A discussion of earning with Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers

If you’re just starting out in the publishing and webmastering business of if you’re a seasoned professional, two of the hardest things to accomplish are building solid backlinks to your website and getting more traffic to your website. Many experienced professionals will all agree on one particular activity that will not only accomplish both of the aformentioned necessities, but it will provide you with wealth of information and can be a really fun way to promote your websites. The activity I’m talking about is posting and being active on public discussion forums. While there are numerous forums out there and there are new ones popping up everyday, the purpose of this article is to highlight the best forums for webmasters in regards to building solid backlinks and driving traffic to your site. Below are listed, in my opinion, the top 10 forums for webmasters because they all offer signatures that do not have the “nofollow” tag on the links and they all pass “link juice” because they are well indexed by the search engines. Please note, part of getting a good response from forums includes being a constructive member of the community, so before I list the forums, I’ll give a short list of do’s and don’t regarding behaviour in these online communities.

The Do’s

• Do be friendly, remember the old adage “You can attract more flies with honey”
• Do be helpful and share your knowledge, you’ll be suprised how people take to helpful posters
• Be positive. If you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything at all.
• Stay on topic with discussions and don’t lead them astray.
• Make friends with people and answer all non-spam PM’s (private messages)

The Dont’s

• Don’t join a forum and immediately start posting links to your site.
• Don’t spam forums with junk posts only to get your links in
• Don’t be negative and/or take things personal
• Don’t send spam PM’s (private messages)
• Don’t offend the moderators or owners of a forum you’re on

Now that we’ve gone through some of the basic Do’s and Dont’s of forum ettiquite, on to the list of my top 10 favorite forums.

Top 10 Discussion Forums

• #1 DigitalPoint - Hands down, DigitalPoint is the best Webmaster Forum out there.
• #2 SitePoint - Sitepoint is another great Webmaster Forum.
• #3 V7 Networks - V7 is a fantastic resource and fun place to post.
• #4 Code4Gold Forums - Allows the biggest signatures.
• #5 Webmaster-Talk - Another new forum but growwing rapidly.
• #6 BloggerTalk - For bloggers, passes “link juice”.
• #7 5StarAffiliatePrograms - One of my personal favorites.
• #8 Warrior Forum - A top notch marketing forum.
• #9 Webmasters Help - Another new forum that shows potential.
• #10 Searchen Forums - This one throws nice “link juice”.

If you’re not taking full advantage of Discussion Forums, you’re missing out on one of the greatest tools for promotion. There’s not a successful webmaster out there who hasn’t, at one time or another, utilized forums as a tool for promotion. If you’re the shy type, the great thing about forums is that nobody really knows who you are, so there’s nothing to be worried about, you don’t have to be Britney Spears to get attention, all you have to do is be yourself and get involved in the discussions. Take the plunge and you’ll be glad you did !!!

Cheers,
Dave

         

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Just in time for Halloween, the internet has had it’s first widespread massacre and coming back from battle is the victorious Google, carrying it’s opponent’s head on a stake, dragging the corpse of the fallen SEO (Search Engine Optimization) through the mud.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your monitors, for it is with great sorrow we mourn our fallen comrade. While SEO’s death may not be apparent to the omnipotent network bloggers and marketing gurus who routinely game the search engines to stuff their pockets full of more affiliate cash, it is painfully obvious the peon webmasters and bloggers that we are no longer considered a contributing factor in the internet’s development.

In a recent turn of events, B5Media has convinced Google to fix their network blogs Pagerank. I guess you have to be a network blogger and hooked up with B5Media to get anything done when your blog or website gets slapped by Google. Apparently several of B5Media’s network blogs were bushwhacked with Pagerank penalties in the recent update but Brian Clark at copyblogger.com is reporting that after one of the B5Media representatives got on the phone with Google, his site’s Pagerank, which had been reduced to PR4 from PR6 has been re-adjusted to a PR7. It also appears that Darren Rowse’s problogger.com has also been restored to PR6 from the Google beatdown to PR4. It must be nice to have friends on the inside of Google to get them to take notice of your site and personally make changes to it’s Pagerank. Unfortunately, this is not going to sit well with the scores of non-network bloggers who have been unfairly penalized and for all the other webmasters who were penalized in this update.

Victor at Mobile Marketing Watch is one of the non-network bloggers caught up in Google’s frenzy to exterminate paid-links, and his article Google Dinged My PageRank gives another side to the story, although he doesn’t have the power of B5Media to re-adjust his Pagerank.

Hamlet Batista has published an excellent, in-depth article PageRank: Caught in the paid-link crossfire that details the computation of Pagerank and the trickle down economics that govern Google’s alogorithm for applying it to websites.

