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11 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Okay, so we know we need backlinks and we need to be commenting on other blogs. We know it is not all about the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN anymore… by the way who the heck searches with MSN anyway… seriously?

Whoaaa… Hold on Cow, what do you mean it is not about the search engines anymore?

Good, we had hoped you would ask that question.

Take a look at the social communities from Alexa’s top 500 sites (yes, we know that Alexa stats are debatable but they still give you an idea). There are sites such as: Facebook, YouTube, Friendster, Flicker, hi5, Myspace and more… just to name a few. These sites are all getting traffic that is very comparable to Google and the wonderful thing is these sites are begging you to give them content. The other thing is there are hundreds of these type sites being added daily and many of them get stampedes of traffic very quickly.

You see, we can spend hours of our days, banging our horns against our keyboards, or in some cases throwing them across the room to do everything we can to keep that traffic coming into our sites but the fact (or at least we think it is a fact) is that we are at times our own worse enemy when it comes to this. We read something or hear that something works and so we do it, but the problem is…

That Is ALL We Do!

We get excited and see that it works and so we stick to that only and do the the same thing over and over again… and at first it works but then it plateau’s and eventually starts to droop like a saggy utter.

Think about any new traffic tool that comes out. People will often slam them right out of the gate, saying…

“we are NOT using that, we are sticking to what we know works”

…but the problem is they are not seeing the big picture. These tools are never intended to be the end all be all of traffic and neither should any one source be the end all be all of your traffic. If it is, then you run a huge risk that if they change something, it could destroy your existence on the web. We should all be constantly looking for different ways to increase our grazing areas. When these new tools come out, test them out, see how they fit into your business. If they work, then use them, if not then drop them.

This is true for relying on any one source of traffic such as Google, Stumbleupon or any other one site. The trick is that you need to be as diversified as possible and always look for new opportunities. Yes of course you want to provide excellent content and reasons for your readers to return but what about grabbing new readers? Are you constantly looking out for new opportunities of places to get more readers… more traffic… more mooney?

Do You Like Sloppy Seconds?

Over here we are not totally keen on the idea of getting sloppy seconds. And waiting until everyone is using or recommending something is just like that. You get in after the spammers have ruined it for you. The fantastic thing is there are 1000’s of these type sites popping up all the time. Some of them are new and some have been around a while but the spammers have not exploited them yet.

A great example of a site we started using not too long ago is feedbite.com (hence the title of this post). Now we are not telling you this site sends a flood of traffic, but it does send some, and the effort to set it up was literally minutes, so the return on time investment is worth it. Now by sharing this site, it will probably start to get abused… but who cares, we will find others to use.

What we really like about this site is that it uses your rss feed and so once you set it up, you are done. It is not like Stumbleupon and Digg, were you have to have the content submitted each time manually, of course it does not get the traffic those send either.

The links do not have a nofollow tag.. which is a bonus and people can vote up or down you content so it gets on the front page. Google Also seems to respond good to it.

So breaking it down, feedbite.com may not roll in the traffic like crazy, but it does bring in traffic and any extra traffic is great… especially when it is so easy so easy to set up.

Now back up for a second. Our point here is not to promote feedbite, this is not a paid review or anything like that. Instead it is simply a process for you to consider implementing, a process that expands your pastures and also grows your backlinks to your blog. Lets call it the…

Cow Traffic Diversification Process

…and it goes like this…

• Once a week go to http://www.go2web20.net/ and look at the tags “Bookmarking”, “Blogging”, and “RSS” (need to do that separately)
• Check out some of the new “Web 2.0″ sites and look for ones that you can post public accessible content on.
• Submit your rss feed (if allowed), content, pictures, videos or whatever else they allow BUT (and a big one at that) make sure that if you are adding content such as a post, that you add a link back to your blog with a call to action (read the post “Using Content to get Traffic” for more on that).
• Check your stats in a week…. Look to see if that site sent traffic to your site. If it sends traffic, keep it and expand your use of it… if it doesn’t then drop it and move on.

This is powerful because it helps expand your reach and the side benefit is Google loves the variety in backlinks to your blog. You also do not have to update the content here regularly like your own blog…. Unless of course you see loads of traffic from it then you will want to take advantage of that (we would anyway).

Go try it out and let us know how it goes.

13 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Great! All the technical stuff is done and you can now start filling up your blog with content. We suggest that you at least have 10-20 posts before you even start thinking about telling people about your blog. A blog with no or little content will get nobody excited but yourself. If your blog at least looks the part, visitors will get the idea that they are dealing with an established blogger, someone that could teach them a thing or two, so they’ll be back.

