CONTEST: Win a Free Apple iMac, Nintendo Wii or iPod Nano

Okay there’s an extremely valuable lesson to be learned over at Jeff Johnson’s blog UndergroundConfessions.com.

Yes, you could post some comments on his blog and yes you could win one of those three cool prizes, however you need to look past all of that and find the value through observation.

Let me ask you first, do you have a blog? If not, why not?

They are so simple to setup and with a little time and energy you can start the flow of traffic almost immediately. Not to mention how well they rank in the search engines because of the simple nature of the way they are structured to provide new updated information on all kinds of hot topics. (more…)

Don’t walk… Hurry Up and Rush to BlogRushh.com

So you’ve heard about Web2.0… SO WHAT!

What’s the big deal, what does it really mean?

The best interpretation of Web2.0 I’ve heard and I’ll paraphrase it, “Web 2.0 revolves around the social aspects of the web, where web sites, services and companies are creating entire networks of user driven content“.

Take YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr for example, great ideas, great web tools, but if you were to take the users and their content out of the system you would be left with an empty skeleton of a web site.

What is BlogRushh? (and no that’s not a typo)

Oh wait, you mean you haven’t heard of it yet?

It’s soon to be one of the Top Blog 2.0 tools available online…
And let me give you a quick tip, drop whatever you’re doing RIGHT NOW… and go get an account because in 3 months from now when the rest of the blogosphere (and the Internet) has adopted it to call their own, you’ll be left wondering what happened.

Oh and did I mention that it’s 100% FREE, and it will drive hundreds if not thousands of highly targeted visitors to your blog?

(more…)

Got your own blog?

How does a Rushhhhhh of highly targeted visitors sound?

http://BlogRushh.com

I’ve been blogging for over two years, I’ve setup 13 blogs using everything from Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, WordPress and a few other less recognizable solutions.

I currently run and operate 3 large blogs in various different niche markets (not including this one).

…And folks… history is being made today!

Having spent the better half of this year installing and testing blog widgets (close to 60+ to be more precise), my team and I have found that there are a few invaluable widgets that every blog should have. (I’ll post and update with a few more later)

But with as many cool tools, gadgets and widgets you can install and plug into your blog, I’ve not seen one that even comes close to bringing traffic to your site.

Sure there might be a few that will bring a trickle, and the ideas sounded good, but after testing them, it wasn’t enough to keep using them as they just take up space on your Nav Bar.

Today this changes…

My good friend John Reese has just released the beta for a new service called BlogRushh.

The simplicity and design of this new blog widget (which takes less than 5 minutes to install on your blog) is going to shake up the blogosphere and set a new bench mark for the entire industry.

He’s got an awesome little video clip that explains everything, so go check it out.

http://BlogRushh.com <-- See For Yourself...

income.com - Join the Most Valuable Internet Marketing Community In The World! Best of all… it’s FREE!

John Reese of Income.com posted a recent question on his blog…

View his full post with all 4 questions here…

My reply to his post is as follows:

Hey John,

Looks like things are boiling over on your end with your new income.com pre-launch blog. I love your new sound studio… I’m jealous!

Anyhow I’m not an SEO expert but I’ve been Stompin’ for a while and this is what I would say in response to your questions.

1 - Q: Permalink Post Structure - Is it better to be using a /name-of-the-post/ (directory) structure instead of a /name-of-the-post.html structure?

Answer: From all that I have read I chose to do the full directory url structure with my blog instead of the .html version. I don’t have a hell of a lot to back it up but it’s working fo me.

I have no answer for you on your second and third questions.

4 - Q: PageRank ‘Aiming’ - what is the best no-follow strategy to use with certain links on my blog while ‘aiming’ all that PR on that page to a certain tag or special permalink for a specific post?

Answer: Okay I’ll get geeky and see if you can understand it…

What I would do (and should, if I can find the time to not be so damn lazy on some of my own SEO tricks), is to make every single link off your blog home page into a nofollow tag except the few important keyword rich posts you are trying to get ranked. Then place at least one link that also is a straight up link (don’t use nofollow) and point that at something like a sitemap.

You don’t want to make this page be a typical site map though, sprinkle some content around with RSS or article clippings to make the page look good to spiders. This sitemap should link to every single page on your blog, all posts, etc. so that your entire site gets indexed.

Finally make sure that you point all your internal blog pages at the home page. This way you can channel the PageRank and build up PR equity on your main rool URL. Then you simply pass that around to whatever posts are specifically written for SEO content.

Here is are a few sources for plugins that I use with WordPress.

* UrbanGiraffe
* NetConcepts

Hope this helps,
Segovia Smith

PS. In case you are suffering from the supplemental index problem that many blogs and CMS systems tend to have, check out this quick video by Jason Katzenback of Portalfeeder.com.

As a follow-up from my previous Tag Cloud post I’ve been on the hunt for some scripts or code I could either use or modify to add a tag cloud to this blog and a few of my other sites. Most of the scripts are either overly complicated, too simple without enough features or they cost money.

Being such a big fan of $FREE things, I kept looking. And of course with enough time spent on searching the web you can find almost anything.

I found a great little tool that requires no installation of databases or php scripts. It takes less than 5 minutes to put on your site and it’s very customizable. I was able to change the style sheet to match the blue tones of our site and then simply post few lines of code on my Menu Nav Bar page and viola… we have a Tag Cloud.

If you scroll down the page on the right hand menu below the Search Box and Bookmarklets, you’ll notice it.

You can manage your account from their web interface and create as many clouds as you like.

The service integrates beautifully with your blog you only need to input your main RSS feed and then it pulls down all the blog posts, counts up the words and sorts them into cloud formation.

To create your own Tag Cloud go check out ZoomClouds free service.

The term ‘Crackberry‘, now voted Word of the Year for 2006 by Webster’s New World Dictionary, has been heard throughout schools, office cubicles and even at your local washroom movie theatre.I stumbled across this term as I was looking for word trends, slang and street lingo while doing SEO Keyword research for a new campaign I am working on.

The humorous part is, there seems to be quite a bit of commotion going on around the web and in the media. They’re saying things like “…this wide spread epidemic could foster a new generation of Crack Babies…”.

I did a few quick searches and found the term defined in several online dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, NetLingo, and the Urban Dictionary.

“The etymological source of the nickname is the highly-addictive rock cocaine, called crack, for the first part of the word, combined with the berry from BlackBerry,” writes James Alan miller, a journalist for SmartPhone Today. (more…)

I often find myself just surfing the web and one of my top hot spots for getting great ideas is Michel Fortin’s blog ( www.SuccessDoctor.com ). The way I see it, if you’re going to make money online you’ll notice that it’s very hard to do so without using any words or text.

So the more you learn about copy writing and how to win peoples attention with short to the point headlines, the more money you’ll make.

I found a recent post where Michel is giving away (yes for Free) six hours of world class copywriting in both audio and transcripts format where he interviews Garry Halbert and John Carlton.