You hear about sites that take off and get thousands of users overnight, before they know it the owners are getting millions of unique users hitting their site and the world is their oyster. Okay, now let’s talk about everyone else, the 99% of the population of bloggers, podcasters and video producers. Unless you own a successful brand or property with thousands of dedicated fans, you’re starting at ground zero like myself.

Prepare yourself for many nights and weekends working on your personal brand and website. Making money on advertising occurs when you can show advertisers “impressions” on your properties and your new property may be receiving under twenty visitors a day even if you’re pushing one to three daily pieces of content; it’s a slow process. Video bloggers are worse off because all their awesome content is unsearchable–it’s not textual. They’ve got to work hard, craft great headline articles and start supporting blogs and articles to support their effort to bring in organic searches. It’s possible but it takes time.

I’ve found very few working shortcuts to getting seen as a video podcaster and audio podcaster. There are no fast ways to be number-one in a search engine or ranking on the top podcasts in a podcast directory aside from paid advertising or getting a web celebrity to pimp your show. You can setup twitter accounts, facebook fan pages and accounts on all the trendy social network systems on the Internet and that won’t make your show popular until you understand how to use the tools most effectively. You can buy consulting for a hefty fee or do what I did: follow a few other brands that are doing it successfully and mimic their behavior, that’s not a shortcut, that’s an educational experience.

Spend less time looking for the shortest route to success and spend more time pumping out quality content, watching others performing social networking techniques and being an all-around normal guy or gal with the drive and passion for success. Let people know about what you’re doing and why you’re confident it’s a successful venture.

Trust In Yourself

When producing audio and video content, there is only one person you can trust to get the job done: yourself.

When most of your salary is being paid in blood, sweat and tears you’re going to find very few people want to work with you in the effort. Unless you can find co-hosts, guest audio speakers or a video crew of dedicated passionate individuals, you’re going to be doing most of your work alone. Creating a great audio show is only as good as the participants in the show. You may have the best idea in the world along with a great chemistry with your fellow podcasters but if they decided to leave, lose interest or “no show” for a few episodes, where does that leave yours how and your audience? Are they going to work those same nights and weekends to promote the production you’ve all been working so hard on?

I’ve found the most reliable thing to do is build a list of friends that are comfortable on camera (or on a mic) and get as many to show up to the shows as possible. Don’t trust any one individual to have the same drive and interests as yourself but, as a whole, you’ve got enough folks to always make the show. Having a pool of individuals to call upon (much like they do on This Week in Tech), then you can always have a successful broadcast.

Lessons of the day: Only trust yourself to get the job done and plan on working your ass off to get there. Don’t hire SEO experts, social media professionals and all that crap; learn the techniques yourself using articles and free editorials on the Net. Teach yourself how to be successful, don’t expect others to do it for you.

I’ve received a few e-mails lately asking about how I handle some of my shows release schedules. In short, how often should a podcaster or video podcaster create a new episode? Every situation may be different but there are some obvious trends I’ve seen over the last few years.

Although a release schedule really depends on your shows content and purpose, the best possible scenario would be short episodes on a daily basis. This turns out to be a lot of work if you’re working alone or in a small group. This is most challenging if your content is time sensitive, such as daily news, industry news or the like. Large firms have benefited from daily shows like CNET Buzz Out Loud. Others, such as Wine Library TV grew from a retail store into a daily show by pushing out great content for 18+ months before making it big.

A daily show between five and ten minutes seems to be the sweet spot for video shows (and 20-minutes or so for audio shows.) Viewers will be able to watch your show during lunch, breakfast or sneak one in during work hours when the boss is not looking. You’ll find it’s fast to edit and produce a show that’s small and tight because there are few chances for major errors or interruptions and the post production is quick with very little render time required. Audio episodes requires less attentiveness so longer shows will be more acceptable.

A short video show will lend itself well in terms of disk storage, quick downloads and easy to post content on sites like Blip.tv. The downfall? You’ll have limited time to squeeze in all your content per episode. If your information isn’t time sensitive you can sit down and record five episodes in under 30 minutes of real time! You can edit each show individually (which could take an hour or so depending on how much post production you’re doing) and launch each one at the start of your day.

