Savvy Affiliate

Several of my Pages have been hit with comments or trackbacks from blogs that I haven’t seen before.  Several of them are startups, a few are more mature and I just hadn’t heard of them.   So if you are looking for any new sites to browse, there are a couple gems in this list you might want to check out.

• DerekBeau - This is a site with some good information on affiliate marketing and how to make your blog profitable.   Well designed site, has a nice feel to it
• My New Hustle - A very new site, focuses on some tricks to make money on the internet.  Some of the tricks seem a little sneakier than things I would think of
• Blog That Outside - Because You know you can’t blog that in the house.    A new blog, but a relatively prolific blogger.  Has some good articles up.
• Kristofers Blog - They say “The Ravings, rantings and lunaticle stylings of a webmaster -slash- journalist. ”    I say that’s about right

P.S. They are all running top commentator plugin with relatively few comments on the list.   So easy links if you want to go there and leave a few comments.

 You know who else has relatively few comments in their top commentator plugin?   Savvy Affiliate.

Right now 2 comments will put you on the list.  How can you pass that up?  

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Day 46 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

As your blog grows you will likely find more and more demands on your time.  You may want to start a new blog.  You may want to spend more time working on monetizing your site and generating traffic, and less on generating content.   However it is content that makes the blogging world tick.  If you stop putting up quality posts to your site people will stop coming.

What’s the Solution?

One easy solution to continuing to put up quality content and saving yourself time is to get a guest blogger to help contribute articles to your site.   Guest bloggers will work for either money or traffic, so if you have either one that you are willing to share, you can get some quality articles for your site.

What are some tips on publishing Contributing Authors

1. Verify that it not duplicate content - For the first couple of posts that you publish from a specific person, run a check on a couple of key phrases to make sure it isn’t already published elsewhere on the internet.  You don’t want to screw yourself by putting up some duplicate content.
2. Give it a proof read - You may be surprised how little editing goes into blogs.  And anything that goes up on your blog reflects on you.   Many times I have seen guest posts no blogs and read the comments.  The commentators often have no idea that it was a guest posts, and just attribute it to the main site author.
3. Give Credit - You want to continue to get articles from your contributing articles.  So make sure that you give credit where credit is due.   Give them a prominent link so make sure they get some traffic to their blog.  This will make them more inclined to give you more content in the future.

So How Can you get guest bloggers?

Getting guest bloggers isn’t easy.  You have to be able to offer something to the people writing for your site.  However here are some tips to make it easier.

1. PR is important - People judge a site by its Page Rank.  If people are looking at contributing to your site they will most likely evaluate whether or not they will get any search engine rankings out of it.  If they won’t then they won’t contribute.  So if you are having trouble getting contributing authors, wait till the next PR update and you might fair better.
2. Guest Blogger - Guest blogger is a site where blogs can ask for guest bloggers, and people who are looking to contribute posts can find blogs to post on.   How well it works as a marketplace is still up in the air, so if you use it be sure to let me know
3. Ask For Guest Posts - If you want guest posts, make sure that you have a link on your site letting people know.  Direct them to a page where you ask for guest posts, and inform them how they contribute.  Be sure to let them know if you will take control of they content or whether or not they will retain ownership.    After all, your site may not seem that big to you, but a newbie may be looking to guest post anywhere to get some links.  Be sure to give them the option.

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Day 45 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

How Can She Drive Traffic To Your Site?

This girl can help you drive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site from Social networking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. It all stems from participating in those sites, and building up your friendships

The Best way to drive traffic with Stumbleupon is to actively participate.

You can not effectively game the social networking sites. If all you do is promote your own site your influence will quickly diminish. The top social networking sites have algorithms set up to catch exactly that. If you don’t actively participate, and promote other sites than your own, you will eventually have no influence over other Stumblers, and no influence in sending a page to the Digg frontpage.

To get traffic to your own site from Digg or Stumble, you have to have influence. You have to have friends

So if you have to dive in and participate, what should you use?

