Ok, so I have gotten like 30 emails in the last 24hrs asking me if I got slapped like Griz and Ben. Answer: nope. Why?… cuz I only have a handful of Adsense sites and they are legit, big, kick ass blogs with content written by me and updated pretty regular. Sometimes I think people forget that before I ever became an internet marketer, I was a blogger… …like a true blogger who just wrote shiz because he wanted to talk about foot derm, nose hair and other man-scaping issues. I wanted people to know how I make my lawn turn blue in summer and give out tips on laying floor tile in kitchens. I am an expert in many things in my own mind, and on my blogs I convey it. My shiz is, and always has been original and different.
These are big sites, they do fairly well with Adsense.
I do, however, have smaller niche sites, but not for Adsense… I prefer Chitika for smaller sites. I also use some easy affiliate stuff on my small niche sites, mostly stuff from NeverBlue.
I take other measures also that help me to stay “legit” and my next post is about this very thing… in fact, my next post is the very most important thing I have ever talked about here. It has actually been written for about 3 weeks now (sitting in drafts), but I just have not taken time to shoot the vid that illustrates the point. Afterall, this is “Blogger Illustrated” ain’t it?
Jumping Into Social Media
I have also been learning, watching, experimenting with social media marketing. Yeah, hard to believe eh? But there is no denying the usefulness of this medium when it comes to brick and mortar businesses. (not that social media fluff where some dude with a sh*t eating grin runs around giving seminars). I am talking about REAL social interacting from REAL businesses with their clients or potential clients. It’s been quite obvious to me for many years that big business doesn’t get it, but small ones do!.. and that is cool shix IMO!
Couple social media platforms with some bad-ass SEO and you are golden. I’ve always known WHAT social media SHOULD be, but it took Josh and Steve to really hit me with it head on and calm my passionate outbursts LOL.
So that is what and where I am… plus, I still work my corp job and right now I am pulling 13 hour days — No vaseline.
Did you know the world’s largest retailer, Walmart has a blog? Chances are you didn’t and that’s because it has to be the most beautiful example of a great corporate project that has failed miserably… and it is quite sad. The Checkout Blog, as it is named, started somewhere around December 2007 and is currently being severely neglected by a large team of Walmart management types who pose as the “writers.” As of today, there has been one post in all of 2010 and it is nothing more than a boring laundry list of sales links. No passion, no real human feel, nothing. And this on the official blog of a ginormous company with enough resources to conquer any niche anywhere on the web. So what gives? Why does the Walmart blog suck it so badly? Here’s what I think (in brief)…
3 Points About The Walmart Blog
(1) The Walmart blog FAILS! because big companies won’t devote the right resources to social media projects, if they devote any at all. Keep in mind that I work for a very large company and have for the past 12 years. I am a middle manager.
I am also the guy who has been quite outspoken when it comes to bending the ears of all the top execs at every chance I get, urging them to jump head long into social media and blogging. So far, my big mouth has really not made much of a difference because the lawyers have warned the c-level execs about the “dangers of social media.” But one good thing happend recently: the head of sales for our entire company took a pop shot at me at a high level meeting by snidly remarking, “well, if you need to get ahold of Allyn Hane, just go to his blog… har har ha ha…”
My company is stuck in the dark ages, so I applaud Walmart for at least giving it a go, but to be honest, the failure of the Checkout Blog actually speaks volumes more. It shows me that the giant Walmart does not see the value in blogging and web 2.0 style interactions. If they did, they’d hire 4 or 5 people who did nothing more than just blog, full time. But instead, the large team of writers for the Checkout Blog are middle and senior managers who are already very busy and stretched in their other responsibilities –meaning the blogging takes a back seat when things get busy. They also have no direct incentive to make the blog profitable, so they don’t.
Can you imagine the great things that could be done on a Walmart blog that was alive and full of passion and human interaction and cared for by a full time staff of fully invested employees? Let’s talk more about that in the next point ok?
(2) Without a doubt, blogs are the ULTIMATE social media tools for business and personal uses. Any so-called social media professional who does not value blogging for business is a fake and a liar, straight up! In the case of Walmart, their blog was started for the wrong reasons: this is obvious as it has been left to die a terrible death on a well-designed page.
Here Is What WALMART Should Do With Their BLOG
So what could the Walmart blog be? Let me run with it… after all, I am just a blogger myself…
Right now, it is spring time, and the Walmart near my house is loading the parking lot with all kinds of great landscaping supplies, trees, shrubs, flowers, fertilizers, top soil, garden statues and other cool outdoor decor. If Walmart had a full time lawn and garden blogger, that person could hold a small workshop teaching people how to build a beautiful flower pot bouquet with annuals. The entire workshop could be conducted in the local Walmart garden center and could be filmed, edited and posted on the blog. Cool right… and guess how many flower pots you would sell across the country? Probably more than a few, but you wouldn’t come off as pushy of overly marketing! You’d offer value locally at the store, and nationally on the blog… coolio!
