You're going to want to subscribe to my RSS feed. It's the greatest thing since sliced bread - even better, in fact. You know you want to.

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Oh wait, that’s exactly what blogging is.

So what’s the purpose of this post? Clever satire, hopefully. There have been so many similes and metaphors comparing blogging to things like ninjas, flowers, and grapefruit - most of which aren’t effective - and they don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. It looks like any ol’ blogger can just think of blogging as [adjective] [noun] and then write a post about it like some twisted game of Mad Libs.

Of course, people seem to like that kind of stuff. I will say that I have been entertained by comparison posts, especially ones that don’t make any sense. Well, I suppose blogging is kind of like being a midget juggling unicyclist hobo in that… uh… well, if you carry the two and divide by zero…

Ah hell, there’s no way those two are even remotely alike. I’d like to see someone take up that metaphor!

Posted by Max Miroff | 10 Comments »

Common sense, unlike blogs in the niche of making money online, is one of the rarities on the blogosphere. Whether it’s people proclaiming that you can make millions just by giving away your SSN or by buying a ten dollar e-book, there is no absence of idiocy on the net. Here are ten newbie blogging misconceptions for your intellectual viewing pleasure.

1. “Alexa is TOTAL BS.”
And this statement is totally UNTRUE! While Alexa may have some discrepancies in it’s rankings and you may be sad that your site is still in the millions, the general positions of the sites on the web are expressed well. You shouldn’t just dismiss any form of online rankings - your competitors don’t, after all.

2. “Linking to authority sites with high pagerank will help my blogs pagerank”
You wouldn’t believe how many times this issue pops up on Digitalpoint (three, at my count). Linking to websites does nothing for pagerank - it’s only determined by the sites that link to you. Sorry, but Google probably doesn’t care whether or not you link to it.

3. “You NEED to post once per day”
There isn’t a blog police that will kidnap you and brutally beat you if you leave your blog alone for a day or two. You can still achieve high traffic levels by posting once every two or three days.

4. “Don’t monetize from the start!”
Monetizing your blog is perfectly fine at any time - just don’t splatter your page with ads like some crazed college art student. As long as your advertising isn’t intrusive upon the content, it’s alright.

5. “Blogger is better than Wordpress.”
The falsity of this statement is self-explanatory.

6. “Dofollow blog comments are worthless”
The key word here is dofollow. That means they’re counted by search engines. That means they help your rankings. They’re just as good as any other link you can get on a blog.

7. “Blogging is easy”
Even if you’re an expert in your niche and you’re writing about the passion of your life, you will be starved for ideas on some days and discouraged on others. The key is to keep on being consistent in blogging.

8. “I can StumbleUpon my own posts”
If you stumble your site more than once or twice, it starts to get suspicious. Even if you’re an active user, your thumbs up will eventually become devalued and you’ll possibly be banned from Stumbleupon.

9. Chow, Rowse, Shoemoney, etc. are blogging GODS.
While these probloggers are undeniably successful, their word is not the law - you should do your own independant research and thinking before following their advice. Hell, even Blog Badly is only right 99.9% (repeating, of course) of the time!

Posted by Max Miroff | 21 Comments »

If you’re blog just isn’t cutting it anymore and your marketing plans are failing, there’s only one thing to do - write craploads of content. One post a day, two posts if you’re really crazy. This will in turn skyrocket your readership, and by skyrocket I mean increase it at a slow and steady snails pace.

WHA? WHY?
Think about it - if you write one thousand posts and each attracts an average of one search engine visitor per day, you’ll be getting one thousand visits per day. That’s a hefty sum of readers! Writing consistently is the easiest way to get more visitors because as long as you have content that is being crawled by Google and Yahoo and you take a few steps to optimize it (All-In-One SEO plugin, anyone?), they will come. This is a technique you can fall on when your readership stagnates because this is a pretty assured way to get things going again.

THEN WHAT?
After your traffic numbers are high enough, declare yourself an authority blog in your niche and make people grovel at your feet just for a linkback flaunt this fact to attract even more hits (see: JohnChow.com). Once you get the boulder (metaphorical, of course. Unless you’re Indiana Jones) rolling, just ride with it until you get all the way to the bottom of the mounta- er… I mean… all the way to the top! Yeah, take that, gravity!

Posted by Max Miroff | 11 Comments »

Tired of getting hit with the banhammer by Google for selling links? LinkShowOff is a fairly new advertising site that follows in the vein of programs like Scratchback because it offers blog and website owners the chance to sell nofollow text links to advertisers. In short, that means that Google won’t lower your pagerank for selling links through it.

