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Quotey::

Use your blog as a traffic generator for your lead capture page.

One clear advantage that a blog has over other ways to manage content is that there are specific website traffic opportunities open to it that you just can’t get for a static commercial site.

When you start using those methods, link from every page to your ……

That’s from an inspired article I wrote exclusively for another site that handpicks its authors. (How do you get on these high profile sites? Besides writng the best content you possibly can? Be nice and helpful to nice, helpful people and those people seem to go out of their way for you, too. Imagine that.)

And you want to know who’s good people? Allan Gardyne. And I’ve been saying that way before he ever published anything of mine. Genuine, smart guy who writes short, polite emails even when you screw up typing your own email address!

And no, I’m not telling you THAT embarassing story….

Anyway, even though I spelled Allan’s name wrong in my newsletter (though not on this main blog here that I wrote about the newsletter ), he was kind enough to approve my application for an authoring account on his prestigious site, AssociatePrograms.com. I lurk in the forms over there a lot, enjoying the discussions and calling it “research”.

Which technically it IS, NOT procrastination.

In order to be an author there, one must be approved, and contribute exclusive content. So instead of publishing my article “7 Ways to Use Blogging to Increase Your Affiliate Income” here, I hereby encourage you to read it over yonder. Ta!

Popularity: 100% [?]

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This is taken from a list of 21 that I’m creating a free ebook about, based on a video that is going with the upcoming update to my Blog Traffic and Optimization Guide that is becomeing a brand new multimedia product in a few short weeks.

I’ll give you three to give you an idea of why I call them Traffic Twist Tips….

4- Be sure you’re showing up in the appropriate tags, and the blog directory. You might not be tops in your tag all the time, but it’s not as hard to get on the top ten for a blog directory topic - and you stay there ’til you’re toppled!

6- Speak about what’s people are already searching about. Look in the upper right hand corner under “What’s the buzz.”

12- Link out to the littler. If you have one link in technorati, link to people who have none. They love and need you more than someone who is ranked in the top one hundred, and they’re likely to link back. Many big-time bloggers started with no audiences, and grass-rooted their way to the top. This builds long-term loyalties and deep roots into the community, so you get a much higher quality of traffic as well.

Other tips include how to get the most coverage from your Technorati posts, how to troubleshoot when your tags aren’t showing up, and a cool way to leverage your Technorati posts to get better Google inclusion.

For more of these, you’ll want to get my guide about blog traffic and optimization, which now includes a FeedBurner video and a Quick Guide to getting your First of Hundreds of Top Ten Google Rankings in Three Weeks or Less, as it will be included in the overhault of this product as an upgrade to existing owners. With a subscription to the newsletter, you’ll also get various free guides to blogging, humbly authored by yours truly.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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First, he gets One Million Cool Points from me for doing a search on “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Half of them were for knowing who they were. Rock on Jim….

But I didn’t even discover that gem until half way into this ISEDB article, “Video Raised the Internet Bar“, which is also thus far the cleverest play on the song title “Video Killed the Radio Star” as it relates to the web. Getting back to the article - it’s about an accidental stumble Jim and some golf buddies made into Google video to find video content that had good enough sound quality to fill a Led Zeppelin craving (I know. But I’d already awarded ALL the points).

Here’s a quote.

“Sufferin’ succotash dude! Hold your horses or even better, go slow-cook them. If it was that easy, I would just be able to type “led zeppelin” into Google like this and… HOLY ****! Check this out guys…”

Inadvertently I stumbled upon Google Video. Pete’s Led Zeppelin craving was instantly assuaged by a live 1979 performance of “Rain Song” and I was about to experience one of the most interesting innovations seen online in months.

While the Zeppelin footage was old and grainy, the sound was master quality. Next, we moved to the early ’80’s looking for anything by The Clash. We were rewarded with a live concert version of the piece Rolling Stone Magazine called the most influential song of its decade, London Calling.Again, because the recording is almost twenty-six years ago, the video quality is rather low but the sound quality is excellent. Two successful searches lead to us

Now, you have to go read this article. It’ll be fun and nostalgic, I promise.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Sez LibraryJournal.com:

Google Book Search has just unveiled two innovations: one provides links to Worldcat.org and international library catalogs, while the other allows users to download out-of-copyright books. So far reviews from librarians have been mixed. Downloadable access seems to be hit or miss, with no real pattern for finding which books are available.

This was news on the Google Book Search blog right at the end of August - here’s a quote if you missed it (of if you didn’t know they HAD a blog):

You’ll find everything from classic novels to ancient philosophical texts, to any number of practical or creative works that have entered the public domain since the earliest days of the printed word.

To easily locate public domain titles you can download in full, simply select the “Full view” radio button on Google Book Search, then click the new “Download” button that now appears on out-of-copyright titles.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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This is just delicious. From the Google News site, you can now scour old archives of various newspapers, as of yesterday.

Users can also narrow their searches to specific time periods or publications of interest.

Users can search archives from Google News (news.google.com) by clicking on the ‘News Archive Search’ link. For selected queries, users of Google web search (www.google.com/) may also see links to the top three related articles from the news archives integrated at the bottom of the result page

More from Search Engine Watch:

“The goal of this service is to allow people to search and explore how history unfolded,” said Anurag Acharya, Google distinguished engineer, who played a major role in shepherding the new product.

Google has partnered with news organizations including Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post, and aggregators including Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and HighBeam Research, to index the full-text of content going back 200 years.

Archived news results can be found in three ways. You can search the news archives directly through a new News Archive Search page. News archive results are also returned when you search on Google News or do a general Google web search and your query has relevant historical news results.

And coverage from BusinessWeek:

Clicking on a search result will yield a summary and—here’s the part online publishers are sure to love—give users the option to buy the full article. “If I’m LexisNexis, it enables me to create an ongoing revenue stream from searches that lead to my content,” says Allen Weiner, an analyst at researcher Gartner. “I can market to those people and up-sell to them.” Contrary to the idea that Google devalues paid content, the search engine could increase the value of content and subscription services that users previously didn’t know existed.

Thiink of all the research you can do. We always knew the internet would live up to the promise of being a mega-libarary, and one could argue that it has far too many books. But this fingertip access to so many offline media giants is a step to evening out the quality…

Popularity: unranked [?]

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The answer my beloved Google gives is YES. I didn’t realize you were allowed to click on your own Related Links from Google OR that you could alternate them with paid content. And it seems that related links box is getting more interesting too - here’s what it said on the official Adsense Blog:

Let me give you what the MBAs call the 8-second elevator pitch (our buildings are not very tall around here) on Google Related Links. The idea is you surf over to http://www.google.com/relatedlinks/ and start creating a Google Related Links unit for your site…

..While Google Related Links don’t give you revenue directly, you can use them to keep your site fresh and interesting without any maintenance. Happy visitors mean repeat visits. And if you’re feeling especially creative, try alternating between Google ads and Google Related Links in a given space on your page. This will encourage people to look in that space for interesting dynamic content.

That. Is Gangsta.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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