Let’s go a step further: what if that lawn and garden Walmart blogger got together a group of Walmart employees and they went to a local nursery school in an economically depressed area and re-landscaped the front of the school using eco-friendly landscaping principles and native plantings that require little water? What if they also set up a compost bin and taught the kids some of the principles and uses behind composting? Video tape it and blog it boys and girls!!!!
How many compost bins could you sell at the local stores? But more than that, what great public relations feelings would this spread about the Walmart brand? How good would those volunteer employees feel about the good they did? How cool would it be for them to be on video or in pictures on the blog that is viewed by hundreds of thousands of people?What if the local TV news picked up the story? What if you tweeted about it? The possibilities are freeeeking endless!!!!!
Are you getting the point here guys? More than that, why is Walmart NOT getting the point?
(3) Big companies dumb down their employees and outsource creativity to people who are not personally invested in the business, thus harming their message and killing the passion dead! (I’m guessing a little here, but I bet many jobs that were performed by actual Walmart employees 20 years ago are now outsourced… not necessarily overseas, but they are outsourced to companies that are not directly related to Walmart) …So when mid-level employees are afforded a chance to be creative, like on the Walmart blog, they have forgotten how to be real, fun and passionate about their subject. They instead are used to following rules and staying inside a safe box of cold corporate guidelines. These Walmart employees are not in creative positions like marketing and design as those functions are now outsourced. They have also forgotten how to interact with humans who also happen to be customers. It’s become all about numbers, counts and profits, not relationships and meaningful interaction.
You guys tell me what you think. I am very interested in your opinions. By the way, this is EXACTLY why I am teaming up with Steve, Josh and Brian on a new project, Echelon Social Media Consulting. It’s about time.
Today I am gonna show you two ways to get links and use a recent post by Darren Rowse to do it. He wrote a really good piece on Optimizing A Single Post For SEO recently on Pro Blogger Blog Tips: Go read it and then come back… oh, and look at that, I even gave him good anchor text in that link, I am such a good dude! BTW– to learn more about good anchor text and what that means, take an hour and explore my video introduction to backlinks.
Darren’s SEO Post
Just to summarize Darren’s excellent (I am serious about that) article, he basically talks about going back to certain older posts (keep in mind that a ‘post’ is actually a ‘page’ that is indexed by engines) and cleaning them up based on the results they are or are not getting. There are on-page factors to consider that will effect the traffic and rankings. In my little world, I call this “content pruning” and it is based on John Chapter 15 of the Bible believe it or not. I will do a full posting on this in the future as it is very important when you want to build and sell a site for $30,000.
Darren also talks about off-page SEO (ie: links) and that is where I will focus today. I will also attempt to add to the foundation he laid so nicely for us. With that in mind, let’s get after it!
First off, I know that I have been talking a lot about links, but have not showed you how to really get them yet, and there is good reason for that. It’s because I want you to take the little bit of time you do have and use it wisely instead of just flailing all over the internet ocean wasting time with crap that doesn’t work. So today, here are three ways you can get links.
The first way we are looking at is taken from this quote in Darren’t article: (he is talking about his competition)
what I found was that in the case of my competition on this one is that the competing site had a lot of forwarded links pointing at it. I’m not sure what was going on with it but it seems that the majority of the links pointing at my competition are from forwarded domains and not actual live pages.
DISCLAIMER: this first way of getting links is NOT something I recommend you do, but I can tell you that it does work. (how’s that for clear as mud?) We can talk all about this first method (using Darren’t article as the launch point) and beat it with comments until the cows come home… but you should be very careful about how you use this knowledge young Jedi!
301 Redirects And Forwarding Juice
Here is the loose definition (for our purposes) of a 301 redirect from Wikipedia:
A web page may be redirected for several reasons:
A web site might need to change its domain name.
An author might move his or her pages to a new domain.
Two web sites might merge.
With URL redirects, incoming links to an outdated URL can be sent to the correct location. These links might be from other sites that have not realized that there is a change or from bookmarks/favorites that users have saved in their browsers.
Now watch the video to see it illustrated (yeah, this is Blogger Illustrated!) in a way we can all understand:
I will tell you that redirected or forwarded link juice is NOT ALWAYS a long term strategy for growth. It is quite temporary in a lot of cases. But if used correctly, it can help your site. In case you are wondering, “yes” I have used 301 redirects in the past with some fairly good success, but I didn’t do it with the “juice” factor in mind. I did it for the traffic factor.
301 Redirects For Traffic First, Juice Second
To make a long story short, I bought a pre-owned URL in a fairly competitive niche. The URL was still indexed, had lots of incoming links, and was getting about 100 visitors per day. I purchased the URL and forwarded it to another site of mine in the same niche so when the traffic came, the people still got what they were looking for and I made money. Eventually, my own site began to rank for all the keywords anyway (because of the forwarded juice!), and the actual 301 forwarded traffic dwindled to nothing. Are you following that? WHAT CODE do you use for a 301 redirect?…Here’s an article on how to do it. I use the php version because it is easiest for me.
