They Work Harder then You Do!

May 31, 2007 | Comments (4) | Filed under: Blogging

I came across this video earlier today from Loren Feldman at 1938 Media. and I thought it was really funny and also really excellent advice for many bloggers out there. Want to know why ShoeMoney, JohnChow, Darren Rowse make more money then you do? It’s because THEY WORK HARDER THEN YOU DO!

The video is mostly just all in fun, but its message is very true and one we should all take to mind when starting out your online business. Just as a warning though, the video does feature some foul language and crude humor, so make sure you’re not easily offended before watching.

Enjoy!

Blog Profits Blueprint and Mentoring Program

May 31, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Online Business

For those of you who don’t already know, Yaro Starak is the author of the Internet business blog Entrepreneur’s Journey. It’s a great site with tons of tips on improving your online business and a site I try to visit almost every day. Today, Yaro officially launched his first e-book entitled Blog Profit Blueprints. It’s completely free and a great read for any level of blogger. I highly recommend checking it out, even if you think you don’t have anything new to learn…

The reason I’m mentioning this at all is to highlight a couple of opportunities resulting from this launch for both beginner and established bloggers. First the launch of Yaro’s mentoring program, entitled Blog Mastermind, appears to be a top notch effort in all regards. Anyone who signs up gets access to a wide array of video, text tutorials, and lessons all specifically geared at helping you make a living entirely through blogging. You can communicate with other members, and also ask questions directly to Yaro to help improve your business. You’ll also get a sneak peak at Yaro’s own techniques and tips that have helped him be as successful as he is.

If you’re not interested in the mentoring program, you may be interested in promoting it instead. The Blog mastermind program also offers a great affiliate program that has the potential to become a reoccurring source of income for any blog. For every member who signs up to the standard mentoring program, you receive $20 bucks a month for every month they stick with it. Not a bad deal and one I think many of us can take advantage of. For more information on how to become an affiliate check out the Blog Mastermind website.

Using the Digg API to Prepare your Site for the Digg Effect – Part 1

May 30, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Tools

As I mentioned before, I’ve been experimenting a bit with the new Digg API to see what exactly is possible with it. I’m not alone in this either. In just about a month since the API was released, literally hundreds of API based tools and products have been released all over the web. Just take a look at the finalists from the Digg API Visualization Contest for some of the crazy ideas people have come up with.

I’ve been really busy these days helping a friend of mine get ready to launch a small video website to showcase some of the graphic art talent at his school. While we were working on optimizing the site as best we can to withstand the Digg Effect, I had an interesting idea for a way to use the Digg API to automate a site to withstand the Digg Effect.

One of the hardest problems with a burst high traffic situation (where you get a massive influx of visitors over a short period of time) is that most sites are unprepared. Almost all of us sacrifice top level optimization of our blogs to provide more user luxuries such as recent post lists, MyBlogLog widgets, top commentator lists, etc. The problem with these is they require more database accesses, more JavaScript loading, and more CPU usage/memory to run. That’s fine in a situation where your traffic is spread throughout the day, but in a burst situation, it can eat up all your server resources and eventually cause it to crash.

The ideal situation would be to provide all the comforts of your site when traffic is balanced, but limit these functions for a short period of time as soon as you see your traffic beginning to spike. At least, that is, until you switch to a hosting situation that can handle both. The best way to survive this type of situation is to switch your page entirely to HTML only, as soon as you think your traffic is about to explode. This can be done manually, but sometimes people will submit your pages to Digg for you, and you can easily be surprised by the traffic. 

So, my idea was that maybe it was possible to completely automate this functionality? One of my favorite plugins we use here at Bookmark Bliss is called WP-Cache. WP-Cache, in essence, converts your pages to HTML, automatically, and refreshes them both smartly (whenever you update or someone adds a comment) and periodically (every few hours). This has its limitations, but can really save your Wordpress blog when it comes to burst traffic.

What if your site isn’t using Wordpress though? This is the situation we are in with my friends video site, where we are basically deciding on how to implement our own caching scheme directly into the site.

It turns out the Digg API is VERY powerful and you can really accomplish a lot of great things with it. I really hope what we’ve done for the video site will translate into an improved Wordpress plugin as well, but for now I’m not quite sure.