You may opt for a weekly show because it fits your schedule better while still working in about 20-30 minutes of great content. Nothing says you have to meet a 20-minute marker, a 10-minute weekly show is fine too. The downfall to a short weekly show comes down to keeping your audience attentive over the long term. A short show might leave less of an impression and they could forget to visit your site each week. If you provide great syndication methods, such as iTunes, you can help remind your audience to tune in each week.

There may be opportunity for a video show that runs only once or twice a month if you’re looking to test the waters, have a rough schedule or your show guests are hard to coordinate. The major downfall being the slow growth of your audience because there is less content to consume. You’re statistics will increase greatly as you have more shows for people to go back and watch after they’ve discovered your content. We’ve got plenty of people new to our shows that go back and re-discover old episodes and that greatly pushes up our download count.

Look at the release schedule over a single year. If you run a show once a month you’re going to end up with 12-episodes at the end of the year. If you run a show twice a week you’ll have 104 episodes after the year is through and, of course, a daily show will have upwards of 250 episodes (if you take weekends off). More shows means more statistics and a better chance to grab new listeners because you’ve always got something new to promote.

Now, let’s talk about statistics. Granted, many video podcast producers will tell you “it’s not about the numbers, its about the content” but we’re human and we love to categorize, organize and know what the heck is going on. What we’ve noticed, with trends in Common Man Cocktails, is that each episodes viewership peaks the first two days after its launch. Then, viewership declines as everyone has seen the latest show while a few new viewers are slowly keeping your numbers going throughout the dead-space between launches.

When we launched the show once a week on Wednesday we’d have big numbers from Thursday to Saturday and then they would fade nearly to nothing by the following Tuesday night. Then, we started pushing out an episode on Wednesday and Saturday, our numbers would pop from Sunday through Tuesday night, just as we prepared to launch the next show. This allows our viewership to maintain a constant rise throughout the week as we gain more momentum and new viewers.

The end result, each new episode peaks the day of launch by another twenty views or so, incremental growth each episode shows progress and interest in the brand. So, wouldn’t it be in our best interest to do a new show everyday? Sure! Except for the small issue with having a few other jobs to do and producing video podcasts as a hobby as this is not quite the best time to bring a brand to investors.

If you’ve got time and dedication to cut a new show every day, the other technique I’ve seen used quite a bit is to run four short episodes a week and one medium length show during the middle of the week. The small shorts can be used to keep your audience attentive, progress your shows content throughout the week and give them a large dose mid-week as something to look forward to viewing.

While a few techniques may work for you, knowing the different possiblities to work towards gives you a nice goal to achieve. Many people are looking to get into video podcasting and hopefully this gives them something to think about in their preparation.

Just remember, the most important part of creating your podcast is the content. You can produce a show nobody wants to watch each day if you want, but that’s not really worth your time.

Podcasters track their downloads, watch for trends and do all they can to promote their show. That might be using SEO style techniques to get brand awareness in google to social networking with friends and strangers. If you google the keywords: gaming podcast you’ll notice my property: gamingpodcast.net arrives near first if not right at the top (depends on the day). Was that a coincidence? No, not really. Now google drinking podcast and you’ll have similar results: my properties arrive first.

That was key number one: free advertising via google for people looking for podcasts related to gaming and drinking (not always going hand-in-hand of course). Two years went by with almost no user feedback in my gaming podcast, but each episode was going from ten downloads a week to twenty, and thirty and fifty then one hundred and so one… but who was listening? Silence.

I was #1 on my google search terms which brought an expanding audience but still very little in terms of feedback. The first major barrier is finding a topic that elicits a lot of feedback. The drinking podcast receives very little feedback and I’m not expecting it to grow too much in the next year. The show is more for entertainment value and learning but doesn’t ask a lot of questions. In 20+ episodes we received, probably, three e-mails about the show. Not a stunning reception.

But, the audience continues to grow, the RSS feed statistics rise and we get more downloads minutes after posting than ever before. For this podcast I have relied on my instincts as to which direction to take each episode – a drinking podcast doesn’t bring a lot of feedback but if the audience rises instead of falls I know I’m doing it right. If you’re driving in the dark and never hit a tree than you know you’re doing some pretty awesome driving.

