You're a blogger and most likely, you are constantly hearing about pinging or blog and ping. The thing is, you don't know what it is and what it can do for your blog. Well, that's fine because a lot of bloggers don't quite understand pinging. In this article, I will explain what pinging is, how it helps your blog, and what the best pinging services are.

What is pinging?

When a blog is pinged, it essentially tells a web blog tracking system that the blog has been updated. Thus, pinging is the process of telling tracking services that a site has been updated.

So how does pinging work? Well, a ping service scans blogs for updates on a regular basis. Whenever there is a new update for a particular blog, it is reported back to the pinging service’s site. You can almost think of ping services being just like search engine spiders - both scan sites looking for information, and both report that information back to their specific site. The difference is, a ping service only reports back new blog posts.

Why is pinging useful for your blog?

Pinging, in effect, tells people that there is a new blog posting available. Those who are loyal followers of your blog will see the ping and want to visit your blog. Those who haven’t read your blog before will also see the ping and perhaps think “Hey, there’s a new blog I haven’t been to before, I think I’ll check it out”.

Pinging helps to increase your traffic because it tells people when your blog is updated. Those who visit sites with pinging services will see this information in the form of a ticker on the left or right side, or top of the page. The ticker is usually in XML format and typically includes the title and URL of your blog, as well as the date and time of the update.

OK, so now you know what pinging is. But which websites offer pinging…?

The answer is, there are several pinging services available which you can use to have your blog pinged. We’ll go over some of them right now.

Pingomatic.com

This one is usually the standard ping service which is listed in your blog interface. It pings several ping services at once like e.g. Blogstreet, IceRocket, Moreover and Weblogalot.

Weblogs.com

Weblogs.com is probably the most well-known pinging service. Weblogs.com monitors sites for updates and then pings whenever there is an update to report. Virtually every blog software is available to use Weblogs.

Yahoo’s Blo.gs

Another popular pinging service. This one is offered by Yahoo and has a built-in integration with movable type and other tools. One cool thing about this service is that it offers the ability to give out updates via Instant Messenging services like AOL and ICQ. It is a direct pinging service, so those who sign up for subscriptions to your blog will be sent an email anytime your blog is updated.

Blogrolling.com

Blogrolling allows its bloggers to manage their blogrolls (updates) through a web-based interface. Recently
updated blogs are also highlighted on Blogrolling’s web site. Data is automatically retrieved from other sites like blogger.com and weblogs.com every 5 minutes. Often times your blog is already being pinged by Blogrolling, so you might not have to sign up for it. Search on the site first for your URL before signing it up.

Technorati

Available at http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, Technorati is another service that pings blogs. It gets its data from a variety of places and is definitely a site you should go to for blog pinging. If you're adding Technorati tags to your posts, it will also give you multiple backlinks which can have a very high pagerank and thus will improve your site ranking in the search engines.

These are just 5 of the many different blog pinging services available. A quick search on Yahoo or Google will reveal many other possible blog pinging services to use for your blog. It is best to ping/sign up for as many as you possibly can to ensure that your blog is well-pinged.

A well-pinged blog will definitely help your blog attract more visitors because not only will you get direct visitors from these services but also valuable backlinks. And since these sites have a high authority with the search engines (meaning, most of them have high Google Pagerank), you can get easy and automatic backlinks from authority sites.

This is especially true when your links can be found on popular so called "TAG" pages. A tag is similar to a keyword. So ping as many many of these services as possible and watch your blog traffic increase.

P.S. You can enter a list of websites to ping e.g. within your Wordpress interface. You can find it listed under "options/writing"!

Tags: adsense, search engines, tags, technorati, traffic, websites

On Monday, I showed my email subscribers a cool new script that pulls down videos from YouTube and let's you build a new website in a matter of a few minutes. I thought, I should let you know about it, too…

And anyone can build sites with it… it's so easy.

All you need to do is upload a few php files to your server and edit 1 config file (there are help videos included with your purchase)!

This is an example of a config.php file which I have already modified for a keyword that I want to build a new website for (yes, that's really all that is in there):

<?
//edit the variable below in case your website is within a subfolder, please type the subfolder here.
//(example, if www.site.com/videos/ is your site, set the variable below to videos)
$folder = "videos/bmw-3-series/";

//website keyword
$website_keyword = "bmw 3-series";

//your adsense pubid
$adsense_pubid = "pub-4716257659577666";
?>

All I did was enter the folder name to which I uploaded the php files ("videos/bmw-3-series/"). Then I entered the keyword ("bmw 3-series") and my Adsense publisher ID.