In part two, I’ll step through our solution and how we completely automated the Digg survival process using the Digg API.

When is it time to switch to better hosting?

May 28, 2007 | Comments (14) | Filed under: Hosting

When it comes to running an online business, a site is only as good as your web host lets it be. If you’ve got a slow webhost or one that is constantly down, even a great site can appear to be poor as a result. To make matters worse, finding a great webhost is not an easy task. I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue lately due to some pretty major concerns with my current webhosting provider, Site5. As most of you know, I tend to experiment a lot with traffic from Digg, and recently, I’ve been finding some interesting (read infuriating) issues with my current host.

My recent concern is that they seem to take a very inconsistent stance when it comes to dealing with influx traffic resulting from the “Digg effect” or the ”Slashdot effect.” Sometimes they let the traffic just flood in with no issues, which is what happened for my 300 article and my color palette article, but other times they take extreme measures such as locking down my site (and all my other sites hosted in the same account) for hours at a time.

As far as hosts go, Site5 has been really top notch for me so far, which is why this has been bugging me so much. Their support is excellent and you really get a lot of bang for your buck with their hosting plans. I also experience very little downtime and generally fairly fast site speed at all hours of the day. So the way they deal with this particular issue is really throwing me.

When you really think about it though you can’t really blame them for any stance they take when it comes to this issue. My hosting package is a shared hosting plan, and there are most likely hundreds of other sites hosted on the same server. If one site blows up in traffic, it can directly effect the traffic of the other sites. So in that situation would you shut down 1 client to appease 999? Of course!

The real question is, when is it time to switch to better hosting and is the hosting really better?

There are literally hundreds of different options out there ranging from 5-50 dollar shared hosting to 200-1000 dollar dedicated hosting / co-location. Obviously a dedicated plan is a big step forward, but generally for new sites, the cost of this type of account is a little prohibitive, at least until they start producing a steady revenue stream. So, that leaves more shared hosting.

The old adage, you get what you pay for, hasn’t always been true for me when it comes to paying for shared hosting. I’ve paid for cheap plans that worked beautifully and more expensive ones that were absolute trash. As a result, I’m a little hesitant to think upgrading to a $30 or $40 a month hosting package would do much to solve my problems.

Let me pose these question to all of you. At what point do you bite the bullet and switch to a better more dedicated hosting solution? Do you wait until your sites would pay for the hosting themselves, or do you make the switch early and ultimately improve your income by avoiding downtime? What has been your experience when it comes to hosting and paying for various different levels of shared hosting? Is more expensive ever better traffic wise or just resource wise?

At the end of the day, switching to a dedicated hosting platform is really not that bad in the big scheme of expenses. With a small set of blogs or even a few great resource sites, you can easily generate enough revenue to cover the cost of the server with not much effort. The real issues is deciding when the right time to make the jump is, without sacrificing your user experience in the process.

Technorati gets a Face Lift, Experiences Downtime as a Result

May 25, 2007 | Comments (4) | Filed under: Tools

Seems like everyone is rolling out some big updates these days with MyBlogLog and Technorati being the latest in the list. Today, Technorati rolled out a major overhaul of their blog indexing system that actually includes quite a few changes and a graphic facelift. This comes directly on the heels of their changes a few weeks back where they replaced the old system of Rank with a new system called Authority.

The new changes to the Technorati service include the following:

1. Streamlined search that incorporates keywords, tags, and blogs into one search (I never use their search, but I am amazed this wasn’t the case already)
2. Cleaned up user interface
3. Some graphical toys like a scrolling blog ticker

Really, nothing too crazy to write home about, but with changes coming every few weeks it seems, Technorati appears to be making an effort toward gradually improving their service.

Today’s changes did not go off without a hitch as Technorati experienced substantial outages throughout the day as a result. According to Technorati, these outages were mostly due to missing “bot defensive” code that unfortunately was omitted from the final release of the new site. They appear to be back on track now though, so hopefully things should be normal again.

We’ll see how the community takes to these recent changes and hopefully we’ll see more updates in the near future. For those of you out there that use Technorati as a feed aggregator for your blog, do you actually do a lot of searching and article finding on the site itself? I really don’t use it for more than a way to get my feed out there a bit more, but maybe I’m missing out on a tool for finding other great blogs? What do you guys think?