The gaming podcast was a personal challenge, how do I grow an audience of interactive gamers. A few guidelines that have worked well for me:

Build a Blog

If you don’t have a website as a landing page for your podcast audience than you need to get one yesterday! WordPress is a great launching point because you can get a blog up and running in under an hour with a comment system and spam protection. This will be where you’ll post your show notes with open community comments.

Initially, you’ll want to post content on your blog to build up content on the site and get google to start chewing on it. If your podcast is about cats, you’ll want to blog about cats, post silly cat images, link to cat related websites and click the links to hit their site and bump their referral logs (so the author sees you). “Work the room” with people and their cat interests and let them know you’ve got a website and audio/video podcast. Post on your blog three times a day for at least three weeks to build up a bankroll of content.

I used this post method on everydaydrinkers.com and started receiving alcohol from PR people to review along with accessories. Heck, I even got a portable beer pong table because, with all my editorials, I became an expert in the drinking industry. Not too shabby as a method to start a landing site for my audio show, eh?

Setup Forums

Setup some forums, if you’re using wordpress I suggest Simple:Press from YellowFish. They will link to the user accounting system within WordPress so commentors that sign up on your blog can post forum topics immediately. Post forum topics, get your friends to post some topics and populate the forums. Don’t expect to build a 1,000 user audience overnight or even in the first few years. But, if you make it available someone may use it and you can use that as feedback for your show.

Contact Us and E-Mail

Don’t post your e-mail address on your blog if you don’t want a lot of spam – but you can setup a contact us form using WordPress and the Secure and Accessible Contact Form module. This will give your audience another way to contact you. If you’re creating a podcast you can use your e-mail in the audio since spammers aren’t that smart.

Promote Your Podcast

You can promote your podcast in a number of easy and affordable ways. After you’ve got three episodes you can submit it to iTunes. You can google “podcast directories” and create an account on all the directories then submit your RSS feed. I suggest tying your RSS feed to Feedburner so you can track statistics in one of the more industry standard methods. Each directory that accepts your podcast will also automatically link back to your website because it’s part of the standard iTunes complaint RSS feed (which Feedburner will standardize for you). That increases the chances google will rank you well.

You can also use a very low cost advertising method as I have done for my shows at ProjectWonderful. For a few cents a day you can splash your podcast banners on all types of sites that focus on the demographic you want to capture. That might be personal blogs, business, food and drinks, lifestyle, home gardening and many others. Don’t expect people to find you, find them first and do it on the cheap.

Ask Questions

There are a few ways to get your listeners to submit feedback. You can ask questions in the podcast that you think people may have an opinion on or you can discuss things that people just cannot afford to let pass, usually dealing with politics, international affairs or anything you’ve had past heated discussions about on a personal level. Some folks will go out of their way to demand feedback by just being over the top controversial, you’ll get hate mail but it is, in fact, feedback.

Do It

Do setup a website, do keep the content fresh, do post consistent episodes on a regular schedule and give your audience many outlets to respond to your podcast you’ll get some traction. We received roughly four comments on our Gaming Podcast until we setup gamingpodcast.net and built out a forum. and comment system

Many people are shy and don’t want to compose an e-mail to a stranger. Others are paranoid and don’t want their email being spread around. Some folks post on forums on a daily bases and find that the natural way to comment while others will blindly and anonymously post in response to a blog entry. Feedback comes in many forms and everyone seems to use their own technique. This is why we choose to include forum posts, blog responses and e-mails in our “feedback” section of our gaming podcast. Some users may not have submitted it thinking it would make the show, but we pick and choose to make sure gamers realize they too can talk back.

At first, you may have your own friends write in or simply make up questions from people that don’t even exist. Perhaps that “imaginary” writer has something controversial to say and it could elicit more feedback from real users. Once you start a trend others will feed into it and chat on a normal bases.

Lastly, you may notice that every podcast has its own set of responders. From Buzz Out Loud form CNET to The Daily Giz Wiz by Leo Laporte to GameSpots podcasts and language learning podcasts, there is a set of “regulars” that write in constantly and keep the show interesting. Everybody needs a few regulars, just like a bar or a restaurant — you’ll know them by name and they’ll add a new dynamic personality to the show.

