You have to have noticed it. The recent trend to describe your product as being so good that ClickBank banned it. It’s beginning to seem that the only thing ClickBank bans is the stuff that works, which makes you wonder about all of the marketers stuff that is listed in clickbank.

That along with the recent trend in trying to define things as simultaneously “stealing” and yet at the same time “perfectly legal”. Get a friggen dictionary. You can say things all day long, but if you can’t agree on simple definitions of words, it’s really so much noise.

Well, that’s enough for now. No one has been mentioned, no one has been linked. You are smart enough to figure this stuff out. Just remember next time you hit one of these things, if they can’t agree to simple definitions, how are you going to get anything out of their writing. Yes I realize they are “just marketing” but when “just marketing” is blatantly BSing like that, well….

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Man there are so many things to think about, so much to do, so many directions to go in…

Can you do me a favor? I am trying to decide what information to send you next, but there are
so many things to decide from. So I’ve arranged to have a survey done to find out what my readers most want to know.

Can you go to this web page and tell me your most important question regarding internet marketing? I’ll take it straight to heart and you’ll see the results reflected right here on the blog.

Click Here to Help Out Now!

Thanks!

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

I will be releasing an ebook about this site very shortly, targeted specifically at Bum Marketers and how we can use it to make more Bum Cash than we ever dreamed of.

• You can upload free reports, audio and video to this site and promote your sites and affiliate program, like Your tube but better!
• You can upgrade (right now during beta) for FREE to upload paid content and sell it with an army of instant affiliates for each product!
• You can promote other people pages (or any page on the site for that matter) and earn a commission on everything they buy from anywhere on the site!
• You can refer publishers and earn a spiff every time any one sells any of their paid products!
• The affiliate commissions are on TWO TIERS, so you can refer other affiliates and earn whenever they make a sale!
• You get credit for the customers that land on your pages Even When they come from the search engines!
• You can create dozens of affiliate links throughout the site, or even set up so that when you send people from your own sites, you still get credit even without the affiliate links!

I really just can’t believe you are still here! Go Now. Sign Up. Get Links. Publish Content. Make Money.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

You can find the report on the download page here.
Beginners’ Guides to WordPress Blogs

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

I’m running through here and wanted to real quickly let you know about a new site my friend Noah Fleming just started. It’s BumMarketers.com and it promises to be the most advanced collection of techniques and methods you’ll find anywhere on the net for people who want to learn simple, deadly effective, but free or cheap methods of running their business online.

Right now Noah hasn’t even actually launched the site, but the signup form is active anyways, ssssshhhhh. So you can get registered right now even though it’s not launched yet.

Now, I’m going to be heavily involved in this site as a staff member and I’ll be bringing my own brand of trench fighting niche marketing to the table. In fact the reason I wanted to post this here real quick for my readers is that I’m doing something i never do. I’m sharing a site with you. I registered a brand new domain and people are going to watch as I develop it into a bum blog. Everything I do will be right there for you to read about, watch, comment on and question. I’ll explain what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, and you’ll be able to hit the site and see exactly what it looks like as I implement it. We’ll even get together for live chats now and then. But here’s the catch. I don’t know when Noah is officially launching the site, but the minute he does, I’m pulling the offer.

ONLY those who join in pre launch will be able to follow along as i build this site.

So if you want in on this, get over to BumMarketers.com and get signed up now!

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Not surprisingly, frequency and quality of posting dominate the top of the list, but presentation plays a bg factor as well, with nearly a quarter of respondents saying that they unsubscribe because of partial feeds, or feed excerpts.

Now the knee jerk response to such an article is to examine the list and change everything that might be costing you subscribers. I mean you do want subscribers, right? And once you’ve got them, you want to keep them, no doubt.

But wait a minute. Remember that frequency is the biggest thing on the list. Specifically that too many posts would trigger 34% of the respondents to unsubscribe. But that flies in the face of the fact that many of the top blogs out there post an average of 30 times a day.

So before you just start making changes be sure to consider your audience. If you’re in the tech toys market, like engadget, you probably aren’t seeing too many unsubs for posting too often. On the other hand if your blog is really serving as a platform for your newsletter, like nicheBOT, Your readers are going to stay subscribed even though you post every week or two.

Then there’s the excerpt or full post argument. I know that some people will not subscribe to this blog, or will unsubscribe from it based solely on the fact that I publish excerpt, not full posts. I’m OK with that, largely because I have a good idea of who is staying subscribed, and they are the ones I am posting to any ways.