SEOBook’s Aaron Wall speaks up here regarding Google Pagerank :

Since Google is demoting PageRank’s viability as a site’s global authority score perhaps this is a time for Yahoo to bring back WebRank, or Ask to launch something like CommunityRank. The Google-webmaster relationship is fraying. This presents an opportunity for whoever wants to take it.

In my opinion, I really don’t think Google Pagerank matters anymore and for the most part Google search is irrelevant for getting high quality traffic to your blog or site. Most webmasters have already learned that being active in forums and commenting on high quality blogs brings them more high quality traffic and returning traffic than Google or Yahoo ever will turn you. Plus 90% of search engine traffic will “bounce” at a much higher rate than traffic gained from effective social networking.

Whatever Google’s reasoning for continually attacking the webmaster community, it will eventually backfire on them because in all truth and reality, the whole text-link selling and web-directory niche markets arose specifically due to Google’s Pagerank. It strikes me as odd that a multi-billion dollar company who is raking the money in with their overvalued stock will actually cut the throats of the community that put them on the map.

SEO is dead, Google killed it, long live Social Networking.

         

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We’re a little more than halfway through the month of October and once again, it’s been a very busy month. The social networks and blogosphere have been providing a plethora of topics and content to blog about. Here’s just a few of the most popular stories from around the web.

Google Acquires Jaiku
Mashable social Networking News has asked the question, Breaking: Google Acquires Jaiku, Why Not Twitter? and from Jaiku’s site We’re Joining Google. Now the multi-million dollar question, Why the heck would Google even be interested in these seemingly “junk technology” sites? It looks like the Web 2.0 revolution is going to make the dot com implosion of the late 90’s look like a triple decker red herring sandwich.

Speaking of Twitter - Blogger Pays his Rent using Twitter
Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick has recently posting the interesting article Twitter is Paying My Rent. I have to admit, I just don’t see anything useful in Twitter, but if this guy is paying his rent using it, more power to him. I just wish I could figure out how to use Twitter for anything useful? It just seems like a big waste of time to me, but maybe the attitude of “Time is Money” doesn’t apply to the internet and text-messaging generation.

MSNBC Acquires Newsvive
One of the most innovative social news sites, and a personal favorite of mine, Newsvine, was acquired by MSNBC. According to Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News, Newsvine will remain a stand-alone site with MSNBC providing technology resources. The complete story is avaliable here : MSNBC Interactive News Acquires Newsvine

Yahoo Assumes Control of MyBlogLog
The rumours have been flying since early 2007 that Yahoo had acquired the blogger community MyBlogLog. The rumours have finally been solidified with Yahoo recently co-branding the MyBlogLog site and now requiring a Yahoo Id to access the service. This acquisition and subsequent co-branding has seen bloggers across the blogosphere removing the MyBlogLog widget from their sites. We’ve removed the widgets from all of our blogs in solidarity. After all, who wants to be passing the “link juice” to a Yahoo owned company ?

John Chow Reaches a New Milestone
One of my favorite bloggers, the quintessential John Chow, has announced New Blog Milestone - 10,000 RSS Readers. Congratulations to John Chow and here’s looking forward to the next big milestone, the 100K mark.

         

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As far as “Social News” websites go, Newsvine is by far the most professionally designed, intuitive and elegant website in the plethora of available communities. Whereas Digg is by far the most popular and driven by it’s fanatical Linux and Macintosh user base, Reddit is designed for simplicity and is easy to load in your browser, NewVine is the best looking, slickest and most professional of all the Social News/Social Bookmarking sites. Newsvine has a significant number of enhancments that make the interface completely customizable for the end user. The layout is organized and has dynamic features which make Newsvine a truly unique content aggregator. Here is a basic screenshot of the Newsvine interface:

I particularly like the “Newsvine live” feature on the right hand side that scrolls the incoming stories. The move rather quickly but there is always something interesting scrolling past every few minutes. The site allows users to close panels, arrange them how you want and totally customize the interface. I’ve submitted a few stories to Newsvine recently and I did get a decent amount hits, not as many as Reddit or Digg, but it was still worth the half a minute it took to submit.

As with most Social News or Social Bookmarking sites, members can submit sites, vote or comment on articles, add friends to their profile, join groups and other social activities. Members create and maintain their own Newsvine column by writing articles or just pointing to existing ones. One of the most interesting aspects of Newsvine is that you actually get paid for your article submissions. Here’s how it works:

Now that’s a real twist and a leg up on competitors like Digg, Reddit and Fark.

Drop by Newsvine and check it out.

http://www.newsvine.com

If you’d like to discuss Newsvine, here’s a new forum thread I created for discussing it.

NewsVine - Elegant Social Bookmark and News Site

Happy Publishing.

         

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