April 2007

It’s Tea Time 420 edition. Get out your pipes and smoke em’. Let’s get started with this weeks quality hydroponic stories. Enjoy and don’t eat too many Cheetos, they will turn your keyboard orange.

* I have to get this one out in the open immediately. I came across this nonsense when I was browsing around for my previous post. Make your phone 100% catholic too. What?

* Go check out a great post on web 2.0 domainers and arbitrage from Frank Schilling. Excellent read and he makes some well though out points regarding various aspects of 2.0.

* Welcome to the Rabbit Hole! I think he wrote that title just for me. It has to be one of the best resources you will ever find. Todd also lays out his Communist Link Manifesto with perspectives from each player with regards to link building.

* It didn’t take long for the Greatest Living American to become the Greatest Living American. Sweet.

* I really like the posts that Brian does on “some old guys” tips on whatever like PT Barnum, Ogilvy, Hemingway and this week we’ve got Benjamin Franklin the Online Marketer. Great series Brian, keep it up. How about Rambo’s guide to Adsense arbitrage?

* Does your affiliate site hate that quality score garbage? Hide Your Links with Graywolf.

* Bill must be the king weed smoker this week, he’s been obsessively churning out good stuff. First he found a good paper on link spam detection (pdf). Some great info on historical data and rankings in these two posts. Great info bill, I’m poring over the link spam paper this weekend.

* John Chan asks us Why Google is always so sneaky. Apparently they changed the bidding process from max CPC to some average CPC thing. I’m getting tired of Google.

* From Alister Cameron via problogger, here is another excellent algorithm type post on how Google Blogsearch ranks your drivel.

* ATTN: HACKER SAFE BOOSTS SEARCH RANKING. Oh wait; I see a comment in there from Matt “Link Gestapo” Cutts. Sorry Hacker Safe, you should have kept it quiet. Along the same lines Aaron at SEO Book lets us know really why Google is frightened of every link that isn’t in their pocket.

* Intraweb Gold with a 420 theme - Is Your Cat a Stoner?

That’s all for Friday “Weed” Time for this week. I gotta go eat some tacos.

Check out these evil Catholics selling text links. I wonder if the Great Satan (aka: Google) will ban them?

I guess the Catholic church is on par with these equally disturbing lunatics. I think the gun nuts are giving those links out of the kindness of their hearts and the church is obviously trying to bring down the great beast called Google. Let’s see what the algorithms think…I’m heading over to place a spam report.

I hate top 10 lists. I know they can be a great summary of information and the titles are sure to bring in some traffic (like you, just now). However, I find in about half the cases they are either geared for people trying to make digg or they just suck. Unbelievably, I found this on the front page of Yahoo highlighted as a main story. I’ve had personal experience pricing Yahoo Marketplace links and I know how incredibly expensive they are and also how much traffic a front page link will bring. These prime real estate spots exist so you can find out how to pick up women. First let’s just make fun of the list:

1. She has a great dog, so you pet the dog and ask, “What’s your dog’s name?” Obviously she will tell you, to which you can comment on how sweet the dog is and the conversation should naturally unfold.

2. You’re in a café and she has a newspaper. You can ask, “Do you mind if I read that section when you’re done?” When she gives it to you, ask, “Anything exciting I should read first?”

3. On an airplane, ask to borrow a pen. If you’re feeling really courageous, once you’ve got her pen, shake her hand and say very seriously, “Nice to meet you, I’m ranked #2 among America’s Most Wanted Pen Thieves. Ever seen it?” Sure it’s kinda cheesy, but it’s also the kind of off-the-wall thing women love.

4. At a diner, ask her if you can borrow the salt from her table. When she gives it to you, say, “Thanks, I saw you eyeballing it so I thought I’d help out by removing the temptation for you. Salt is very bad for you, ya know,” as you proceed to douse your own food with it — another one that’s sure to get some laughs.

5. In a bank line, you can even use the lack of customer service on the part of the tellers as a prop. Why? Because it gives you something to talk about — that’s exactly what props are for.

Okay…so the dog one has a chance. But let’s take a look at #3. “I’m ranked on America’s Most Wanted Pen Thieves”. Are you kidding me?? I’d rather shoot myself in the face.

I’m going to skip all the rest and get to the point. The article, which is on the front page of Yahoo and has been since last night, links to his “date coaching” store found at http://www.attractandapproach.com/. What do we see when we hit the site?

Any idea how much revenue this guy is wasting? Who cares if your site was a little crappy before. Don’t take it down as soon as you get that much targeted traffic. Do a redesign after you make a shit-load of sales. Or maybe you should call me and I’ll charge you a small fortune to be on retainer so you don’t make dumb ass mistakes like that.

