Blip.TV and Video Podcasting

Posted on October 11, 2008 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under content, podcast, video | Leave a Comment

So, we’re taking our drinking show seriously, doing our best to promote the show and get out a lot of episodes. Although, we’re only three episodes in, the set is prepared and ready for more. We’ve got two more shows that still need to be edited.

The first three shows are key to get ourselves into places like iTunes and other directories so we can be taken seriously. We’ve decided to station our video home at Blip.TV. Although it doesn’t allow for a lot of customization it does allow us to host the shows for free if we don’t want to upgrade to a pro account (which we’ll eventually do). It has a flash and our original show in the RSS so you can subscribe to the RSS!

The mixed drink show will also be taking on a new name: Common Man Cocktails. It summarizes what we are, what we do and how we will present our drinks. Here is the third show.

Video Podcasting: Demonstration

Posted on August 4, 2008 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under content, podcast, video | Leave a Comment

If you’re thinking about getting into Podcasting with video, you can do it for under USD $3,500 and make it look formidable against the competition (real budgeted video podcasters). Here is an example:

Everyday Drinkers: Chocolate Vodka Martini from Derrick Schommer on Vimeo.

Now this was done with a 3-point lighting kit from Lowel for around USD $980 and a Sony HVR-A1U purchased on ebay for USD $1800. For a mic we used a Shure SM11 lavalier mic attached to the Alesis Multimix 12 Firewire wired into a Mac Book Pro and recorded with Garageband.

The reason for the mixer and the Mac Book Pro rather than directly into the Sony HVR-A1U was because we were getting hissing sounds out of the camera even before recording. This hiss would go down on the tape and become a permanent fixture in the video (our first video, also on Vimeo reflects this, I used background music to distract from it)

You can certainly record directly into the sound module on the camera, we wired the MultiMix 12 to record into the camera and the laptop so we had a backup of the audio track and something to sync up the “good” audio on when trying to align the audio with the video in Final Cut Express 4.

If you’ve got a PC or Mac handy (preferably with little noise coming from the case), you can pickup a MultiMix 12 or equivalent (such as the 8 track one instead). We use the MultiMix 12 for recording other audio podcasts so it came in handy for this project.

The entire video was shot in under 10 minutes, with another 10 minutes assigned to set design. Setting up the camera with the right 3-point light configuration took a few hours, but it was worth it. Now, we leave the set configuration for future shows!

What is Podcasting?

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under audio, content, podcast | 1 Comment

It’s hard to imagine not understanding what a podcast is, but over 80% of the Internet will ask the question, “What is a podcast?” The answer is much simpler than they think because the word “podcast” really means nothing; Apple made up a term that stuck, pure and simple.

Video cast, audio cast, so many ways to define audios presence on the Internet but it’s hard to wrap you mind around its simplicity. Recently a met with a guy looking to define himself on the Internet and was afraid I was going to bombard them with more search engine optimization tips (SEO). Imagine his surprise when he found our methods of marketing were not exactly SEO By The Book, but utilized other sensory systems.

As far as I’m concerned, the basic mechanics of SEO have been bundled up in great blog software like Wordpress. You can get the All In One SEO plugin and you’ve completed the basic SEO best practices. Forget page rank, link backs and vying for impossible keywords for a minute, think podcasting.

Not everyone is going to be fit for podcasting, but those looking to expand their business with audio tidbits, training, keynote speaking, book publishing and other ventures can benefit from a podcast. The major barrier being those that are savvy as writers or public speakers aren’t always “in the know” about how to take their audio online. It sounds like a very tough task to tackle, but it’s easier than they think.

During my meeting I was asked “how do I compete for words like ’stress’ when their are so many competitive sites selling stress relief products and google returns millions of hits?” One way is to attach yourself to the new broadcast medium of audio on the internet (aka podcasting) because you can bring in an enthusiastic audience and compete in podcast directories instead of google search results.

So, again, what is podcasting?