You don’t want to be perceived as the new kid on the block because readers just can’t be bothered with yet another new blogger. Appearance is everything!

Speaking of appearance, make sure that you double check the facts for each and every post before you publish. You don’t want to get caught with your pants down, when it turns out that something you’ve been telling your readers isn’t true. Don’t think people will bother visiting again when they find out you’ve got no idea what you’re blogging about. After the facts, make use of your spelling checker. Nothing turns a reader off more than bad grammar. (Luckily for us, English isn’t our first language, so we can get away with the odd mistake here and there).

With sufficient content in place, you can now start looking for visitors. Networking with peers in your niche is key here. Seek out established bloggers and make sure you start leaving interesting comments on their posts. We say interesting; because that is the only way you will spark their reader’s curiosity. If they feel your comment was a good addition to the whole discussion about the topic, they will hit up your blog to see what else you’ve got to say. Just be genuine with your comments and do not become a comment spam whore, as most readers will be on to you in a second and never visit your blog, EVER.

Remember – “if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain”.

There are tons of ways to get your name out in the blogosphere. Sign up with blog communities like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and Entrecard. In time these sites will help with your name recognition and branding. Do not expect a lot of visitors from them straight away, but it is important that you become a familiar face. Make sure you use only one avatar and stick with that all over the place. Preferably something in your blog’s colors. If you have a mascot like us, use it!

Another powerful tool us bloggers have at our disposal are the social networks that are all around us. If you use the right approach, these can give you tons of visitors from outside the somewhat restricted blogosphere. Here you will find all sorts of Internet users, not only savvy webmasters and bloggers. Why is this good? Because they have probably not heard of whatever affiliate scheme you’re promoting, and they might actually sign up, unlike your peers! Yes, you need to find and target the right crowd if you want to make money online.

Be sure to use the big social media sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com and Del.icio.us with care. Do NOT go around submitting your every post. You’ll be banned before you can say moo, cutting yourself off from a great deal of potential exposure in the future. Preferably, don’t even submit a single one of your own posts, just make sure your readers have a quick option to submit it for you. Use a social plugin for your wordpress blog, perhaps something a little visual, to remind them that they can share whatever post they think is worth sharing. If it’s worthy of sharing, it will be shared. Oh, and don’t forget to ask your online friends for favors, just make sure you don’t start spamming them with requests!

So now you’re commenting on all the right blogs (popular blogs in your niche), you’ve signed up with the blog communities and you’re getting a bit of traffic coming in from social media sites. Well done, on to the next step – contests.

A contest is a great way to get others to write about you. As you are in charge of the entry rules, so you can have other bloggers write about your contest! (e.g to win this fantastic prize XYZ, all you have to do is write a little post on your blog about this contest.) Needless to say; The bigger the prize, the more participants and the more exposure you’ll get. Besides the linkbacks in their post, you could ask them to link back to you with a specific anchor text to increase your SERPS for that keyword. (Careful with this one, Google frowns upon these kind of link building tactics.) Try to find a sponsor - a company that has a lot in common with your blog’s niche. You’ll always have NO if you don’t ask!

Checklist:

• Make sure you have plenty of content for new readers before you start your self-promotion. No content equals not interesting equals not coming back.
• Quality control. Enough said.
• Network with your peers. Comment on the right blogs. Get your name on the blog networks. Use social media with care.
• Organize a contest, preferably sponsored by a company in your niche. (Companies have the money to put up a big prize, and big prizes attract big crowds!)

26 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Knowing what you want before you dive in is extremely important, otherwise you will end up getting sidetracked, wasting precious time and energy on things that won’t make you any money, but instead bring you frustration and disappointment. Nobody ever said it was easy to make money online. Well, we think someone should have, because it is!

The thing you’ll need though is a solid game plan, to tackle any challenges, which will undoubtedly cross your path to .COM riches at some stage. Prepare yourself for what’s coming. Channeling your efforts into one subject at a time is 100x more productive than going at it like a loose cannonball.

The problem with trying to do everything at the same time is that you’re more likely to encounter multiple issues at the same time. The best way to become a unmotivated blogger is to stack up a nice pile of problems for yourself. And it’s easier to quit than to keep pushing isn’t it?

Unfortunately, quitters don’t make money online.

There’s no rush into setting up your blogging operation. Make sure you over think every step before you take it. If you’ve done your homework, and you have created a solid ground for your blog, the only way is up. If you rush through things without thinking, you will probably run into issues sooner or later.

Just imagine:

You’ve picked the cheapest web host plan you could find, only to be unpleasantly surprised at a later stage that there are tons of limitations to their service. Bandwidth restrictions, shared CPU time, insufficient memory. All these things equal downtime, pissed off readers and loss of income.

