Friday, July 29, 2011

FW: Google's Page Speed Service Wanna Make The Web Faster

 

 

Feed: Daily Blog Tips
Posted on: Thursday, July 28, 2011 8:05 PM
Author: Daniel Scocco
Subject: Google’s Page Speed Service Wanna Make The Web Faster

 

Image removed by sender.
Image removed by sender.

How would you like to have Google grab all your site files, host them on a Google server, optimize the loading time with several tweaks, and then allow your visitors to visit your site directly on Google’s servers all around the world?

I sure wouldn’t mind (except maybe for the aspect of losing control).

The good news is that soon this will be possible, as Google just announced a new service called Page Speed Service. According to the announcement post:

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

Image removed by sender. google-page-speed-service

The service is being offered to some beta testers right now, and soon it will be available for all web publishers. Right now what you can do is to run a simulation here to see how much your website would gain from Google’s service. In my case it wasn’t a huge boost. The “Page Load Time”, which is the main metric, improved by 19%.

If you like the results and to become a beta tester, though, you can apply using a link on the official announcement post (I linked to it above).


Original Post: Google’s Page Speed Service Wanna Make The Web Faster


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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

FW: Global Success Club Review

Global Success Club Review

I haven’t spent money on Internet marketing ebooks or membership sites for a long time (if I remember well the last one was Aaron Wall’s SEO Book!), but this month I forked out $97 to get access to a site. I am also planning to renew my subscription, so I figured some of our readers could be interested as well. But here’s is the whole story.

global-success-club-payment

A couple of weeks ago a person approached me via email asking what advertising options I had available on my site. I told him I work mostly with banners, but that I was sold out at the time. Nevertheless I asked what product or service he wanted to advertise, so that I could see if it was a good fit. He replied saying it was a membership site called Global Success Club, and he sent me a guest account so that I could check it out.

I had seen that name around (even on some high profile sites like John Chow and Shoemoney), so I decided to check it out.

What I Didn’t Like

At first I wasn’t impressed at all.

The sales page looked like all those “get rich quick” and “work from home” products you have out there. On top of that there was a lot of hype in the sales copy. Things like “Make Six Figures In The Next 90 Days!” and “Absolutely Guaranteed!”. This is a big turn off for anyone who has been online for more than six months…

I had a free guest account, though, so I decided to login to the members area to understand what was going on inside. Here’s the screenshot of the Dashboard:

global success club review

As you can see the first menu item is called “Business Center”. Inside it you’ll basically find material to become an affiliate of the program, so that you can refer others and earn a commission by doing it. That is pretty much how the “money marking” part of the program works.

I am not a fan of such programs, but there was one thing useful there if you are just getting started with Internet marketing. It’s called “90 Days to $100k Per Year Program”. It’s a step-by-step program, where every day you’ll have a set of actions and tasks to perform.

I checked the tasks for the first few days, and it seems that if you follow all the 90 days you’ll leave a good foundation for how to promote things online (they focus on promoting their own program, but you can use it for anything else you like). But then again, nothing revolutionary here, so if you have been working online for some time you won’t find this very useful.

What I Liked A Lot

So far nothing special, and if this was everything available for members I sure wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else, especially because it costs $97 per month. But then I went on to check the second menu item, called “Training Center”.

global-success-club

Inside it I found two pretty valuable sections. One is called “Business and Internet Marketing Center”, where you’ll find a bunch of Internet marketing videos (e.g., Email Marketing, Facebook Traffic, PPC Traffic), interviews with successful Internet marketers (e.g., Frank Kern, Chris Brogan, Eben Pagan, John Reese, Jeff Walker), and a couple of complete Internet marketing seminars, including one from Mike Filsaime that had a cost of $5000 when he run it a couple of years ago.

Things were getting better, and at this point I already thought the site was worth the $97 just for the training material you would get.

The second section inside the “Training Center” was called “Success Coaching”, and there you’ll find two complete programs with Tony Robbins (a very famous motivational speaker), and a section called “Top Speakers”, with seminars from a dozen more motivational and success speakers.