Once you’ve got a few regulars consider your job done. Most of your audience is listening to an audio podcast because its a nice passive way to get through their day. They don’t need to write in to show their support because their downloads and impressions are left on the show through the shows yearly growth.

Have you ever called into an FM radio show? Probably not.

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.

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!

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.

Now, those widgets may slowly get better ranked in google if they’re truly unique, however my experience in video games shows that it’s too popular to rank in many search engines on page one or two of the results. So, this may or may not work out for you and your widgets. The “standard practice,” today, is to blog daily to show google you’re serious about content and providing it to the masses.

Therefore, I learned to blog on my own e-commerce site to provide new press releases, personal reviews of video games and just rant about the industry. For the first year I blogged once a day at least to gain keywords I wanted, making sure to blog about my own products as much as possible (and linking to them). Then, one day, someone put one of my content-rich articles on digg.com…

You want to see how fast an article can be marked as spam? Get 30+ diggs and hit the homepage and all of a sudden…silence. Users flamed through comments and marking the article as spam. Why? It was an article that apparently had value and merit in the industry and it had enough diggs to hit the homepage.

Because social diggers and other anonymous internet users are fickle and have bad attitudes about much of the stuff they find on the Internet. The fact that the article was from an e-commerce site raised eyebrows with thoughts of “you’re pushing your own products through digg, you spammer.” In reality, I wasn’t even the person that put it on digg to begin with yet I’m being yelled at as a spammer? It doesn’t take long to realize you’re article/site is on digg because the “digg effect” is substantial and potentially destructive to your website and bandwidth.

You’ll have better luck on StumbleUpon.com for trying to spread your information than a social news site like digg. People love great content but they don’t like the fact that they think they were duped into coming to the site to make a purchase. We’ve grown so used to spam, lies, tricks, deception and fraud that we cannot stand the idea of liking content on a page that may also sell products.

Readers are far more used to advertising and affiliations around the site content than they are knowing the overall theme of the site is to sell. In other words, if you don’t work hard enough to ‘trick’ them they’ll drop your site in a ball of flames and rants. Had the site been bundled with affiliations and embedded popup links it wouldn’t have been battered by the public because we’re so used to a daily dose of advertising.

Moral of the story, watch what you do when blogging on an e-commerce website, if you want to provide rich content it might be easier to start up a WordPress blog and link back to your site when you want to bring users closer to your products. It’s really just a “front” for the real site but it keeps whiners at bay.

Internal linking does contain some great SEO benefits as well. Google weights a page highly on how it found your site, for instance if someone with a Page Rank of 6 linked to you some of that PR6 weight can trickle down to your page and/or site. However, I’ve seen many cases where I’ve had internal pages holding more page rank than my main site or other pages on my site. What’s going on?

Google obviously decided a specific page on my site is highly important for one reason or another. A good example is my podcasting page on techdiversions.com, the podcast page is PR4 while the homepage is PR3. This is because my podcasting page was pushed by myself when I was trying to rank for “gaming podcast” in google, which I successfully got on page-1 results. I’m in every podcast directory I could find on the Net and on message forums about podcasts and podcasting. The result is my podcast page is better ranked than the entire site.

This can also happen if you write a really great article that ends up high on the organic search charts, even by accident, and gets linked from all over the Net. Most bloggers link to your article not your homepage and that may lead our article to having higher weight than your site itself. Now, consider what the impact would be if you cross referenced other related articles on your site in the content. Google will see it and flow some of the weight down to the related articles, hopefully giving them a bit more weight than they would have had without the internal link.

As a result you may get a bit more weight on less popular articles by linking highly popular articles to them on purpose but with a reason. Linking to an unrelated piece of content or site with unrelated relevance may not do what you want. What I tend to do is think about my content and see if I can put some forethought into what I may be able to link to in my own site before I even start writing.

Once you start to think about ways to exploit your own material you’ll grow in the habit of doing it with less thought. Remember: don’t link the hell out of the article so it glows with anchors tags!