That said, I do something to try to minimize the effect. I do not let WordPress, or any plug in, automatically generate my excerpts. I hand roll every one of them. My excerpts are a short sentence to paragraph of focused copy designed to let the reader know what I’m posting about and invite them to come read it. Yes, that’s right I wrote every excerpt on this blog as a personal invitation to you to come read the post.

But the REAL question is…

You have to have subscribers before you can have unsubscribe rs. I’d love to see Darren ask “What makes you subscribe to a blog”. I’m sure we can all predict the top of that list fairly accurately. But I also suspect that there will be some answers that shed light on why some people didn’t subscribe even though we thought we had given them good reason. Those little things that add up to big differences in readership levels.

That would be a great article.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

His reasons, in a quick list are

• BumpZee is more than “bumping”, Digg is not.
• BumpZee is new, so it’s not gamed, Digg is.
• BumpZee is professional, Digg is not.
• BumpZee solves problems for the busy professional.
• BumpZee has widgets that are actually easy to use.

While it could be noted that BUMPzee may not yet be popular or big enough yet to try to game, it must also be noted that the nature of the community is such that attempts at gaming it will cause more public harm for the would be gamers than would ever be the case at the amorphous, anonymous digg community. Diggs demographic is not people attempting to forge alliances with one another, and share and learn about their industry.

The rest of Jim’s points, I would say, stand on their own merit.

Now I would add a couple more reasons

#6 Reason BumpZee Is Better Than Digg
BUMPzee has an easily quantifiable demographic, held together by a concrete, common interest. Diggs, demographic is murky at best, and given to extremes of fickleness. What’s hot today will be passe, and anti-cool next week. BUMPzee, on the other hand targets a group with a single common interest, that of affiliate marketing. We may not all agree on everything, but we all know what we’re here for. This serves to increase the sense of community, which should also decrease some of the shenanigans that occur at more generalist sites like MBL and Digg.

#7 Reason BumpZee Is Better Than Digg

BUMPzee emphasizes conversations between equals, Digg has a vote you off the island mentality. You can comment on Digg, but what’s the point. There aren’t really any conversations. It’s a giant pissing/popularity contest where most often the strongest argument on any side of an issue is “you’re lame”. BUMPzee members communicate with each other, and do so respectfully even when disagreeing. And the architecture is set up to encourage this. First, as Jim noted, your blog is tied to your account, and secondly every page on the BUMPzee site emphasizes the opportunities available to engage the other users in dialog. And the algorithms, while not public, obviously take such conversations into account, because I see posts with fewer bumps, but more conversation leading those with more bumps, but no one talking about it. I think Scott made the right choice there.

Be sure to read Jim’s Post here.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

It’s all about what everyone else thinks. A mad scramble to seek the lowest common opinion and get launched like so much digital debris to the front page where much love and untargeted traffic will beat the crap out of your server.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the concepts of a social web. I think reader participation is great. I love my readers (Heck I even got Scott Jangro to call you readers instead of visitors - That’s so much nicer, don’t you think?). But at some point, I have to kick and scream a little and indulge my inner two year old.

It’s all about me, baby!

That’s why I was so pleased to stumble upon (see, it keeps creeping up, doesn’t it?) Tumblr.com Tumblelogs. And in jst a few minutes of pointing and clicking on colors, I had my very own Home Business Blogging Tumblelog. I’m kinda proud of it.

No one can vote against it. No one can worse still not vote for it. It’s all about me. A stray thought pops into my ADD rattled brain and it take 60 seconds to infect the 3 people I anticipate becoming regular readers. I can post anything that strikes me. and, unlike my WordPress blogs, it seems to promote short concise posting (something most of my readers here would appreciate, no doubt).

Right now it has a Page Rank of 1 and virtually no traffic according to Alexa, but I predict it is going to catch on. I think it’s time we all had some “me space” and it’s about time we could all just grab a quick random thought here and there without feeling like we have to dissect it, carbon date it, toxicity test it and generally bend fold and spindle it.

Go grab your own Tumblelog. Post something short and pithy, then come back here and post the URI. I promise to read it! And what’s better, I promise not to vote on it!

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

First off I guess I’ll tell you which browser it is. It’s Fire Fox. Specifically version 2.