MyBlogLog introduces new Tagging Options

May 24, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: Tools

A few days ago I speculated that big changes may be on the horizon for MyBlogLog as a result of some downtime issues with common wordpress plugins. Lo and behold, those changes have arrived sooner than expected. Earlier today, TechCrunch announced that MyBlogLog will launch a new Tagging feature sometime soon that will allow users to tag web communities they frequent.

According to the article, MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier had this to say about the intended functionality of the new features.

The main use will be to categorize topics and people to let users find new content they might be interested in. If you read a certain blog, view it’s MyBlogLog page and click on a tag to see other blogs that are tagged with the same word.

If you’re interested in trying the feature out, visit the MyBlogLog community for Bookmark Bliss and toss in a couple of tags. I recommend using “Online Business”, “Blogging”, “Programming”, and “Web Design” but the choice is definitely up to you

While this feature is interesting for sure, it seems to me like they are playing a bit of catchup with competitors such as BumpZee having already implemented tagging long ago. One other interesting note is that in an attempt to help fight spam, MyBlogLog encourages users to flag such sites with the tag “Schmoe” standing for Social Media Optimizer. These sites will be reviewed by MyBlogLog and will have appropriate actions taken against them.

Ultimately, plans are still in place for the site to be redesigned and maybe renamed (Yahoo Blog Log?) at some point in the future. I hope they take the time to optimize the query time of the widgets as well…

Interesting news to say the least. Hopefully the “schmoe” tagging doesn’t get out of hand. Anyone who is interested in doing a little tag promotion swapping, let me know in the comments. Post a couple key tags you’re interested in and a link to your community and maybe we can all help each other get started.

10 Techniques for Reaching the Digg Front Page

May 23, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: Social Networking

If you’re a regular reader here, then you know one of my favorite subjects is how to use Digg and other social bookmarking sites for promote your articles. We’ve had our ups and downs with Digg, but overall, making it to the front page of Digg can be an excellent way for a new site to generate some initial traffic and demonstrate the quality of writing they have to offer.

There have literally been hundreds of posts on the Blogosphere with tips and techniques for reaching the Digg front page. Some of the advice is of a decent quality while others clearly have no clue what they are talking about. One of the questions I constantly get asked here at Bookmark Bliss is how we were able to reach the Digg front page on several of our articles? The best answer I can give to that is by learning from those who have tested it out ad nauseam, and combining their techniques into one that worked for us.

With that in mind, I’ve compiled 10 excellent posts detailing techniques that should help you get started in your quest for the elusive Digg front page formula. Keep in mind though, no tip is flawless and you have to experiment yourself until you figure out what works best for your site. So, without further ado, I bring you THE LIST:

1. Tips from a Top 10 Digg user on how to get to the Frontpage – JohnTP
2. 15 Ways to become a Digg Power Use in only 48 hours – EarnersBlog
3. How to get Digg Frontpaged - Net Buisness Blog
4. 8 Ways to Help you get to Digg’s Front Page – SEO Egghead
5. 10 Steps to Guarantee your make the Digg Front Page – SEO BlackHat
6. How to ‘Still’ Get on the Digg Homepage – Pronet Advertising
7. How to NOT get on the Digg Homepage – Google Blogoscoped
8. How to Build a Digg Culture on your Blog – Problogger
9. Exploring Pay-Per-Digg – John Chow
10. 10 Ways to get on to Digg’s Frontpage – Web Expose

MyBlogLog Ninja Updates – Big Change on the Horizon?

May 21, 2007 | Comments (2) | Filed under: Tools

It looks like MyBlogLog has been making some changes recently, without really publicly announcing them. For the last few days, the usual methods for displaying images on your site, directly from MyBlogLog profiles, was no longer working. This included standard plugins like MyAvatars that were no longer able to display member images.

However, today, everything seems to be back to normal. I visited the MyBlogLog website for news on any major changes, but I couldn’t really find anything at all. Since acquiring MyBlogLog in January, Yahoo has yet to make any big changes. Meanwhile, the number of MyBlogLog members continues to grow which has caused their system to show some signs of buckling under the pressure. As a result, many users have started testing alternatives such as Explode and Bumpzee.

