Archive for July, 2009

Posted on July 29, 2009 - by Kelly Verge

Free Niche-related WordPress Theme Pack

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This morning I created a WordPress theme for a new niche site.

I thought it might be of use to some of my readers so I’ve packaged a few different versions of the theme.  In addition to the header shown to the left, there’s a header for the following themes:  pets, couples, medical/health, and a blank header to be used with your own image.

Enjoy!

“Thoughtful” WordPress theme – thoughtful.zip

Posted on July 28, 2009 - by Kelly Verge

SeNuke Now Builds Linkwheels With One Click!

Linkwheels can be very powerful tools for building authority with the search engines.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, each site has a backlink to your main site, but each also contains a link to the next spoke on the wheel. Some linkwheel designs also include patterns of crosslinks across the wheel, but the most basic (pictured to the left) is also the least likely to be penalized as a linking scheme – especially with larger wheels.

The inter-linking passes a bit of link juice from each spoke back to the hub. Since each spoke is interlinked, a bit of link juice is also passed to each spoke, which increases the overall effectiveness of the whole wheel.

Today SeNuke added a “Web 2.0 Profile” module to their product. Really it’s just a means of building linkwheels using profile pages on social sites. Here’s how it works:

• You enter 3 lines of information, then press “start.” The software creates accounts at all of the sites you’ve selected (including automatic captcha solving).
• Next, press one button to automatically handle the verification emails for all of the new accounts.
• Next, enter the URL you want to be the hub of your new linkwheel, press “go,” and it builds the wheel, inter-linking each spoke.
• Finally, press one more button to ping each of the new spokes so that the search engines find them.

As released this module contains 490 sites:

1 PR 8 domain
9 PR 7 domains
48 PR 6 domains
87 PR 5 domains
70 PR 4 domains
114 PR 3 domains
88 PR 2 domains
73 PR 1 domains

(Please note that the PR of the main site does not directly carry over to your profile pages, but some of the authority is passed down.)

The best part about this specific technique is that since the pages are built on profile pages, unless abused by a user, the pages aren’t spammy or obtrusive. Really, the whole software package is like that. When used in a thoughtful manner, SeNuke just makes it easy to do the backlinking you should already be doing for your sites.

This new addition to the SeNuke software shows just how committed Areeb is to making SeNuke the best piece of link-building software on the market. He could have easily make this module a stand-alone product and sold it to his existing customer base. Instead, each time he adds a new module, he’s building value to an already powerful software suite.

If you can’t tell, I’m impressed.

Click here to try out SeNuke for free.

(Areeb does a much better job of updating the software than he does with updating the sales page. The newest features aren’t mentioned, but when you sign up for the free trial you’ll have full access to all of the program’s latest features.)

Posted on July 27, 2009 - by Kelly Verge

Top Ten Tools to Track Twitter Trends

Watching the trends on Twitter can be a good way to do real-time market research. These trends can also help spot the hottest news stories – those that have “viral potential.”

Even for the average Twitter user, these hot trends often point out the coolest subjects.

There are lots of tools that can help you stay on top of the latest trends on Twitter without needing to be glued to Twitter all day. Here are some of my favorites:

1. Twitter Search – It’s simple. On the other hand it displays the top 10 topics real-time in a basic display. Additionally, if you click on the tiny link for “Advanced Search,” you can do some pretty cool things.
2. Tweetmeme – This site shows which URL’s (web pages) are being tweeted the most. If you’re interested in staying on top of the hottest stories or news, this site might be for you.
3. Twitterfall – This strangely hypnotic site shows the real-time tweets that contain the selected trending phrase or your search phrase.
4. Trendyobot – Follow this bot within Twitter and he’ll send you the latest trends as the start happening.
5. #hashtags – This site tracks trending hashtags. Hashtags are a way of being involved in a wider conversation than with “regular” tweets.
6. Twitt(url)y – This is another site that tracks the most tweeted URL’s. They present the information in a different format than Tweetmeme, so use whichever one you like best.
7. Monitter – This site also tracks either the hottest trends or your specific search terms, but it also has a widget you can place on your website.
8. Twist – Pretty cool Twitter trend site that displays a graph of the trend.
9. Retweet Radar – This site shows the topics that are retweeted (RT) the most on Twitter. The topics are displayed in a cloud format. They also show the people and URL’s that are retweeted the most.
10. Tweetizen – Shows Twitter trending topics and allows you to only show trends in areas that interest you.
11. TweetGrid – While this site doesn’t give you the trending topics, I’ve included it as #11 because it’s a useful search tool.

