Advertising on Bookmark Bliss

March 21, 2007 | Comments (0) | Filed under: General

I just wanted to take a moment and talk a little bit about advertising here on our site. First things first, please welcome our newest advertiser – TagSociety. TagSociety is a web directory that can help you connect with some of the best sites on the Web. Unlike most directories, TagSociety takes the time to screen every submission and ensures that each one offers valuable content that is not misleading, illegal, offensive, or hateful. If you’ve got an online business and are looking for an affordable way to showcase your site, as well as receive a link from a PageRank 5 listing,  pay a visit to TagSociety and get tagged today!. 

On the subject of advertising, there is no better time then now to showcase your product/service/site at Bookmark Bliss. We are just under 3 weeks old, and already we have an average of 2,500 visitors a day thanks in part to several articles reaching a wide audience through Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. For an idea of the different advertising packages we have to offer, visit our advertise with us page for the full details.

All advertising space is available on a first come, first served basis, so if you’re interested in advertising with us, make sure you get in today. For more detailed information on advertising options and packages you can contact us at anytime and we’d be happy to help you with any questions you might have.

Never underestimate the power of inflammatory comments

March 21, 2007 | Comments (7) | Filed under: Blogging

One of the most underrated methods of generating traffic to your blog is to comment on other people’s sites. Writing a comment accomplishes several things that you might not realize. First, it increases your visibility. Simply put, the more sites your name and URL is on, the more chances you have for someone to see the link and stop by for a visit. Secondly, comments are a perfect opportunity to throw down some of your jeopardy style knowledge and contribute to a serious discussion. Potentially, this has the possibility of impressing people enough that they want to visit your site just to see more of what you have to say.

In some cases as well, commenting can increase your search engine rank if the site you post on does not make use of “nofollow” attributes for their links. These types of sites are few and far between these days, but there are many people who support the nofollow movement and keep their blogs open for linking. Also, some search engines simply ignore the nofollow attribute, so it never hurts to get your URL out there.

On the flip side, the third method, and possibly the most underestimated when commenting for traffic, is to write inflammatory comments. Now by inflammatory, I don’t mean jumping in and saying something racist or ignorant, those are likely to just get you banned. What I mean is that instead of popping into a comment discussion and saying something like “I completely agree with your points for reason 1, 2, and 3″ you could say something like “You guys are all crazy, this is why I think so reason 1, 2, and 3.” On most active blogs, I think you’ll find the community is much more interested in contrary opinions then they are in complementary ones. A good inflammatory post can spurn on additional commenting from others who feel the need to attack your post or defend their own. Also, if your comment is well written with solid points to back it up, you’ll probably generate even more traffic from users who agree and don’t post, or from people who don’t agree but want to bring the argument to your own home turf. Sometimes people will just check out your site to find out whether or not you hold the same opinion in your own posts.

For blog owners, inflammatory posts can really help improve traffic to your blog. When people come across your article, they are much more inclined to stick around and respond to an inflammatory comment than they would be to a complementary one. This can increase your number of returning visitors (people like to keep coming back to make sure they get the last word on a subject) as well as improve your overall comment count with debates coming in on both sides of the issue. Obviously it’s important to make sure your comment section doesn’t get out of hand, but it’s alright to let things get a little heated. Your community will benefit from it, I guarantee it.

Examples of inflammatory posts can run the gauntlet from simple things like pointing out spelling mistakes in an authors post (I am sure there are MANY in this one alone) to actually disagreeing with their entire article and highlighting their mistakes. I would recommend, however, that you only post on blogs you are genuinely interested in. This is good advice for any comment you want to post, good or bad. Randomly commenting on sites for the sake of commenting will probably get you no where. Find sites you like, and don’t be afraid to voice your opinion, even if it is contrary to the status quo. I think you’ll find the benefits of being active and opinionated are well worth the effort, in the long run, when your site starts getting more and more traffic because of it.

If you’ve got something to say, whether complementary or preferably inflammatory, lets hear it! The wolves are ready and the comment section awaits you!