Here is the resulting site: http://www.hq-cars.com/videos/bmw-3-series/

It doesn't just build pages for your main keyword but the tags which are used for the videos get created on your site as well. All automatically.

There's no additional work involved. And in order to get the spiders to the site, all you need to do is use the
social bookmarking buttons (you need to have accounts with the services already, though, or it could take slightly more time) and add your site to them.

This is a script that's really useful to add more content and multimedia to an existing site (like I have done here) or to create a complete video site from scratch.

I don't know for how long this will still be available at that price. But it will definitely be worth every single penny!

Get your copy of Niche Video Site Builder here:

==> http://hopurl.com/38905

I simply love this new script and I am sure you will love it, too )

To Your Success,

Detlev Reimer

Need to contact me? Visit:

http://www.ethicalinternetmarketer.com/helpdesk

.

Tags: adsense, social bookmarking, tags

This time, I am going to review a product that I must warn you from. I purchased Michelle Andrew's "Instant Money Vault" and to say that I was disappointed about the content is still an understatement…

First of all, during my purchase I reloaded the page 2 or 3 times and noted that she offered her product with 2 different price tags - $39.99 and $29. Some days ago, I saw a price of $47. Obviously, she was still split-testing her salesletter. After more than 3 weeks that this product has been on the market, I was thinking that this stage should have been over now (nevertheless split-testing IS a very good thing to do!!). Anyway, I purchased it for $29 and started reading it (she's offering an audio version, too).

And what I read really surprised me: It was the content from a Private Label Ebook by Michael Rasmussen that I had purchased the rights to more than a year ago! "Michelle" has taken that ebook and just added an introduction about some "Instant Affiliate Websites" which you should purchase (they are a bonus for a lot of ebooks related to making money with Google Adwords) through her link (which gives her an instant $20 commission). Of course, it is legitimate to make recommendations for related products. I'm doing that too if suitable.

But…

"She" doesn't even explain what you have to do to make money with these "Instant Affiliate Websites". Yet, she goes on explaining why she's recommending that you upgrade to the PRO version. Of course, the "PRO version" has many more features and some free vouchers for Google Adwords and Yahoo advertising worth $100. Then "she" says "Later I will show you how to turn $100 worth of advertising into $5000 of profit". I still have to find that chapter where she is explaining anything like that…

Why am I putting the "she" in brackets?

Because I found out that this is not a true identity. In reality, this is another website by a guy called "Mark Warren" - founder of the "Ultimate Wealth Package". And surprise, surprise, this "Ultimate Wealth Package" seems to consist of the same business which is selling review sites to people who in turn have to promote them on Google Adwords.

I know, an income like the one in their screenshots can be earned. They are not showing you the whole story, though. Because if you are advertising in such an overcrowded field like Internet marketing, Weight Loss or Forex where you'll find the most profitable products, your Google Adwords costs will be extremely high. You may be lucky if you can break even with your commissions. Most of the times, they are just showing you their income without mentioning anything about their advertising costs…

The kicker was that this package was promoted by Andrew Fox just yesterday:

"Michelle told me some of the tactic's I taught her in my product 'The Guru Slayer' really helped explode her income."

- Yeah, sure….!!

And another statement from Andrew: "I've just reviewed it and there are *DEFINITELY* some gold nuggets inside this one… "

- Mmmmmhh, I wonder where he had seen those "gold nuggets"… Maybe, I need a better shovel…

The testimonials and screenshots are most likely from Mark Warren himself who is making good money with his "Ultimate Wealth Package". To me, this a try from him to extend his reach as probably not enough people are still promoting his Ultimate Wealth Package. Because in the Internet marketing field, the attention span for new products is not very long. If something is on the market for more than 3 months, it's considered "old hat" already even if it's a phenomenal product. Sad, but true…!

So my recommendation is to stay away from this product. You won't find any new "insider secrets" in that "Instant Money Vault" - just a bunch of "old" Private Label Ebooks and even the main product is a relabeled Private Label Internet Marketing Ebook. Compliments for the salesletter, though. It really sucks people in and newbies are very likely to make a purchase.