Using Your Own Sites For Links
As if all of that above wasn’t long enough, let’s look at another part of Darren’s post that is helpful. It’s the simple mention here:
I don’t tend to do much of this type of SEO as I find my site tends to get a nice number of links pretty naturally from other sites but I know those who are more into SEO will work hard on some of the following:
analysing where the competition is getting their links and looking for opportunities to get links there too – for example if a link is coming to your competitor from a forum discussion or blog comment you might also have an opportunity to leave a quality comment there with your own link.
links from other blogs you own (particularly one on a relevant topic) link to your page from it
internal links – this is something I do do – basically its about interlinking your posts. While internal links don’t count as much as an external link they can help a little.
pitching links to other blogs – if you have a relationship with other blogs in your niche try pitching a link of the page that you’re optimizing to those bloggers.
sharing links in social media – most social media sites like Twitter and Facebook put no-follow tags on links so they don’t count directly for SEO but I find that an occasional push of an older post on social media sites can lead to indirect links from other bloggers. I also suspect that search engines are paying more attention to what links are being shared in social media sites so getting your links into them (without spamming) could be useful if you have a network of people who will pass them onto their own networks.
Note: the generation of links can be a fairly ‘black hat’ game at times. It can also be pretty addictive and become an obsession. I personally would prefer to spend my time producing quality content than spending my days asking for links. Do be a little careful with link building – not only can it be a time suck but if you engage in tactics that Google sees as against their Terms of Service (buying links for example) you could also be jeopardizing your sites ranking in their index.
The portion up there in RED is what we are going to focus on today, but I do think it is funny how Darren makes sure to uphold his “baby jesus of blogging” image by saying he’d rather produce good content than build links. ROFL! I dunno about you, but I am able to produce KILLER content AND build links (not buy links, build links… distinct difference) without wasting lots of time. I am not obsessed… I am just a realist and my name is not well known; so for me to get “natural links” in the ‘cordless drill niche’ is like trying to squeeze blood from a dead dried turnip! ROFL
You go Darren, we love that polished image brother! seriously man, good for you… I think you sell yourself short and you are very capable of producing top content and building links… but for the rest of us…
This is very important guys, and it really does make a big difference in your sites’ rankings. Once again, don’t be stupid with this technique. If you are going to build a “support” site for your money niche site, make sure to include superb, well written content on both the support site and the money niche site. Don’t be an idiot! You will NEVER hear me telling you to put out crap on the web, NEVER! If you put something out there, make it good, period! Look above, even Darren says it’s “ok” to get a link or two this way… but he warns you to be careful with it. If it’s good enough for baby jesus blogger, it is good enough for me!
This means that your cordless drill site could get a supporting link from another site of yours that is about electric drills. See how that works? Once again, go see my videos on backlinks if you are unclear of HOW to point the link.
By the way, if you watch the heavy bloggers in the world (not the MMO ones) you will see that this is exactly what they do but not so over-simplified as presented here. What they do is take their mega-giant computer site, for example, and use the power and popularity (mostly the link juice) of that site to jumpstart another site that may be about Mac Hacks or IPhone or something like that. Get it? That only seems like a natural thing to do, which leads us to…
The Plus One More (that’s funny!)
The Family Of Brands Concept
Real quick, have you ever looked at a page like this: That’s a “family of brands” and the page links (do-follow BTW) to each of the individual brands. This is kind of like a reverse way of looking at “linking out.” The actual page you see there does not make any money directly, but the pages it links out to do make money… follow that?
Even Darren has “family of brands” type links on his B5Media site. See it here. That page is a PR5 boys and girls! Nice juice flowing there eh?
So many times we internet marketers think that we should be sending 1,000 links at a site. But what if you have one big site, like a home base or brand home, that sends links out to your individual brands? Just an idea. Not saying I would do this, but it’s just to get you thinking a little bit ya know? You guys gotta think for yourselves sometimes in this game and test test test! Some of you are too worried about leaving “footprints” all the time, and I get that… but I am of the belief that my content is so stinking good, that it doesn’t really matter about footprints because I am genuinely helping people! (ack!) You also need to spread out the kinds and types of links that you get (link variation) and we’ll talk about that here in the near future as well.
Again, if you don’t like this idea, then don’t use it.
almost last thing: YES, I am gonna show you a very easy way to get a PR4 or PR5 sites that you could use to your advantage using one or more of the tactics above. Stay tuned, it’s all free.
VERY IMPORTANT
I also wanna take a quick second and introduce you to a blogger/marketer who has struck the perfect balance in my opinion. Sugar Rae kicks all form of ass and demonstrates it in this post about her branded web site about Black Berry. The key with Rae is that she is the truest of the “Third Tribe Marketing” type. Not Chris Brogan who has his head up his bloated ass. If you don’t know what the third tribe is, don’t worry about it… just go read Rae’s shiz… it will help you. If you wanna build websites that sell for big money, follow this site, of course, but also read what Rae writes on her blog too… I mean that guys.
DONE… (just look at this freaking post… THAT is good content. More than 2000 words about making money with oil filters baby!)
Ok, so I have gotten like 30 emails in the last 24hrs asking me if I got slapped like Griz and Ben.
Did you know the world’s largest retailer, 
seriously man, good for you… I think you sell yourself short and you are very capable of producing top content and building links… but for the rest of us…