If you are going to take the time to actively participate in either Digg or Stumbleupon you probably won’t be able to do both. So which one should you use? I have recommended Stumbleupon in the past, it is much better than Digg. Recently Problogger has come to the same conclusion, Stumbleupon is better at driving traffic than Digg.

So once you start using Stumbleupon, what is your goal?

One of the main ways you gain influence in stumbleupon is by having people befriend you. If they befriend you, they will be sent the pages that you stumble. Blog-op recently posted a great article on how to build stumbleupon friends. And he was right on almost everything. You build friends over time. You need to recommend pages and interact with the community and build up a network.

But there is one more essential thing you can do to build friends. Be Hot.

Lets be honest. It is a simple fact that a lot of people will interact with a girl just because she has a hot profile picture. Many of the highest followed Stumblers on Stumbleupon are attractive girls. And that is no accident. All other things being equal, who would you be more likely to add as a friend

I don’t think it is much of a stretch to think that more people would add the picture on the left as their friend. I know I sure would.

So you aren’t a hot girl, don’t have too many hot female friends, what can you do? Well that is where Stock xchange comes into play. You can go there to download free images to use.

So is all this immoral?

Perhaps. This may not be the most ethical way of driving traffic. I won’t argue that. I think it can be an effective way though. As an experiment, why don’t you open a new Stumbleupon account and try your usual methods of getting some friends. If you have a hot picture up right now, put up an ugly picture. If you have an ugly picture, put up a hot one. Spend 5 days working each account, and see how many new friends you acquire.

I would be interested in hearing the results.

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Day 44 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

One problem I have continually had with my site is poor design.  Although I’m good at writing content, getting links, and driving traffic, site design is a huge weakness for me.  However good site design is essential.   With poor site design people will look at your site and leave immediately.  Your bounce rates will be huge.

Where can you get good themes?

While having a good theme is essential for your site, actually designing a theme can be very challenging.    There is a lot to learn before you can design a good theme.   You have to learn PHP, HTML, CSS etc.    And many people started blogging to get away from having to run those aspects of your website.    So if you don’t want to make your own theme, where can you get one?

1) Wordpress Theme Viewer - This is the default wordpress theme database.  There are thousands of themes in here and many of them have been well designed and validated.   This is a good first resource.  Check it out and you could very well find something that is almost exactly what you are looking for.

2) Wordpress Theme Generator - Want to create your own theme?  You can use this tool to configure different themes.  Quickly and easily vary the colors to see what looks good.  Change the spacings, where the sidebar is located to suit your needs.

3) Free Wordpress Themes - One of the myriad of sites you can get if you Google “Wordpress Themes”, this has a nice repository of different themes that you can check out.

But they don’t exactly fit my needs

Chances are, any theme you download isn’t going to be perfect.  There is going to be something in it that you want to change.   You may not like the colors, you may not like the spacing, or you may just want to put in a couple of different pictures.   However starting from a free base theme and modifying it to suit your needs will be an order of magnitude easier than trying to create one yourself.   The easiest thing to do is pick one that suits your needs format wise, and not worry about color.  Changing the color of your site is much less difficult than changing the format.   Get the format right first, then worry about the color.

I want my Page to Look Like That Site

Stealing someone else’s theme is as bad as stealing their content.  But if you are just looking at a single aspect, like how did they get their picture to go to the right of the menu bar, you can dig into their code to see what they did.

The easiest way to dig into their code is to just download their page and examine it in a text editor or webpage creation tool.   Internet explorer and Firefox allow you to easily download a webpage to your desktop.   Presumably the other major browser do as well, but I don’t use them so I don’t know.

To download a page to your computer using IE 7  (IE 6 is very similar) Go to page, save as, and saves as a “Webpage Complete”   This will allow you to view the CSS and HTML separately, as they will be in your site.

To save a page in Firefox go to File - Save Page As

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Day 43 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

In my previous posts on Google webmaster tools I have covered How to diagnose problems with your site, and how to find out who is linking to you.   This post will cover several other tools available to you in Google’s Toolbox.

