Thanks Daniel

If this is your first time visit to EdwardKhoo.com, I would like to say welcome & thank you for the visit. My name is Edward & I blog about blogging, making money online & marketing tips.

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There are so many good articles written in year 2009 but only few of them made it to the list. Not because they aren’t good enough, but these are great posts, & by that I mean something that’s so good you simply can’t afford to miss. If you haven’t read them yet, grab yourself a cup of coffee & enjoy reading these posts.

1. 25 things I wish I’d known when I started blogging By Web Distortion

Oh boy if he published the article earlier I wouldn’t have waited for so long to see the growth in traffic & reader base. Really honest & effective ways of promoting your websites, a must read if you have just started your blogging career.

2. 21 Link Builders Share Advanced Link Building Queries By Search Engine Land

Great interview with 21 link building experts covering how to identify link target, types of sites, people & search queries used on acquiring links. Tips might be a little bit advanced for users, but it’s definitely a great resource for link builders who wish to build a better link portfolio.

3. The Parable of the Lemonade Stand: Is AdSense Costing you Money? By Problogger

View from an affiliate marketer on affiliate marketing vs Adsense. If you aren’t doing well with Adsense, this post might be your savior.

4. The First Rule of Copyblogger By Copyblogger

I like the way Sonia depicts the theory of “Content Is King” using Fight Club’s rules. An interesting read & also an essential guide on creating good contents.

5. SEO and your crap filled site By Web Ink Now

Crappy site isn’t going to survive. Indeed, as what David mentioned in the article: “Performing search engine optimization on a crap-filled site just makes it slightly less crappy.”

6. Best of 2009: 24 social media experts interviewed By Econsultancy

If you are a social media addict who’s looking to establish your presence on social media sites, here are 24 interviews conducted by eConsultancy on tips & tricks to become a better social media user.

7. Bing SEO – How Does it Differ To Google? By SEO Wizz

While Google is dominating the search market with a staggering 80% traffic share, Bing might be an alternative if you are not getting any ranking love from Big G. See the difference on how both of them rank sites & how to optimize your website to achieve a better SERP.

8. Don’t Just Read What Top Bloggers Write – Look At What They Do! By SEOptimise

Other than their writings, you should also pay attention on what they did with their blogs. Whether it’s robots txt or homepage layout, these seemingly unimportant elements might be their secrets in gaining loyal readership.

Which post influences you the most in year 2009? Have your say in the comment box below!

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In Part 1 of the series we talked about content scrapers & how they work, in this article we will take a deeper look on how to detect & take action against those leechers.

This is why Copyscape – the plagiarism checker was created. Copyscape is a sophisticated search engine that can often “see through” attempts at disguising or stuffing content with keywords. Remember, content scrapers are spamming search engines so most won’t bother trying to disguise scraped content. They’ll just post it. But since Google has cracked down on these cyber-thieves, some content scrapers will change a headline or subhead and maybe even add a few lines of text to your post.

Copyscape can often find what Google can’t. And the service is free. Just type in your site’s URL to see who’s ripped your content. If you’re lucky, you’ll come up clean when you run a Copyscape search. If not, you may find your content has been ripped by a couple of dozen sites.

If you are a Wordpress user, Antileech plugin works like a charm for most of the bloggers. Basically scrapers wont noticed anything odd when they steal your content, except that the plugin has generated some random content to let them put up on their sites. So how do Antileech identifies a spammer?

AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content.

Now that you get the idea of how it works, simply download it & upload just like any plugin. It won’t take more than 5 minutes to save you from duplicate content issues & like any other plugin, it’s FREE.

Will backlinks from these sites affect my rankings?