10 Top SEO Keyword Search Tools

March 20, 2007 | Comments (7) | Filed under: SEO

One of the crucial first steps in developing or revamping a site is researching keywords you want to rank highly on in Google and other search engines. Generally, you want your site to rank well for the specific niche you’re in, so the goal is to find any keyword in your niche that is not overly used in other sites, but still has a large number of visitors searching for them every day. Once you determine what keywords you want they affect every other aspect of your site including investing in a domain for the site and coming up with a design that highlights your terms.

Here is a list of 10 powerful search tools you can use to help you find the best keywords for your site. Some of them are free while others :

1. WordTracker
1. Free Trial, $271.88 / year to subscribe
2. Keyword Discovery
1. Free Trial, $599.40 / year to subscribe
3. Overture Keyword Selector Tool
1. Free
4. Nichebot
1. $1.00 Trial, $0.33 / day to subscribe
5. Google Adwords External Keyword Tool
1. Free
6. Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool
1. Free, Donations Accepted
7. Good Keywords
1. Free, Downloadable Software Application
8. Google Trends
1. Free, Analyzes keyword Trends
9. SpyFu
1. Free
10. SeoBook Keyword Tool
1. Free
11. WordZe
1. $7.95 for trial, $35 per month

Of the three pay services, I have only paid for and continue to use WordTracker. WordTracker combines different results, such as those from Google, MSN, and Yahoo, to give you an overall score for your keywords compared to existing sites. I have read some good things about WordZe as well, but I have not yet tried their service myself. If anyone has an comments, good or bad, about any of these, please drop us a line…

Akismet – I think I love you!

March 19, 2007 | Comments (7) | Filed under: Blogging

Just in case you haven’t been watching our spam blocked widget at the bottom of our black side bar, during the last few days our total number of spam blocked has been jumping up by leaps and bounds. The plugin responsible for this is known as Akismet, and was mentioned as one of our top 15 wordpress plugins. Akismet now comes pre-installed with new downloads of WordPress, which could not be better news for anyone running a blog.

Akismet basically works like this, when a new comment or ping is submitted to your blog via your comment fields or by trackback, it is sent to the Akismet severs to be tested. If the comment is determined to be spam, it is dumped into a spam queue on your site. If the comment is questionable, it is queued for moderation. If it passes all the tests, it gets posted on your site. The beauty of the entire system is you benefit from the knowledge of all other blogs using Akismet, and your spam fighting tools are up to date at all times.

About a year ago I setup a blog / community site for a friend of mine using Drupal for the backend. Within a month of his site being up, he had over 5,000 spam comments posted to his site, and the number of incoming spam was even effecting the performance of his site. We eventually just decided to turn off commenting anyway, since he didn’t really want it in the first place, but it really makes you appreciate just how amazing a tool like Akismet is to have at your disposal with WordPress. As it turns out, since then the Drupal community has learned about the power of Akismet as well, and now has a plugin available for their latest release.

If you’re running a site with any type of open commenting system, I couldn’t recommend Akismet more. These days, spam is so prevalent that you are just setting yourself up for disaster without using some kind of spam filter. If you need proof of Akismet’s value, TechCrunch just recently passed the 2 million spam blocked mark. Now THAT is a lot of spam. We’ve just barely passed the 300 mark!

Website Review: Guru.com

March 19, 2007 | Comments (8) | Filed under: Reviews

When it comes to freelancing, Guru.com is the self proclaimed world’s largest marketplace for freelance talent. If you’re a programmer, hardware administrator, lawyer, graphic design, web developer, writer,  fashion designer, accountant, salesman, or business consultant, Guru is a place where you can go, register for an account, and apply for open jobs in many different fields. About a year ago, Bookmark Bliss registered with Guru with the goal of expanding our reach in terms of landing programming contracts. Guru seemed to have a lot of contracts listed daily, so we figured it was worthwhile to test it out.

Unfortunately, the site is not as good as it may seem at first glance. In our experience, Guru.com is almost entirely populated by what we like to call “empty contracts.” What that means is that while the job may seem like one you have a chance at picking up, most of the time the potential employer doesn’t have any intention of actually awarding the contract. Almost every listing is either designed to get a free estimate on what something would cost or to get an idea of what type of person you need to hire to do the work.

