How the big guys stay big

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I posted a comment on a “big” blog the other day. By “big”, I mean a popular, well frequented blog.

What surprised me was the amount of referral traffic I got as a result of that single comment. I know we all talk about blog commenting as a way to build backlinks and traffic, but this one really surprised me.

That got me thinking a little bit about how these blogs work. They remain popular by virtue of the fact that they are popular. People comment on them because they know they’ll get good referred traffic, the blogger gets lots of free content, which means many people go to read the blog, which means that many webmasters want to have their comments on the blog. It’s a whole revolving door type thing.

The frustrating thing is that in a lot of cases the posts which attract dozens of comments on the “big” bloggers sites are nothing special. I know, these guys get their reputation by providing quality content over a long period of time, but a lot of what they post is pretty much the same as what you’ll find in any one of a couple of hundred blogs on the same subject.

The question is this - how do we get to become one of the “big” guys?

Buggered if I know!

Worthless blogs number 1

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I wrote the other day about not bothering to post to your blog unless you actually had something to add to the intar-web.

Well, I’ve found the mother of all bandwidth wastes today - 533 posts in the last 200-odd days, and here’s what this person is doing:

Taking an RSS feed from somewhere, auto (I assume) posting it to a wordpress blog, but just using the summary. Then, at the bottom of the summary, he has a link that says “Read more…..”.

He then pings the blog aggregators
The kicker is, that this “link” takes you to a signup page to buy something called “AdSense Trainer”. There is no “Read more…..”

This is incredibly deceptive, and, I would imagine, bordering on illegal, if not most certainly unethical.

This person gets no link love from me, but you can find the blog here: http://news.adsensetrainer.com/

Cool tool - SearchStatus Firefox extension.

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Now this is a tool that’s well worth the download!

The SearchStatus Firefox Extension gives “at a glance” PageRank and Alexa ranking information on the fly, as well as a host of other information.

After installation, and restarting Firefox, you’ll notice two small bars in your status bar, one indicating PageRank of the page you’re viewing, the other showing the Alexa rank.

Right-clicking on the small logo to the left of the bars presents you with a miriad of options:

All in all, this tool provides any webmaster or marketing person a wide variety of valuable information.

Prepare for a new wave of Made For AdSense sites

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Every blogger and his dog is writing affiliate-link filled posts about  HyperVRE at the moment.

I was going to write a review of the product, but Eric beat me to the punch (and did a much better, more thorough job than I probably would have, as well!)

The creators of this product have used a very clever viral marketing campaign, I won’t go into it here - Eric’s written a good, honest appraisal of the software, including how they’ve got just about every blogger on the planet talking about it. (As can be seen by their alexa graph below - that’s some impressive numbers!)

And this:

That’s some scary good numbers there, they’ve done an excellent job of marketing the product, but what does it all mean?

What it means is that the power to create millions of spammy, crappy MFA sites has just been placed in the hands of Joe Average. Where once the tools used to create these sites were complicated and difficult to use, your average webmaster with a modicum of HTML knowlege, and a list of keywords will be spitting out spam sites like there’s no tomorrow.

This tool has the potential to single-handedly wreck the web. I’ve written before about AdSense causing the decline of web publishing standards. This tool leaves AdSense in its wake in this regard.

Content writing for those who suck at it

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OK, so you’ve been approved for your AdSense account, and you’re ready to start cashing the cheques.

You’ve got your website design all worked out, you’ve chosen your niche, read up a bit on search engine optimisation, and you’re ready to go.

Now you need to actually produce your content.

This is where so many bloggers fall down. Poorly written, or un-original content is probably the biggest turnoff for potential readers. Before you decide to go weighing down the blogosphere with more of the same, consider the following:

Content-Writing can be broken down into two parts, they are (not surprisingly!) the Content, and the Writing 

Content: this is the ideas that are expressed by the writing. There’s little point writing something if your ideas aren’t new or innovative. What value is there in re-hashing something that someone else has already written? By all means base your writing on someone else’s blog post, but provide a counter-point, or expand on their ideas.

Writing: there’s little more that turns off potential readers than poorly thought out arguments. Well, maybe one thing - poorly written content. Bad grammar and spelling, poor punctuation, and general sloppiness make your content hard to read, and dent your credibility as a legitimate source of information. You wouldn’t expect this from the New York Times, so don’t serve up your readers second-rate material.

If you look at these points and don’t think that you can produce the ideas to write compelling content, or your spelling and grammar isn’t up to scratch, maybe you need to pay someone to create your content for you, or look at other areas to make your millions.

Footnote:

There is a difference between your and you’re, learn it, use it

Becoz is not a word

Then is not an alternate spelling for than