If you know of a cool Twitter trending tool or site that I haven’t listed, place a link to it in a comment so that I can check it out, too.

Posted on July 19, 2009 - by Kent Verge

Today’s the Day!

Are you frustrated at how long it’s taking to find success? It’s easy to feel that way when you’ve tried what others say work but don’t seem to find the key. The easy answer is to quit and try something else, but the easy path isn’t always the right one.

Let me tell you a little story about a man named Mel.

Mel was a scuba diver in the 50′s and 60′s back when the sport was very young. In fact, he opened the first dive shop in the world in California and had some huge success. Over the course of several recreational dive trips to the Caribbean, Mel became intrigued with the idea of finding treasure in the many shipwrecks in the area.

In 1962, Mel joined forces with another treasure hunter to search for a group of ships that wrecked off of the coast of Florida way back in 1715. Since his partner was funding the operation, Mel agreed to work, along with a small team of divers, for a year without pay for 50% of whatever they found.  Every morning before making their dives, Mel would tell the crew, “Today’s the day!” Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go as planned. Days turned into months and they didn’t find anything.

On the 360th day of the year, Mel once again said, “Today’s the day!”

That day they were trying out a new contraption that used the ship’s propellers to push clear ocean water from the surface down to the bottom where the divers where working. The idea was that the clear water would push away the murky water from caused by their digging. As an unintended side effect, the blast of water dug a hole in the ocean floor that revealed 1,033 gold coins! Today was in fact the day! Mel later said of the event, “Once you have seen the ocean bottom paved with gold, you’ll never forget it!”

After almost a year of searching, Mel and his team found the 1715 fleet which they continued to salvage over the next ten years. But that’s not the end of Mel’s story.

In 1969, winter storms off of the east coast of Florida prompted Mel and his team to shift their efforts to searching for a new wreck in the waters off of the Florida Keys. This ship was the holy grail of treasure ships: the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha. The Atocha sank off of the coast of Florida in 1622 with a cargo of 40 tons of gold and silver. This was a prize worthy of a real treasure hunt!

So Mel and his team began their search, and again, Mel would begin each day by saying, “Today’s the day!”

And they searched…
For eleven years…
Then, in 1980, Mel found another staggering treasure in the Keys. Although it wasn’t the Atocha, he found one of her sister ships — the Santa Margarita — that was sunk in the same storm. This find netted Mel and the team more than $40 million in gold and treasures. Although this was a find of historic proportions, Mel wasn’t satisfied. He’d been searching for the Atocha for years and felt like it was just outside of his grasp. So they continued searching.

Five years later, July 20, 1985 started like any one of the previous  5,400: “Today’s the day!”
Indeed it was.
That day Mel and his team found what his son called “the Mother Lode.” After fifteen years of searching, Mel Fisher found a shipwreck containing stacks of silver bars, chests of silver coins, gold, jewels, and thousands of other unique artifacts. One of the divers described it as a reef twenty-five to thirty feet long and five to six feet wide, made up of silver bars. They had finally found the resting place of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha. This find was the richest treasure find since the opening of King Tut’s tomb. They continue to dig up emeralds and other artifacts from the wreck to this day. The total value is over $450 million and continues to grow.

After fifteen years of searching and frustration, Mel Fisher finally found the success he knew was there all along. What made Mel different from all of the others who searched before him?

He never gave up.
So when you find yourself getting frustrated, remember the story of Mel Fisher. Maybe the next article you write won’t be a home run. Maybe your Squidoo lens won’t make any sales. Perhaps that PPC ad is just a waste of money after all.

Or, perhaps today’s the day…

Posted on July 9, 2009 - by Kelly Verge

How to Quickly Ping Any Open Page in Seconds

Over on the Warrior Forum Tom Brite just posted a quick tip that’s worth sharing.

He describes how to use a simple bookmark/favorite to ping new or updated sites.  It could also be used to ping a blog after you make a comment for a backlink so that it will be crawled more quickly.

Take a look at the post here and let me know what you think.