I went straight to the “Top Speakers” section, and I was blown away by the first video, from a guy called Les Brown. The video is about living your life fully and reaching your goals. While I was never a fan of “The Secret” type of stuff, this time around it made a lot of sense to me, and in fact I ended up watching the video twice. I liked it so much that I asked a manager of the site if I could give this video as a freebie to my readers, and he agreed. Here’s the link for you to watch it (no strings attached, not even an email address is required. Just click and watch).

After that I started watching the other videos inside that section. It became a habit to wake up and start watching one of them as I had breakfast. Then one day I was getting ready to start my morning ritual when my login didn’t work. My guest account had expired…

That’s when I went to the homepage again and I signed-up for a normal account. They offer a free trial for seven days, and after that you start paying $97 per month if you want to retain access to the site. My free trial expired and I paid the $97 gladly to keep watching the videos. I am halfway through them right now, so I think I’ll pay for another month.

What Else Is Included?

The other stuff included in the membership site I just glanced over. There’s a forum where members can ask questions, there are occasional contests with prizes for members who refer more people to the site, and there are some live webinars as well from what I understood. I was mainly interested in the training videos, though, so I didn’t pay much attention to those other sections.

Global Success Club: Worth it?

Here’s my take on the program: the hype they use to sell the program and the “money making” part didn’t impress me that much. As I said above it’s basically a referral program where you earn commissions by referring new members.

The videos inside the “Training Center”, however, make the site well worth the money in my opinion. I went to research online and I found another website offering those seminars and videos, and the cost was $97 per seminar. Inside Global Success Club you’ll get over 20 of them for the same price.

As I said there’s a 7-day trial for $1, so you can check it out and decide for yourself. Here’s the link to sign-up for the free trial.

If you have questions about the program let me know in a comment below and I’ll address them.

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Got something to say?





 

 

Feed: Daily Blog Tips
Posted on: Tuesday, July 26, 2011 6:39 PM
Author: Daniel Scocco
Subject: Global Success Club Review

 

Image removed by sender.
Image removed by sender.

I haven’t spent money on Internet marketing ebooks or membership sites for a long time (if I remember well the last one was Aaron Wall’s SEO Book!), but this month I forked out $97 to get access to a site. I am also planning to renew my subscription, so I figured some of our readers could be interested as well. But here’s is the whole story.

Image removed by sender. global-success-club-payment

A couple of weeks ago a person approached me via email asking what advertising options I had available on my site. I told him I work mostly with banners, but that I was sold out at the time. Nevertheless I asked what product or service he wanted to advertise, so that I could see if it was a good fit. He replied saying it was a membership site called Global Success Club, and he sent me a guest account so that I could check it out.

I had seen that name around (even on some high profile sites like John Chow and Shoemoney), so I decided to check it out.

What I Didn’t Like

At first I wasn’t impressed at all.

The sales page looked like all those “get rich quick” and “work from home” products you have out there. On top of that there was a lot of hype in the sales copy. Things like “Make Six Figures In The Next 90 Days!” and “Absolutely Guaranteed!”. This is a big turn off for anyone who has been online for more than six months…

I had a free guest account, though, so I decided to login to the members area to understand what was going on inside. Here’s the screenshot of the Dashboard:

Image removed by sender. global success club review

As you can see the first menu item is called “Business Center”. Inside it you’ll basically find material to become an affiliate of the program, so that you can refer others and earn a commission by doing it. That is pretty much how the “money marking” part of the program works.

I am not a fan of such programs, but there was one thing useful there if you are just getting started with Internet marketing. It’s called “90 Days to $100k Per Year Program”. It’s a step-by-step program, where every day you’ll have a set of actions and tasks to perform.

I checked the tasks for the first few days, and it seems that if you follow all the 90 days you’ll leave a good foundation for how to promote things online (they focus on promoting their own program, but you can use it for anything else you like). But then again, nothing revolutionary here, so if you have been working online for some time you won’t find this very useful.