I just recently upgraded to version 2, and while some of the changes are pretty small, most of them are really pretty neat too. For instance the tabs now have little “x”s in them to close them with one click the same as the Opera tabs.

Some changes are, as nearly as I can tell meaningless, such as changing the name of “extensions” to “add-ons”, though there are few of these.

But my favorite change is the one this post is about. The one that makes me look smarter than i really am…

Fire Fox version 2 has a built in spell chaecker.

Now when I misspell something in a forum or a blog post I know I’ve misspelled it. For instance the only misspelled words in this article is the last word of the previous sentence, and the word sentance which is how I originally spelled sentence in this sentence.

Those who have read my postings in forums over the years or read my sporadic posts on this blog, know that I am terrible at spelling. I have stray letters and AWOL letters scattered throughout everything I write. But not lately.

Admit it, you’ve been wondering what it was about me recently. Thinking to yourself, “You know, I never realized just how smart Dane really is”. Haven’t you?

Now you know the truth. I’m not any smarter, but my web browser is.

Beyond the way you’ll be able to easily astound your friends and readers with your sudden leap into increased intelligence, there are many more features and tools available to the Fire Fox browser that are invaluable to running an on line small business.

Whether you are doing Bum Marketing, Affiliate marketing, Niche Blogs or any other type of online Home Based Business, Fire Fox has tools that will make your work easier and more effective.

You Don’t have to be so smart if your tools are smart enough!

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

How many megabytes –Gigabytes?– of resale rights and PLR products are sitting on your hard drive gathering eDust?

Don’t despair, my friend! There is hope for you. The only question is whether or not you can look hard and long at your reality and accept what is instead of what you wish were.

First, I’d Like to invite you to download

Josh Anderson’s Neophyte Parachute Report. This is a PDF version of a post he made to the Warrior Forum back in December. The reason I’m providing you with the PDF is that if it describes you, and if you can face that reality for yourself, you need it in PDF form. You need it sitting on your desktop so you can click it open and re-read it. You need it printed out so you can take it with you. Yes. It’s that important. If you can face your own reality in that report, nothing short of your future is riding on taking the steps of correction.

The Four Things

Now for the four things, the only four things you should be spending your money on right now as you launch your online home based business.

1. Time: Spend money on time. If something will really honestly cut the time it takes you to perform certain tasks by a significant amount, this frees up time to spend on doing more of what you were doing, adding other activities to the mix, or even giving some time back to your family and friends (You KNOW you’ve taken some from them). This would include things like keyword tools,
2. Product: Spend money on acquiring product. Not just any product, but product you can actually turn around and move. This could be content you purchase to repackage and sell, or post as content to bring in traffic to forward to affiliate programs. But it has to be product you can move right away. Don’t buy product you might be able to sell sometime down the line. If you can’t turn it around and be selling it with a week pass. There will be more product along when you are ready for it, fear not.
3. Money: Yep. Buy Money. Can you buy a software application for a one time fee that will replace your monthly subscription and pay for itself in a few months? That’s a good buy. Can you save two or three months hosting fees by paying a year in advance instead of month to month? Good Buy. Purchases that reduce your expenditures on infrastructure for your new home based business allow you to spend more money on products and time, which allow you to increase your earnings.
4. Promotion: This is really just spending money on all three at once. It is also the life blood of your new business. Be sure that you do not neglect promotions. Free promotions are great, but they aren’t really free. They have some cost in lost time, product or prospects. Spending money in this category is like spending it in all three of the others at once.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

The strongest reason to recomend them to my mind though, is this; Each of these networks allows me to bring some of the most powerful mojo that social networking sites offer to my own blog pages.

And that mojo is social proof.

When you think about it, the real power behind social networking sites, and social bookmarking sites in particular is the social proof they offer.

“Wow, that site got 100 votes in a couple hours! I better get over there and check it out!”

“Hey this guy has 500 (followers / friends / community members)! I wonder what he has to say that they all want to read?”

That’s power.

BUMPzee and MyBlogLog, of course offer this social proof among their pages just like all of the others do, but they both take it a step further. They both let me put little pictures of all of the community members that come read my blog right there on my blog.

“Hey look at all these people who actually come read this guys blog! I wonder what that post there is about?”

And this happens both subtlety, and without the readers actually having to post a comment. Though I believe there is a tendency to get more comments too, related to the social proof of others actually visiting the blog. Nothing concrete there, just a suspicion.