It’s almost impossible to affect a website. Imagine this: If this is so easy to affect the SERP of a website, these thieves will most likely sabotaging their competition all day long. It might work if they want to take down a newly created site, but an A-list blogger probably wont feel itchy at all. Of course, the best way to prevent this is to gain high quality inbound links from relevant authority websites. With these link love from another bloggers, search engine will know you are a good citizen & they wont put you back behind the steel bars

Try to ask a thief to return the thing they have stolen & they will ignore your request, same theory applies to blogging. You ask them to remove the content & they wont give a sh*t. Worried? Relax, Google will know who’s the original writer & they will identify who’s the copycat. But think of it, these sites might have some PR & you can get some link juice from them, so why not just enjoy these freebies?

Content scraping doesn’t mean anything bad, when someone tries to steal something from you, that means you must have something valuable for them to steal, & that’s a good signal that you are on your way to become a better blogger :p

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You won’t even know it if you don’t check regularly.

Content scrapers are simple programs that scrape content on topic from sites or blogs for posting to the content scraper’s site. The sole purpose of content scrapers is to rip content, post it to a series of junk sites that are slathered with PPC and paid advertising, and make money on clickthroughs.

Spamming Search Engines

Sites that are built on content scraping don’t cost a lot of money – just the low cost hosting fee. Scrapers search the web for sites that post content on the “subject” of the scraper’s website. So, all of the content is related to a topic – usually something about your health and well being, your family, your finances or some other topic that has wide appeal.

Scrapers register a dozen domain names (cost: less than $30 USD) and build a dozen duplicate sites. Then, the scraper takes all of these garbage sites, and links them together, in effect, spamming search engines who “think” that all of this low level linkage indicates sites that are visited frequently and further the search of site visitors to any of the dozen scraper sites.

Google has cracked down on scraper sites, but they’re still out there. And, (1) they may be scraping content for use on their ring of low-rent PR0 sites, or (2) they may be linking to your higher ranking site and dragging you down – without your knowledge.

Links Farms

Scrapers make their money on clickthroughs. No self respecting site owner would place a paid advert on one of these sites, knowing that the site’s sole objective is to generate revenues via clickthroughs.

Google hates links farms. The prime objective of any search engine is to deliver quality SERPs – the best possible search results based on the user’s query keywords. Links farms water down the quality of SERPs and, as a result, diminish the value of Google’s #1 product – links to relevant sites. It’s not nice to make Google mad.

Most links farms scrape content from blogs and web sites with impunity. Let’s face facts: copyright law on the W3 is non-existent. Do you think I’m going to take the time to sue some content scraper who ripped off an article from my site and posted it to her site without permission? How much do you think I’d collect in damages? Crossing international borders and dealing with copyright laws of another nation. It’s not worth the expenses and content scrapers know it.

So they rip you off. They post your content and content scraped from a dozen other sites, build a bunch of low-rent sites, populate these PR0 sites with ripped content, link the sites together and create the appearance of a series of quality sites.

How To Know If You’ve Been Scraped?

The easiest and least expensive way to see if you’re the victim of copy scraping is to use search engines, since they’re the target of content scrapers (so don’t take it personally).

Go back into your archives. Find a sentence in each post you’ve made. Choose a sentence that has a distinctive phrase or even anchor text in it.

Next, cut and paste that sentence into the Google search box. Then, add quotes around the sentence. This tells Google that you ONLY want SERPs that contain this exact sentence. Now you may get lucky.

However, if you get a “No results found” message, or your blog is the only one that shows up on SERPs, it still doesn’t mean you haven’t been scraped. Content scrapers are black hats so the rules fly right out the window when dealing with these clowns.

Another way of detecting it is by typing in search query link:website.com or install the free & mighty SEO for Firefox tool to have a look at your backlinks. If those domains consist of numerical figures with dash in it, most likely these are the sites that you would like to stay away from. Just click on it & if you see ads are flying all over the site, bingo you have just caught a thief with your own bare hands.

Some content scrapers will take your beautifully written piece and stuff it with their keywords, simply inserting keywords throughout your article. So a simple Google search using quotes may not turn up a content scraper.

