The social networking site MUTI has a clique that is determined to remove business posts. Sadly I get some good traffic from Muti despite the crime of self promotion. I get that Social networking allows people to vote for or against sites. I was told by a regular that he would vote against against any people in my networks efforts, because in his words, the submissions are purely to drive traffic. Hallelujah, actually NO, does he understand why people promote their sites on MUTI? To drive traffic, thats why everyone uses Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Fark et al, to get their message seen.

So a few people have decided that posting your own site is Taboo and the rest must fall in. In my opinion a smallish group of spammers could hijack most of the SA aggregators and Social networking sites but have not bothered because the rewards are not worth the effort. There are those legitimately using the systems to, yes shock horror, drive traffic without any abuse of the system and there are a group of individuals opposing self promotion on the web voting against them. It seems that the voting anti network is determined to create a site without any valuable how to content. According to their benchmark every article on this site and any of those within this network are spam. This site designed to sell websites and offering free tutorials on getting traffic has no value because all the content is SPAM.

These people have become very important in their own minds, legends in their own lunchtime so to speak and feel that with their importance comes the right to decide who else gets to display their concepts and ideas on MUTI. Maybe they should start in on the aggregators and independant blog sites. They should decide who writes what and what may be posted. It seems that you as an individual can break an unwritten law and sin by promoting your own materials. I am sorry, In my world any author, artist, teacher that does not promote their own work will starve. If the work fails the tests of value, then yes demote it, but remember because you perceive it to have no value or interest, would I feel the same? Personally I hate blogs with fluffy kitties and inane slogans but I make the assumption that they proliferate because other people like them. Should I agitate to remove them from the web because they offend me? OR should I just bypass them.

There was a time when I got seriously unhappy about a certain type of blog and I would fight them. Seriously the only person sweating about that was me and a few others. If you don’t like it move on. Find something you do. I found a great tool called stumble upon. Boy, you can move from site to site better than channel hopping on the telly. You can teach it not to serve you stuff you don’t like. Why get unhappy because someone posted something that does not grab you? Move on.

My prediction. MUTI is going to die because the lack of interest generated when all the stuff is the same because it suits the clique, everyone else will move on. Someone suggested that I find a community more suited to my needs. I would like to think that many MUTI readers would love info about getting more traffic to their sites and blogs, at the same time I am guessing there are as many who couldn’t give a hoot.

Three people were today accused of being one because they use the same interface. Are all the MWEB bloggers the same person because they use the same interface? Maybe all the citizen bloggers are the same person. Get a clue.

Education needs boosting. People need to be taught that the world is bigger than their home state or  backyard.  Its  sad but true that most people don’t have a clue because they are under informed. If your content does not add value it becomes as valuable as this answer from Miss South Carolina. Seriously I knew America had a problem when they voted for Bush but seeing this I reckon Mr Bush may be upgraded from moron to idiot.

Are the days of making money on the web history? Is the aftermath of the dot com bust that nobody can do it anymore? If these so called facts are real why are new internet millionaires being created daily?

The facts are that any business has the potential to succeed. There are a few criteria to making money on the web that are exactly the same as making money from a so called real business. The first thing you need is commitment. The second you need is a plan, the third is some research, The fourth is action.

The reason 80% of businesses in the real world fail in two years is to do with that planning and research. Its all good and well starting a business that someone else is making money from. But the research would tell you that putting another take away in a small village may not be the best plan because of something called saturation. Because there are three successful take aways on the block does not mean a fourth will also be successful. Research is the key to success.

Getting more traffic with the long tail refers to using keyword strings that people use to search for products and services. It is far easier to compete on longer strings than on tight one word searches and here’s why. Google will look at websites and decide how pertinent the information is on the search criteria. If you look at the using Google more effectively tutorial I made you can see the difference in results for shorter less defined strings. You can have 800 000 or more broad results for a keyword like Kruger Park Safari but only 28000 or so for the tight match Kruger Park Safari. Where would you prefer to compete?

