You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

Put simply a free (as in beer) course by the Stompernet people.
They will no doubt attempt the never ending upsell but I have faith you will resist and as long as you do then this is the perfect short course for you.

7 Deadly SEO Mistakes

It’s free you got nothing to lose by having a read and to be honest they could charge for the course and it would be better then 99.99% of the competition.

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

We don’t often mention big marketers latest hype after all they get enough publicity but for a change I thought we should cover this one. a) because it’s the launch of Butterfly Marketing 2.0 but also because it’s FREE!

Yep Free barring shipping, a thousand pound + course coming on dvd to your door

Claim your copy now

It really is that simple, go watch the video, grab your copy before they run out.

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

Bit of shameless self promotion but over at newmedias.co.uk we just released Your CAPTCHA advert the idea is instead of the traditional math puzzles or copy the secret word the CAPTCHA is based around an advert allowing you to present an advert that for a change the user has to read!

You can check out the details of how it works Your CAPTCHA Advert at $24 its a cheap method for brand and product reinforcement as well as making your sites monetization strategy just that little bit different.

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

I just wrote a quick tutorial on newmedias.co.uk about using our newest free plugin to help monetize old posts but thought paymentblogger readers would also be interested. While the date hiding aspect of the post will I suspect be of limited interest, the ability to increase the number of adverts shown on a post/page after a certain date I suspect will interest a lot of people and involves just one line of code (you can also use other advertising plugins such as openx or oio publisher wrapped with our code to make it truly expandable.

So without further ado go read about and then download

Make Money From Old Blog Posts

Just a quick thought for those who perhaps just want to monetize posts rather then pages you can do so by wrapping the is_post_old() function first around

if(is_single() && !is_page()) {

}

This will show it then only on blog posts and not pages as well.

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

So some people might have been wondering what was with yesterdays out of the blue post regarding Theme Forest, sure it was news but it’s not really our style. Well today was going to be the day where I introduced one really simple easy tip via a case study but it didn’t go according to plan.

Breaking news

Being the first news source while great is not normally very profitable if your small, chances are the big sites just simply will not link to you. Even if your well known in the industry people are far more likely to read a news portal such as Techcrunch. These sites tend to have a massive readership but most of those readers use them more as a central location for information following the links (trackbacks) to other sites for their review and commentary. If your going to break a story or write a story its worth looking to either initially link to one or more of these portals or if you broke the story before them link to them via an update (you need to be quick) if you are in the first couple of links on a story from a major portal you can expect a level of traffic similar to many social networking sites. What’s more this traffic is highly targeted.

Cashing in

Well if you targeting news stories that are press releases for products (such as theme stores) simple referral links work well. It’s free traffic and unlikely to convert to long term readers unless you have spent time working on some good commentary (which in turn means with breaking stories you are likely to have missed the boat)

Obviously to take advantage you need a method of generating trackbacks blogging software does this automatically and CMS like Drupal have specific plugins.

Theme Forest - Case Study (how it went wrong)

So this was the point I was going to show you how with Theme Forest I got a few hundred visitors most of whom clicked through using my affiliate link and while sure the vast majority won’t be paying out I could look forward to a meal out for my ten minute effort….

Wrong.
Instead I had 0 visitors from Techcrunch, so what went wrong? Simple Nick runs another couple of sites on this server one of which is a proxy, which means we tend to have problems with Akismet and Typepad spam protection system. Unbeknown to me at the time all trackbacks are being thrown into Akismet hell from this server consequently the case study brought 0 visitors from Techcrunch though a few bemused passers buy did click the link probably wondering why I had suddenly gone uber spammy. That said it has worked in the past, even on a Saturday story being the second or third trackback has resulted in a couple of hundred visitors with direct referrals to the product nearly all those arriving on the site via Techcrunch and a couple of other sites have gone on to click through to the product mentioned in the article. Every time barring Theme Forest a meal out has been paid for (sometimes it might have been a local Kebab shop )

Is it right, is it spam?

The big news sites rarely are a good source for news they tend to present bite size chunks and not some in depth commentary that add to a discussion for many the only reason for linking to them is for the reciprocal link (though some nice minded souls at least give credit if the site was their source). The problem comes if your using them as a source of traffic you need to be quick, to be quick your not always adding commentary yourself. One tactic I like to use is “Live Blogging” this can get terribly messy but you start out with a skeleton post link through to your source then expand the post over the next few hours taking in more commentary and views. Depending on the type of site you are using your community might find this style of blogging confusing and frustrating though it can work well with the community supporting it.

Combining live blogging with Microblogging

Let’s take the idea of live blogging and mix in Microblogging (services like Twitter) if we generate a post with a brief article about what it is about, along with commentary being pulled in from a microblogging source the page can quickly fill with content. Rather then just pulling general comments from everywhere it is easy to setup a system where 2 or 3 “Authors” provide the commentary from their own microblogging accounts responding to each other to form the conversation, while if other people join in their own thoughts are vetted before going live. Combine with normal blog comments and not only do you have a non spam legit conversation going, but one people may wish to join in. Suddenly breaking news can create a new community.