Archive for the 'Miscellaneous' Category
A little while ago I explained how I needed to change my strategy and reduce the posting frequency on this blog. An idea that I toyed with was inviting guest posters so I ran a poll in that blog post.
The most important statistic is the number of people who didn’t vote at all. Out of over 2000 subscribers, less than 100 voted so from that I can conclude that the majority of my readers really don’t mind if I have guest posters or not. The poll ran pretty much neck in neck for about a week and then finally the “yes” vote managed to just about pull ahead.
My personal feeling is that a few select guest posts could be a welcome change but I would not want to overuse them. I had originally suggested a weekly slot which I now think would be too much. I will use no more than two guest posts per month.
So, the purpose of this post then is to invite those of you who wish to guest post to submit your work to me. I’ll need to lay down a few guidelines:
Subject Matter
As this is a personal blog branded to my name, I need to make sure that any opinions expressed are my own. Even though every guest post will be properly credited to to the author and linked to his site, many readers miss this and still see the guest post as having come from the blog owner. Therefore, I’ll ask that the posts be guides, resources etc and not opinions. And I don’t want to see “10 top tips for a killer sales letter” :-)
Posts should stick within the topics that I cover here, that is generally Internet Marketing, Social Media and blogging. I’ll be particularly interested in posts about Social Media as that is a topic of growing interest for me.
Post Quality
This is a hard one to pin down but I’m not going to publish anything that I feel doesn’t add value for my readers. I see a lot of posts around the blogosphere which are well written and reasonably informative yet they are just “blah”. Its rather difficult to explain. A good post should enrich the reader in some way - teach him something, spur him into action, make him think etc. Post quality is a very subjective matter so to cover my butt I reserve the right to reject anything I don’t like for any reason whatsoever! However, if I don’t like your post I’ll try and tell you why.
Submission Details
Just email me via the contact form. You can either send me your complete post or just shoot me an idea. Either way, I won’t publish anything without reading it first and I will always write back and tell you if I’d like to use it. I’ll maintain a list of guest posts and I’ll publish them in accordance with what seems most relevant at the time. I will always contact you before I publish your work.
Please make sure you give me your full name, the title of the post and also a link to a site that you would like to have promoted in the post. Also, feel free to send me a short bio or some kind of introduction that I can add at the beginning to encourage readers to click through to your site.
If you are somebody who has emailed me about guest posting in the past then you can probably expect an email from me over the next week or two as I am going to be trawling through my email archives to contact those people - I’ll point them at this post.
Only 6 links this week but there is some seriously meaty content in this lot!
The Poor Man’s Product Launch Formula - For those of you who follow the ‘bigger’ guys out there, you will know that Jeff Walker launched version 2.0 of his famous Product Launch Formula this week. I tried to buy it and had issues with their order form which they are still trying to resolve for me. In the meantime, Dr Mani has put together a ‘poor mans’ version as a blog post. Great stuff and essential reading for those who don’t have a spare $2k to spend on Jeff’s version.
25 Paths To An Insanely Popular Blog - Skellie sure likes to put together some killer resource posts and this is a superb one. Many of us like to blog for popularity (me included) and not just for money. Skellie shows us 25 different ways in which we can become popular, including models such as being talkative! Guess who she showcased for that model? Ahem, yes I know I talk to much… keeping it to 6 links this week ok! :-)
This Is One Virus You NEED To Catch - Viral videos that is… Ryan Shamus has put together a wonderfully informative post about what viral videos are, how they can help you, and how to make them, share them and market them. I’m just starting to experiment with video, I shall be returning to this post a lot in the coming weeks.
Should I Change My Website Into a Blog? - Darren Rowse is the expert on blogging so he is certainly fit to answer this question. In my opinion too many people start blogs. I have talked about the benefits of static sites over blogs many times, especially for small niches that you want to monetize simply. This post is a great way to evaluate whether or not a blog is right for your project.
New Blogging Experiment Owner Lays It Out There - It came as a big shock to me earlier this week when Ben Cook of Blogging Experiment announced that he was selling up before his year was over. However I really like the new owner Max Davis and this blog is staying in my feed reader. This is his introductory post.
200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter - You ARE on Twitter right? If you’re still having doubts about Twitter then read my guide on it and then hop on over to this post from Marketing Pilgrim and start following some of the big names in the Internet Marketing world. And of course, you’re following me right? :-)
I hope you’ve all had a nice Easter break, and don’t forget if you want a chance to win my StumbleUpon course the Easter Egg Hunt is still open until tomorrow. Lots of juicy links for you this week:
Sometimes You Have to Reinvent the Wheel - Yaro Starak talks about the process of taking somebody else’s system and trying to replicate what they do in order to enjoy the same level of success. This is the basis for many products in the Internet Marketing niche and yet it’s not as simple as that otherwise everybody who bought such a product would be rich right? Yaro examines the reasons why people fail despite following a proven system and offers up some solutions.
Only the First Anchor Text Counts - Internal linking using anchor text is a way of boosting rankings for your own pages. This post from SEOMoz shows the results of some Google experimentation when there are multiple links to the same url on one page.
How to Increase PageRank and Keyword Authority - Courtney Tuttle is proving to be quite an SEO expert. In this post he explains the difference between PR and keyword authority and shows how to boost them to increase search engine rankings.