I’ve just increased the number of readers displayed in my BUMPzee widget to 20, and if it seems like this shows an improvement, I’ll bump it further. I’m heading over to MyBlogLog to see about showing more users from that network as well. And I may, if there is the possibility, set up pages with copies of the codes that show a hundred or so recent readers. Not in the side bar, but in an actual page linked from below the widget inviting you to see “who else reads Home business Blogging”.

I know the initial reaction is to limit the number of recent readers (and I like that term better than recent visitors, can we change that or make it configurable, Jangro?), but I would encourage you to experiment with showing more. My bet is that the social proof you gain far outweighs any clicks through to other network members, and even if it does, eventually they lead back to you. That’s what community is all about.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

This reverses a long standing position ha has had (that i agree with) that it would be a bad idea to email comments to readers. I’m going to stick with that original position myself.

Here’s Why:
As good as I currently feel my spam resistance is, I know it’s not perfect. I don’t want to risk the possible outcome of a single cialis or viagara type post getting into the email boxes of my readers. Especially a new reader who has not had time to get to know me and might assume that it was evidence I would approve such a thing happening.

To be sure I believe the possibility of such an occurrence to be slight, but still the possibility is there.

On thing that is niggling at me right now is a lot of odd reader registrations. They are registering with names like “health insurance” or “cheap viagara”. It’s been going on for about two months now. I’ve deleted some of these registrations out of hand, but others, I’ve left in to see what the next move might be. So far none of these registrations has done anything but register.

My best guess right now is that these are automated attempts to get links published on reader / author pages on WordPress blogs that have such pages, which I don’t.

One thing that concerns me though is that my SpamKarma is set up to automatically pass any comment by a registered, logged in user. I doubt it will take long before some spammer decides to try that route. I’ve downloaded the next layer of protection already, but haven’t installed it yet, as I’m still waiting to see what the next move might be.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

if you would like to start using the powerful conversation tools you blog can offer and not be killed by spammers in the process, chack out Scott’s solutiong or mine. Mine is here Follow Me, And Stop Caving In To The Barbarians.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Everywhere i go I see all of this pink. It’s not the pretty shade of pink that makes me smile when my daughter insists on wearing it. It’s a harsh, insistant pink that screams the anguished cry of helplessness. It is the pink of despair and surrender.

It’s the pink that defaces so many good sites now like technorati.com and wikipedia.com.

It’s sad really that this pink has taken on such negative connotations for me. Once it was a tool that had great power. But like any great power, misuse can lead to some downright ugly scars.

The thing that’s made it so bad is how it’s splashed all over the comments and trackback sections of blogs. This is not right. It’s not polite. It’s downright rude.

Especially when it’s so damn easy to correct.

I’m talking, of course about the common style convention of placing pink boxes around rel=nofollow links. Well, technically I’m not talking about the style, but the fact that bloggers have utterly surrendered to spammers.

We’ve tucked in our tails, rolled over to expose our bellies and admitted that spammers are smater (or at least possess more passion and drive) than us.

Shame.

How does it feel deep down in your creative, constructive soul to admit out front and in the open that you are too lazy to actually fight to retain your tools at the first real battle with the barbarians? They possess scripts. They possess automated tools. That’s really all they have on their side. And yet we just threw no follow at them and washed our hands like so many pontus pilate wannabes.

We blog and moan about the spam, and the only thing we do to try to stop it is punish the people who come to our blogs and take the time to make valuable contributions through real comments and trackbacks.

And it’s completely pathetic.

Yes, pathetic! Especially if you blog with WordPress.

All you have to do is get Spam Karma and Do Follow. Install those two plugins (It will consume a full 15-20 minutes of your life) and you can trade real links with good folks who do things properly and not have to worry about the spammers.

So here’s the deal.

Take the pledge. Take back the comment and trackback space. Install the plugins. Post in the comments here that you will follow links to the good commenters and trackbackers and fight the good fight. I If you need help. If you have problems. If you have questions about how to get these things installed on your blog let me know and I will help you.

Not only that. I’ll set up a page here on this blog for bloggers who follow, and I’ll link to you permanantly. Your choice of family friendly keywords leading to your family friendly blog. And I’ll go on a link building bender to grab some good page rank for that page. And I’ll beg other people to also put up pages linking to the follow bloggers.

So what about it? Are you blogger enough to stand and fight? Or are you gonna hide behind little pink boxes for the rest of your life?