ALRIGHT, SO HOW DOES IT WORK?
To sell links through LinkShowOff, you have to sign up, add your site to their listings, and put their customizable widget up (you can see it in my right sidebar). Unlike Scratchback, LinkShowOff actually has a marketplace for the sales of advertising which expedites the process of getting some cash (if you’re a publisher) or finding some quality advertising (if you’re an advertiser). You get payed a flat sum for each link displayed on your widget (a maximum of twenty links can be up at once). As more ads are purchased, older links are bumped off the widget and new ones appear first, allowing for a dynamic structure.

THE REFERRAL PROGRAM
In addition to selling links on your own site, you have the option of referring other publishers to the network. The rates are quite low at the moment - only one dollar for every person you refer that earns a dollar - but this low threshold could work at the moment because of the new nature of the program. If one was to refer a few hundred publishers to LinkShowOff that sold even one link, they could make a nice sum.

GETTING PAID
Payments are monthly with a flat fee of $3 per withdrawal, which is a nice change from horrible monopolies greedy companies programs like Text-Link-Ads which takes half of your profits. You can currently get paid through Paypal (speaking of monopolies…) once you reach the payout of $10.

WHAT ELSE…
LinkShowOff does have a few problems right now, though - namely the fact that there are no site statistics available for websites listed in the marketplace. Alexa rankings, Pagerank, and traffic should be present for each blog to create for a more open sales platform. In addition, the website looks unprofessional and Web 1.5: there are some grammatical errors, the FAQ is short and incomplete, and the site design is greener than Kermit (and it’s not easy being green).

IN SHORT,
LinkShowOff has potential but needs refinement. When more advertisers join, there should be plenty of ad sales (even as a new program, I’ve already had a link bought on my widget). If it gets a facelift and some extra features, it could be a winner.

Posted by Max Miroff | 6 Comments »

 One of the easiest ways to steadily increase your visibility is by getting other blogs to link to you, but this often isn’t an option for people with awful blogs some. Luckily, there is a much easier way of getting natural backlinks without resorting to blackmailing and googlebowling your competitors - blog carnivals.

BLOG CARNIVALS? WILL THERE BE CLOWNS?
No way, inquisitive headline! A blog carnival is when a blogger decides they are too lazy to write a post but still wants to throw something up on their blog - it’s a compilation of links to other articles.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE LINK LOVE
The great thing about blog carnivals is that you can easily submit your own posts for consideration on a blog carnival. To do this, just sign up at blogcarnival.com and search for a few blog carnivals that are coming up in your niche. Gather some select blog posts to use for said carnivals and submit them to it. Within a few days, the carnival will take place on someone’s blog and you’ll get an improved Technorati rank, more traffic, and a free backlink!

AND NOW FOR THE CATCH…
There is none. Sorry to burst your bubble, readers - I know you love paying money for things but blog carnivals are absolutely free (unlike real carnivals. Damn clowns peddling me out of my money with their rigged games) and require pretty much no effort to join.

Posted by Max Miroff | 12 Comments »

Anti-SEO, as I mentioned in one of my posts, really does seem to exist in the form of Googlebowling, an extremely blackhat (and asshat) way to lower your competitors SERP’s. The premise is this: if bad neighborhoods (spam sites, splogs, porn, gambling, etc.) link to a certain site using the same anchor text, aforementioned site will invariably drop in rankings. For example, say a website “A” ranks #1 for term “X.” If competitor “B” ranks #2 for “X” and no matter what he does, he can’t outrank “A,” what does he do? Submit site “A” to thousands of porn directories, gambling affiliates, and scraper sites that all link to “A” with anchor text “X,” of course! Google would notice this huge increase in backlinks from crap sites and thus theoretically drop the rankings of site “A.”

WAIT, WHAT? SERIOUSLY?
Well, technically not. Google denies this can happen in its official webmaster guidelines:

“Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site’s ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google’s index.

Fact: There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”

Of course, Google also penalizes for the following things:

Purchasing Site Wide Links
Many links having the same exact anchor text
Links from “Bad Neighborhoods”
“Sneaky” Redirects AKA Doorway pages
Using Cookie Cutter sites

I don’t see what prevents a competitor from linking to you with the same exact anchor text from bad neighborhoods or buying site-wide links for your site, so Googlebowling should be possible if you have enough money, resources, and are an evil genius.