You get fewer searches done with long tail but a far higher return. It is in your best interest to find a few phrases that get reasonable results and use them to get more traffic. In my business I am consistently looking for long tails and applying them. I have a few long tails that give me consistent results. a few each maketh many total. “A few pennies here a few pennies there and the pounds add up” as my Grandad used to say. Pity it took me this long to understand.

In order for you to see the power of this, Search Google for “getting more traffic” One of my sites was number two this morning for both the broad match and the tight match using this term. I am aware that this is not a good “traffic generator” but it makes a great example.

We have decided to create a few wordpress themes starting with African Lion Safari. which you can see in action at South Africa holiday.

Theme Name: African Lion Safari Theme
Theme URI: http://www.guymclaren.com/
Description: African Lion Safari theme is a Widget ready WordPress theme with 3 columns, right sidebar, rounded corners and fixed width. Tested on Flock, Internet Explorer 7, 8 and Safari. Theme is XHTML/CSS valid and SEO friendly. It works in older versions of Internet Explorer but the png graphics do not give the correct effect.
Version: 1.0
Author: Guy McLaren
Author URI: http://www.guymclaren.com/african
Tags: african lion safari, tourism, website, green, yellow, 3 columns, widget ready, rounded corners, right sidebar, fixed width, seo friendly

African Lion Safari Theme

Download Theme

Is it serach or search? I know you wanted to correct my spelling in “getting serach engine rankings”, you just can’t help yourself. While doing some typing I noticed that I type serach almost every time I want to type search, My Chinese keyboard creates this typo without any thought or planning. So I started thinking, Is it just me that makes this typo or is this a general malaise? After some research I can confirm that this is a common typo. I searched Google and got 1 320 00 and something pages with serach on them. Thats a lot of typos but on closer inspection found that some of those are legitimate. There’s a Jewish word serach that gets used a lot but I still found lots of typos.

Are you seeing a typo appearing often in respect of your product or service. Why not take advantage of it? Look at the long tails you are using are there any obvious typo opportunities? Check them out on Google and see if they are as common as you think they would be. It could mean an extra 150 visitors a day or more even, maybe fewer but  in my book an extra 40 prospective clients is better than none.

Defining quality content is rather simple. Quality content adds value and is interesting. If I were interested in your subject and arrived at your site. Would I leave happier and satisfied that I had what I needed?

Example: NOT Quality Content

Im a local graphic designer and photographer

I BUILD WEBSITES CHEAP $300 and up very professional

YOU NEED LOW PRICES ON BUSINESS CARDS /BROCHURES /FLYERS/ POSTCARDS?

YOU WANT HIGH QUALITY OFFSET GLOSS LOOK?

1 THOUSAND B.CARDS $49.00

500 FULL COLOR BROCHURES $249.00

5000 2 SIDED POSTCARDS W/ UV COATING ONLY $349.00

This was copied and pasted verbatim from a forum

This is good content. Quality Content is KING

Web design is a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media delivery via Internet in the form of Markup language suitable for interpretation by Web browser and display as Graphical user interface (GUI).

The intent of web design is to create a web site — a collection of electronic files that reside on a web server/servers and present content and interactive features/interfaces to the end user in form of Web pages once requested. Such elements as text, bit-mapped images (GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs), forms can be placed on the page using HTML/XHTML/XML tags. Displaying more complex media (vector graphics, animations, videos, sounds) requires plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, Java run-time environment, etc. Plug-ins are also embedded into web page by using HTML/XHTML tags.

Copied from Wikipedia.

In this article, a precursor to the challenge I want to discuss, Spam and Quality content.Wikipedia defines Quality as follows “Quality in everyday life and
business, engineering and manufacturing has a pragmatic interpretation
as the non-inferiority, superiority or usefulness of something. This is
the most common interpretation of the term.”