 To make matters more interesting, Guru actually charges a fairly hefty fee if you want to really compete in its online marketplace. There are several different levels of freelance contractor, Basic, Guru, and Guru Vendor. Each level has various restrictions on it. For example, a basic user can submit only 10 proposals per month while a Guru user can submit 100. For a yearly Guru account, the fee is $199.95 and for a Guru Vendor account it’s $259.94. Obviously, the higher you go up the bracket the more they hype your proposals. In our experience, the free account is virtually useless at Guru and carries a sort of stigma amongst employers as being inferior in quality to the vendors. You practically are forced to upgrade to at least Guru if you want a chance at any contracts. According to Guru, Basic members create more than 20% of the invoices at Guru.com, so this might be more of an isolated situation with us or perhaps limited to the sections we applied in. In our experience, the number of free invoices was much lower than 20%.

In the just over 6 months we were paid Guru members, we submitted many, many proposals (on average 10 per week, with just a 2 man team). Of these proposals, we had less than 10% of them actually get awarded to ANYBODY and of those 10% only 2 expressed an interest in awarding the contract specifically to us. The one proposal we did get, the company actually used Guru’s convoluted system for sending invoices and accepting projects to cheat us out of $100 dollars in work. So, all in all we invested almost $200 and came out with nothing except the loss of hundreds of hours of proposal writing time.

Guru.com has two really major problems that make it a pretty bad environment for small business freelancers. The first is that anyone can submit a proposal and has absolutely zero responsibility to even follow up after the initial post. Every proposal we submitted was several pages in length (2-5) and when the employer does not hire anyone for a project, the time taken to apply is totally wasted. One proposal we submitted was for someone interested in building online software for designing custom boat docks. They liked our proposal, and followed up asking if we could do a quick image mockup of our idea. We did, and the person never responded again. Basically, they used our excitement of the project to illicit a free design with no intention of awarding the project to anyone. Suffice it to say, we learned a good lesson that day.

The second big issue with Guru is that it has a very complicated Escrow and invoicing system that has so many steps that it is easy to get completely lost with what needs to be done. We were awarded a very small contract for $100 dollars and we completed the work, submitted an invoice, talked to the company over the phone, and submitted the completed project work to them. Unfortunately, we had failed to notice a very hidden requirement for Guru to completely commit to a project, which allowed the employer to take our work without paying leaving us no recourse to follow up. This was a huge fortune 500 company, but I will keep the name out of this document since it was Guru’s fault more then it was theirs. Basically, we were awarded the project, we submitted an invoice, we contacted the employer and submitted a formal project proposal, we did all the work and met every deadline on the proposal, and we submitted the work to them. The only thing we didn’t do was get a second acceptance of the proposal in Guru’s system, instead we got it over the phone. Because of this, the employer had the ability to completely walk away from the project despite a month of effort and work on our part. In the end they got everything for free, and we got nothing, including no completed proposal in our profile which could have helped us land additional contracts.

Overall, we found Guru’s system to be difficult, and gives 100% of the power to employers and absolutely none to the freelancers. Their database is populated with “empty contracts” and the potential for work is not worth the subscription fee it takes to get it. I don’t recommend Guru for anyone interested in Freelance work, you’d have a much better chance going door to do then you do through their site, at least in the programming and web design fields.

If anyone else out there has had any experience with Guru, we’d love to hear about it. The site had a lot of promise, but in the end none of it pays off. If you’ve had a different experience, please let us know all about it.

UPDATES: Article was updated to include the actual official names of Guru packages, Basic, Guru, and Guru Vendor. Also, I have added a statistic sent to me by Guru on the number of Free account invoices that are sent through their site. This would give some indication as to how many contracts are awarded to non-paying members.

BlinkList – Del.icio.us with Digg Ranks

March 18, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Social Networking

Ever since I started really looking into the potential of social networking sites to improve online business, I’ve been compelled to test out many of the new competitors who’ve stepped into the ring. While juggernauts like MySpace and Digg may have a stranglehold in the arena, they also have many problems that could be the opening a competitor needs to get their foot in the door.