What I Liked A Lot

So far nothing special, and if this was everything available for members I sure wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else, especially because it costs $97 per month. But then I went on to check the second menu item, called “Training Center”.

Image removed by sender. global-success-club

Inside it I found two pretty valuable sections. One is called “Business and Internet Marketing Center”, where you’ll find a bunch of Internet marketing videos (e.g., Email Marketing, Facebook Traffic, PPC Traffic), interviews with successful Internet marketers (e.g., Frank Kern, Chris Brogan, Eben Pagan, John Reese, Jeff Walker), and a couple of complete Internet marketing seminars, including one from Mike Filsaime that had a cost of $5000 when he run it a couple of years ago.

Things were getting better, and at this point I already thought the site was worth the $97 just for the training material you would get.

The second section inside the “Training Center” was called “Success Coaching”, and there you’ll find two complete programs with Tony Robbins (a very famous motivational speaker), and a section called “Top Speakers”, with seminars from a dozen more motivational and success speakers.

I went straight to the “Top Speakers” section, and I was blown away by the first video, from a guy called Les Brown. The video is about living your life fully and reaching your goals. While I was never a fan of “The Secret” type of stuff, this time around it made a lot of sense to me, and in fact I ended up watching the video twice. I liked it so much that I asked a manager of the site if I could give this video as a freebie to my readers, and he agreed. Here’s the link for you to watch it (no strings attached, not even an email address is required. Just click and watch).

After that I started watching the other videos inside that section. It became a habit to wake up and start watching one of them as I had breakfast. Then one day I was getting ready to start my morning ritual when my login didn’t work. My guest account had expired…

That’s when I went to the homepage again and I signed-up for a normal account. They offer a free trial for seven days, and after that you start paying $97 per month if you want to retain access to the site. My free trial expired and I paid the $97 gladly to keep watching the videos. I am halfway through them right now, so I think I’ll pay for another month.

What Else Is Included?

The other stuff included in the membership site I just glanced over. There’s a forum where members can ask questions, there are occasional contests with prizes for members who refer more people to the site, and there are some live webinars as well from what I understood. I was mainly interested in the training videos, though, so I didn’t pay much attention to those other sections.

Global Success Club: Worth it?

Here’s my take on the program: the hype they use to sell the program and the “money making” part didn’t impress me that much. As I said above it’s basically a referral program where you earn commissions by referring new members.

The videos inside the “Training Center”, however, make the site well worth the money in my opinion. I went to research online and I found another website offering those seminars and videos, and the cost was $97 per seminar. Inside Global Success Club you’ll get over 20 of them for the same price.

As I said there’s a 7-day trial for $1, so you can check it out and decide for yourself. Here’s the link to sign-up for the free trial.

If you have questions about the program let me know in a comment below and I’ll address them.


Original Post: Global Success Club Review


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Saturday, July 23, 2011

Optimization Page

Friday, July 22, 2011

FW: Don't Put Your Ego Above Your Productivity

Don’t Put Your Ego Above Your Productivity

As soon as your website starts growing I am sure you’ll start receiving all sorts of crazy emails. There will be people claiming you are dumb and that your content sucks. People asking really stupid questions that could be solved with a quick Google search. People confusing you with someone else and so on.

What should you do in those situations?

If you listen to your ego, you’ll certainly want to answer. That is what I used to do as well. For example, I often get emails from people confusing my company (called Online Profits) with some other companies and courses (e.g., “Quick Online Profits”, “30 Days to Online Profits” and so on). Here’s one of such emails I got recently:

To whom it may concern.

I have 2 charges on my credit card ending with the numbers 2719, one charge for 2.97 usd from online profits and another charge from quick-support.com.

I have already investigated and know that you are sister companies. I have already sent an email and a phone call to someone who did not appear to want to speak with me.

I am asking you to immediately refund any charges to my credit card and please remove all data and information you may have of me including my email address. I have already stated and am doing so again. Your company, companies are a scam and I’ll go to any length to insure that you stop charging my credit card as requested.

