Sure you can utilize a theme that has a linking structure set up.  But now you are limited to only a few links.  Sure, you could go in and create your own theme file, but if you don’t know how to do that, you are screwed.  Enter Blogroll In Posts.

Blogroll in Posts is my new Wordpress plugin that easily allows you to add your blogroll into any post or page you want.  You can separate by categories, customize the style, header, and much more.

Head on over and give it a shot.  Thanks!

http://www.coolryan.com/plugins/blogroll-in-posts/

Now available on Wordpress.org!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blogroll-in-posts/

I wanted to create asides for my site.  Result? Disastrous.  First, there are no real plugins that allow you to utilize asides properly.  It is mostly done through hacking your theme.  That is terrible.  Next, I don’t want my asides clogging up my front page, especially  if I have single line asides.  A sidebar widget is so much better for this.

So what is the result? Time to make a plugin.  Yup.  We need a good asides plugin people! So it’s time to make one.

My next plugin project will be called easy Asides.  It will be a widget where you can drop a widget, select the category and it will do the rest.  It will remove the categories from the loop on the front page.  It will enable you to use a drop and go widget.  It will also utilize the featured image from 2.9.

Enough rant.  Time to get to work.  Talk soon.

Everyone does it.  Collecting bookmarks, saving stumbles, diggs, etc.  They eventually get a little too massive.  You really like sharing your resources, so you do it socially.  Now I am doing it more than socially.  I am providing it here.

I will be updating it and everyone is welcome to comment with their own personal ones as well.

Thanks all, I will keep you all updated.

Talk soon.

Lets go! Lets go!

Duplicate Content, What is it?

In order to debunk this, it is best just to go to the source. Google describes duplicate content as:

“…substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”

The rest of this article is located here. It goes on to say that duplicate content isn’t necessarily something that is instantly penalized for just existing.  There are many instances when duplicate content is OK.  Mobile phone versions of sites, articles belonging to multiple categories, and printer friendly versions of pages are all recognized as multiple versions of the same content, not duplicate content.  Even content that is syndicated is still considered to be the same even though it is spread across multiple domains.

Why It Has A Bad Rep

Duplicate content has a bad rep for one main reason.  “People Have No Idea What They Are Talking About!” Yup, that pretty much sums it up.  There are a bunch of other reasons too, but that one really does cover it.

Firstly, in that same article mentioned above, there is an area where they say duplicate content is a big no-no.  It is mostly when a piece of content is spread across multiple domains in order to fool search results.  Google doesn’t like this because users don’t like this and they want to please their users, and in turn, please their advertisers.  So, when someone is feeding the same thing on most of your search results, you kinda failed at the whole “delivering the best search results” thing.  So, they make it a point to penalize anyone who is deliberately trying to fool search results. And Google is smart, they know when you’re trying to do it.  So don’t.

Secondly, there are forum topics abound on duplicate content and how to handle it.  This topic on the Warrior Forum garnered over 28,000 views and over 655 replies from so-called “experts” on what to do about where to place an article first for best results.  This spins from then entire duplicate content misconception.

Next, there is a whole arsenal of tools out there said to rid you of the “Duplicate Content Penalty”. There are checkers, spinners, and many other tools available to help rid you of this cursed disease.  Some are free, most are paid.  So it only makes sense to hype up the whole duplicate content thing in an effort to make sure you are good and scared enough to buy/use their products.  To put it bluntly, there is profit to be made from fear and ignorance.

One of the best examples out there is Copy Scape. They first go under the premise of “Anti-Plagiarism” which was a good stance to take.  No one wants their content stolen.  Then they started to diverge into a more, “find out if your content you had written for you was just rehashed or reused.” Not bad, but a step toward the wrong direction.  Now, right in their title, they have “Copyscape Plagiarism Checker – Duplicate Content Detection Software.” They have a pro feature that charges you a nickel for each search you do.

Am I saying Copyscape is some terrible company? No, they do provide a good service.  But they now leverage the misconception of duplicate content for the sake of more profit.