One of the somewhat newer players to the game is a site known as BlinkList. If I were to describe the site in a single sentence, I would say it’s the combination of Del.icio.us and Digg with a slight twist. Users of the site build their own bookmark lists, very similar to Del.icio.us complete with description, title, and their own set of tags. Where the twist comes into play is that BlinkList treats each person who saves a bookmark to their list as the equivalent of what one Digg would be. So, if six people save an article, then the article recieves six “blinks.” Any user commiting the link to their saved list is essentially endorsing it as an article other users might want to read. The ultimate result of this sort of distrubuted bookmarking is that articles are promoted to the front page based on their bookmark popularity. This is nearly identical to the Digg model except for the fact that the promotion of the article comes from different users independantly bookmarking a site in addition to them seeing it in the list of popular posts and choosing to click it.

I’ve been using the site for a couple of weeks now, and I have found BlinkList to be a very promising resource for the submission of articles. I found one of our posts, The Developer Cheat Sheet Compilation, submitted independant of my efforts and there seems to already be a large body of users submitting and promoting articles. The website is very slick and clean, with a lot of AJAX based user interface design that makes it really easy to navigate.

One thing I really found interesting, as well as promising for new bloggers, is their listing of most recent bookmarks available on the main page. This list updates very quickly, but an article is promoted to the top of it EACH TIME someone adds it to their profile. Unlike Digg where your new post can quickly be buried from the main page, never to be seen again, the more popular your article becomes, the more chances it has to be seen by readers of the site. A very nice improvement over the Digg model.

Overall, I think this site has a lot of potential both as a place to promote your articles and also as a place to find and read interesting posts. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on BlinkList and adding it to my list of go-to resources for promoting new Bookmark Bliss posts. If you’re interesting in trying it out, you can submit any of our articles to BlinkList by clicking on the share this link at the bottom of every post.

If you’ve had any experiences with BlinkList, I would love to hear about it, good or bad. I think for now, I’ll keep playing around and see what other interesting ideas they have in store.

Stumbling for the Little Blog

March 17, 2007 | Comments (0) | Filed under: Social Networking

These days, everyone seems to know all about social networking sites and the benefit they can have to a fledgling blog. Get your article on the main page of Digg, and you’ll have so many visits in one day, your web server will probably crash. Traffic like that can really put a new site on the map but just how hard is it to get to that type of exposure?

Recently, I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of that very question by experimenting with sites such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Since Bookmark Bliss started in the world of online business, we’ve been trying to increase the visibility of our articles. After all, what good is a killer article, if no one knows you wrote it? For a new article, the skies the limit in terms of exposure. There are now a multitude of sites that allow you to submit something you’ve written and have the community decide (slightly differently for each site of course) whether it’s worthy of their praise or wrath.

In terms of potential traffic, any of these social networking sites can generate many visits to your articles despite a substantially different approach to how they actually operate. Take the first three sites I mentioned, each of them is based around community involvement for both the submission and the promotion of new content. All three have a rating system which allows users to visit a link and rate the content available with more or less a glorified Roman Coliseum thumbs up or thumbs down.

The real challenge, however, comes with knowing where to post and which site has the best potential for generating attention.

With Digg, I think most people will find it difficult to get promoted to the main page, especially if you’re a newcomer. As a tool for consistent article promotion, you’ll definitely need to invest a lot of time in the community. Digg relies heavily on a sort of friendship based relationship between members for promoting articles. I think you could write one of the best articles ever written, submit it as a serious member of the community, and still only have a small percentage chance of getting your article promoted to the front page. This has a lot to do with the sheer volume of posts submitted to Digg. A lot of factors need to align to make your article popular using Digg alone. Posting category, title, time of day for the post, and number of comments all play a huge roll in getting to the front page.

Similar to Digg is Reddit, but with an added twist. Since Reddit only allows topic titles and no descriptions, it can be EVEN HARDER for a new blogger to generate enough attention to get some traffic to his article. On the flip side, however, the lack of description means less things for people to scrutinize, so if you can write a catchy title, your chances may actually improve. Like Digg, without a large friends network you are mostly just hoping people will take the time to click your link, otherwise, your chances of promotion are very slim.