Spam in our context is defined like this “Spam (electronic),
unsolicited or undesired bulk electronic messages. There are many types
of electronic spam, including

E-mail spam, unsolicited e-mail.
Forum spam, posting advertisements or useless posts on a forum.
Spamdexing, manipulating a search engine to create the illusion of popularity for webpages.
Spam in blogs, posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks.
Newsgroup spam, advertisement and forgery on newsgroups.
Messaging spam (“SPIM”), use of instant messenger services for advertisement or even extortion.
There
are other definitions that exist and other formats which are used. Spam
is bad. Never use spam for any reason because it will harm your
business. You may sell to the odd person but you cannot build a
business using spam. You will alienate far more people than you will
gain as clients. I receive emails weekly from some companies
advertising Computer equipment. They visited my website, found that I
was in IT and started sending me information about hard drives. I don’t
even look anymore, I just junk it. I did try and tell them that they
were not doing themselves any favours but they chose to ignore me. In
the back of my mind I know that when I have some spare time I will
educate them properly. If they had bothered to read my site they would
have noted that I do programming, not hardware. They have definitely
never been referred by me. I would never recommend their products and
most definitely will not be buying them.

If its an advert, its spam. Full stop, no argument. If I visit the
forum and I gain no benefit it’s not quality content. Quality content
is information, not an an infomercial. I will help you define whether
what you want to post is quality or not by asking this question. What
benefit is gained from reading this article. Is it purely that I will
know what you are doing?, or, Will I gain wisdom or education from the
article?

Selling is not the objective, getting people to buy is. People that
buy are always happier than people who have been sold to. I know all
about selling, having been a salesman most of my adult life. I know
that when I pressure sold I had far more returns or discontented
clients. When people bought from me they were far more inclined to
refer their friends and or buy more goods.

The secret on the web is that people are looking for information to
help them make a buying decision. Thats right they are not looking to
buy right here and now, but If you give them the information to make a
buying decision they will buy right now. They are looking for quality
content to make decisions.

Are they finding that information on your website? OR do they have
to go to your competitors. Many have heard me say that function trumps
pretty every time. Function includes elements of pretty. If the site
has no redeeming “pretty” you may lose the odd client, but if the site
has no Quality Content you definitely lose the clients.

This article is a pre-challenge article, designed to prepare you
for the FREE 30 days to earning money from your website program. If you
want to know more tell me here. and I will keep you in the loop.

Yes, I know its day 4; I have learnt something really important in this challenge. The thing I have learnt is that being prepared is not something to take lightly. I have started the challenge and not been ahead of you in doing my articles. I realize now that I should have already had Day 15 in the bag by now, allowing me time to refine my research and get the articles ready before the due dates.

So I am immediately advising you that the challenge will still be 30 days of articles but they will take place over 60 days. I will be doing an article every second day.

Awstats

In my report back I have already received my first link throughs from del.icio.us, I have had Amatomu hits and I have had a few extra search engines spider my site.

For those of you using AWStats, just look at your statistics page and check the following:

1. Last update – check the date it was last updated. If it was not updated in the last 24 hours, let me know and we will talk to the technical people and get it sorted out.

2. Next – the summary, unique visitors, number of visits, pages and hits. The system uses the IP address of the visitor to determine unique visitors. This is the part we need to grow in order to get repeat visitors. Number of visits – how many pages the viewed. You have the viewed traffic, which would be real people. The non-viewed traffic is spiders, bots and other scripts. I am not going to discuss Monthly history as it’s pretty self-explanatory. Days of the month allows you to see when you are getting the most traffic. Skip along to the header – Robots, Spiders Top 10. How many have visited you and how many times. If you like you can see the full list by clicking on Full List.