Sidebar: Sorry for the lack of Tea Time this week. Getting ready to board the plane home from SES NY and didn’t really get time. Instead of reading Tea Time, go make fun of David Wygant for being a retard.

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see? It’s Friday Tea Time again and we found a lot of good material this week!

* The posts I enjoyed most this week: The first came from Aaron at SEO Book about Google being the online Alan Greenspan. Very interesting read so go read it you slacker. The second was from Arnaud Fischer at Search Engine Land on the tipping point to social search. This guy should write more books.

* Probably the best thing for the newbie and veteran alike. SEO Ranking Factors from SEOmoz. Read it, bookmark it, print it, and then record it on to a DVD.

* I’ve been watching this company (TapeFailure) for a little while and we have a review to look at from AddedTraffic.com. I’ll be interested to see where this goes.

* On the blogging front, we have don’t think outside of the box inside a granular quantum leap during a paradigm shift that is reaching critical mass irregardless of your expectation managing credibility gap. Did that make sense?

* A guest post on Problogger from eMom herself. She provides the ultimate guide of ultimate link guides. Well worth a bookmark. Also from guest blogger Neil Patel we have directions on creating a successful blog post. Straight and to the point, just like he says.

* Take a few minutes and get a free link. Now go generate a thousand links from amazon. Now go pay for some Diggs and you’ve landed the #1 spot for (insert term here)!

* Are you pissing-off your users? Make sure you know how to measure the pissyness. (No, that probably isn’t a real word)

* Analytics time folks. Since Google released their Website Optimizer to the world, here are 64 things to test that will get you started. Go create some linkbait but remember it is as useful as a pitchfork in a space battle without analytics. Forget the page view though, since attention seems to be the word of the day. I don’t buy it. Revenue is my word of the day.

* Let’s talk personalization…DON’T GET SUCKED IN! Big brother is watching, move off the grid. Skynet will be after you. What I really mean is that I wouldn’t get too worked up about trying to cater to personalized results. Bill had a good post on news personalization that could tie into other types of results. It’s worth paying attention to.

* Bill also writes about building communities in your community and it’s an interesting way to think. There is a ton of potential around this idea and very few that are grabbing these opportunities.

* From 10e20 comes another good post discussing marketing to teens via blogs. Be sure to check it out. The part that stands out to me is: “I don’t know if someone that I didn’t know at all could persuade me to buy something online. I think I would have had to at least heard of them or what they’ve done.” Be scared, be very scared. I know a good way to market to teens, but nobody knows what to do with mobile marketing it seems.

* Intraweb Gold - Your cat is a commie.

Happy UnBirthday to all, and always remember Rule 42: All persons more than a mile high must leave the court immediately. I’m off to NYC for SES…see you there!

I normally don’t like to use the word “Sure-Fire” because for some reason it always comes back to bite me in the ass. Anyhow, there are plenty of great ways to gain RSS subscribers to your blog, but this post is not about that. This post is about my number one irritation I commonly come across when browsing through blogs; I can’t find your RSS feed. It is a sad thing that so many SEO types make this error. If I have to spend more than 10 seconds looking for it, that is not good. It doesn’t have to be as obvious as it is on my blog, but don’t hide it on your sidebar or make it blend in with your blogroll. The goal here is to get subscribers, not tick them off by hiding your feed. The easiest thing to do on your blog should be to subscribe to your feed. Let’s take a look at a couple examples of what not to do. I mean no offense to these bloggers, this is just my opinion. These guys have much more experience and success than I do. I digress. Here we go with the “don’t do it” category:

www.mattcutts.com

Matt, I know most people reading your blog know how to sign up for a feed, but it doesn’t stand out as it should. I have to search for it in your side navigation. I’m thinking a green RSS button at the top of your navigation would be slick.

scobleizer.com

I don’t really know what his thinking was on this one. He places an orange feed button but it looks like it is for the comment feed because there is a “Main RSS Feed” link above it. It is a little confusing. It is also below the fold and it blends in with the regular navigation menu. Fixing this would be as simple as separating the feed area and changing up the look slightly.

Okay, enough of the bad examples. Let’s take a look at some excellent examples that I think probably have higher subscribe rates (total assumption):

www.problogger.net

A great example of what you should be doing. The buttons are above the fold with eye catching colors, he uses a reader count to let people know he’s popular (the more popular, the more likely people will subscribe). As Darren has mentioned before, Bloglines is his most popular reader so he uses that button and a regular feed button which takes care of the majority of his visitors.

www.seobook.com

This is a great example of simple and to the point. It stands out appropriately and takes you to a separate page with the most popular readers.

www.themadhat.com

And of course my favorite example…ME! Probably an overkill but I give you the main feed and the most popular options via a really cool service called AddThis.com.

So make your feed stand out on your page so I can find it and subscribe. If your content is borderline I won’t bother to manually subscribe and you lose out on a new reader!