With StumbleUpon, the little blog has a bit more of a fighting chance. Stumble allows users running their stumble toolbar to rate sites they “stumble” upon and add them to the network. Once it’s in the network and categorized, anyone else stumbling through the web has a chance to happen upon your article. This has great potential for an unknown blogger in that people are immediately brought to your submission without having to click a link. This means your post has just as good a chance as any other for exposure and if it’s good, you will be rated highly increasing the number of people sent your way. It’s a great system that allows you almost as fair a shot as anyone to get your article seen.

In my experience, StumbleUpon has the best return rate for a submitted article. Even if you are new, a quality article can get a lot of Stumbled traffic. With Digg and Reddit, you are mostly hoping on a catchy enough title to cause people to click. If you don’t have it just right, your article will go no where.

Your best bet is to build up respect within all three communities, and keep on submitting articles. Eventually, your posts will start getting more and more traffic. While you may not reach the front page with Digg or Reddit right away, each can send you many visitors even for unpopular articles. It never hurts to submit if you think your post is a fit for the community. You never know what people will like at the end of the day…

Link Roundup – March 15, 2007

March 16, 2007 | Comments (1) | Filed under: General

Even though Bookmark Bliss is a fairly new site, we’ve already had many members of the blogosphere stop by to visit and some even join our MyBlogLog community. We really hope that trend continues. Some of you might not have had the chance to check out everyone in the community, so I wanted to bring you a taste of some of the great articles these sites are producing. Here is some of what our community members have been talking about that I think you might find interesting:

1. AskShane.org put up a great article on why Delayed Posting is a Beautiful Thing. It goes through the basics of why you might want to use the WordPress timestamp features to stagger your posts and how they can make your blog more respectable through consistency.
2. Over at Esplanade, Lyndon wants to know, Are you Spending too much Time on your Terminal? Something I think a lot of us might need to ask ourselves.
3. On the flip side of the coin, everybody’s favorite evil blogger, John Chow, is running an Evil Blog Contest where you could win a Nintendo Wii by adding a post in your own blog about the contest. It doesn’t get any easier then that.
4. When it comes to social networking, when is a linkback not always in the best interest of your site? DeepJiveInterests takes a look at the lose-lose situation of Startups Dealing with Getting Crunched, Dugg, Slashdotted, and Redd(ited). While obviously a new site is dying for some love from these big players, it may be all for nothing if their sites can’t stand up to the influx of new traffic.
5. At Half Sigma, they examine Why a Career in Computer Programming Sucks. As a career programmer myself, I found this to be an interesting perspective for anyone who is just starting out their own programming career. A lot of people don’t realize just what it takes to remain competitive in the game.
6. Mitchell at HarpzOn discusses ways that you can increase your Branding on the Cheap with Google AdWords. For all of us just starting out, every penny counts and this article shows you one way to make the most of it. 
7. Finally, and slightly off topic with the rest of the posts, I came across an interesting article at one of my favorite movie sites, AintItCoolNews. The article discusses how last weekends blockbuster success, 300, may actually be the first documented film to owe the majority of its success to web based marketing. Pretty amazing if its true, and a real sign of just how powerful the web, blogosphere, and online marketing has become.

That’s all for this roundup, but stay tuned for many more in the coming weeks. If you’ve stopped by for a visit at Bookmark Bliss and like what you see, take a second and join our community. It’s the best way to let us know you’re out there so I can return the favor

Passive Website Income

March 16, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: Marketing

I was just reading ShoeMoney’s blog today, and came across this post outlining 5 ways to make passive income on your website. An interesting read and definitely something any new blogger should take a look at.

While I’ve barely started out in the online business environment, I’ve done some research on all of these forms of passive advertising. Commission Junction and AzoogleAds seem like very popular and powerful affiliate sites, although I have barely had a chance to scratch the surface when it comes to their full potential.

I currently have a few sites in development as we speak that will hopefully be a much bigger opportunity to take advantage of affiliates. I’ll let you know which way we go with them when they get closer to launch.