It’s broadcasting yourself in audio (or video) form using digital media on the Internet. For now, think audio podcasting because its easier, more cost effective and allows for faster editing. Using websites and syndicated feeds (known as RSS) you can promote your show and publish it reliably each week. You take an audio “show” of any length, five minutes, one hour, whatever and compress it into an MP3 format using almost any audio tools. Once you’ve compressed it into a .mp3 file you can upload it to a content delivery network for very little money. I use liberated syndication (libsyn.com) and pay them $10.00 a month for 250MB of storage (which holds roughly four one-hour podcasts) and they will publish an RSS feed for me.

With libsyn I can generate an RSS feed in a few minutes to cater to most major podcast directories like iTunes. You can submit the feed to iTunes and within a few weeks you’ll be accepted into their directory (unless your content violates their terms of service of course). Now you’re syndicated and can start building listeners and marketing yourself.

If that sounds simple, that’s because it’s really not hard; it’s just ‘new’ and different so it can be intimidating to understand at first. Here are some basic steps:

1. Record quality audio (buy a good microphone that works with your computer).
2. Build a structured show with your great content and keep it shorter if possible (this is dependent on genre of content of course)
3. Save your audio file as .mp3 with 96kbps quality and in mono to keep the size down.
4. Upload it with FTP over using libsyns web uploader
5. Fill in your iTunes details in the settings on libsyn to explain what your show is about, give it a great title (something you want to compete for in google for keywords isn’t a bad idea)
6. Publish the new file
7. Take the RSS feed which libsyn will expose for you and submit it into iTunes, podcastpickle and all the “podcast directories” you can find on the Internet using google.
8. Monitor some of your metrics on your show via libsyn (as they give you graphs and such)
9. Become a podcast superstar (or at least garner a listenership)

Publish weekly shows on the same day each week and devote some time to coming up with topics and ideas for each show. Consider yourself a radio broadcast show, what would you expect to see out of them? Reliability, excitment, enthusiasm for the topic, structure and energy.

Audio is a passive experience, your listeners may put your new podcast on their mobile devices (i.e. ipod) or listen to it on their computers while working. Set the stage by building a website which you can talk about on your podcast (i.e. “checkout our blog on weekly updates and more thoughts on the topic”) to keep people coming back and building a community.

Video Podcasting, A New Venture

Posted on June 18, 2008 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under content, podcast, video | Leave a Comment

We live in a time of user generated content and the wave of great content isn’t letting up anytime soon. Mainly, because people crave great content and humans are in love with learning and expanding (most of us anyway). Along the ride we’ve seen how great blogs have risen from nothing, such as the Fake Steve Jobs blog. We’ve seen real media start to get involved with their internet precense just as CBS picks up CNET in a purchase.

As Internet speeds, in the US anyway, speed up we’re seeing more people bringing their own user generated content in the form of video. Sites like Vimeo, GameVee and other YouTube like sites have developed to house some of our importent, albiet huge, data files. Other companies have gotten people to fund their adventures, much like Revision 3 has managed to do, they’re expanding their show list seemly each month.

The common computer user can pickup a camera with a built-in microphone for under USD $50.00 at any big retail outlet and start video casting in an hour. Creative content is king in our new found industry and each month it accelerates to new heights, levels and fans. Right now, a show may max out at 100,000 to 500,000 fans, a small amount compared to a broadcast TV show, but broadcast TV started small too.

The next few years are going to be amazing and I’m looking to get involved. My wife and I are working towards are first video casting adventure and, over the next few months, hope to have a fresh new video podcast for iphones, ipods and for online watching. Our goal is to test the waters, experiment and learn from our findings.

The world of video casting is still small and learning all the great techniques is still a challenge, so we’re planning to learn from our mistakes and get any informatoin from the great “user generated content” pouring onto the Net each day.

As we learn stuff I’m going to work to keep you informed. Wish us luck!

Google Re-Index and Organic Search Impact

Posted on May 7, 2008 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under 103bees, content, organic search | Leave a Comment

Our last episode with google involved a hacker attacking one of our blogs and causing us to be de-indexed by google. Now, I’ve had a chance to see how it impacts performance, organic results and witness the power of google before my eyes.

After being de-indexed and asking to be re-submitted my wife and I have had a chance to watch the response time of google answering our plea and putting us into their search engine again. We were de-indexed on a Saturday and by Tuesday we were back in the google search results–very efficient
for such a large search engine company. Three days response time was beyond my expectations of efficiency, especially considering they say it could take up to thirty days!

