Archive for August, 2008

Posted on August 29, 2008 - by Kelly Verge

67 Blogs with Top Commentator Plugin and Pagerank

To continue on the theme I started yesterday, today I’m posting a link to a list of blogs with pagerank that have the Top Commentator plugin installed.

What this plugin means for you is that if you comment regularly enough, you can earn a sitewide backlink on a blog with pagerank – and some of the juice will be passed on to you.

Yan at Thou Shall Blog compiles just such a list. It’s not definitive, but it’s a good start, and he will add any PR blogs that his readers find. Here’s the link: High PR Blogs with Top Commentator.

As I’ve said before, it’s important to leave relevant and meaningful comments.

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Posted on August 29, 2008 - by Kelly Verge

More Backlinks With DoFollow, Top Commenter, and CommentLuv

I’m always on the lookout for new or easier ways to find sources for backlinks. One somewhat standard method of gaining backlinks is to comment on blogs where they don’t have nofollow set on their comments (although as I’ve said, I wouldn’t be too hasty in discounting nofollow links, either).

Anyway, I found a small but growing search engine that will give you a list of blogs that are dofollow as well as those who use either the Top Commenter plugin or the CommentLuv plugin for Wordpress.

Top Commenter is often used to give a prominent backlink for the people with the most comments in a given period. It’s designed to encourage repeat comments by rewarding them with backlinks. Often this plugin will be enabled even when the link within the comment is nofollow.

CommentLuv inserts a link to your latest blog post in the bottom of your comment.

While it’s possible to build a Google search to look for these things, it’s often easier to just bookmark a site and use it instead of remembering the syntax for a search string.

The site is called DoFollow Diver and it’s at http://linkbuildingbible.com/dofollowdiver/.

Please remember – if a blog owner has turned off nofollow, they are making an effort to help us with our promotion. The only thing we have to do in return is to make real comments to their blog posts. Please don’t leave spammy comments such as “nice post” or such. Eventually this type of comment might make a blog owner rethink their decision to give backlinks, and this would hurt all of us.

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Posted on August 22, 2008 - by Kelly Verge

Top 25 Linkbuilding Tricks

I’m always on the lookout for new ideas on building quality backlinks, Yesterday on Search Engine Genie, AlenJoe posted his top 25 tricks to getting backlinks.

While many of the ideas weren’t new, and some of my favorites aren’t listed, it’s still a good resource for those who are looking for ways to build backlinks.

Who knows… If I keep doing research on this, I might be able to do a 101 Top Linkbuilding Tricks post soon.

Here’s the link: Best 25 Tricks on Link Building

Tags: backlinks

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Posted on August 16, 2008 - by Kelly Verge

Use Google to Beat Google

It’s all about authority.

The goal is to find a site that Google views as an authority and then have that site share some of that authority through back links. Of course, the context of the link has weight, too, but the authority of the site has a great deal of importance.

Last night I found a resource that helps speed up the search for sources of back links – specifically links from gov and edu pages. Since Google considers these pages significant when it comes to establishing authority, any help along these lines is really beneficial.

The resource is a cheat sheet with many different search engine queries. If you plug away for just a little while using different combinations, you’re bound to find a source of an incoming link.

Here’s a link to the download page…

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Posted on August 15, 2008 - by Kelly Verge

A Pretty Woman Shows Why Testing is Critical

A bank in South Africa was doing some pretty extensive testing on a direct-mail campaign. They tested different offers (interest rates) as well as testing other things such as images within the ads.

They found that placing a picture of an attractive woman had nearly the same effect with men as lowering the interest rate by 5%! There was no change with women.

This means that it’s worth testing response both with and without a picture of a pretty face. You won’t know until you test.

Here’s the full article: Neuromarketing – A Pretty Woman Beats a Good Loan Deal

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Posted on August 14, 2008 - by Kelly Verge

30DC – How to Activate On-Page SEO Plugin

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Posted on August 14, 2008 - by Kelly Verge

Follow Links -vs- No-Follow Links

Nearly everywhere you look, people talk about the need for finding blogs and/or forums that have follow links (in other words, sites that have not turned on nofollow).