How To Solve Duplicate Content Problems

If you want all your i’s dotted and all your t’s crossed, there are a number of things you can do to help Google out.  First, you can stop peddling your crappy PLR all over the net.  Now that I have that off my chest, we can talk about other solutions.

Canonical URLs

These are basically a way of telling Google and other search engines that the content found on this page via this link is the ACTUAL place to find the content.  This helps solve any problems with your CMS’s giving google the same content multiple times via different URLs.

NoIndex

Another way to help out the SE’s is to tell them, not to index certain parts of your site.  A good way of doing this is using the NoIndex meta tag for parts of your site that contain duplicate content across a different URL.  This robots identifier lets the search engines know not to index this part of your site, and therefore, not include duplicate content.

Use 301 Redirects

If you are restructuring your site, use appropriate 301 redirects, (permanent redirect code).  This tells Google that your content is on another url instead of just indexing it twice as duplicate content.

Syndicate Appropriately

Perhaps one of the final nails in this proverbial coffin of this duplicate content issue is the fact that Syndication even exists.  If all duplicate content is considered bad, why would utilizing things such as RSS be considered GOOD by Google? There is a catch.  When you syndicate, make sure that your RSS feed gives credit to the original content with an appropriate link.  Most RSS feeds do this automatically with the title being a link to the original article.  It is good just to double check, because you never know.

Other methods are also good practices, such as avoiding placeholder pages, also called stubs, TLD’s, avoiding unnecessary repetition, etc.  They can be found at the Google link below.

All in all, you need to focus on providing GREAT content for the search engines, not just making sure your average piece of garbage article is the only one out there of it’s kind.

Until next time.

Further Reading:

Duplicate Content – Google Webmaster Central

Canonicalization – Google Webmaster Central

Deftly Dealing With Duplicate Content – Google Webmaster Central Blog

It is free and easy to use. Simply fill out the form and click on the “Get Headlines!” button.  All of your headlines are easily created and formatted for easy use.

Any and all feedback is welcome.  I want to know what it will take to make this tool better.  Thanks and enjoy!

Click the link to view:

http://www.coolryan.com/tools/easy-headlines/

When you promote to a niche, you promote a very specific sector of a market.  An example of a niche would be foreclosures in real estate or perhaps driving traffic in Internet Marketing.  You are known as a traffic man, or the foreclosure man and you target people who are like minded.  That is great.

Now it comes time for cross promotion, or perhaps expansion of your market.  Whoops! You might not be able to do that now.  Why?  Because you targeted a niche.  Now all of your efforts have been targeted at that niche and because of this, you cannot cross-promote anything to them.  You target them for a specific thing, and that is all they were interested in.  So you try to give the foreclosure niche a book on how to increase the value of their home. Ummm…. you can’t.  They were only interest in foreclosure.  So your response will be much less responsive.  So instead you must now target your book to home flippers instead.

Now, let’s say you targeted instead the Real Estate Market, or just the Internet Marketing market. You can now effectively cross promote them.  Want to know about traffic, promotion, conversion?  We got you covered.  Want to know about home flipping, auctions, foreclosure?  No problem.

And now when you have a cross-promotion available, you can now effectively target them and therefore properly leverage all of your hard working getting your lead, client, buyer to begin with.

Many marketers say you make a lot of money on the back-end and through cross promotion. So if you cater to markets, you will no longer have to work so hard to get that person to buy your product.  You already have them.

And expansion is much easier. So go out there an expand, with markets!

Until next time.

Without further ado, lets dive in.

What Medium Do You Cover?

In a previous article, What People REALLY Search For Online, I talked about the three mediums that cover the entire Internet. They are Information, Products/Services, and Entertainment. Each one of these is monetized a little differently in order to gain the maximum revenue possible from each of you users.

Information

Information is best served either through ads, on a CPM, (Cost per Thousand) or a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) method. This is because people aren’t searching with a credit card in their hand. They are searching with a question in their head. If you are trying to pelt a product at them while they still have the question in their head, you are not going to get anywhere. If you can answer their question properly, (sometimes even with a product as the answer) then you are much more geared towards your objective.