What we witness next was latency from google which was very unexpected but not too surprising. The day casualgamerchick.com was re-indexed by google traffic almost reached normal conditions (600+ hits a day, off by roughly 200). It seems our organic results were simply “filtered” out while de-indexed but left in the same search position the day of the re-index. However, three days later, we could have been considered de-indexed again considering the drop in organic search hits.

Why?

Three days after being re-indexed all our key pages, which were on the first page of results in google, dropped to page 70 and deeper! At this point, we saw organic search results drop as if we were not in google at all; it was another sad day. It seems google decided to drop our pages “rank” from the important search results, presumably because of the hacks in the pages. It took google three days to “catch up” and drop us down in the results probably as a result of being demoted from google days before.

In this graph from 103bees.com, you’ll see the yellow bars represent search traffic (referrals were mainly from images.google.com, RSS readers and in-bound links). April 26th was the day after being told we’re losing our indexing and the 29th was the first day we realized our site was indexed again:

After our three days grace period (or “lag”), four more days went by with 50 to 75 organic search results, most of which were our “normal” traffic from MSN and Yahoo organic search, google wasn’t directing any users to our site! Then, yesterday, everything changed again; our first page google search results were back in force and once again google was sending traffic towards the site. I validated this by doing routine queries each day for keywords we initially ranked search result one to ten to validate we were not there. Oddly, sites that linked to us with those key words were still ranking at the top but our site was not.

Why?

My guess is google has a delay of roughly three to five days for any potential shake up to occur. Although the act of being deindexed was fairly quick, we were out of the results one day after being told it was occurring and arrived back in the results fairly quickly, the organic search results themselves take time. You do not receive a “welcome back” message when you’re re-indexed so it’s hard to measure the response time from the re-index, but it’s obvious that the impact waves through the organic results for about a week before maintaining some amount of stability.

If you find yourself de-indexed and have put in a request to be included again you can probably look forward to:

• Short delay between re-indexing if your site is accepted again.
• A short burst of google traffic upon re-indexing (you get happy)
• A short burst of being thrown down in results due to the prior de-index (you get said again)
• Back in action within two weeks of the initial de-indexing (yay!)

Although the site isn’t completely back 100% it was obvious when google mixed things up with their results in the matter of hours. A day of 50 search results with a next day of 600 is a drastic difference and will be detected by most metrics overnight.

This goes to show just how big google is in the organic search market, perhaps too big. A blog is at the mercy of google and must comply to all of google’s terms of service or find their site wiped from the map–Yahoo and MSN just don’t hold up against the results you’ll get from google.

Beware of Hackers: De-Indexed From Google

Posted on April 26, 2008 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under advisories, blogging, organic search, page rank, search | 1 Comment

It is as if each day is a lesson in life, today’s lesson is “keep your wordpress installations up-to-date or face the consequences.” Luckily wordpress is easy to upgrade and should be kept up-to-date at all times and plugins should be monitored for updates and security advisories or else…

You can find yourself out of favor with Google. We found this out at casualgamerchick.com when we received an e-mail from google stating the site was being removed from google because it violated the terms of services….

What?

Yeah, a day or two ago we got hacked and the site theme was modified to include hidden links to sites that broke the terms of service (and most moral values). A day after our notification our organic searches went from 800+ a day to 0.

Google has no warning messages, just a standard message that even considers what occurred as a problem, “This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.”

They are very efficient about bring your traffic to a screaming halt and losing any ad revenue you make. We’re still waiting to see how long it ‘really’ takes to be re-included into their index. They send you a link where you can plead your case and ask to be re-included–they say it can take up to 30 days but sites on the Net seem to have folks getting back in within three days. We’re hoping it’s closer to three than to thirty.

Lesson learned. A few other sites I help run also were hacked but I fixed them before they were found by google, but a site that gets constantly scanned by google because of it’s great content is the site that will be de-listed first (go figure).

Although I don’t agree, I believe you should get at least a 3-day advanced warning to fix the issue, there isn’t much you can do against the mega-giant Google; you need google rank.