Read Part 2 here

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Why in the world would you link to another blog – an outlet that enables visitors to your blog to leave with a click? Doesn’t make sense, does it? Well, the fact is, it makes a lot of sense – especially if you link into blogs that appeal to the same readership.

1. Develop professional relationships.

I always have few pieces loaded and ready to post on other blogs. I want to appear on other blogs that have the same readership that might be interested in my blog.

Appearing on the blogs of others is a sign of credibility, something that is sorely ( and I do mean SORELY) missing among bloggers. Although it has been proven that linking out will not reduce the pagerank of any sites, most bloggers still prefer not to link to other sites.

Develop professional relationship with fellow bloggers and both parties will be benefited in the long run.

2. We’re building a knowledge base.

Blogger A writes a post called “Building Effective Landing Pages.” Three days later, Blogger B posts “Building Trip Wire Marketing Into Landing Pages.” Now, I know Blogger B reads Blogger A’s blog, and I even know where he got the idea for his trip-wire piece. But that’s not plagiarism.

Blogger B added new information, brought new talking points to the discussion table. That’s nothing more than building a knowledge base at the speed of digital.

By connecting with other bloggers, you learn from each other, you share ideas and you grow the base of knowledge within your sphere. Knowledge sharing isn’t a bad thing, it’s a good thing. So learn from the competition. Don’t just spin a post to make it your own. Add something to the discussion.

Together, we’re building a knowledge base.

3. Be part of a bigger target.

If it’s just you and your little blog, you’re nothing but an atom in the blogosphere. But, if you link to 10 other bloggers in your post, perhaps they might give you some link love after they noticed the trackback when they login into their WP dashboard.

It makes it much easier for readers to find you and, if they like what they see and read, you have another subscriber. Or, at least you got a bookmark. That’s not a bad thing, is it?

4. Network free.

As in all things, it’s not always what you know, it’s who you know, and hooking up with other bloggers is the best way to network.

You might get called in to do a little job. Two months later, that client calls you directly for a big job. So, you helped out a fellow blogger, you made an impression, you networked and guess what…it landed you a nice new assignment and the potential for a long-term business relationship – the best kind to have. It’s always better to have a stable client base than to constantly beat the bushes for the next assignment from the newest client. Give me that long-term assignment any day.

In fact, it costs ten times as much to find a new client than it does to keep an existing client in place, so networking, over the long-term, is the key to success. Over time, you build a steady client base that keeps coming back for more of your great work – and you don’t have to do anything except answer the phone.

Connectivity, a bigger target, overflow work, business synergies – there are a lot of good reasons to add other blogs to your blog roll and have other blog masters add your blog to theirs.

You never know where that next big client is going to come from. You never know where that long-term gig is going to come from. But you do know this: connectivity on the web = web success, whether it’s site connectivity or connecting up with other, quality blogging professionals.

Choose wisely. You’ll look better and bigger than you are.

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Everyone can talk a good game or deliver the goods and actually become a successful blogger and even – hold on – a professional blogger, as in you earn a living taking care of your blog. See the point here? They’re getting rich by earning decent dough writing words & selling ideas.

So, what are the secrets that made Darren Rowse & Daniel Scocco successful? Let’s take a look at the 10 traits of successful bloggers and see how many do you have

1. Passion.

Passion about your topic (you’ll be writing about it a lot) and a passion to share what you know, think, believe, saw – you want to share. That’s what blogs are all about.

Create a blog, or build your blog around something about which you care passionately – even if it’s Paleolithic entomology. If that’s what works you up, that’s the subject of your blog. Blogging is supposed to be fun.

2. Curiosity.

You might not think of this as an important trait of a blogger – a words-by-the-kilo writer, but good writers are curious people. They want to learn and are willing to take on any topic. They’ll figure it out because of that innate curiosity.

3. Imagination.

Well, what’d you think, ideas were going to start popping into your head as soon as you launched? Recommendation: put together a list of at least 50 titles and have 10 finished pieces in the chute ready to launch.