Adding Sidebars to WordPress Themes - This is part of a new weekly series about WordPress on Blogging Experiment. This technical post demonstrates how to add sidebars to a WordPress theme.
The Aweber Guide for Affiliate Marketers - This is a very long and in-depth post from Uber Affiliate showing how to use the autoresponder software Aweber in your affiliate marketing campaigns. I’ll be re-visiting this post once I get my email course up and running.
8 Types of RSS Subscribers Explained, Part 1 - Not all RSS subscribers are the same and in this post Wayne Liew shows us the various reasons that people subscribe and how that affects their value to the blogger.
The Triangle Strategy - How to Optimize Efficiently - This confusingly titled post from Patrick of Piggy Bank Pie is actually a very neat way to focus your efforts with Social Media.
How to Breathe Life Back Into Your Blog - Dee Stewart guest posting at ProBlogger offers some advice for bloggers who may be thinking about quitting their blogging efforts. In particular she shows how to get a lot of inspiration by reading back through old blog comments.
Photo by lyle58
This weekend is Easter so I thought I’d do something fun! I’m creating an Easter Egg Hunt on this blog! I have hidden 30 easter eggs throughout the blog and your job is to find as many of them as you can! Every egg that you find gets you entries in the competition. I’ll select 10 winners at random to win a copy of my StumbleUpon traffic course once is it released.
UPDATE - This contest is now closed.
The Eggs
I have 5 different eggs and I will be placing 6 of each throughout the blog. Here is what they look like:
| Egg #1 |
Egg #2 |
Egg #3 |
Egg #4 |
Egg #5 |
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All 30 eggs have now been hidden so the hunt is on - get hunting!
How to Enter
There are two ways to enter this competition depending on whether or not you are a blogger. If you have a blog (it doesn’t matter how small) then you can write a post about this competition and link to all of the pages & posts on my blog on which you found the eggs. Every egg that you find and link to will get you five entries into the competition. So if you find all 30, thats 150 entries for you.
I don’t want to exclude non-bloggers so for those of who don’t have a blog you can enter via email instead. Just send me a mail with all the URL’s on which you found eggs and each one will count as one entry.
Not Started a Blog Yet?
I imagine that most of you reading this do have a blog of some sort but if not, this might be a good time to start one! My free WordPress ebook is geared towards building static niche sites but it tells you everything you need to know about the technicalities of creating a WordPress blog, what plugins to install, how to back it up, how to format your post links and so on.
If you decide to start a blog on the strength of this post, blog about this competition and mention why you’ve started the blog and I’ll throw in an extra 30 entries into the competition for you! That’s as many as you could get if you emailed me with all 30 URL’s so its worth your while doing it!
Competition Rules
All 30 eggs will be cunningly hidden by midnight Thursday 20th March UK time but you can get a head start and begin looking for them now as 10 have already been hidden. The competition will run until Tuesday 25th March 9am UK time - that gives you the whole of the Easter holiday period to find all of the eggs.
Each person can only enter once but the more eggs you find, the more chances you have to win. The maximum number of entries you could gain would be 180 - for starting a new blog (30 entries) plus finding all 30 eggs and blogging about them (150 entries). Only one copy of the StumbleUpon course can be won by each person.
It will also take me a couple of days to gather all of the entries together so the winners will be announced a few days after the closing date.
UPDATE - This contest is now closed.
Strange, for the first time in ages I’ve kept on top of my blog reading and yet I’ve not saved that many links this week. Oh well, here they are…
12 CPM Alternatives for Adsense - We’re always told not to rely too much on one source of revenue and yet a lot of people still earn the majority of their income from AdSense. Darren from ProBlogger presents 12 alternatives for you to try out.
41 Blog Success Tips From 10 Years of Blogging - Chris Garrett has been blogging for 10 years! Wow, I honestly didn’t even know blogs had been around that long! In this post he shares his insights in the form of 41 practical tips that you can put to use today.
How To: Hiding Your Affiliate Links - On this blog I don’t bother hiding affiliate links as this is a make money online blog so it seems redundant to do so. However for niche sites it is a practice that I would consider. Alex from Net-Entrepreneur shares several methods of doing it, none of which cost any money.
Stop Existing and Start Living an Amazing Life - I absolutely loved this post from Christine OKelly the Self Made Chick, it completely resonated with everything I believe in. Easily the best post I have read all week. Read it now.
Free 115 Page Tutorial on Marketing to Women - (CommentLuv) This is a rather tongue-in-cheek poke at people who don’t really understand women from Sonia of Remarkable Communication. It had me laughing out loud in several places. Women - read it and laugh. Men - read it and take note!
Starting a Blog That Isn’t a Time Sucking Money Pit - This is an absolute whopper of a post (and you guys think I write long posts!) by Courtney Tuttle that explains why so many blogs just suck our time and money and shows us how to start one that doesn’t do that.
25 New and Different Ways to Use WordPressMU - (CommentLuv) I haven’t talked about WordPressMU yet, but its a system for managing multiple blogs in a single installation. This post from Andrea of WPMU shows 25 non-conventional uses for it which helped me understand a little more about what this software can do.
Get a Free Database Driven Website - David Wooding emailed me and asked me to promote his competition that offers to give affiliates a database driven website. It’s not something that I need right now so I didn’t look into it myself but I said I’d mention it so check it out if that is something you are interested in.