Here are some lessons you’ll want to keep in handy if you’re a blogger with a site that has mild to great traffic:

• Monitor Security Advisories: Take them seriously, don’t wait until later to do the updates because later can be too late.
• Perform Weekly Site Audits: You might be small but you should practice the work of the big boys, try to go through error logs, access logs or at least view your sites source in a browser once a week to check for hidden links.
• Perform Weekly Backups: Run a backup and put the backup off-site each week (or more). Try to keep a site with up-to-date content staged on a secondary hidden site that you can quickly ‘diff’ and repair the changes. If you’re hacked this can save you hours of hunting for the problems.
• Minimal Plugins: Only take the needed plugins for your CMS. If you don’t utilize them, disable them. Every plugin is an exploit waiting to happen and increases the chances of SQL injections and other badness.

Hopefully it won’t happen to you, however, the more popular your site is the more likely you’re going to be subject to an attack. Hackers don’t care if they only get links to their site from your hacked blog for a few days before your site is destroyed. It’s unfortunate people exist that have this type of attitude and lack of caring for others but it’s not going to change anytime soon so be prepared.

If you’ve been de-listed, read up on google’s help center.

E-Commerce: How Do I Make Money On Products?

Posted on February 25, 2008 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under content, ecommerce, revenue, search, seo | Leave a Comment

For years I’ve been challenged with trying to figure out how to attract customers to an e-commerce website selling video games. First challenge was building the site (based on Drupal and E-Commerce) and the second issue was marketing the website.

After consulting firms told me “how” and “what” I need to do to get my site “ranked” I had all the knowledge I needed to start working the magic, right? Lots of blogging, lots of keyword use and formulating my messages so google would absorb and make my data available to everyone who organically searched… why spend money on advertisement when you can get it for free with google?

Because life’s too short and a ton of people are playing the same game of SEO. If you’re in a niche market with little competition you can utilize google and other search engines to rank #1 for many things, but video games is not one of them. Mainly because their are so many game review sites and fan blogs that you’ll have a hard time generating enough specific content to rank first. Think on this, if I want to rank for “Saints Row” for the “Xbox 360″ I need to chat about the keywords a lot but I really just want to sell a game.

When people search for those keywords they’re probably also including “tips and tricks” or “howto” or other things to get ahead in the game; people aren’t really searching for buying the title. On top of this challenge, journalists and bloggers have talked about the game for months (or years) before the title was released so they’ve already ranked on the first page, leaving you to clean up on page two or three (or fifty or sixty).

How, then, does one make money on E-Commerce sites? Unfortunately, you have to spend money to make money. You’re going to want to look at shopping sites like shopping.com or pricegrabber.com. These sites are “pay per click” systems where you’ll pay them anywhere from 10 cents to 45 cents (or more) when a customer of theirs clicks on your product and is sent to your page. Believe it or not, it’s worthwhile because you’ll have a tough time ranking organically based on obscure and unknown match criteria but these product search systems are pretty basic: you got a low price? You rank first.

Over the course of a year or more sales on video games from our site weren’t so great using standard organic searching. The competition was high and we spent more money housing products that didn’t sell (as drop shipping video games is cost prohibitive) and products were being reduced in prices while ours didn’t move…making it nearly impossible. Around the holiday season we’d make some money from Google’s product search, Froogle, but not enough to justify a business. It was time to either close the doors as a loss or try something new.

Shopping.com was our next step but their customer service was lacking, their product integration was a bear and extremely tedious to do product matching so we ended up on pricegrabber.com. They gave us a single point of contact person for all our needs and have been available whenever we had an issue. With .35 cents a click, it was still risky (minimum deposit is USD $250.00) but it was all worthwhile because product sales jumped from 0 sales per month to about one a day… still way off from a “success” but a hell of a lot better than nothing!

Over time our rating has increased (it’s only been a month!) so we’ll slowly get more customers taking a look at our products. In the end, we can call it a lesson learned, sometimes SEO isn’t the right idea, sometime you have to swallow your pride and spend money to make money by marketing it on a site which as done this for years and has departments that spend time and money getting your products to customers easily.