Usually after a person’s question is answered, they will move on to the next stage, which is either to answer the new questions that arose while answering this one, or an entirely new different question. Usually ads can answer those questions for them. Or maybe your next article will answer their next question, and gets more views for your CPM Ads.

Products

If you are marketing products, you need to make sure that every question a person could possibly have is answered and any sort of buying objections are addressed and diffused before that person leaves that page. An affiliate program is best used here.

Entertainment

CPM ads are usually best served here. People are just browsing from page to page at this point. Get that ad in front of their eyeballs as many times as you can.

What Type Of User Is At Your Site?

There are 5 stages to the buying process and sites that can cover all of them. If you find out what stage your user is in, you can usually direct your ads appropriately for the most money.

Need Arousal
This is when the person first realizes a need has to be met.

Information Search
This is where the person searches out more information about this need and how to fulfill it.

Evaluation Behavior
This is where the person takes the information he has recieved and begins to rationalize and rank this information in order to make an informed decision about it.

Purchase Decision
This is where your user actually takes his ranked info and makes a purchase.

Post Purchase Feelings
This is where your user gets his/her need met and evaluates the outcome.

For more on this, visit The Stages Of The Buying Process.

So, where do you stand? The best places to be at are the Evaluation Behavior and Purchase Decision stages. These will help you make maximum money with your website. Need Arousal takes too long to get them to the final stage, and the Information Gathering stage, (which is where many websites find themselves) still needs another two steps before the final stage. Too little money is earned here. Post purchase feelings are a complete waste of time unless cleverly leveraged.

If your website is in the wrong spots, this could be why your website isn’t doing well. Is your site just answering questions? Or is it providing evaluation behavior solutions or even purchasing decisions? If not, it’s time to start. Making simple additions like this to your site can make a huge difference in how much money your website is making.

Killer Combos

You want to get into that butter zone when it comes to these. Some of the best combinations for maximum revenue are:

• Products/Evaluation Behavior
• Products/Purchase Decision
• Information/Evaluation Behavior
• Information/Purchase Decision

Gear your site to this medium/user combo and you will see an exponential growth in your revenue! To get the maximum money with your website, you need to make sure your formulas are correct.

Ok, this article has gone on long enough.

Until next time!

If you look through the hoards of keywords, niches, markets, and search stats, you will eventually see that people go online looking for three things:

1. Information
2. Products/Services
3. Entertainment

Every search, every query, every keyword, site, bookmark, EVERYTHING on the web can be placed into these three categories. Sometimes these categories can cross over, and sometimes there is even an exception to the rule, but that’s why its called an exception.

Lets break it down, shall we?

Information

This is what the web is primarily still used for in my opinion. Otherwise Google wouldn’t be the number 1 site in the world. People are looking to answer a question. The quest to find more information always begins with a question. It usually starts with items like:

• “how to”
• “where can i”
• “what is”
• “who did”
• “why should”
• “when did”

That’s right. The 4 W’s and an H cover ALL internet information. This article answers the question, “What Do People Search For Online?” I’ll bet all of your other articles on your site do the exact same thing.

Primary players in this medium are Google, Wikipedia and About.

Products/Services

This is where someone has got their credit card in one hand and the telephone in the other. They are looking for a product or service. Usually if they are looking for something like this, they have actually already done the information part of Internet searching. They aren’t looking to answer a question, because all of their questions have been answered already.

If one is marketing to a certain medium, this is usually the one to market. Ready to buy is sweet music to a marketers ears.

Primary players in this medium are Amazon, Ebay, and Craiglist.

Entertainment

Yup, because time wasting has become a huge part of what the Internet is today, people go online to occupy themselves and make themselves happy, even if for a short period of time.

Social media, Video, Music, and other rich media usually always dominate this area. If you are looking to play, here is where you want to be.

Primary players in this medium are Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, and ALL PORN ON THE INTERNET.

Cross-Overs/Exceptions

I know what you’re saying now. “But Ryan, what about X,Y,Z! That so and so doesn’t fall into your little list!”