Check Your Page Rank

Although there are many tools available to let you look at the page rank of a specific page, I think that the one available on Google is very good at letting you take a macro look at your entire page.   It gives a break down of how many of your pages are ranking high, medium, low, and how many haven’t been ranked at all.

Currently all the pages on Savvy Affiliate are ranking low.   Given that this is a new site it isn’t entirely surprising.   It is nice to see that most of the pages have been indexed and assigned a page rank though.   Additionally it is handy to see the page with the highest page rank.  I’m surprised it isn’t my main site, but that will sure to correct itself with time.

Site maps

You can access your sitemaps in Google webmaster tools.   If you have a sitemap for your page, use the webmaster tools to point Google at it.  This will ensure that Google indexes all of your pages, and does so fairly quickly after they are first posted.   Google checks the sitemap on a daily basis, which is more frequently than many new sites would be checked on their own.

 Search Queries

Finally you can use Google webmaster tools to see how most searchers are finding your site, and where you rank for that query. 

Unfortunately Savvy Affiliate isn’t currently ranking well for any really desirable keywords.  Most of the search traffic I am receiving is from my long tail search terms.   However this give me some direction of keywords I might want to target in the future.   Am I getting some hits for “Monetize Your Persona?”  and I rank number 4 for the topic?   Perhaps I should do a post on the subject and try to move up to number 1.

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I recently added the Top Commentator Plugin to my Blog.   It is an exciting plugin.  I think that it will help encourage comments on my site, and reward the top commentators with links that count in Google.  I know that the Top Commentator plugin on other people’s blogs has encouraged me to leave more comments to try and get on the list.   However sometimes it can be difficult to find blogs using the plugin.     As such I have started to compile a list of all blogs using the Top Commentator plugin, or a clone.

Rules

1) Blog must have top commentators on the Sidebar, at the bottom, top, or anywhere else that is on the majority of pages.  If you just have top commentators on a single page in your blog you don’t qualify for this list

2) Links in the plugin can not contain the rel=”nofollow” tag, they must be search enabled

3) Submit your blog by leaving a comment or sending me an e-mail and I’ll add it to the list

4) New additions go on top for easy reference, after a while they will be put alphabetically

5) If you find a site on here which is not using the plugin, or has turned on rel=”nofollow”, let me know and I’ll remove it from the list

6) If you like this, you may also want to check out Forums That Follow List

If you like this list, please give it a link and let others know.

Top Commentator Blogs

• Blogging Tips

• Blog That Outside

• Blog-Op

• Derek Beau

• Derek Semmler

• Eugenio

• Foot Prints On The Moon

• My New Hustle

• Reality Wired

• Rich Minx

• Savvy Affiliate

• Self Made Minds

• Untwisted Vortex

• Vi-Su

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I’ve been poor on my bloglines reading recently, and have been struggling to dig my way through upwards of 1400 posts.   Here are 10 Gems that I found while working my way through all those posts