My bank and visa is supporting me on this matter and I urge you to immediately contact me to verify that you will stop charging my credit card for any membership charges, or for any charges at all. I honestly do not know what the charges are for and furthermore I did not sign up for anything that asked me or told me I would incur monthly charges.

My answer was the following:

Hi,

I have no clue regarding what you are talking about. If you visit our website you’ll realize we have no products for sale right now. All we offer is a free ebook and a free course. So how on earth would we be able to put a charge on your credit card?

Second, we never heard about that other company you are talking about.

Third, if you keep making false allegations about our company we might require you to prove them in court. So please check your facts before emailing random companies.

The guy obviously didn’t reply, as he must have realized his confusion.

Did I gain anything by replying, though? Nope.

Did I lose anything? Yep, my time.

Sure, it took 5 minutes to write that email. But what if you start replying to every single stupid email you receive? It will add up.

The solution? Tell your ego to shut up and simply ignore stuff that will not help your business.

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  • Sign-up to the Daily Blog Tips newsletter and you will be able to download the "Make Money Blogging" eBook for free (worth $47).
  • You will also receive tips to improve your blog, strategies to make money and useful resources from around the web.

5 Responses to “Don’t Put Your Ego Above Your Productivity”

  1. Stephanie on July 21, 2011 4:16 pm

    I’m like anyone and hate it when people get my company mixed up with others. My least favorite was when someone was claiming on RipoffReport that I owned some site I don’t own and have never been associated with, and posted my name, address and phone number in their complaint. I was happy that it was my previous contact information, but still steamed to be incorrectly associated with the company they were having trouble with. That I did because it’s visible, even if not associated with a site of mine.

  2. doug_eike on July 21, 2011 4:55 pm

    Excellent suggestion. I think this applies to making comments on blogs, as well. If you don’t like what the blogger writes, the best thing is to stop visiting the blog. Contradicting and correcting other bloggers is mostly about ego and is a waste of time. Thanks for the tip!

  3. Elle on July 21, 2011 5:41 pm

    I don’t really get this type of email, but I do agree that its a waste of time replying.

    However, you could set up some canned responses in Gmail pretty easily, and I think you can even automate them for certain filters. For example, you could filter any that mention credit card charges and automatically send them that email you wrote.

    I think this would be particularly useful for bloggers that receive a lot of complimentary emails, because as a reader, it takes extra effort to send the email and not getting any response from a “favorite blogger” can be disheartening.

  4. Megan on July 22, 2011 3:28 am

    yes, I just woke up this morning to 40 spam comments on my blog. Drives me mad. your immediate thought is “wow that ‘s a lot of comments” and are just as quickly put right back in your place when you realise each one tells you how great your blog is but doesn’t explain why…

    Still, visitors to my blog are thin on the ground so at least someone (even an automated system!) is looking. :(

  5. kumo on July 22, 2011 4:33 am

    I think it is best to just ignore such email because it might just be a scam to trick for a reply. In some cases, they just spam every emails or website they can find just for a response. Base on the response or reply, they will try to check if any of them worth follow up for a scam. I normally categorize these email together with the scam emails which asking for verification of bank account, PayPal, ebay and any accusation they proclaim.

Got something to say?





 

 

Feed: Daily Blog Tips
Posted on: Thursday, July 21, 2011 10:42 PM
Author: Daniel Scocco
Subject: Don’t Put Your Ego Above Your Productivity

 

Image removed by sender.
Image removed by sender.

As soon as your website starts growing I am sure you’ll start receiving all sorts of crazy emails. There will be people claiming you are dumb and that your content sucks. People asking really stupid questions that could be solved with a quick Google search. People confusing you with someone else and so on.

What should you do in those situations?

If you listen to your ego, you’ll certainly want to answer. That is what I used to do as well. For example, I often get emails from people confusing my company (called Online Profits) with some other companies and courses (e.g., “Quick Online Profits”, “30 Days to Online Profits” and so on). Here’s one of such emails I got recently:

To whom it may concern.

I have 2 charges on my credit card ending with the numbers 2719, one charge for 2.97 usd from online profits and another charge from quick-support.com.

