Don’t Click This

Damn. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do over the next few days. I’m basically redesigning my entire student site, it’s currently in a table based layout (I know, I should be using CSS but it was my first site which I started before I knew anything about websites). Anyway I’ve decided to make it more blog like so this does obviously save me having to actually make the design itself - I’m going to use a pretty cool design I came across on Jon Waras’ blog.

I’m also in the process of switching hosting companies to 34sp.com (my host for my other sites) as I was paying £10 a month, which really isn’t great value for money considering the traffic levels the site currently receives. And I’m also still writing content and getting links for my MTB site too (Which has generated it’s first revenue by the way - something to the tune of about 30 cents I think!). So basically, I’m going to be pretty busy for a while…

This is brilliant! Plus it’s much quicker than the Yahoo/Overture tool. I know wordtracker is the paid choice for a lot of affiliates so I think it’s safe to assume that this service should be pretty accurate too.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Source: Final Tag

I knew something was up with it, it hasn’t worked at all for at least a week. I normally use this keyword tool which incorporates the overture tool and gives an estimate for other search engines, but even they agree that something is up:

This really sucks, looks like I may actually have to start paying for this kind of service. Bummer.

My MTB site got indexed in Google yesterday, which was pretty quick I thought, as the site has only been up for a couple of weeks, but then someone over on A4U said they’d had sites indexed in 8 hours! Still doing lots of link building, I’ve also considered submitting some of my articles to other MTB sites but I’m not entirely sure if this will get my site penalized for duplicate content or not. I know using free articles is generally a no no but I’ve heard people talk about exchanging articles (with a link) and I’m wondering if this is purely for attracting visits via the link or if this does provide an advantage from an SEO perspective. Hmmm.

I know this has been on Digg but this is without a doubt the best mashup up I ever heard. Goldigga vs Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Awesome.

I can’t remember how I came across this blog the other day, but it instantly went into my favs list. Robb is also the author of Dollar Exposure, another blog that I frequently visit, although I had no idea they were the same person! Anyway, Robb’s come up with an interesting concept which he calls ‘Blog It Forward’, you can read his full post on it here. Basically, the idea is that you write a short review of 3 people’s blogs and simply ask them to ‘Blog It Forward’ to three more people (and you never know, someone might write a review of your blog). So I really like this idea and here are my 3 blog reviews, hopefully in turn they’ll blog about 3 more people!

David Lithman

David’s blogging style is the best kind in my opinion. His updates are always interesting and I think it’s good to mix personal updates in with business and I know that some people think that you should stick on topic blah blah blah but I always find it interesting to learn a little bit about the person too. I have a very short concentration span and lots and lots of lengthy posts about one topic doesn’t sit well with me. Anyway this is one of the blogs I usually check every day and is well worth a read.

Kieron Donoghue

This was the blog that got me really interested in affiliate marketing in the first place. Kieron is one of the big players in the UK affiliate marketing scene and his blog is a really good insight into the industry and has some really good tips too. It’s really interesting reading some of the older posts from 2005, which show just how quickly things are changing (and much has already changed) in affiliate marketing. It does sometimes go a while without being updated but it’s still a great read.

Nothing Ventured

Nothing Ventured is run by Tom C, who has recently started Trust My Garage. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I really like his writing style. His views and experiences with adsense and affiliate marketing are always very interesting and insightful as well as his general business commentary. It’s one of the few blogs that I find really thought provoking. Plus, his blogroll has a load of really interesting blogs which I wasn’t aware of before.

I’m thinking about moving my student discount website to wordpress (currently 100% hard coded html). I’ve heard quite a few people talk about using wordpress for their main sites as a content management system and it seems to perform pretty well, the examples I’ve seen look dead good. Plus the fact it’s so easy to install and there are loads and loads and loads of wicked plugins for virtually everything you could ever want! I did consider Joomla but I don’t know that much about it, plus it’s got a lot of features that I don’t really need. I’ve also been thinking that if I make it more ‘blog like’ I’ll be able to get listed in blog directories too, which would be handy.

I’ve sort of neglected the site recently (have been considering selling it) and it needs a lot of work, so I figured now would be a good time to overhaul the whole thing. It’s been ticking over and making money, but traffic is starting to go down so I’ve decided now I really need to get cracking!

I don’t know what the hell has been going on over at 34sp.com (my host) but I’ve had some serious issues accessing my websites, especially this blog - it’s been up and down dozens of times today; sometimes it’s just slow, sometimes I get the old wordpress database error and sometimes it just wont show at all. It took me about half an hour to actually publish the YouTube post earlier, which really pissed me off! Everything seems to be back to normal now (touch wood) and hopefully this is the end of all the shenanigans!

Apparantly, YouTube are planning on rolling out a revenue share system in a couple of months for people who upload their own videos. But before everyone goes and starts uploading tons of videos, you should know it’s exclusively for the uploaders who own the full copyright to the video. There are currently various video sites that run an ad revenue share scheme but none with such a huge audience as YouTube.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.

The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

YouTube has more than 70m users a month and was recently bought by Google.

The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website.

Read full article from the BBC Website

Last night I spent about three quarters of an hour playing this. No, seriously. It’s awesome! Anyway, back to work…

Original link from The Cleverest Dot Com