If you want a good product which will explain all the Internet marketing basics to you then I'd rather recommend Holly Mann's ebook called "Honest Riches" which I had reviewed some time ago.

Let me know what you think of my review by making a comment on this post.

Tags: adsense, adwords, affiliate, ebook, google adwords, internet marketing, internet marketing ebook, tags, websites

PART 1

Search engines are the gateway to the Internet - in most cases they are the first tools that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. Without at least one backlink, you will not get listed in any search engine! This is true even if you've submitted your website on their "Add URL" pages (is not necessary, though… the search engine spiders will find your link automatically if it can be found on at least one popular domain). And the more links you are getting and the more often other websites are using your keywords when they do mention your website, the better you will rank for your keywords.

This is why link popularity is so imperative. If customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales…

You're probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word - plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. Google uses the term "Pagerank" for this - the more backlinks you have for your site, the higher the "Google Pagerank" (between 1-10 with 10 being the most valuable PR).

So how do you make your link "popular"?

Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It's a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.

The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don't get discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords even though it will take you longer than if you just take a step back and go for the less competetive phrases.

There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not give your site link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than "link farms" - pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!

The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have
reservations about your visitors seeing (e.g. spammy websites with no real content). The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. This is what is called linking to a "bad neighbourhood". Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it (lose your pagerank).

So let's get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and get top 10 rankings on all the major search engines:

1.) DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS

One of the first things you should always do is to get listings in as many of the free web directories as possible. Personally, I think that a listing in Yahoo is too expensive with almost $300 per year for a business related site (which is the case when you want to make a profit off your site and who doesn't want that?). There are a lot of other websites where you can get listed for a smaller fee or for free so I don't bother getting listed there. Dmoz.org, the most important free web directory you can get into, gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed. It can take months…

You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of an appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships "Alpaca wool" from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to "Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State." BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper - and submit your listing to the "Fine Alpaca Wool" category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.

When adding your link text into the form, make sure that you are using the keywords that you want to get your high search engine rankings for!

2.) RECIPROCAL LINKS

The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site's visitors. Let's look at the Alpaca Wool site example.

Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website's traffic, you are increasing both of your site's business prospects - and both of your sites' link popularity. Look which sites WANT to exchange links. Obviously, sites with no link partner page are not interested in exchanging links.

Contact sites where you can find a links page and tell them that you've added their link to your site (you need to add their link first if you want them to consider linking back to you!) and if they want to reciprocate. Do not go over the top with this by sending out thousands of generic link requests. Only send requests to website owners of sites you have visited and considered great partners.

The best way to do this reciprocal linking is to go to Google and do a search for e.g. intitle:"add url" +inurl:"your keyword here". What this does is that it checks for the title of the page and looks if it has the "Add URL" phrase there and the second part checks if your keyword appears in their URL. To stay with the above example, you would look for "wool" or "knitting". Most sites which have "Add URL" in their title will gladly exchange links with you and probably have a reciprocal links manager script in place. This way, you'll get listed on their links page automatically as soon as a backlink on your site is found.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find (spread over days and weeks, not hours…), bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. Too many backlinks in too little time will trigger a spam filter with most search engines. For example, it would not be normal for a site to start with 0 backlinks when it is spidered by the search engines and have 3500 backlinks 3 days later. Do not focus on reciprocal links alone but try to get more one way backlinks through the other methods mentioned in this article.

3.) SOCIAL BOOKMARKING AKA „TAGGING“

Social bookmarking websites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. In a similar way like you save your bookmarks in your web browser, you are able to save bookmarks on these special websites. You can "tag" your links meaning you can assign keywords to your posts and content in general.
Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries, etc. - can be found. Social bookmarking is also part of Social News Sites like Reddit.

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.

These sites are also meant when people are talking about this Web 2.0 thing.

Web 2.0 means websites for a community of people, social networks, and these people rate and tag content rather than a search engine or some automated solution ( Sites like Flickr.com and YouTube.com belong into that category as well). This way, the relevance of content gets determined by real people as opposed to having some search engine apply algorithms and get results which are not always suitable.

That’s why Digg.com claims:

“Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that's important to you!”

Popular social bookmarking sites are e.g.:

http://www.technorati.com/ (it’s also a blog directory)
http://www.digg.com/
http://de.licio.us/
http://www.reddit.com/
http://www.furl.net/

and dozens of others. More and more sites like these come up on a daily basis and only the future will show which ones will get as popular as the ones mentioned above.