Your choice.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

More valuable by far, in my own oppinion, MyBlogLog lets you build a visible community on your blog with the insertion of just a line or two of javascript code. Community building is at the heart of blogging, and anything that helps build that sense of community is a good thing for the blog owner and for the blog’s readers too.

You can see this blogs community here -> Home business Blogging.

A few days ago I downloaded a parasite block list from MVPs. This is a list of domains that you can add to your local hosts file and point them to your local machine by defining the domain as pointing to the ip address 27.0.0.1. So for instance if some site tries to load a doubleclick.net page or script, the entry (127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net) in your hosts file would load the file on your own local webserver instead (some tools for customizing this are provided at MVPs).

Shortly after loading this list into my hosts file, I started seeing problems with MyBlogLog
It wouldn’t load correctly, and I couldn’t log in. I also noticed that my picture was not showing up on blogs i was reading that have the MyBlogLog code installed.

I didn’t inittially tie the two occurances together. It took a few days before i realized what had happened. MyBlogLog was in the parasites file.

I went in and removed the lines that redirect MyBlogLog and everything went back to working. And that might have been all there was to it. But I got to thinking. Why was MyBlogLog in the parasites list?

So I fired off an email to MVPs to ask. here’s the email I sent.

Hi,

I’m wondering why mybloglog.com is included in the hosts file? While it does track, it is tracking it’s own users across each others sites and it isn’t serving any porn or ads.

I just deleted those lines from the file, but I’m curious about the thought behind blocking them.

Dane Morgan

And Mike Burgess actually mailed me back with a reply.

Dane,
Thanks for your feedback …

re: it is tracking it’s own users across each others sites”
Mybloglog looks at reader behavior inside blogs, like what is being read
and where readers go next, delivering information it can sell to web advertisers.

FYI: MyBlogLog is part of the Yahoo Developer Network (advertising)

[Example]
<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://track.mybloglog.com/js/jsserv.php?mblID=2006061606541135′>&ly;/script>

The above is typically embedded and it does track *all* users, not it’s
own users … you can view the script safely here:
[LINK]

I will remove the following, but the others will remain for now:
127.0.0.1 www.mybloglog.com

Mike Burgess
Microsoft MVP - Internet Security
“There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″
www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

To be quite fair, what Mike says here is correct. All visitors are tracked and logged by the MyBlogLog code. The question that remains is what purposes are those data being used for. According to the MyBlogLog Privacy Policy it’s this.

Web Beacons

MyBlogLog uses web beacons to understand what users are clicking on across the blogs and other web sites in its network. The information collected through these web beacons is used to find out more about our users, for more accurate reporting, improve the effectiveness of our marketing, and to make MyBlogLog better. MyBlogLog sets a cookie along with its web beacons, see above.

Nothing is mentioned about selling this information to other parties, but since Yahoo now owns MyBlogLog that would make the Yahoo Marketing machine not a third party, right? Now, if you are reading this blog, you are probably a marketer yourself and this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but to a lot of non marketer types it is a huge deal.

here’s the privacy section from the MVPs Criteria Page

Privacy Criteria

1. Does not contain a privacy policy, or uses a 3rd party privacy policy which fails to provide an easily accessible privacy policy that explains data collection and other practices used by the program or site.
2. Does not contain or display an acceptable and enforceable EULA (End User License Agreement)
3. Installs a LSP (layered service provider) without full disclosure and explicit user permission
4. Silently tracks sites visited without user permission, such as by IP address, GUID, email address, name or other identifier such as 3rd party hit counters, web beacons, and or 3rd party Cookies.
5. Tracks Web browsing behavior and transmits this information to a remote server
6. Tracks online activity and matches it to personally identifiable information without clear notice and consent, including but not limited to Web pages viewed or accessed, user selected content, keywords and search terms.
7. Tracks Web browsing behavior via 3rd party Cookies (aka: Data Miners) or requires the user to access another site for the purpose of using an “opt-out” Cookie
8. 3rd party surveys that are part of third-party advertising, marketing, or metrics/measurement networks without full disclosure of information obtained or where this information is retained and with whom this information is shared
9. Collects personally identifiable information without express consent in statements other than the EULA or privacy policy

Sections 5 and 8 would seem to me to place MyBlogLog within the limits of this selection criteria, since the users browsing various blogs are having information about their visits and their machines sent to a third party server, and MyBlogLog states in their privacy policy that part of their purpose is to increase the effectiveness of their marketing through their web beacons.