If you’re planning on selling products, take some time to invest some research in a site that assists users with finding products for their customers and see how hard it is to get on their list of search results. You may also need to get a developer to write in hooks to get your products on their site easily or use excel to upload your products on a daily/weekly basis so customers get the most recent prices from your site.

Competing For Organic Search Hits

Posted on December 23, 2007 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under 103bees, adsense, adwords, affiliate, blogging, content, google analytics, keywords, organic search, research, revenue, search, seo, seo tools | 1 Comment

If you ask any consultant how to rank on the first page in google, they’re going to probably tell you its a combination of effort, luck, some google “magic sauce,” relevance, patience and targeting a niche market.

No matter how great your writing is, no matter how awesome your site looks, you may still have issues gaining traffic to your site because you’re on page 99 of google’s search results. Let’s face it, if you’re on page-3 of the google search results you might as well be on page 300. I’ve had plenty of pages arrive on page six and seven and I’ve had some clicks… but it’s never relevant. If they’ve not found a site to service their needs in the first five pages… you’re probably way off from what they are looking for, or a re-hash of something they already don’t care about.

Problem One: Effort

You’ll have to put in a lot of effort to receive page-1 or even page-2 results in google. It doesn’t happen over night, so be patient. In a highly competitive keyword space it also won’t happen on a single blog post.

Here are two scenarios, you are considering a site to write about “video games” because you know a lot about them, or “baby carriages” because you’ve recently had a kid and you feel you know enough about them to write articles involving baby transportation in the way of a carriage. Which one will be more profitable?

The average cost-per-click for a video game keyword ad is:

The average cost-per-click for a baby carriage ad is:

So, technically you’ll make more money on the keyword baby carriage as long as you realize the total searches are going to be much less (almost half says adwords traffic estimator). I don’t think it’s any surprise that more people are interested in search for video games than they are for baby carriages.

So, video games is the place to apply all our efforts, right? Maybe not. Do a quick search for video games and you’ll see something like this:

If you do a search for baby carriage you’ll see something like this:

You may discover, as I did, there are many less competitive pages for baby carriages, 323,000 compared to 799,000,000 for video games. Judging your competitive marketplace you’ll see it will be far easier to rank on page-1 on google for baby carriages and they’re going to give you better ad pricing (in general) using adsense.

What does this mean to you, the blogger? The market space is less competitive for baby carriages and thus you’ll have an easier time ranking on the first page of google’s organic search results. Less people are searching for baby carriages, however, you’re more likely to be the one getting clicks if you try hard enough because ranking for video games on any of the initial google page results is going to be a rough road. In the end, you’re effort will pay off much higher for something with less search results.

Problem Two: Luck

There is some luck involved with organic search. Some days people won’t do that many searches for your content, or, if it’s season dependent, some seasons may receive less organic search results. The next nature of luck… are the competitive sites trying to rank for your keywords any good at it?

To change your luck, you can do some deeper research and check the top ranked sites to see if they use the meta-keywords field or have content that’s really relevant to the search keywords. You can take what could be random luck and focus it into a well thought out plan and avoid having to rely on a lucky roll of the keyword.

Luck also plays into the niche field you’re getting into when writing content. You can start writing about a topic that’s rarely talked about on the Internet and then, one day, it becomes a huge hot button topic and you find yourself getting traffic you never though you’d get. Luck can be awesome at times.

Problem Three: Google Magic Sauce

How organic searching works is a mystery, a well-understood mystery, but it’s still a mystery none-the-less. SEO experts have found ways to “game the system” by making your content more relevant to google; crafting your text in a specific manner…using good keyword density but not overdoing it, is a good example of some basic SEO practices. You can take their advice and follow it like the SEO bible and google can change their sauce at any time and all your effort goes to the gutter.

Luckily for you, google tries to make subtle changes to their system and not revamp their organic search system from the ground up. Some subtle changes may indeed change how you rank in search results but those are the issues a Search Engine Optimizer deals with on a quarterly basis (usually google updates their ranks and such every three months, “big changes” will probably come at this time).