I have already investigated and know that you are sister companies. I have already sent an email and a phone call to someone who did not appear to want to speak with me.

I am asking you to immediately refund any charges to my credit card and please remove all data and information you may have of me including my email address. I have already stated and am doing so again. Your company, companies are a scam and I’ll go to any length to insure that you stop charging my credit card as requested.

My bank and visa is supporting me on this matter and I urge you to immediately contact me to verify that you will stop charging my credit card for any membership charges, or for any charges at all. I honestly do not know what the charges are for and furthermore I did not sign up for anything that asked me or told me I would incur monthly charges.

My answer was the following:

Hi,

I have no clue regarding what you are talking about. If you visit our website you’ll realize we have no products for sale right now. All we offer is a free ebook and a free course. So how on earth would we be able to put a charge on your credit card?

Second, we never heard about that other company you are talking about.

Third, if you keep making false allegations about our company we might require you to prove them in court. So please check your facts before emailing random companies.

The guy obviously didn’t reply, as he must have realized his confusion.

Did I gain anything by replying, though? Nope.

Did I lose anything? Yep, my time.

Sure, it took 5 minutes to write that email. But what if you start replying to every single stupid email you receive? It will add up.

The solution? Tell your ego to shut up and simply ignore stuff that will not help your business.


Original Post: Don’t Put Your Ego Above Your Productivity


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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

FW: Linkbait and Content Marketing - What Are Your Goals

Linkbait and Content Marketing – What Are Your Goals

Post image for Linkbait and Content Marketing – What Are Your Goals
By Michael Gray on May 26, 2011