If any of you have had positive experience with Affiliate Marketing, I would love to hear about your successes and failures. I’m currently only using AuctionAds on one of my sites, and it has thus far been ok. Lots of clicks, but I have yet to make a sale in the 2 days it’s been up. Hopefully that improves

Domain Investing – Expiring minds want to know

March 15, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: Domain Names

Every so often, I get into a debate with friends about the idea of unused domains as an investment. The underlying question is this, if you buy a domain with a one year registration, but ultimately never use it, should you simply let that domain expire? Now there are two sides to the coin on this issue. The first is obviously, why pay another 10 bucks for something you aren’t using? A hard point to argue with. On the other hand though, there is the idea that investing in a domain is like investing in virtual real estate and like real estate, the property matures in value over time. In the case of a domain name, it doesn’t have to grow much to be worth more than the 10 dollars you originally paid. So, which choice is the best one for your business?

Obviously, your ability to pay for the domain registration plays a huge part in that decision. If however, you have the funds to continue registering, from my experience, you are much better off to keep the domain then to let it expire. Owning a domain is like the new millennium’s gold rush claim. You stake your land before others do, and you attempt to mine it into a fortune. Sometimes it pans out and you find gold in dem’ der’ hills. Other times, your land turns out to be a lemon, and is completely barren of the yellow (gotta love Deadwood). Even when you think the claim is dead, you never want to simply walk away allowing someone else to find fortune that should have been yours.

 Since it only takes a matter of seconds to claim your piece of Internet real estate, many people (including myself) make purchases as soon as inspiration strikes, to ensure the name is reserved. Sometimes these ideas pan out and develop into productive websites or active community portals. Other times though, for whatever reason, the domain name remains dormant and goes completely unused. At the end of the year you have a choice to make on whether to keep it, or let it go.

 With millions of people registering new domains all the time, the odds of someone else eventually wanting a domain name you have is pretty high. Increasing those odds are the fact that since you registered the name, it will now be appearing on every domain name expiry list all over the web. This increases its exposure making it much more likely to go to someone else rather then back to the registration heap. Securing expiring domains is big business, and by letting your domain go for nothing, you make it just that much better of a deal to a prospective buyer. If you aren’t sure what your domain is worth, you can try sites like dnScoop to get an estimate of just how valuable your url might be.

In the year you held your domain, you might not realize it, but a couple of big things happened that makes your domain much more valuable then when you picked it up. The first is you’ve held the name long enough to pass the search engine sandbox. The sandbox is the idea that search companies like Google require a domain to be registered for a certain amount of time before they can be sure that it is legitimate. So, this means that any new content added to your domain will enter into search engines with much more speed and credibility then it would with a freshly registered domain. This is very valuable to web developers, especially those starting out with a new site. In addition, your URL has been off the market for 365 days. This fact alone means at least one person was interested in the domain, which increases the value to squatters and resellers just itching to make a quick buck off your mistake.

Here is a perfect example of the value of an expiring domain. Almost 2 years ago now, a friend of mine really wanted to put up a website to encourage bulldog lovers to share photos and videos of their dogs. He registered the domain MyBully.com (no link because he no longer owns it, as you will find out soon) and had the best intentions of putting up a site. He implemented a basic welcome page, but work and family got in the way, and he never did have the opportunity to build the site. When his yearly renewal came up, he declined it and let the domain fall back into the heap thinking no one else would want the domain. Fast forward a year, he now has more free time and the idea of setting up the bulldog focused site comes back to the forefront. Unfortunately,  the domain is no longer available and has been snatched up by a domain reseller who now wants almost $900 dollars for the domain. Needless to say, he really regretted letting the domain go, and is now on the lookout for a different name.

If you are sure you don’t want to keep the domain, there are options available to you that will help you get the most mileage out of it. Domain auction sites such as Sedo, Afternic, Domain Aftermarket, and Enom can help you get the most money for your name. If you want to keep the name, but don’t have any plans for what to put on the site, consider parking it to earn money. There are many ways to make that small $10 dollar investment earn you more money at the end of the day.

So, what does this all mean?

Well, in summary, your domain is as valuable to someone on the web as that prime parking space you have down by the Air Canada Center in Toronto. You wouldn’t just walk away and let someone take your space, so don’t do the same when it comes to your web identity. Don’t let your registered domains go without getting your money’s worth and that will most certainly never happen by letting it expire.