Problem Four: Relevance

Your content will have a specific relevance when it comes to how google views your site since an automated system is scanning your words, not a human. When writing content focus on what your site is about and less about other random stories. If you’re making a blog about baby carriages you probably want to shy away from talking too much about products outside the space or writing articles about other industries.

If you start changing your topics you may start arriving on page results not truly pertaining to your overall content. It will be hard to keep subscribers coming back if they think you’re about one thing but you’re really a site about something entirely different. And, adsense will start giving you ads that aren’t related to the keywords you originally did research on. You don’t want ad’s that are low pay CPC when your research ads that are high CPC.

Problem Five: Patience

Don’t expect to rank the day your site opens up. It may take a few weeks or a month before you see a single organic search arrive on your site. Using google analytics or 103bees to monitor your organic searches will allow you to see what’s going on in terms of search traffic. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, patience is key to so many areas of a good blog or website.

Google likes sites that grow slowly, over time, they also give higher weight (or so people say) to sites that are well aged, so your competitors whom have been around for six years or more will usually show higher than you for the same keywords. That’s okay, people don’t always click on the first result in google, they’ll read the meta-description that google presents before clicking (usually) or at least the title of the result. They also may click on many of the first page results while doing research.

Keep at it for six months or so and see what you can do with your site. Watch the search results to see how people are finding your site and focus on what’s working. It’s important to realize this may not be what you want to work in all cases, but making money sometimes requires you to do things you may not want to do (in moderation anyway).

Problem Six: Niche Market

This is, by far, the most lectured topic in search engine optimization and web marketing in general. Selling a product someone else already has market dominance over is going to be frustrating and if you’re a low-budget shop (or have little time) try sticking to something that’s not so overdone…baby carriages for instance. If you’re not passionate about the topic you can look around for something else or do some research and learn the topic anyway, perhaps you’ll grow fond of it.

If you really want to do video games or something like that, pick a specific genre of video games (Role Playing Games, Racing Games) or a single video game fan site and dedicate your time to it. Just remember, if you grow bored of that video game you’re still going to have to maintain the site if you want to bring in ad revenue. As a blogger who writes about video games I’ll tell you up front: it’s a long frustrating road before you gain any type of search hits that net you revenue.

If you want to write about “news” on your topic make sure their is a lot of news going around because you don’t want it to dry up and go stale. News sites also require much more effort and consistently daily blogging (hourly is best) to keep people interested. News, on the Net, doesn’t last long so you’ll always be searching for the next hot story.

You can pay USD $5,000 in consulting fees to learn this, or take my word for it… targeting a niche market is going to be the difference between making some money and making nothing. Affiliating with a niche market is also a great idea if you don’t plan on selling products yourself and play to rely on ad-revenue to make a dime (more dimes with affiliating + ad’s than doing only one). Provide niche market content to help your readers make an intelligent decision about a product and continue to update it to keep those fans coming back for more.

Have Fun!

If you want to write daily content you must enjoy it or it will grow more like a “real job” that you hate to commute to each day. Enjoy yourself, have fun writing content and be smart about what you’re doing.

Good Luck!

Design And Layout Pays Off

Posted on December 20, 2007 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under blogging, content, design, theme | 1 Comment

What is it about your blog that separates you from the other bloggers? Is it the content? Or, are you breaking news nobody else has been able to break?

More than likely you’re not breaking any news stories but you are probably providing content that’s informative, interesting and well crafted. You can write the best blog content in the world, but if you’re site is hideous to look at you’ll probably never get anyone reading the content. Just as the best pie won’t be tasted if it smells like dirty feet, the best blog won’t be read if it’s an eye sore.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a world class graphic designer to build a nice blog layout. If you’re using a wordpress blog you can find plenty of high quality themes to get your point across, if you’re using Drupal you’ll find a huge supply of pre-created themes. Every great content management system has a theme installation process so you can find classy themes by inspiring artists free of charge and all it takes is a few clicks to make it happen.

When building a blog it’s best to provide a two or three column layout so your text can be fit into a smaller area of space. Nobody wants to read a sea of text, they want something managed, organized and easy to read. Many of us are used to reading editorial “columns” or articles in a magazine or newspaper so you want to provide the same format to keep your readers feeling comfortable about your text. This starts with making columns in your blog and gives you an area to provide advertising space, categories and other site links.