• Lorelle on Wordpress writes on Some tips to limit duplicate content - She states that Google more or less expects a blog to have duplicate content.  After all, that is how they are designed, but you can still take measures to limit the duplicate as much as possible
• Problogger writes about How To Capture Seasonal Traffic For Your Blog - A surprising amount of traffic that flows across the web is seasonal.  It occurs at the same time every year.  If you are in a niche which is somewhat seasonal, you can use this knowledge to both capture new traffic, and recycle your best posts for added exposure.
• Jon at Art of Money spoke on 7 Ways Google Can Ruin Your Life - How much trust do you have in Google.   Sure they say “Do no evil”, but they sure have the ability to do that if they wanted to.  They could do everything from deleting your accounts to ruining your chances at landing a job
• Rich Minx has a list of 30 Blogging Resources For New Bloggers - Some nice sites that you will mostly be familiar with if you have blogged for a while, but that you may not of heard of if you are new at this game.   I found several that I hadn’t seen before and am glad I checked it out
• Chris at Blog-Op has an article on How To Mothball Your Blog - You have put a lot of time and a lot of work into your blog.  You may not want to work on your site right now, but who knows about in the future?  So take the time to mothball your blog correctly, and make sure you come back to it.
• Lorell on Wordpress writes on Blogging with Firefox’s Split Browser Extension.   Since I don’t have two monitors on my home computer, I have been meaning to try out the split browser extension.  I think that it will greatly reduce the time I spend clicking back and forth while writing posts.  Lorelle has inspired me to download the extension sooner than I otherwise would have.
• Daniel At Daily Blog Tips writes on How To Find Advertisers For Your Site - Finding direct advertisers for your site can be the Holy Grail of advertising.  However there is an art to doing it.   Daniel has gotten a couple in the 7 months he has been in business, so find out his tricks
• Jon at Art of Money tells 7 Blogging Tips You Can Learn From The Beatles - What on Earth can you learn about blogging from a band that is almost half a century old? Well Jon thinks that you can learn to blog for yourself first, that you can learn to strive for continual improvement, and value integrity above all else, among others. 
• Scott at Self Made Minds writes about How To Scout Out Domain Names Valuable In The Future - He has a couple of great ideas that I had never of thought of.  I will definitely have to consider some domainineering
• Problogger writes on Using A Point System To Track Progress - Like many of you I have a full time job.  Darren’s tips on keeping track of your blog progress by assigning points to different activities and making sure that you hit a certain number of points every day is a great idea for me.  It will help me keep track of what I should be spending my time on.

Well that’s all for now.  But don’t worry, I still have 1003 posts left in my bloglines que, so another Blogging driveby will be on its way soon enough.

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Day 42 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Google webmaster tools are an amazing tool for anyone who is building a website.   In Part 1 of Google Webmaster Tools I wrote about how you can use the tools to find bugs in your site.  This post will be about how you can use the tools to find out who is linking to you, what pages they are linking to, and what anchor text they are using in their links.

What is being linked to?

One of the nicest features about Google Webmaster tools is its ability to to list all of the pages in your site which have external links pointed about them   This list is much more robust than the list you would get if you used Link:www.yoursite.com.   Google filters the results if you use Link:    By using webmaster tools you get the full result list, and it is much more impressive

The next step, if I want to see who is linking to a particular page, is to drill down on that page and see all the incoming link

My page on “Value of a Blog Post” got 18 incoming links.   It seems like those 18 links are from about 4-5 different sites.   Which isn’t too bad for one of my posts.  Clearly I should try to do more like that.

Finally you can look in Statistics, Page Analysis, to see what the most common anchor text linking to you is. 

Not surprisingly, my most common anchor text is “Scott”, my name, “Savvy Affiliate”, the site title, and “Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use”, which was a post I wrote for a Problogger group writing project.     Since I’m not currently targeting any keywords I can’t say whether or not any of my keywords are on here, but you can use these tools to check how well your key word targets are progressing.

Tomorrow I will show some of the statistics that are available through Google webmaster tools.

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I have been kind of Blah about blogging recently.  Not exactly burnt out, but not as gung ho as I was when I first started out.     But a couple of things have made me get more excited about blogging and ready to get back in the game

1) Make Some Money - Although it probably counts for very little to many bloggers, I recently go some clicks on a few of my Adsense ads netting a few dollars.   Does a few dollars matter?  Not really.   But any income is nice to have and making a little bit of money can go a long way to raising my spirits

2) Read my Feed Backlog - I am about 3 weeks overdue on most of my feeds.  Those were the same 3 weeks that I was feeling blah about blogging.  And you know what?  After getting back into my feeds and reading some of my favorite blogs I am starting to get more excited again.   Are you feeling blah?   Go back to why you started in the first place

3) Get Some Traffic - I have had a couple of traffic spikes over the past couple of days.    Thank you stumbleupon.   Getting some traffic and responding to comments really invigorates you.  It helps me blog when I know someone is reading it and benefiting.

 This post was written for Daily Blog Tips “3″ Group writing project.    While I don’t think it will net me the prize money, how bout some links?

Have you ever hit a blogging slump?  What got you out of it?

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