Oh, and by the way, this article was written for purely educational purposes, *wink wink* *nudge nudge*

Posted by Max Miroff | 15 Comments »

Ever find yourself doing something as silly as posting on your blog? I know I have. Here are ten easy, guilt-free ways to talk yourself out of making a post:

1. “My blog traffic is already skyrocketing!”
Because who needs to post when you’ve already had 1000 visitors that day?
2. “I can always do it tomorrow”
The procrastinator’s greatest weapon - playing the tomorrow card.
3. “I’m way too tired! Sitting on my couch all day was EXHAUSTING”
Blogging clearly takes great mental, physical, and emotional effort. Why bother if you’re already tired?
4. “Why blog when I can _______?”
Find alternatives!
5. “My post probably won’t be that good anyway.”
The statement that makes you fail before you’ve even began (and subsequently failed).
6. “Blogging definitely isn’t as important as ________”
A few options to help you fill the blank: playing video games, sleeping, watching TV, making pancakes, raiding with your WoW guild, etc.
7. “Someone already posted about my idea!”
Note: practically nothing is original anymore.
8. “I’ll do it a bit later today.”
A variation on the always good “I’ll do it tommorow.”
9. “My blog sucks anyway”
…and low self-esteem will make it even worse!
10. “Well, I doasghtjyk,gyfkdtjsrtttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt”
The option for when you fall asleep on your keyboard.

Posted by Max Miroff | 11 Comments »

Remember the post about my method of building free high pagerank dofollow blog comments? I also promised a way to make some easy money from this, and Blog Badly delivers!

WHY YOU’LL MAKE MONEY OFF OF THIS
Blog commenting is currently a very “in” method of building links and people crave getting some high pagerank blog comments - in fact, some might even pay for it ;). That, of course, is the basis of the steps that follow.

HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH DOFOLLOW BLOG COMMENTS: THE STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

1. First, use the tools mentioned in my post about dofollow blog comments to find twenty or thirty (or even more. The more links you have, the more money you’ll make) high pagerank (PR3 - 7) internal dofollow blog pages.
2. Organize all of the blog pages in a simple list. I suggest categorizing by blog niche and listing them from highest to lowest pagerank.
3. Now there are two ways you can go from this: either sell the list or offer dofollow blog commenting services. Both methods are pretty good ways to make some quick cash, but the latter generally nets you more money (because you can sell each link for higher)

IF YOU WANT TO SELL THE LIST…

1. Get onto a forum like Digitalpoint and start a thread promoting your list or just contact individual bloggers about your list asking if they’re interested. Remember to emphasize that the high pagerank pages are the ones you can actually comment on.
2. Sell the list for any price between $5-$40 (depending on how many links and how high their pagerank is. Use your gut instinct.) Offer a few review copies for discounted rates if no one buys.
3. Watch the money roll in!

IF YOU WANT TO SELL THE INDIVIDUAL COMMENTS…

1. Again, get on Digitalpoint or ask another blogger if they’re interested in your service
2. Sell your blog comments however you see fit. Remember to include a detailed report for your buyer and DON’T SPAM. No one likes spam. Your mother would be ashamed.

BLOG COMMENT RATES
If you’re not sure for how much you want to sell your individual blog comments for, try this handy dandy index!

PR     PRICE
1            $1
2            $2
3            $3
4            $5
5            $7
6            $8
7            $13
8            $18
9            $22
10         Where the hell did you find this? I mean… uh… $30?

So get out there and sell some comments! It’s literally the easiest way to make money online.

Posted by Max Miroff | 26 Comments »

Posted by Max Miroff | 3 Comments »

While talking to my good friend Breakaway from Link Building Bible about social media optimization and StumbleUpon, I came across a startling and obviously enormous theory that will change the way everyone will think about Stumbleupon. Forever.

Well, kinda.

STUMBLEUPON KNOWS
Not about that time you accidentally used the wrong bathroom, but about whether your Stumbles are organic or not. That means that if you get a bunch of your friends to thumbs up a page in an attempt to boost its initial traffic, a red alert goes off at the SU headquarters and your page gets blacklisted or at least denied some traffic. I know from experience that even though some of my articles have had 5+ stumbles within two minutes from friends, they never got any visits. In short, inorganic thumbs up that occur within a set period of time after you submit your site probably have a small effect, if any.

ORGANIC VISITS = WIN
StumbleUpon most likely checks whether or not it referred you to the page or if you came there through different means. If you were sent there through http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=”pageurl” then all is well and your thumbs up have power. On the other hand, if you aren’t, they devalue your thumbs up/review. This makes it even harder to game and furthers the fact that the only people that can make an article popular are the actual social media users. Generic make money online blogs aren’t going to be happy about this one!

Posted by Max Miroff | 14 Comments »