A light colored background may be easier on the eyes and avoid additional strain on your reader. Your audience won’t be happy if their always straining their eyes trying to read your important content and, believe it or not, there are other sites with important content with light colored backgrounds… if you want to keep your readers coming back to your site make them feel at home.

“Several light-on-dark sites look fantastic for a few seconds or even a minute. I just find actually reading articles on them very straining on my eyes, and I hate the way they linger on the retina when I look away from my screen.” (456bereastreet)

There are plenty of examples of sites that can invert text with white text and black backgrounds but a site that is primarily about content in the form of writing is probably not one of them. Reading a two paragraph product description isn’t the same as reading a blog novel or travelers journal. Keep that in mind when you wrap a theme around your writing.

You’ll find a variety of different themes, all accomplish different tasks and explain their content differently. When choosing your theme ask yourself if you could see it looking more like The New York Times or WalMart–both styles have a purpose but accomplish it with different color combinations and themes.

If you’re at a loss for which to choose, stick with a white background with black text and work from there. Plus, you can embed images into your site which have a white background to them without looking out of place.

Market Yourself Slowly To Google

Posted on December 15, 2007 by Derrick Schommer
Filed Under backlinks, blogging, content, link bait, seo, social networks | 1 Comment

When working towards great back links, referrals from other sites and social bookmarking, it’s important to work slowly and build up to it. It it said that Google likes a young site to grow over time, sites that show up in the google index and have thousands of back links may be suspicious to a search engine for “black hat” techniques to grow your site.

Some people try to boost their site quickly by buying links to high page rank sites which they must maintain for months before google will recognize them as real. Nothing is more useless than buying a few links for a month while google hasn’t even noticed the link or considered it significant, why waste your money?

Most great sites on the web have grown naturally, even google itself started out small and grew over the years. Blogging isn’t an instant path to big money, it’s going to take time and patience. Work a schedule trying to achieve a few referrals a week for a few months and see what happens. If you’re building great content others will link to you without even requesting and you’ll get some low ranked links without problem.

As your site grows in size, content and rank it will appear more frequently (we hope!) in google and other search engines and new users will see it and link to it. You’ll probably find yourself in a few blog indexers and aggregators too, which is nice for a little linky linky.

When building back links on social websites and networks make sure you’re not wasting your time linking to sites that have the “nofollow” directive in their anchor tags to your site. A good example is reddit and stumbleupon.com both of which are nice for minor flash crowed traffic for a few days but neither will allow google to follow the links to your site. The “no follow” directive tells google to not follow the link to the other destination. A good way to tell, post your stuff where you’re trying to and view the source; if the source has a “no follow” link then don’t bother attempting to use that source for link back activities.

That’s not to say many of those sites aren’t worth a bit of flash crowd traffic to see if anyone finds your content interesting. Maybe you’ll get a few RSS subscribers out of your effort. It’s good not to hunt for general link backs, hunt for people that may find your content interesting no matter what avenue it is.

I’ve found blinklist offers a good bookmarking tool that links back to your site correctly and has one or two aggregator tools that people use to build ‘recent blinks’ and such, this gives you even more link backs. You can also try a site like Jaiku, which builds your “social presence” on the Net. With Jaiku you can setup RSS’s from your blog and it will post them into your presence which will be linked back to your site very quickly. Jaiku, recently acquired by Google, seems to have a high rank and usually appears before my own site in google when searching for my own article names!

Jaiku has been hard to get into for new users since the google acquisition so you may have to try for delicious to bookmark and create back links to your website(s). You can try on Facebook but if you only have one or two people on your friends list you probably won’t get too many clicks. Thus far I’ve found many of the social bookmarks have more value in link backs than actual clicks to your site. In a month my basic delicious bookmarks may net me 10 clicks to my site from random users, is that worth using daily for blogging when it requires you to manually click “bookmark” and enter some data about your article? Again, depends if anyone digs (pun intended) your delicious links.

Slow and steady wins the race, get your links but take your time. Aggression buys you flash crowds, maybe, but organic searching is free marketing, flash crowds only last a few days and you’ll be back to very few users again.