 0 0.2em 0.5em;'><h3 style='margin: 0em 0 0em 0;'>Disclosure</h3>

Note: all the quotes seem to be messing up even with a code plugin, so don’t just copy/paste the above, it won’t work. Also note I am not a CSS expert and just play around with things until they look ok. I tested first of all on a test blog running Kubrick, and then copied the code over here.

In the second box you just have 3 closing Divs

For individual disclosure declarations, I am using something like:-

<p style="margin: 0em 1em 0em 0em;"><small>Whilst the content I create, however it is distributed is commercial, relevance is always considered before any potential financial gain. <a href="http://andybeard.eu/disclosure-policy" rel="nofollow">Disclosure Policy</a> <a href="http://andybeard.eu/contact/" rel="nofollow">Contact</a></small></p>

I actually need to make that a bit more structured, so I can just wrap any entry with paragraph tags, although that entry will always be “small print”.

The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating

The only way to really see the effect is to see how it looks in an RSS reader or on various Meme Trackers.

Meme Trackers

Here is what a post should look like on Megite

You will also notice they also use your favicon, so well worth spending a few minutes generating one.

RSS Reader

No screenshots – try signing up by email and RSS to take a look. I think I need to make my box slightly narrower, because then the Feedburner Feed Flare using will all align nicely down the right hand side of the author box. Currently on a 1024×768 Google Reader view, only some of them are on the right hand side.

Landing Page

The changes have definitely made my Feedburner landing page for subscribers look more professional and personal.

ToDo List

I still need to format my tags the way I want to, both on page and in feeds. The same goes for related posts, which in syndication will most likely be cut off.
Some default CSS of my theme also seems to over-ride my inline CSS with margins and paddings, so I need to take a careful look to see how that can be corrected.

Standards compatible? Well I didn’t use any tables, or fixed fonts –

Conclusions

It is worth spending some time working on how you want your content displayed in the future, as once your working environment is setup, it can save you a lot of time, and improve the results you achieve. Are you in this for the long haul?

I am happy to see that I have crossed the 200 subscriber count. It isn’t a number to create a big fanfare about, but would like to thank those who have subscribed.

Hopefully I can reward your subscription by maintaining a different thought provoking perspective to other blogs you subscribe to.

I was also interested to note that Feedburner’s new statistics offering now features on your front page when you log in. I will probably add the Feedburner code to this blog sometime today to compare statistics for my planned reviews on stats packages.

As a proactive Internet Marketer or corporation, you might have a massive email list already, but you are now switching to more interactive communication with your customers and prospects by publishing your newsletter on your blog, and maybe copy / pasting it into an auto-responder.

1000 Email Subscribers = 1000 Blog Subscribers?

Both Feedburner and Feedblitz have the possibility to import subscribers to your blog. There are some special arrangements I believe involved, but it would be quite possible to boost your blog subscription overnight. For some people we would be talking similar numbers to the subscribers to Techcruch – maybe even more.

I was never much of an email marketing fanatic, and always preferred to share information on my blogs, or on forums. Not very good Defensible Traffic.

Blog subscriptions don’t currently work quite as well as email auto responders, but I am not suggesting you throw away your email lists. It is just another channel, but a lot more interactive.
JV Deals in the blogosphere is just a matter of linking to good content.

You will have to be prepared to interact with your audience, and do a little more than just pitch products with every post you make. Back to the old giving value concept from yesteryear.

On the otherhand, the blogosphere wouldn’t know what has hit them.

I have noticed the effect of surges in RSS feed subscriptions in the past, followed by a slow decline in readership after a few days or weeks. Some readers stick around long-term thankfully. Brian at Copyblogger has also been talking about RSS.

Defensible traffic is one of the reasons I placed a priority on subscriptions and community involvemnet on this blog, rather than monetization.

Here you can read more about my blogging strategy and my efforts to build this blog into a community.

1. Are your most frequently clicked links for your subscriber buttons? – long-term subscribers are the lifeblood of any blog or website, and are immune to the whims of search engines
2. Recommendations for your content on social networks and bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Mybloglog (without you gaming them)
3. Trackbacks and links – when people want to tell their own readership about what you are talking about. Links also help in the search engines
4. When you gain the same traffic for posts with crappy titles as “linkbait” posts – titles are important, but it is much better that a reader expects every post you write to contain value, irrespective of the title.
5. Real Comments and Discussion – I honestly prefer for people to totally disagree with what I write and tell me so (and why), than give me comments like “I agree”
6. Increased revenue per visitor – the more traffic you throw at a site, the more money you will make, but that is like putting the cart before the horse. If you engage your visitors they are much more likely to stick around.
7. Increased targetted traffic – linkbaiting is great, but if it doesn’t eventually bring you more measurable targetted traffic, it is pretty pointless

Thoughts for the future

Will we start seeing linkbait blindness?
How many tools do you use for tracking various results?
Are your average page views per visitor less than 2?
What percentage of your visitors leave a comment?

It is not just a numbers game, it is also a conversions game