3. Visits duration: How much time are people spending on your site? The more time they spend here, the less time they are on someone else’s site. This will tell you if your content is good enough to keep them. Less than 30 seconds means they never read your site, but then again that could be that they have been getting your info in a RSS reader. More than 2 minutes is good. Anyone spending more than 5 minutes did some reading. Which pages are they viewing? Pages URL tells you where they are visiting, entering and exiting. I will spend more time on this later.

4. I want to move on to the browsers. Just look at the range and see what people are using. For the first time I notice that I have more Firefox users than Internet Explorer viewers. This is good for one because I know my sites have been tested in Firefox.

5. It’s the next section that I wanted to tell you about. Where did they come from?
Direct address – these are people that typed in the address directly.

I see that 89.1% of my traffic is from Bookmarks. This is great; it means people are coming back. 0,6% from search engines, we need to increase this but that is a slow process. 10.2% are from links. This is the easiest and fastest part to increase. Click on Full List alongside links from an external page and look at where your hits are coming from. I can see from my links that my membership of various groups gets me visits. I see link- throughs from the various traffic sites we have joined, like Amatomu, Afrigator and del.icio.us. I see Sharon has done some sterling work on posting my stuff to del.icio.us, thanks Sharon. I have had 3 visits directly attributed to your del.icio.us listings.

In order for us to assist one another, I will visit Sharon’s blog and add it to my bookmarks. Please folks help one another, bookmark each other. When you visit a site you like, bookmark it on del.icio.us and also add it to your Bloglines. Using Bloglines this morning I knew immediately who had updated and was able to read in minutes that which took me half an hour to an hour previously. Previously I would need to physically visit every site to see who posted. Today I did not need to because I know who posted. Do it article for article.

Stumble Upon

The next Trafficbuilder I am going to introduce you to is Stumble Upon. You remember how to add the extension, find Stumble Upon and add the extension. Then visit stumbleupon.com and register. Once you have the Stumble Upon registration completed you will have your toolbar. You can now visit sites and either thumb up or thumb down them. While you are doing this you are training Stumble Upon to serve you sites that hold your interest.

If you find a site that you like, thumb up and leave a review and tell people what you thought. Soon you will be getting traffic from Stumble Upon. By the way thumb up your own articles after doing mine. Tell me you have done so and I will do so in return.

Other features of Stumble Upon

Stumble!

Click the Stumble! icon on your toolbar. Stumbleupon will send you sites and pages based on the Topics that you choose. Stumbleupon has millions of sites in its databases, all submitted and recommended by other Stumblers. There is a drop-down menu that allows you to Stumble! in many different ways.

You have mail!

The mail icon changes to alert you when you have a personal message from another Stumbler: You have to Stumble! a bit, choose a nickname and be displaying a photo before you can message other stumblers. There are ways to block messages from Stumblers.

Getting Help!

On Your Pages, there are links to Help and Preferences – The Help resources are constantly being improved upon, with many of the contributions coming from other Stumblers. You can ask questions of other Stumblers in the Help Forum. (You have to join forums in order to be able to post, and some restrictions apply).

How many of you got this article from Bloglines? Please tell me. How about Amatomu, del.icio.us, anywhere?

When gambling 777 is the goal. When the dow index is dropping 777 is not envisaged. The facts are that not only did Wall street hit the magic jackpot number, they broke a new record when doing it. Despite there being no terrorist activity, no discernable reason for panic except that a few banks have gotten themselves into a pickle, there is an armageddon mentality out there.

The sheep are trying to dump there stocks, causing an even greater panic. I am betting some real savvy people are buying everything in sight. These folks are gonna wake up the richest in the world when the shit settles. Why don’t I have the kind of money available to BUY BUY BUY?

This folks is not investment advice, I can’t tell whether its a bull market or a bear market. I just know the time to buy is when everybody is selling. I was just pondering the fact that Kiyosaki actually predicted this but got the reasons wrong.

So the States is going into a little bit of a depression, Its been almost a century since the last big one. It was bound to happen. Welcome to the third world Mr Bush.