It appears these recent problems were caused by MyBlogLog shifting the storage of member images to an alternate location which is perhaps a sign of coming changes.  Could these ninja updates mean bigger changes in the near future? We can only hope!

Dirty Digg Trick – Leverage visits to a Popular Article onto Another

May 19, 2007 | Comments (4) | Filed under: Traffic

For the last few weeks, I’ve been experimenting a bit with the new Digg API. My goal is to create a smart Digg plugin that can be added to Wordpress with a lot more customizable options than the usual Digg button plugins. The plugin is very close to a beta release here on the site, but today I wanted to talk about an idea for a dirty Digg trick.

The idea is pretty simple. If you get an article that starts to do well in Digg, your site starts to receive a lot of targeted traffic directly to the post. Most sites these days put up a Digg button, which encourages visitors to Digg your post directly from your site. You can see an example of a button in action on our post 10 Tools to Help You Select a Web 2.0 Color Palette.

To embed a Digg button, it just takes a small bit of Javascript code, something similar to:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
             digg_url = ‘WEBSITE_URL’;
</script>

<script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

When a new post reaches the front page of Digg, it generally receives hundreds of additional Diggs over a very short period of time. These additional Diggs are mostly un-needed because your post already made the front page and unless it goes on to receive a lot more, recieves little to no benefit from the additional love. It is this fact, that allows our dirty trick to work. What you do is simply change the WEBSITE_URL on your Digg button, which is embedded in the popular post, to the URL of a new post submitted to Digg. This way, every person who visits your page is actually seeing the Digg button of a different post and not the one they’re looking at. So, every time the user clicks the embedded button they are showing support for your secondary article and not the one they just read.

In my quick experimentation I noticed that most people will blindly commit a digg to your new article, even if it’s not the one they were originally reading. It’s actually amazing. As a result, you can basically leverage one popular article into the promotion of a second popular article.

Even better, you could work with fellow bloggers and do a traffic exchange. A popular article on one site leverages a new article on the other. Once the new article becomes popular, you leverage that new traffic onto a third post on another blog and so on…

A dirty trick for sure but in a few test cases I’ve run on another site, it works exceptionally well. So, as long as you’ve figured out the basics of getting an article to the front page of Digg you can consistently leverage your traffic to get more articles promoted.

Almost evil enough to make John Chow proud >:)

Webmaster and Marketing Forums that will Improve your Online Business

May 17, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Online Business

If you’re just starting your own online business, the best thing you can do to get up and running quickly is learn from those who came before you. Online community forums are one of the best ways to accomplish that. Not only can your read about literally thousands of topics, you can interact with community members who can help you with questions and problems as you go along.

Over at DoshDosh, they published a very excellent list of 26 Affiliate Marketing and Webmaster Forums. The list is very comprehensive and gives you plenty of options in a wide variety of common business areas such as search engine optimization and affiliate marketing. Many of these forums are on my daily read list and have almost single handedly helped me improve my own business when I was just starting out.

I highly recommend joining a few of these forums, and if you feel the community is complementary to your own goals and aspirations, then register for an account and visit often. Most forums offer RSS feed subscriptions as well, so you can keep up with the large amount of daily content at the same time you view your other feeds.

Here is a list of my top 5 favorite webmaster and marketing forums in no particular order:

1. Wicked Fire – A great site for tips and techniques from everything from affiliate marketing to increasing traffic to your site. I really like this forum because they aren’t afraid to discuss topics on both sides of the gray zone.
2. Digital Point – This forum is pretty much the treasure trove for the online entrepreneur. Any topic you could want to discuss is available, and with over 20,000 members, there are so many amazing experts to help you with your questions. If you only subscribe to one forum, make it this one…
3. Earners Forum – A great location for topics such as domaining, making money, and freelancing. Lots of active and enthusiastic readers who have a lot of excellent advice for beginners and veterans alike.
4. Sitepoint – This is a great place for covering more of the web design and programming aspects of online business. The owners also provide a popular tool known as the Sitepoint Marketplace which is ideal for anyone selling sites and services online.
5. V7N Forum – Another great place for webmaster information including a lot of talk about search engine optimization.

Bottom line, if you’re not a regular forum reader, you really are missing out on a huge source of powerful information that can basically change the way you do business right away. It did for me and many people I know, and I guarantee it will for you to…