If you already spend a fair amount of time blogging, money may come to you literally as soon as you ask for it. Once you have an established blog with a regular readership, it is easy to turn a profit [...]
Looking for a little inspiration for your blog? Check out this simple exercise that I do from time to time, particularly if I’ve got a little time to spare and a magazine handy. Note: pick a magazine that relates to [...]
Getting expired domains with traffic or backlinks is one of the most underground tactics. EHow.com, the main website of Demand Media, a NYSE listed company worth over $500 million dollars, used this technique as one of its main backlink-building tactics.
So how does it work?
What Happens When a Name Drops
Domain names are registered with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). When a domain name drops, ICANN essentially just de-lists that name from its registry.
There are several ways you can get your hands on that domain, before or after it completely drops out of the registry.
First, you can buy it from the domain registrar itself. This is how GoDaddy does it. When a domain expires from GoDaddy, it doesn’t go back into the pool. Instead, GoDaddy hosts an auction for the domain. The new domain gets assigned to the winner of the auction rather than going back into the registry.
On the other hand, the majority of expiring name registries work by actually waiting for the name to drop off the registry. Once it does, they immediately hammer the ICANN servers with registration requests.
There’s actually an immensely competitive technological war on this front. The first person to get the request through to ICANN gets the domain. There are a handful of companies that provide this service, so they’re constantly battling it out trying to get their requests in faster than the other guy.
It’s a battle fought in milliseconds in complex server arrangements. As a person who’s trying to pick up expired domains, the best way to take advantage of this battle is simply to bet on all sides. Place a bid with each of the services that can pick up domains for you. You only pay for a successful pick-up anyway.
Here’s where to look for expiring domains.
DropDay, Fresh Drop
DropDay and Fresh Drop are expiring domain watch lists. They scour all the various different dropped domain auction sites and make the data easy for you to sort.
While these two services don’t actually do bidding or registering, they can be incredibly useful for finding domains that you might be interested in bidding on.
SnapNames, NameJet, Pool, ENom
These are the actual tools you’ll use to bid on expiring domains.
Take a look through their websites to see exactly how they work. All of them use similar central technology, essentially hammering ICANN with registry requests. However, each of them work slightly differently.
Some require you to say what you want to pay up front; others will start an auction after they win the domain, and still others just register the domains for a straight fee.
A Word on GoDaddy Auctions
Finally, take some time to get to learn GoDaddy’s auction system. It works differently than the ICANN registry services, but due to the sheer volume of domains on GoDaddy’s system, you can find quite a few great deals there.
Picking up quality expired domains requires vigilance. You need to be always on the lookout for quality names to snap up as quickly as possible. That means watching the auctions and the aggregators regularly.
In recent years, the SEO principles has gone through many tumultuous changes. From the Panda update which uprooted many sites to the implementation of social metrics, it’s clear that SEO ranking factors aren’t staying stagnant. However, in spite of all these changes, the underlying fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed.
These immutable seo principles have been the same from the early days of SEO until now. In fact, they’ve only become more and more important as search engines have gotten smarter and smarter.
These are the four immutable laws of SEO.
Law #1: Content Is King
Google’s goal since day one has been to help the best content on the web find its way to the top of the search engines. As Google gets smarter, it’s only going to do this better and better.
Trying to game the system is not a very good long-term strategy. It’s extremely, extremely rare for people to be able to game search engines for any real length of time.
Instead, the best way to get ranked in the long run is to provide content that people genuinely like and want to share. This will generate organic backlinks, which Google loves.
Law #2: Think Long Term
Short-term SEO thinking is not only ineffective, it’s also extremely unhealthy.
People who try to get ranked in weeks rather than months inevitably get burned.
The methods you employ when you’re thinking long term versus short term are different. In the long run, you’ll lay much more solid foundations with long-term thinking than if you were just trying to get ranked as fast as possible.
Get in the habit of thinking in six months to a year in terms of your SEO goals.
Law #3: Understand the 80/20 of On-Page SEO
It’s easy to get sucked into on-page SEO. When it comes to on-page SEO, it really comes down to doing the 20% of work that’ll give you 80% of the results.
Webmasters can get fixated on many of the little things on their websites. Should you use bold or strong tags? How much effort do you need to put into your alt tags? The list goes on and on.
Realistically, there are really just a handful of on-page factors that will make most of the impact. Your keyword selection, your title tag, your H1 and H2 tags and your internal linking structures make up that 20%.
Understand the best practices for each of these things and implement them. That’ll take care of 80% of your on-page SEO.
Law #4: Have a Scheduled Link-Building Plan
Don’t just build links when you feel like it, or when you want to boost your rankings. Instead, keep building links all the time.
You don’t have to spend a lot of time on it. A couple hours a week is enough. Keeping your link-building engine up and running at all times will help you look more organic in your link building. The results also add up very quickly.
Create a weekly action plan for link building. Use the plan to keep up your link building, even when you have other things going on.
These are the four immutable laws of SEO. Follow these SEO principles laws and you stand a strong chance of winning the search engine contest in the long run.