One of the most difficult conversations I have with new or perspective clients is about Linkbait and content marketing and explaining how its real goal isn’t to drive sales but to build links, build awareness, and send social signals to the search engines. To make this post useful and actionable, I’m going to take you through the process/planning stage for a former client I had who has since sold his business.
an important point to understand: we are targeting the “general online population,” not just potential customers …
When I was working for the man and building my own business by moonlighting at night (ok–and a little during the day), one of my first clients was for a salt water fish store. He sold fish and aquarium supplies online. Now, ultimately, his goal was to get his content in front of people who own salt water fish tanks and are interested in his products. However, unless you are a well known brand, competing on price (aka running a sale or promotional offer), or are offering an impulse purchase (no long term commitment and low price), you won’t make sales from social media (stay tuned to the end when I will talk more about this).
IMHO the biggest benefits from social media are link building potential, brand awareness, and social media signals (see what social signals might Google use). Lets take a look at our niche:
  • There is a small subset of the population that has a salt water fish tank and has a potential interest in our merchandise.
  • There is a slightly larger subset of people who know someone who has a salt water fish tank and might forward/share with them content they come across.
  • There is a larger subset of people who are interested in the science/nature/environmental aspects of marine life, marine mammals, and ocean life.
  • There is a larger set of people who are interested in travel aspect of marine life, snorkeling, scuba, diving with sharks, swimming with dolphins, and visiting aquatic-related travel destinations.
  • There is a larger set of people who would enjoy/share photos of marine/ocean-related content, especially if the photos are beautiful, interesting, engaging, or unusual.
  • There is a much larger set of people who will read/share interesting content that is about marine related subject matter, if it is exceptional.
  • There is a small group of people who will publish marine related content and will link to it
  • There is a medium sized group who will write/link/tweet about marine based content if it is exceptional enough (aka the linkerati)
We are going to target two groups of people because they include most of the other groups. They are “people who will read/share marine based content if it is interesting enough” and “people who will write/link/tweet about marine based content if it is interesting enough.” This is an important point to understand: we are targeting the “general online population,” not just potential customers, because our goals are links, sharing, and social signals.
So how do we get started? Let’s come up with some potential ideas for our Linkbait (see creating exceptional content for boring subjects):
Top 10/15/20 Most Beautiful/Ugly/Bizarre Creatures in the Ocean – This isn’t a typical piece of image based Linkbait. I would do all three. Just choose a different number for each one and space them out at least a month apart.
Best Places to Scuba/Snorkel in the Country/Continent/World – This is a bit of travel Linkbait but, again, it has multiple versions. In fact, you can do them as head & tail continent and refresh the posts every year like seasonal living URL’s.
Most Expensive/Dangerous Seafood Meals – This has a lot of options. You can do an info graphic of seafood prices to other food like beef and chicken. You could map graphics of seafood consumption. You could create cooking linkbait about expensive seafood, or dangerous seafood to eat (like the fugu blowfish). You can do Eco/green based content on sustainability of seafood. You can do “mom” based content like how to eat healthy seafood on a budget. You can do health focused content on seafood. There are lots and lots of variations here.
Largest Marine Mammals/Fish/Invertebrates – People like stories about giant sharks, whales, squid or octopi, and you can revisit this kind of post every 2-3 years as news/science updates (see how often should I update my content and updating evergreen content).
Most Dangerous/Poisonous/Deadly Fish/Sea Snakes/Marine Life – Again, people tie into group-think and share common fears of (and fascination with) sharks, snakes, piranhas, and general ocean life. Just be careful and don’t run a scuba piece right before or after a piece about dangerous sharks. It looks … contradictory.
Most Beautiful Ocean/Beach/Underwater photography/paintings – Again people like looking at “nice pictures.”
Now, this list is by no means all encompassing and the titles are just working concepts at this point. Hopefully they give you some idea about how you can take a niche shopping site and widen the focus to include a larger group of people who would be interested in liking/sharing/linking to your website/blog.
The next step is to start to flesh out the articles. Do a little research and figure out which one will have the best content. For example, use a service like oDesk and hire someone to research the most expensive seafood dishes, both currently and historically. Have them be on the lookout for unusual anecdotes like seafood that was expensive and hunted to extinction or seafood that’s illegal to eat. Have them give you source links so you can verify the data before sending it off to your premium content writer or infograpic artist.
Once you know about your pieces, start scheduling them and sending them out to be produced. You could push out a minor piece every 2-3 weeks and a major piece every 4-5 weeks. You want to spread out similar pieces unless you are doing a content series. Make sure you have the tail pieces in place before you push out the head (see head and tail content). As a I mentioned above, don’t push out a “Top 5 most dangerous sharks of Australia” back to back with “Best places to scuba dive in Australia.” It looks … odd.
So what are the takeaways from this post:
  • Think about who your customers are then widen the focus to include as large an audience as possible while still staying “on topic.”
  • Brainstorm for ideas on possible topics for articles.
  • Do research then prioritize/schedule content creation.
  • Create any backup content you may need.
  • Create content and schedule for publication.
  • Spread campaigns out over time to send new links and social signals to search engines over a prolonged period of time.
  • Pay attention to seasonal news/events and tie into them.
  • Look to update science/news/informational content on a regular basis as needed. Use living URL’s.
Ok, you made it to the end. This post has some bonus content! What if you do want to actually sell things using social media? Well IMHO you will need to do one or more of these things:

  • Be a well known, established, trusted brand – If Amazon puts out a top Father’s Day gift ideas list, people will buy from them because they know/trust Amazon. If you aren’t Amazon, you will have a hard time with this strategy.
  • Compete on price – If you offer a sale, discount, or promotional price below your competition, you may make some sales. Keep the item(s) as general interest as possible (aka you can’t sell catfood–no matter how low the price–to someone who doesn’t have cats)
  • Be General Interest, Low Commitment - A lot of people like clown fish thanks to “Finding Nemo,” but not everyone wants to commit to having a fish tank, not even at a cheap price for a startup tank with a free clown fish. However, almost everyone can buy a T-shirt with sharks saying funny things on it.
  • Be impulsed priced – Lots of people want to go to France for vacation, but not a lot of people will drop a thousand dollars or more on a discount vacation at the drop of hat. However, a lot of people will spend $10/$20/$50 on an impulse item if they like it.

