Wishing you and yours the very best. I hope Santa brings you what you want, and that you already have what you need. Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, make sure to take time be thankful for all the blessing that you have.

Peace

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

As someone new to internet marketing, you may will be tempted to do all sorts of things to get traffic, to send out mass e-mails, etc.  One thing I want to caution you on is

SAFE LISTS

There is nothing safe about a “safe list” - more importantly, they suck.  A safe list basically is where everyone is “opted-in” to receive e-mails and you can share your biz-ops.  Sounds like it might work?  Not a chance.  I see all these people that claim they make money from safe lists - I don’t believe it.  Even if it is true, there are people who make money by shoveling manure - doesn’t mean I want to do it.  I mean, who reads the e-mails anyway?

So why am I so fervently against SAFE LISTS?  

• 1. They don’t work.
• 2. I already get enough spam? Don’t you?  Check out the account I opened just for a little safe list experiment (3 safelists, June 27, 2008-December 22, 2008)

154 spam? It's all spam!

• 3. I don’t really have a 3rd reason - isn’t 29,221 (plus 154 spam???) e-mails in just under 6 months reason enough for you???

If you expected an indepth review of safelists - sorry - some things just don’t need that much ’splainin.  

My final thought on the subject - if you join a safelist after reading this post…well…uh…

Today I am starting a case study to see how much traffic, backlinks, etc. I can receive from a concentrated comment campaign. 

This campaign is coinciding with my new diet which you can see over at LosinFat.com  You see I need to do something to keep my mind off of the food thing so I thought this would be a perfect time to start this test.

I will explain the methodology after the study is complete.  I am going to give you a couple baseline stats for my blog and we will see what happens by the end of the study - January 4th, 2009.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Xinu Stat Checker

If any of you would like to share ways you have utilized to increase traffic or any case studies on your own blog that you have done, please share it with the class.  I am not going to veer of my original plan, but I am always open to suggestions on ways to improve the effectiveness of my commenting.

I made my last post about YouTube and their new built in search bar and lo-and-behold, they removed it.  I think that my post was the final straw that made YouTube remove that ugly search bar. 

What?

Anyway, I am sure that this isn’t the end.  YouTube certainly will go back to the drawing board to come up with a similar feature that just “seem” so intrusive.  I think I will wait at least a day before I post something on that just to make sure that they are going to keep it around for more than a few hours.

Oh well…..

Update

Looks like the fix is to have the search bar drop down when you scroll over the player - much better.

As many of you may have already noticed, YouTube has thoughtfully inserted a search bar at the top of their embedded videos to make it easier for you to find other relevant videos. Problem is - it’s ugly!

Which do you prefer?:

Which looks better to you?

So I did a little search to find out if anyone else disliked this little “upgrade,” and I found quite a few.  The people over at TechCrunch were kind enough to post a link to the Google site to explain the mods you need to do to get rid of it.  

Pretty easy actually, you just need to add &showsearch=0 to the end of the video ID in SWF URL of the embed code (what???).  If you don’t know what that looks like, I am going to give you an example below (more…)

Sounds like about as much fun as pulling teeth, huh?  Actually, it can be quite fun and interesting - not to mention, a necessity if you want to grow your blog’s traffic.

I was browsing some blogs I frequent and I came across a poll on the best blog analytics software over at TopRankBlog.com.  I took part in the poll and wasn’t a bit surprised about the results that the analytics tool most overwhelmingly voted for was Google Analytics - 68% of the 188 votes (at time of this post).  Google recently integrated their analytics with AdWords making a nice one-stop-stat-checking-shop (yes, I am a poet in my spare time), and it is an extremely robust analytics tool.  So is it my favorite tool? No.

(more…)

I haven’t posted for about a week now - kind of hectic around the holidays.  I have to focus my efforts at this time of year on my PPC campaigns to make sure I get a piece of that Black Friday action…

Anyhoo, I am pimping an e-book - that’s right - I want you to get this e-book.  It is an incredible 134 page resource that will show you how you can make money blogging.  I am not making a landing page or anything to promote it, I am not giving you some freebies if you get it through my link…you need to get it just because I said so!

This book isn’t even brand new - been around a couple of months….but you need to get your copy now if you haven’t already.  This book has made me take a step back from my bloggging and re-evaluate how I am going about things.  This e-book is the real deal - not theory.

So what is this incredible e-book going to run you?  For a limited time only, you can get your copy for $197, $97, $47 (more…)

Monetizing your blog.

This is not going to be an all-encompassing list of ways to monetize your blog - just the basics.  You will find as your blog grows that you may have different needs.  You may be even reaching a different audience than you had originally anticipated and your advertising will evolve to complement your blog.  That being the case, I am just going to cover a few basic ways for you to monetize your blog. 

There seems to be some out there that shun monetizing their blogs.  Some people say that it is a turn-off and people won’t visit your site.  Based upon my observations, this is totally false.   Most of the successful blogs out there are ripe with ads and many of those people make a nice chunk of change from their advertising efforts.  Are there extremely successful blogs out there that aren’t monetized?  Sure, but they are far and few between.   I would say that even those sites are monetized as it is one big ad for the author and what he or she promotes.

So let us presume that you don’t have any moral quibbles with monetizing your site.  What is the best way to do it?   I don’t know - but below are four good places to start advertising on your blog. (more…)

I think this must be a glitch in Google’s system, but hey, I’ll take it.  Funny thing is Darren’s post content is closer to the search term “what to blog about to make money” than mine.  But like I said, I will take it since I know it’ll never happen again.

(click on image for better view) 

Today’s lazy post is a video courtesy of Web Pro News - a daily must read in your RSS reader!

While many people new to internet marketing may have not yet treaded the PPC market, there is a good chance you soon will.  This video briefly explains the use of negative keyword campaigns and how they can boost your PPC returns.  There is a short article accompanying this video over at WebProNews.