Personally I don’t think this is all that nefarious. I don’t think it’s automatically a bad thing.

But here’s the larger picture. If we resort to using tools that provide marketing information back to the providing party we will almost force people who do not want to be tracked to use methods shuch as hosts files to block those efforts. This in turn will decrease the value of those tools for tracking our visitors. That’s not good for anybody.

Maybe the only real answer is seperating our tracking tools and our community tools. Community tools should only track community members who have opted in to the tracking, and visitor statistic tools should report directly to our own servers logs, or should be stored by a company who is providing the service strickly as a site metrics service and not making their money by turning our site data into markeing metrics for other parties.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Turns out it took a lot longer to accomplish than it should have. You see UTW simply refused to play correctly. And because of the way I was doing things previously I though I had killed this blog for a while.

Back when UTW first came out I donwloaded it and loved the concept, but it didn’t do everything I wanted. There was no integrated way to have tag pages with a real WordPress Loop in them. You had to hack code up, and for me the results were just not good enough.

So what I chose to do at the time was sacrifice categories altogether and have a strictly tag based blog. I hacked away at some core functions and messed with things I probably shouldn’t have messed with. Upgrades have been interesting at times.

So the first thing I had to do today was undo the hacks I had done quite a while ago. Of course I didn’t comment them well enough, and of course I didn’t take notes on what I did. Not I!

Then with the blog restored to a more orriginal state I installed UTW and clicked through to discover that nothing was working. I hacked some more. I deactivated plugins, I upgraded plugins, I upgraded WordPress, I hacked some more. I dug into the UTW code. I searched forums and search engines. I printed code out.

It made no sense!

I have this plugin installed on other blogs and it works. I printed out more code and compared it. I printed out config screens and compared them side by side. Everything suggested that it should work, but it simply did not.

Then, finally I printed out the code for the tag.php pages from one site that was working and from this blog. And there it was. I had created each tag page by simply duplicating the category page from the theme installed on the blog. And this theme, believe it or not began it’s life as Gespaa v2, a WordPress 1.4 or 1.5 theme. And the way it called the loop apparantly still works for WordPress Core functions, bt it was choking the UTW functions. A quick change to four or five lines in the tag.php to call the loop a little differently and it all fell into place and hummed like a fine tooled blogging machine.

The Nightmares are all in the little details.

Note that this post has only one category, but has several tags, unlike the previous posts in this blog. Though with any luck you won’t be able to check out that difference in a week.

Now if I can just figure out how to limit the number of related posts UTW returns. You reading this Andy?

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Most Niche Marketers use this keyword research tool extensively and a few have been pretty lost without it.

Well, the cool thing is that there is no reason for you to wait around to see what happens with this little drama any more. Just delete your overture inventory bookmark and put the new free wordtracker keyword tool in it’s place. With 100 related keywords per query, clickable refinement links and a smoother, faster interface, it’s sure to be a big hit.

And the bonus is that the results (which are daily esimates) are arguably more reliable than anything the overture tool ever offered.

Also, if you have a browser that supports it, there is an open browser .xml widget to add the search tool to your browser toolbar selecter, though when i tried it with my firefox browser it was broken. Hopefully they will fix this soon and a bookmark won’t even be needed.

Check it out here

Free WordTracker keyword Tool

NOTE: Another great idea is to check out Find Hot Markets, which puts a massive array of niche market and keyword research tools at your digital fingertips. I absolutely love this resource and if you are a niche marketer, you will wonder how you managed to stay organized without it!

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

As with nearly anything else available, there are ups, downs and sidewayses to any thing. There are also people who slide in get comfortable and make something of it and others who seem to be laying on a bed of the most uncomfortable nails ever. There are people who sing the praises a little too loudly, and others who dismiss without even knowing what they are dismissing.

I’m gonna lay it out like this. There are SOME PEOPLE for who “bum marketing” can be a nearly literal godsend. There are a number of reasons for this fact. The most important of which are these.

• It is complete.

  Many (hell we all know the truth is most) “systems” teach incomplete processes. As has been mentioned again and again, there is nothing new about article marketing in the sense of posting articles to article directories. What IS new with Bum Marketing is that it gives people the what to do with the articles once they are distributed. Most article marketing information tells them about distributing articles, but only vauge reference is made to the actual purpose and usefulness.