END OF PART 1

Tags: adsense, digg.com, major search engines, search engines, seo, social bookmarking, social bookmarking sites, tagging, tags, technorati, traffic, web 2.0, websites

First of all, I guess, the expression "datafeed" is not known to everyone and therefore, I will try to give you a short explanation:

Usually, a datafeed is the whole inventory of a merchant store all written into one .txt file. It has URL's, product images, categories, prices and descriptions included and the different sections are separated from each other. The links will have a generic affiliate
expression included like aid=XXXXX. And your job as an affiliate is to replace that XXXXX with your affiliate ID.

Some datafeeds are generated with your affiliate ID already included, though. This is dependent on the merchant or the network you're using.

What datafeed formats are there?

The most common formats are pipe delimited (|), .csv (comma separated values) and tab delimited ( - a big space in between the different areas). In order to make changes to such a file, the best thing would be to open it in MS Excel. Because Excel will be able to use the separators and actually display the content in a neat way, in lines and rows so it will make sense when you're looking at it.

What software do you need?

There are several tools available on the market which can bring your datafeed to life. In combination with a Wordpress blog, you can automate the posting to your website. Of course, you'll need to use a datafeed which has enough products in it in order to have content for a few days or weeks.

One of these tools is called Affiliate Feed Generator by Michelle Timothy and it's the one I'm personally using whenever I am putting that kind of sites online. This software will take the raw text file and convert it into a file which you can use in combination with RSS2Blog (having the "break" tags included already). But that's not all: It will also produce a RSS file for you with an .XML ending.

Meaning, you can upload this XML file to your server, fire up any tool which can post entries from RSS feeds to a blog and you're set. You've just automated a huge part of the content creation and posting process. You still have to add articles and reviews and that kind of content, too, in order not to be seen as a "thin affiliate" (Someone who doesn't bring any additional value to their product promotions e.g. by just copying and pasting the ads the merchant provides. These ads can then be found on hundreds of websites…).

Why should you care about datafeeds?

Well, it's one of the easiest way of posting content to your site on a regular basis. Especially if you're using blogs, the whole process can be automated. If you combine datafeeds with posting regular articles, you will have your income on autopilot.

That's because every product that gets posted there has the potential to make you money as your affiliate link is always included. Moreover, by posting it in between your real content, it acts as additional content (most of the times, the product descriptions are long enough to count as real content) - thus making your content more "unique" in the eyes of the search engines.

Your content will be seen as unique as soon as you have added at least 25% of different content to your HTML page. In other words, as soon as you're adding additional material like pictures, videos and additional text and you're not just posting the same article like everyone else, you will have an advantage in the search engines.

So if you're using a combination of Article Builder to make e.g. your private label articles unique AND you're also adding datafeeds to the mix, you can bet that you will have no problems with your content being seen as duplicate content even if you're using the same articles as everyone else!

Where can you get datafeeds?

You can either get them directly from the merchant you want to affiliate with (you probably have to ask them) or you join an affiliate network like Commission Junction (CJ.com) and Shareasale (Shareasale.com). The difference between these 2 networks is that Commission Junction wants you to pay a fee (around $200) to use their datafeeds while datafeeds on Shareasale are free.

Personally, I love the Shareasale network (as it is very easy to navigate and they are listing all the merchants which are offering datafeeds). So if you want to find merchants with datafeeds, you just go to the section "Find/Join merchants" in your Shareasale admin area. Next, you click on the link "View those with datafeeds". And last but not least, you click on "Join program" to the right of the merchant's listing.

Conclusion:

If you want to promote more than just Clickbank products, using datafeeds is a good alternative. Of course, you'll have to choose merchants which have a high payout on physical goods (a minimum of 5% on high priced goods) so it really is worth your time. Just compare some of the merchants which are in the same categories and you will get a feel for this.

And the additional content perspective should not be neglected, either. In times of everyone screaming "duplicate content", it can be a good idea to differentiate yourself from others by adding something useful to your pages. Even if these are just product descriptions - but you will gain keyword density and probably get ranked for keywords that you never knew would bring you visitors. Just check your web stats and you
will see what I mean…

Tags: adsense, affiliate, clickbank, search engines, tags, websites