Link smart, link often, but don’t be annoying to the reader.

The one I’ve used for most of my sites is 103bees.com. It focuses on natural search traffic and builds simple bar graphs to show you what you’ve got for traffic now and allows you to see your referrals against your organic searches. It will enumerate a list of all your recent search hits, the time they arrived and builds keyword lists and search engine page results so you can analyze your daily traffic and make preemptive strikes for content.

103bees is an indispensable tool for search engine optimization (SEO) and internet marketing – everything you need to know about your search engine traffic in one place!

The first appealing feature? It’s free. You can sign up for an account immediately, add the code to your site and start seeing users arriving via search. Then you can analyze what the landing pages, build a tag cloud of your keywords, see a total aggregate of all your configured sites together (I’ve got over four sites configured in mine).

I’m not a 103bees spokesperson but I’m impressed that the site stays up 24-hours a day and gives me real time statistics for no cost to me. I might as well return the favor and tell folks why it’s so damn awesome. Take a look at some of their screenshots if you’re afraid to sign up for a free account right now.

I use 103bees during the day and google analytics before night to run some in-depth analysis against my site(s). 103bee’s real-time data means I can see what people are arriving for with query keywords now and react immediately by providing content based around the keywords to rank a bit higher in them.

They do have a humorous breakdown of the most popular searches on the Internet right now along with the all-time most popular keywords–funny stuff.

I understand Google Analytics is free but when it comes to real-time statistics Google doesn’t cut it. Having a few free SEO tools in your hands will give you far more power to understand all the dimensions of your website without having to rely on guess work.

A podcast requires very little storage, can be produced in mono and vary in total length. Many of my podcasts range from 20MB to 55MB in size for an hour or more of content. Podcasting does require a few key ingredients to make a professional sounding blog:

• Patience
• Practice
• Recording Software
• Recording Hardware
• Post Production
• A Neat Song

You can practice podcasting with friends on Skype to get a handle on everyones personality and prepare to lay down 30 minutes of conversation or create the recording alone. You’ll need some patience if you’re new to recording and you’ll need to spend some cash (usually) to get a microphone and some software for mixing and recording.

A cheap headset, free software like Audacity and some recording hardware (probably the PC or Macintosh you’re more than likely reading this on will do) and you’re ready to start. You can publicize your podcast on iTunes, of course, and a number of podcasting directories around the Web, all which are free!

The details of podcasting is beyond the scope of this article, but you can contact me if you want to know how I do it. The advantages of podcasting can be one of satisfaction as you build an audience or one of personalization. What better way to get returning visitors than to connect with them at a more personal, audio, level.

A website is just a jumble of text while a podcast is a totally different experience. You can share your tone, your personality and life experiences in your audio show which may not translate well to words or could become boring to read.

Develop some show notes and put it into vocal words and get in touch with your viewers from another angle. You can write your show notes after each episode (for additional SEO tactics and content) or you can follow up on what you’ve talked about in the podcast within follow-up articles.

As your podcasting, by yourself or with others, you may come up with other ideas that you can write up in editorials. The podcast may be a vehicle to get your juices flowing for quality content so you can go to town as a blogger. You’ll have to set aside some time for podcasting and post-production so only consider this avenue if you’re serious about putting in some time and effort.

My 1-hour podcast takes about 2-hours to post-produce, add intro/outro sounds and publish on an RSS feed for directories (and iTunes) to pickup. I also rely on libsyn for one of my podcasts because it has a high bandwidth storage solution for a cheap price (USD $10.00 a month) and pretty graphs. The only issue I have with libsyn is their inability to keep their statistic tracking engine online and running, when it is running the statistics are well composed and easy to understand.

A blog is a great start and will develop an audience and a podcast would complement it and bring a third dimension to your writings and personality. People can get to know you for who you are and keep your website and agenda on their minds while at work, at home, commuting or relaxing before bed.

Podcasting can be a great tool to build a loyal fan base along with helping to build your googles organic searches regarding your site. Do a search for gaming podcast or drinking podcast and you’ll see mine on page one. Why? Podcasting isn’t big enough to be too challenging to rank for in google results if you try hard enough – every episode submission is potential google search content.