FW: Not Understanding the Need For Instant Gratification

Linkbait Failure – Not Understanding the Need For Instant Gratification

Post image for Linkbait Failure – Not Understanding the Need For Instant Gratification
By Michael Gray on May 19, 2011

Whenever I see someone else’s linkbait that fails, one of the common reasons is the failure to understand the need for instant gratification. I came across a text book example of this recently so I thought I would share it with you.Like my evil twin brother, Machu Picchu is on my bucket list of places to see before I die. It’s this mystical spiritual place up in the mountains of Peru. It’s made up of ancient Inca buildings and terraced plateaus. It takes at least 3 days to get there and back, and the views from it are simply breathtaking (click any of the pics below to enlarge).
Machu Picchu in the mist Machu Picchu Farming Terraces Llama enjoying view from Machu Picchu Rope Bridge on Machu Picchu Trail
I came across an article from the LA Times “100 facts for 100 years of Machu Picchu“. Great! I love Machu Picchu, and I may know some things about it, but with 100 facts, I’m sure there will be at least one or two new things I’ll learn. When I clicked through, I was presented with exactly one fact … seriously!  The site is running a series with 100 different posts–each with 1 fact. While I have gone on record as saying that creating a series is an effective strategy for building loyal readers, that post ignored the need people have for instant gratification.
As Michael Strong of Blueglass recently wrote about in “Linkbait Fulfilling Your Titles Promise“, if you set my expectation for 100 facts but only give me 1, I’m going to feel cheated/depressed/let-down. The chances that I’m going to “share” your content across Email, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or Stumbleupon just dropped to near zero. I wrote about something similar a few years ago, “When Your Title is Linkbait But Your Post Isn’t“. Writing a title creates “a deal” with the user. They should never have a “Don’t Make Me Think Moment” and wonder what your post is about, and they should find whatever your title “promises”.
Some simple concepts I try to share with anyone I talk with about creating great linkbait:
  • Make a strong impression right off the bat. It can be with words, video, or pictures (see using images for Linkbait), but you need to “hook” people in the first few seconds. Saving the best for last only works when people know who you are, like Steven Spielberg.
  • Your content needs to be exceptional if you want me to share it and do your content marketing for you. Everyday people have hundreds of things, all competing for their attention. If you want to “catch someone’s eye,” you need to be aware of that competition. Hat tip to Gabe Rivera.
  • While it may be very important to you that I like/upvote/share your content, you need to make it important to me. Don’t ever confuse your love of something with the need for Google Traffic . You need to create the “you know who would really like this …” or “I really have to share this with …” type of experience/feeling.
You should think of creating and marketing linkbait as an Olympic Level competition for content creation. Stand out with a catchy, funny, witty, shocking, or otherwise compelling title. Your content should be captivating and grab my attention in my first few seconds on the page. You needs to deliver on the promise your title makes. You need to do it in an interesting and direct manner. Don’t bury the punchline at the end of a 40 minute video or 2000 word block of text. Make it easy for me to do what you want me to do with your content. Want me to “like” it on Facebook? There better be a Facebook button at the end of the post. The same goes for email, Twitter, Stumbleupon, or any other sharing service.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

FW: SEO Smart Links Plugin


Posted on: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 9:09 PM
Author: Daniel Scocco
Subject: SEO Smart Links Plugin

It has been a long time since I recommended a WordPress plugin, but here we go again. I started using this plugin on a niche site, and so far it seems to be helping a lot with the search engine optimization.
The plugin is called SEO Smart Links, and it basically allows you to specify keywords, and whenever those keywords appear on your posts or pages the plugin will automatically create a link to the post of your choice.
As you can see this can be useful both for your human visitors and for search bots, and your posts will be interlinked more efficiently. Here’s a screenshot of the options page:
Image removed by sender. seo-smart-links-plugin
Another use for the plugin is to insert affiliate links on your posts. You just need to select the keywords, and the plugin will automatically link them to your affiliate offers.
It’s quite a handy tool to have on any WordPress blog, so check it out.


Original Post: SEO Smart Links Plugin
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