• You could have gotten a bigger or scalable plan with the right host, but now you’re looking to transfer your blog somewhere else. Most likely facing database problems, DNS issues and ofcourse, more downtime.

  We use a dedicated server from our sponsor, Top hosting Center. Obviously this is overkill if you only have one blog, but they do great blogger hosting plans too.

You’ve downloaded the latest version of WordPress, start blogging away without optimizing the CMS (Content Management System) first. Months down the road, you find out that Google doesn’t like your site, and organic growth isn’t going as fast as you’d like to.

• You will now have to dive in and start fixing things. Unfortunately it’ll be too late for all your previous posts with the SEO unfriendly permalinks. http://example.com/?p=N just doesn’t work as well as http://example.com/best-post-ever in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

Google updated its infamous pagerank, and despite your entire link building strategy, you only got a mediocre PR3 (like us). Would you have gotten a PR5 or higher, you’d be laughing to the bank because your advertising spots would have been worth at least twice as much as they are now.

• Since you didn’t bother with the WWW or no WWW preset, Google now thinks you have two separate blogs. You’ll find that the backlinks are divided between your http://www.blog.com and your http:// blog.com.

  Oops! Fortunately there’s a great WordPress plugin that takes care of that issue. Also make sure you have the right settings in your WordPress > Options > General section. Stick with either WWW or no WWW, so Google knows it has to put all the pagerank it for you has towards your one blog.

Get your own domain name! This is extremely important for any blogger that wants to build a reputable brand name online for themselves. Anyone can setup a free blog at Blogspot or WordPress.com, but again, these free options come with a lot of restrictions. Besides that, people tend to think that personalized domains are more authoritative than the free variations.

A .COM domain is the number one choice, followed by .NET and .ORG as second and third option. Stay away from exotic sounding TLDs (Top Level Domains) like .WS etc. Our sponsor is offering free domain names for everyone that signs up for one of their $6,75 hosting plans. (That’s cheaper than just the name at GoDaddy!)

Checklist:

1) Make sure you’ve got the right hosting plan, keeping your blog’s future growth in mind. A good start is half the job done!

2) Before even writing and publishing that first post, get your wordpress configuration SEO friendly. You’ll thank yourself for doing this a few months down the road when you see the amount of organic traffic (free traffic coming from your SERPs) ever increasing.

3) Set your online identity with your personalized domain name so people will recognize your blog the next time they stumble across it. If it looks familiar, chances are they’ll stick around to read it again.

22 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Do you get caught in the “OCD Loop?”

Do you sit there and hit the send and receive for your email inbox repeatedly, anxiously waiting and looking for “something”… not sure what but “something”? Do you log into your ClickBank or AdSense account 25 times a day, in hopes that something magical has happened? Do you find yourself automatically going to a website, even though you were just there 5 minutes ago and nothing possibly could have changed yet? Do you stop what you are doing everytime the phone rings, even though we know it will take us 20 minutes just to get back into the grove of where we just were… destroying all our momentum.

It is like watching TV (not sure if this is mainly a guy thing here) and constantly flicking to the next channel… we are not sure why we do this, perhaps something is telling us that the most amazing show in the world is on and we are missing it. Regardless of why, the fact is we do and the end result is by the time we shut the TV off, we have not really watched anything.

The same is true for growing your business. You are constantly doing things but at the end of the day nothing is done.

You see the OCD Loop involves a phenomenon among many in the “MMO” field where they exhibit a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in the way that they are obsessive about following a specific sequence of actions repeatedly throughout the day, even if they make no sense. If you were paying a person by the hour and saw them doing those activities, you would fire them… or re educate them anyway.

If you’re really honest with yourself, you need to ask yourself how often you actually allow yourself to fall into this OCD Loop, and fail to stay focused on doing the things that bring money into your business. Pinpoint your tendency for falling into this trap, and start thinking of ways to snap out of it when you feel yourself getting sucked into this loop, because it can waste a lot of your time.

STOP THE MADNESS

If at the end of the day you feel exhausted, stressed out and anxious because you know you were busy but are not sure what you have to show for it…. then maybe it is time to do things different.

How… Tell me please.. How?

Well, if there is one thing we have learned is there is no perfect answer for everyone. What works for us might not work for you but what we do recommend you try however, is to ask yourself these two questions…

1. Is what we are doing right now making us or going to make us significant money for our business?

2. If we were paying someone to do what we are doing right now, would we feel good that the money is being well spent?

These two questions might not do it for you, but we hope you see our point here. Busy work does not mean quality work. Focus on your ROI (Return on Investment) and treat your business like a business.

13 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post