  Most often theoretical or transient goals are put forth. A new person to IM can not pay for better tools or hosting or a night out with the family with a higher PR. Higher PR is great, if you know how to use it and have something in place to use it on.

  Most people talking about their great success with Bum Marketing had nothing already in place to make their article marketing valuable. Now they do.

  If you really don’t understand the appeal, read that again. That is powerful.

• It is simple.

  Very basic, very simple do this, do this, do that, repeat this, watch for this and then do this. If you don’t see the value in that… well…

• It is easy.

  For someone willing to discipline themselves to the task, it is easy. This is different from simple. The principles involved in firing a mortar are easy, but may not be simple. The process of loading a mortar is simple, but may not be easy. The practice of consitantly nailing the target with a mortar is both simple and easy to the person who mastered the previous skills.

• It has a low entry threshold.

  People can literally start earning some money starting with nothing. They can leverage that money into tools that allow them to make more money with the same principles.

• It is adaptable.

  Once the basic principles have been learned it is an almost intuitive step to adapt the system to other similar devices, which has as much to do with the explanation of the explosion of really relatively minor works expanding on the system. Note that most of these offerings are by relative unknowns, not the usual suspects for fad driving. They have discovered something that works for them, found an adaptation to it, andrealized they could share that adaptation with their peers and earn a *small* revenue for doing so.

Also Bum Marketing incorporates the fundamentals of something I’ve been playing with for some time that I call deep well marketing. This reverses the common process of placing signposts to your business where people might go, and instead placing your business itself where they already are. It is not explicitly spelled out as such anywhere, but the system depends on this deep well marketing principle.

Yes. Bum Marketing is fundamentally article marketing. But it is more than that.

No. Bum Marketing is not automatically about using lower quality content, though I am sure there are Bum Marketing practisioners who attempt to play it that way, that is not a “feature” of the system itself.

Saying that Bum Marketing is bad because some people doing it use poor quality content is like saying splogs are a feature of blogging. Some Bum Marketers, no doubt need to be banned to the benefit of the article marketing community as a whole, to include other bum marketers.

The system is deceptively simple. But to dismiss it sumarily or curoraly does a diservice to those who would indeed benefit from such a system to start on, or suplement their current plans.

That’s my 8 cents, what’s yours? The comment form is open.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

There are dozens and dozens of sites out there right now where you can buy niche products to sell. There are tons of crappy keyword lists floating around. There are scads of niche PLR offerings. There are dime sales galore.

There are even a couple of ebooks that actually make a passing, off hand, afterthought attempt at explaining where and how to actually research and dig up hot niche markets.

However there has not been a single resource devoted to providing you with a comprehensive, exhaustive niche hunters tool box….

….Until now!

Look, I’m a serious Niche Market Research Junky. Sometimes I research niches I know full well I’m not going to market to. But they seem interesting, and I love the research. Crazy, ain’t it? And until now, you practically had to be like me to dig up and find all of these tools that let you peer into these markets and see what drives them and how to dominate them …. Until now!

But even I am way happy now that this new resource is available. Because I have to tell you my bookmark folder was getting out of hand. It’s a mess. But now I have a special place I just log into and away I go. All these resources are there and waiting for me in nice organized sections. I can spend less time finding the tool i need and more time using it. Awesome, huh?

But enough of this. I’ll let you head over and see what you think yourself.

Find Hot Niche Markets

.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Honestly there’s no hype here about you have to get in quick. No counting down prices, no limited memberships. None of that scarcity stuff. Well, maybe just one little thing. Every month it starts all over and only people who participated that month can benefit from the co-op private label rights content archives for the month.

The site is The Private Label Rights Miracle Content Co-op or PLRMiracle.com for short. The concept is simple. A group of regular business owners, like you and me each contribute articles to a monthly archive, and each contributer receives a PLR license to use all of the content contributed that month.

Membership is completely free, and any month you need some content and choose to participate, you just submit your articles and you’re in. Don’t feel like writing, or don’t need any content one month? No problem. There are no monthly fees to worry about!

Click on over and check out the brand new, best way to get Free Private Label Content right away.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Andy is definately the kind of guy I’d like to get to know better, and I do hope that over time we get to know each other more. We have a lot of similar interests, and I can tell he’s the kind of guy who needs to know both the how and the why of the way things work.