First of all, I’ll bet you it does. And secondly, I understand that there are times when certain items will cross over two or more of the categories.

A good starter is Browsing Ebay. They aren’t looking for a certain product. They are looking for any product that might interest them. So this would cross over into the Products/Entertainment world because it makes people happy to shop. Browsing any shopping site usually falls into this category.

Next would be comparison shopping. Yes, they are looking for a product, but they are in the early stages of it. So they are looking to get questions answered about a product, such as price, availability, shipping, etc. It is information, but information about a product they are going to buy.

Forum usage is another great cross-over. If you join a forum and you didn’t find a thread via a search engine, then you are crossing over into the Entertainment/Information category. You are not looking for any particular piece of information, but you do want to find out new things and be entertained while doing so.

Test To See What Category Your Topic Falls Under

“So Ryan, which one does my topic fall under?” Good question. Here is a good determination of where your topic falls. Remember, to get a clear answer, you usually have to answer yes to one, and no to the others.

Can Your Topic Be Rephrased As A Question?
If so, it’s almost always Information.

Is your topic something that people have to pay for to access?
If so, It’s a Product.

Is your topic involve socialization, sharing, or time occupancy that doesn’t really net any sort of tangible or measurable result?
If so, it’s entertainment.

Obviously, these are guidelines an not the end all to your problems. Use your best judgment and see which one your topic falls under.

Until next time!

It’s Hard

I’ll bet you saw that one coming already. Yup, if you are looking to make this a full time income, you are going to have to work harder than all the others out there. It is going to take some hard work, determination, and other such father-isms before your blog writing career begins to see any fruition.

But don’t fret grasshopper, there is a light at the end of that rainbow. And that is…

It has it’s perks

Yup. Imagine waking up in your pajamas, (or naked, whatever) and going over to your computer, writing, and going back to sleep. Not all jobs you can do naked, (except stripping).

What was I talking about before stripping? Oh yea, perks. The perks of stripping are… oh wait, did it again.

Being a blog writer offers a lot of freedom. You can set your own schedule, write (mostly) about topics you want to write about, and be your own boss. Now there are a lot of loaded perks in that last sentence, especially since all of those have a downside, but that is for another article.

Now that I’ve pretty much covered my basics on pros and cons and such, lets dive in to the actual part of…

“How To Be A Blog Writer”

Start An Actual blog, (duh!)

That’s right. First you need to get a blog. Make it your own blog. And make sure you keep up with it too. You need to write fresh original content every day. You need to define your voice, your niche, your place in this world. You need to promote this blog anywhere and everywhere you can. And that leads to…

Get Noticed with Social Media

Become a proverbial time waster so to speak. Get on social media and pimp your blog, (and that doesn’t mean dress it up. I am talking street walker that motherf#@$%er). Show it to anyone and everyone. I mean like “hey grandma? Seen my blog? Stop looking at pics of the grandkids and read this post dammit!” kinda showing. And once your family has unfriended you for harassing them, just make sure you start getting new friends. Get in on their networks. Become part of the conversation and make sure you are getting noticed as a blog writer. Once people start to recognize you as a blog writer it won’t be long before you start getting offers to guest blog. That leads to…

Guest Blogging

Yup, don’t be selfish now. You need to get out there and start spreading the love. You need to start trying to get yourself on to more than one blog. Start offering in your circle to post blog articles for others. A lot of paid content sites will offer this, but that market is a little tapped. Instead, try going for high traffic blogs that are unique. You will stand out a lot faster there than on some payperpost blog. You want to be recognized.

Once you have been doing that for awhile and start to develop a following, you need to move to the next step.

Write for the big boys

Now that people know you and like you, (or hate you, either way it is good) you can start to approach the bigger boys and ask them to guest blog. This will catapult you into the big leagues. Trust me, once you’ve written for a Technorati top 100, you’ve made it.

Now that you know the basics of how to be a blog writer, you now need to go out and find out what you want to do with that. Money? Fame? Fortune? The sky is the limit. Just beg your family’s forgiveness for harassing them on facebook.