However, I’ve recently read that nofollow links are not as useless with Google as they were once thought. It appears that if your site is already indexed, a nofollow link will still count as a link with Google, albeit with somewhat less weight.

Today I got a nofollow link on an .edu site for one of my pages. Since that’s the only potential .edu link (unless I get really lucky with this brand-new site), I’ll keep an eye on it to see if I get .edu credit. I’ll post the results here as they happen.

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Posted on August 6, 2008 - by Kelly Verge

30DC “No Promotion Zone” – Yeah, Right…

I realize this point of view might not be popular, but it’s bothering me, so I’m throwing it out there.

Each year, Ed Dale makes a point of saying that the Thirty Day Challenge is a month free of all promotions. They use the month to teach, and the other 11 months to sell.

I’ve had no problem with the other 11 months because the teaching has really be excellent.

By the time this challenge is over, I might be just as pleased with the content. Honestly, I don’t even mind the promotion that’s going on. However, I think they’ve really hurt their credibility by pushing the ideas of “free” and “promotion-free” during the pre-season and early videos – especially considering the non-stop barrage of affiliate “trials” and offers they’re pushing at us.

While it is possible to do this year’s challenge without paying a dime, most of the attention, instruction and hype has been given to three paid solutions.

• First, there’s Market Samurai. From what we’ve used so far, it’s a great tool and well worth the eventual purchase price (supposedly $67 for 30DC members). To be fair, they did also have videos showing how to manually do everything that MS does, but there was a great deal of hype and excitement surrounding Market Samurai (again, I think the excitement is deserved, but it’s still promotion).
• Next, there was Hostgator. They’re making at least $125 per signup through their affiliate link. This isn’t just some little thing to help defray the costs of putting on the training. It was a soft-sell, but selling is selling.I wonder just how many 30DC’ers purchased this hosting. They offer a free solution, but there’s even promotion happening with that (see below).
• Finally (well… there’s still another 25 days to go), there is Wordpress Direct. For free, you get a 30 day trial, during which you can create 3 blogs – all hosted with WD.For $1 (for the first month), you can have 12 blogs, and will be billed at $37+ per month after that. The $1 is a no-brainer – except that many people will forget to cancel or won’t be able to figure out how to cancel, etc. All of today’s videos were about Wordpress Direct. Ed hyped this from before day one. How many times in the nightly shows did he hold up six fingers implying something great was coming on day six?I feel for the brand new people. They didn’t even show any other way of accomplishing today’s tasks.Wordpress Direct is basically a front end for Wordpress installations. They have a built-in template directory as well as a suite of pre-installed plug-ins. For a higher subscription ($197+), you will be able to use some auto-content features, but short of that, it’s just Wordpress.Any experienced Wordpress user could do every thing that WD is doing for us in this challenge. It’s a shame that they are pushing this solution (with a healthy recurring commission) without also teaching a truly free method of doing the same tasks.

I’m kind of embarrassed that I pointed people to this year’s Thirty Day Challenge. I made a big deal about the idea that they might sell to us after it was over, but this month was all about training. They’ve let me (us) down.

“There is no cost for awesomeness,” indeed.

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Posted on August 1, 2008 - by Kelly Verge

30DC Starts Today!

Today is the start of this year’s Thirty Day Challenge.

Last year Ed Dale and crew taught some pretty cool tricks, and from what I’ve seen in the pre-season, this year promises even more of the same.

For example, all 30DC participants will get 40 days of access to MarketSamurai – although it’s still in closed beta, it looks to be a really cool and powerful tool.

This year’s challenge is to make $1 by the end of August. It seems pretty weak for a goal, but it’s something that anyone should easily attain if they stick with the program for the entire 30 days.

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