Unlike a lot of others who have that drive to know, Andy also has a drive to apply. He is right now working on a project that he simply won’t tell me a lot about yet, but the hints he’s droped, both in his blog and in an email or two, leave me with that 8 year old at Christmas kind of energetic, barely contained anxiousness. I can’t wait to see what he cooks up.

particularly I’m talking about linking. And not just linking, but intentional linking. Linking with purpose.

Andy turned me on to an eBook I’d not read before on the subject in this post at his blog; Revenge Of The Mininet. It’s an ebook about how to intelligently link your site’s pages together and how to link from site to site as well. The ideas in this ebook, and the update website that comes with it are very very interesting, and I’m going to be implementing some of these ideas as tests on various sites.

Additionally, this post; How a Blogroll can kill your Pagerank, has me ready to just do away with my side bar. I had already enclosed my blogrolls and links inside a condition loop so they only show on the frot page of the blog, but I’m really thinking about going further. Read around, there are several other posts there that address this and similar linking issues as well.

Why is this?

Well, it’s because both of these “systems” were actually just misguided attempts to use already in place and well used promotional tools.

You have to understand that there is nothing magical about pinging. Likewise there are no deep mysteries about blogging or even closely guarded secrets about tagging. Properly using these three things together in a responsible and reasonable way will generate results far beyond the wild ravings of those who sought to exploit them. It just takes a little more consistancy, time and effort than they were willing to invest.

If you have some small measure of farsightedness and are willing to put in the effort you can use these techniques to really create some great results.

It’s simple. Remember simple and easy are not always the same thing. Lifting an object is a simple process, lifting an elephant will likely require some extra help. So how do we go about lifting our elephants without breaking our backs? Simple….

• Step One: Post some targeted, valuable content to your blog.
• Step Two: Add Appropriate, relevant tags.
• Step Three: Ping select, appropriate Ping servers with your update.
• Step Four: Add bookmarks to your post on appropriate bookmarking sites using relevant tags. Relevance and moderation are the watch words here.

That is all there is to the basics of making pinging work for you.

If you are using wordpress for your blogging platform, there are several plugins that allow you to instert tags into your posts. My personal favorite is Ultimate Tag Warrior. But note that you can just use your categories as wordpress (2.o.x) automatically turns category links into tag links, and technorati and other tag engines recognize these tags.

If you plan to use a lot of categories, then this plugin is not strictly neccessary, but if you would like to limit the number of categories for your blog’s posts, and still be able to tag your posts with any variety of keywords, UTW is a great plugin.

You can further enlist the assistance of your readers by providing quick easy links to bookmarking / tagging sites. I use a plugin called Sociable to accomplish that here. It’s a great plugin, highly configurable and easy to install. You can try it out by clicking on any of the icons at the bottom of this post and bookmarking it at these various sites.

As to pinging, You want to ping, but you want to do it the right way. Just willy nilly loading up as many ping URIs as you can find is no good for you or anyone else. It is in our best interest not to over tax these services with unneccessary, irelevant, or duplicated pings.

One thing you can do is ensure that your ping list is clean. By that I mean you do not repeat ping URIs, and do not include URI’s that are also included by ping relays you might use such as pingomatic.com or pingoat.com. A good way to keep on top of this is to refer to the WordPress Compressed All-Inclusive Ping List. This presents you with two good clean lists, one using pingomatic.com, and the other pinging all services directly from your WordPress blog.

Another great idea is to use your own ping server software. This software will allow you to host your own private pingomatic like service. This way you don’t have to load all those ping services into wordpress. You just ping your relay, and let it notify all of the services for you.

Hands down the best ping server software you can get is Rocket Pinger. Not only can you store your ping services in this program, and assign them to your blogs, but you can choose to have your blog notify the software just like it would notify pingomatic. Or you can visit your admin panel and manually ping your blog after you post. Or you can even set up a timed ping schedule. This way if you go on vacation and load up a few days or weeks worth of posts, Rocket Pinger will dutifully ping each post for you without your intervention or presence. Very Nice Software! Check out Rocket Pinger Here.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Who want’s that?!?!?

Well, I’ve developed an alternative version that lets you keep all of those precious contextual links for your self. I’ve decided to do something a little different this time around though. I posted the full, complete, unedited and uncensored step by step, blow by blow how to process at the Hot To Forum. Hyper FREE… (Look, Ma, No One Elses Ads On My Site!). So click that link, head on over and check it out. I welcome your thoughts, comments, sugestions and questions both here in the comments and there in the forum.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef