Best of The Best : Top Marketing Articles of 2009

Blogging

marketing

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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. 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!


Content Scraping: Is Someone Ripping Your Content AND Good Name? – Part 2

Blogging

Stop Stealing

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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 :wink:

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


Content Scraping: Is Someone Ripping Your Content? – Part 1

Blogging

thief

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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.

Read More »


Why It’s Always Important To Build Relationship With Bloggers

Blogging

Relationship

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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.

This is a guest post by Ronald Freeman who writes for a company promoting fitness ebook. If you want to know how to get buff easily, then this book should be in your top list.


Korporate – Corporate Wordpress Theme

WP

korporate

Want to have a corporate style layout that showcase your business services/products? Look no further than KorporateCorporate wordpress theme that’s designed for business owners.

The Korporate theme allows switching color schemes (Gold, Green & Blue) from the theme options interface in the admin area. Other than that, business owners can display their products/services using the featured content slider. This is a great feature as users get to show off their best content in an elegant way.

Full Features :
* Featured Content Slider
* Three Color Schemes
* SEO Optimized Page/Post Titles (Semantic Markup)
* Graphical Logo Area (Which can be disabled and replaced with a text logo and tagline in theme options)
* Social Profiles Widget (Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter)
* RSS Feed Links Widget
* Four Widget Areas
* Bottom Widget Area (Can be disabled in theme options)
* Threaded Comments

Want to get a feel of it? Try out the demo page.

Download Korporate – Corporate Wordpress Theme