Expand your editorial point of view. See site topicality from different perspectives, throw in a little fun, stay on point, post. Repeat.

If you’re passionate about your blog topic and curious enough to read about it, you’ve got fodder for a number of blog posts for your own blog, so in this case, point 1 + point 2 really do = point 3.

4. Drive, ambition, or at least desire.

Okay, it may not burn in your soul like a red hot ember, but if you build a blog, ambition goes a long way.

Set reasonable goals for yourself – 10 readers in 30 days, 100 readers in three months and so on. And don’t be too hard on yourself if you fall short of your goals. The blog band is so filled with static, it’s tough to get out your signal.

Speaking of which…

5. …the complete lack of false modesty.

If you build a blog, it’s your blog. You’re the boss. So, build it in your own image to deliver the message to the world that you want to deliver. Launching a blog is NOT the time to hide your light under a basket.

Shine on. Which relates to…

6. …confidence, authority and conviction.

It’s your blog. Post with authority, but do your homework, too. You have a responsibility to be truthful and transparent in your posts. You got an agenda, get it out there so readers don’t have to figure you out.

Write your text in the present tense and eliminate all qualifiers. Example:

This widget can save you $1,000s if you try it. (Awful.)

This leading-edge widget SAVES you $1,000s when you try it. (Much better.)

Confident, present tense. Not it will do something, it does do something now. This minute.

7. Interest in others.

As you build a following, you’ll build a collection of friends who’ll engage you through the blog, and maybe through e-mail or even telephone. If you’re living in a one-room shack in the mountains, surfing on one of those hand-cranked computers, touching base with others is probably not your top priority.

It’s your blog, but the best bloggers are the ones who write for others – their readers. They give tips, suggestions, practical advice or maybe some fun. Heck, game-based blogs form the under-pinnings of the blog-o-sphere.

You have to keep up with your readers. And that means research, regular web surfing – taking the time to search for good content and delivering it all in one place. That’s a convenient service. Don’t make the blog about you (unless it’s a vanity blog, which is cool, but don’t expect a lot of organic traffic).

8. A burning desire to express yourself, even if it’s to a small but dedicated audience.

Yep, there are blogs for lepidopterists – people who collect butterflies. So, if you want to know the latest in butterfly catching tactics, or more about academic topics like butterfly taxonomy, pick your blog.

Don’t expect miracles. You ain’t Perez Hilton (talk about being in the right place at the right time!) but over time, you can build a following.

9. Engage followers directly

Unless you have millions, in which case, why are you reading this anyway? Drop a personal “Thanks for following” with some contact information. Engage your readers. The best bloggers know their readers because these readers post to threads all the time.

10. Passion.

Oh, did I mention that already? Well, it’s important enough to mention twice. The successful blogger cares about the topic, whether it’s weather stripping or bias within the Japanese university system – your readers want to hear from you.

Deliver the latest news. Stir a little controversy. Asks questions that encourage threads.

As a blogger, it’s not just your job to post good content. You need to post to threads and engage your followers on a personal, “first name” basis. This builds a blog community – a place to go throughout the day to touch base with other followers of your blog.

And that comes from you. You need passion about your subject, passion about sharing your passion with others and passion to sit yourself down at the computer 2-3 times a week to create new posts.

You also need to have a passion to market your site through social media like Twitter and Facebook. Use social media to push your blog into your topic “space”- no matter how small.

You need to have to want it. The blog world is crammed deep with ghost blogs started by well-intentioned bloggers who thought they had something to say.

Successful bloggers must have more than something to say. They have to have the drive, the ambition, the focus, the passion to spend time to make a blog that people visit daily. Perez Hilton gets more than 1 million hits a day – and he’s a Hollywood gossip.

Imagine how many of the right people would read your blog posts if they are written with passion, conviction, authority and, oh, yeah, consistency.

Feed the hunger of internet users, start working with your blog posts NOW!