I’ve got a little bored of the theme on pilkster.com now so I’m preparing to release it (for free of course) to the public. I don’t really like to run ads on my personal blog, but this theme was originally designed with Google’s AdSense and other advertising networks in mind, in fact it was created for TechPuddle.com, an advertising supported tech blog.
Archive for February, 2008
Like many people I first got into marketing on the internet selling stuff on eBay. When I was a kid I was a big Sinclair fan, the Sinclair Spectrum was the computer I cut my teeth on (after a brief stint with a Commodore VIC20). I found all these crazy people selling Sinclair stuff on eBay and Yahoo Auctions (now defunct in the UK), and started buying all the things I couldn’t afford as a kid.
Back in the early 1980’s it wasn’t uncommon to build computers from parts and plans – in fact, soldering irons were a big part of the hobby scene. Whilst hunting around on the net I came across a guy in the US who had a stock of unbuilt ZX81 kits – a goldmine to a geek like me! So I started importing and selling them. Then I found another guy who had caves full of Atari games, Split Screen camper telephones(!) and other treasures. Needless to say I started importing and selling them in the UK. My eBaying became a bit of an obsession, at one point I started buying and selling Sinclair C5 cars… I still have a Sinclair Zike and probably 50 Sinclair computers in my attic. I built my first real website for selling ZX81 kits.
Selling on eBay was fun, and the main reason I don’t do it anymore is the amount of travel I do (it makes it difficult to hold stock). The hardest part of running a successful business on eBay is finding a reliable, cost effective wholesaler who does small batches. Often buying in large lots is impractical for different reasons (cost, value of inventory, storage space, turnover) and it is difficult for the little guy to get a foothold.
I first experimented with PPC in 2003 whilst on a year’s holiday. I was living in a VW kombi in Cairns, Australia, and working out of an internet cafe. I built my first adsense website in January 2004 (I still own the site) whilst on the same holiday – I bought a secondhand laptop from a pawn shop for $300, and used software off a magazine cover disc to build the site, transferring it to my digital cameras memory card and uploading to the server from an internet cafe. I wrote all the content and did the design myself. I was hooked after the first click!
Affiliate Marketing makes more sense for me as I can walk away from the business for days, weeks, or even months and I know that my websites will continue working for me, and other people will be fulfilling all the orders behind the scenes. I tend to use large, reliable companies (google’s adsense, cj, clickbank etc) who do not change their offers too often, and aim for natural search traffic – I’ve worked with PPC (and had some success), but my commitments mean I cannot stay on top of campaigns effectively. Those of you who have worked with PPC will know that it isn’t an easy business to stay in control of if you are not 100% focused.
Thats enough about me for now anyway. I’m sure there was a point to this post when I started typing, but it seems to have gotten* lost along the way.
*why do I always wind up using Americanism’s when I type on the net?
Posted In: Ebay auctions
Following on from yesterday’s post I came across Shady’s view on dofollow via a drunken thread at DP.
Posted In: PR and Linkpop, SEO
My new friend Ruben was asking about DoFollow promotion. I was about to email him back, but decided to turn the email into a blog post instead.
What is DoFollow promotion?
Over the last couple of years blogs have grown in popularity. Spammers latched on to the fact that when adding a comment to a blog post they could add their link to the comment. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN count incoming links to websites and use these to determine which sites rank highly in their search results. To combat the problem of spam ‘nofollow’ links were introduced – search engines (supposedly) give no weight to these links. Most blogging systems and software (including my favorite, WordPress) now default to using nofollow links in comments. Many other sites with user generated/modifiable content also use nofollow links (eg Wikipedia).
More recently people in the know on the net have got a bit ticked off with Google’s double standards – they request webmasters to build sites for visitors without consideration for search engines, but also promote the nofollow tag (and a whole host of other stuff that I could rant on about all day, but it is 30′ and sunny outside & I want to go surfing). These people in the know have started the dofollow movement, where they properly moderate their blogs/sites and manually reject spam. If you make a valid comment on a blog post why should you not have a link to your site (which is probably related anyway?)
What does DoFollow mean to me?
If you have a website & you want some relevant inbound links you can find dofollow blogs on a similar topic, read them, and leave your comments. This will encorage the owner of the blog and the blogs readership to notice your website/blog, and also provide inbound links to your website that will be noticed by search engines. Search engines are actually quite clever these days (even with all their failings) and they will notice that your site/blog is aligned with the topic of the sites that link to you.
OK, great – where can I find some DoFollow blogs?
Don’t forget that the directory, search engines and software listed above aren’t perfect – you need to check the sites yourself once you have found them. Download a plugin for your browser like SEO for Firefox. This has a useful function that highlights nofollow links (the ones we don’t want!) You can see in the image below that Shoemoney’s name is highlighted red – it is a nofollow link, and I am not giving him any link love. Sorry Shoe, here you go.
Awesome – so howsabout an example?
Sheesh, I’m too good to you guys. Hope the weather stays good.
Step 1: I go to commenthunt.com & type in ‘SEO’ as my search term (lets just pretend that I’m trying to find a linky for this blog) . Top of the list is good old DaveN, another northern monkey with a passion for campervans.
Step 2: I hop over to DaveN’s site and find a blog post relevant to my site:
Step 3: I fill in the comment form, being careful to make my comment relevant and to leave my URL and name (name will become anchor text for your linky, you might want to consider this) :
Step 4: Hit ‘Submit Comment’, and there she is.
Note that on many blogs your comment will not appear until *after* it has been approved by the blog owner.
Any other related stuff?
Search the internet for yourself, fool! Oh, OK, Andy Beard’s post is a good place to start.
Posted In: PR and Linkpop, SEO