There are four main kinds of content on the internet: text, graphics, audio and video. Each of these kinds of content has its own benefits and drawbacks, with each appealing most to different audiences.
Here’s an overview of each of these four kinds of content and when they should be used.
Text-Based Content
This is by far the most common type of content on the internet. Just about every webpage you see is based on text content. One of the biggest benefits of text-based content is that it’s very search engine friendly. Search engines can’t understand videos or audios, but they definitely can understand text. In other words, if you’re running text-based content you stand a good chance of ranking. It also requires less preparation to create text content. You don’t need microphones or videos, or expensive graphic editing programs. All you need to do is type.
Graphic-Based Content
The main type of graphic-based content online is infographics. These are essentially graphics that contain information in and of themselves. One of the biggest benefits of infographics is that it’s often more entertaining and informative than just text. For example, if you’re illustrating the history of a war, it’s much more alive to actually have graphics than just to describe it in words.
Audio
Audio content has really taken off ever since the iPod became popular. In the past, audio content had to be consumed in cassette or CD format. That was both expensive and quite a bit of hassle, and it just wasn’t that popular as a format. But today, people can listen to audios anywhere they go. In the car, on the bus, while walking, at lunch, etc. It saves time and is extremely convenient. Audio content works really well for many businesses.
Video
Video content is one of the most dynamic methods of distributing content on the internet. You can put funny content, informational content, interesting content, high tech content, personal content – just about anything you can think of. Video content also has some of the strongest “share culture.” It’s very easy to share video content with friends on Facebook for example. A video has a much higher chance of going viral than say an audio podcast. The only downside to video content is that it does take more effort to produce. You need to shoot the video, edit the video and finally render the video. The whole process could take many hours, rather than just 30 minutes to write an article.
So which content format is right for you and your business? It really depends on what kind of content you’re creating and who your market is. There’s no harm in trying all four different kinds of content and seeing which one(s) your audience responds the best to.
Content marketing is getting more and more important every day. People today are finding more and more content through social networks and less and less through search engines. That means that creating content people want to share is becoming ever more important. Here’s how to use content marketing to your advantage.
At the end of the day, the only thing that travels with you after every job, deal or business venture is your personal brand.
A lot of people fail to consciously build their personal brands. Yet this is truly one of the most valuable assets you have.
By creating high quality, unique content for a certain market, you establish yourself as an expert. Finding jobs, getting business partners and even attracting investors for businesses gets much easier if you’re a known content publisher.
A customer would much rather trust their money with an industry leader who provides a lot of quality content than a site that’s just out there to sell a product.
There’s something about consistency that really builds trust. Anyone can put up a website to start selling a product, but if you’re producing high quality content for six months, people will instinctively trust you a lot more. They’ll think you’ll still be around to help them six months down the line.
If you ever want to launch a viral campaign, you’ll have a base of users to start you off with.
Let’s say you want to launch a video contest, where users send in funny videos around a specific theme and the winner gets a prize.
If you hadn’t been publishing content, how would you find 100+ people to submit videos? It’d be very hard.
But if you’ve already been publishing content for months, you’ll already have a reader base you can launch your viral campaign from.
Great content marketing is really as simple as focusing on providing good content, consistently.
Good content should be completely original. If it’s based on your own personal experience, so much the better. People should feel like they can relate to your struggles and learn from your lessons when they read your material.
Don’t be disappointed if for the first few months your reader base takes a bit of time to build up. That’s how it works: reputations take time to become established. Fortunately, once your reputation is established, it also builds momentum and can grow very quickly.
The web is veering more and more towards creating good content. It’s not an overnight technique; so the sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll start reaping the benefits.
Having Floating Social Media Icons set on your blog either on the left or right side of the page would be a good choice, since the icons will always be available on the screen when your readers visit the page.
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Earn Money Blogging
If you already spend a fair amount of time blogging, money may come to you literally as soon as you ask for it. Once you have an established blog with a regular readership, it is easy to turn a profit through advertising.
Question:
I’d like to show only excerpts on the articles (blog) page instead of showing the entire post.
Is there a way to do this on my Flexibility Theme?
Answer:
Just go into the index.php file and find this line:
<?php the_content(‘Read the rest of this entry’); ?>
and then change it to:
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
Note: For those that haven’t use the Flexibility Theme before, I can only say good things about this theme. I use Flexibility 3 on some of my other blogs, and I can assure you is the way to go when creating your first blog for many reasons.
This theme is completely customizable, it’s easy to use, has a fantastic tutorial site, AND it’s free!
Who doesn’t want a free simple wordpress theme?
Daniel Turner, reveals some of his best product creation strategies when it comes to online video. There are some pretty good tips in here that you should definitely try using it from now on.
What I love about Daniel’s tips is that it will allow to create online video products even faster. And you know what that means… moh money yo!
Below are the sites that you should submit the page or site your are promoting to, these should be your first steps. There are thousands of sites like the ones listed below, but this list will only feature good and quality places to build backlinks.
Learn how Google decides what pages to rank higher in search engine results and why.
March 14th, 2012 
