I recently mentioned on Facebook that I had been using Linkedin to get Facebook likes. I had a few people ask me to explain more so I did a video for you. The video shows you the basic (very simple idea) way to to do it. Join social marketing groups and add your facebook page info.

People then come and like your page and you go like theirs, One thing I did’t show in the video was that you can also look on their pages and find other people who have swapped likes (they leave a comment with their facebook url and say something like “saw you on the linkedin group”) you can then go and like them and ask them to like you.

More info after the video

When people like me and ask me to like them what I do is
-Make a list in notepad
-Get my wife to like them from her personal account

So they get a like from an account they have not liked (like a 3 way link exchange I suppose) and I can still like any I am really interested in hearing more from in my own personal account.

Pinterest and Twitter
As I mention in the video I use the same methods to get new followers on Pinterest and twitter

Use It Or Lose It
This applies to all things social, if you do not keep on posting, adding friends and interacting with people your account will become less and less useful. You won’t really lose the account but it will lose it’s usefulness. This is one of the reasons why I think it is so crazy to try and manage 50 sites, how can you possibly do all the social bits and pieces that are needed now days to try and keep the Penguins and Pandas happy?

How Do You Get More Facebook Likes?
Do you have some tricks up your sleeves that you are willing to share with us? Please feel free to let us know in the comments below

What is That Site Worth

I got slapped in the recent BMR debacle, some of my sites got hammered good and hard, some got just kicked in the shins. I am taking a long hard look at the ones that got hammered (I am talking position 50 for their keyword) and to fix them I need to do all the things above.  When the sites were top of their pile they only made $30 a month each so they were never big hitters (but it does add up when you have half a dozen of them), but what if...insert some weird reason why they may make more here

Is it worth my time to sit and work on them to get them back in the rankings just to have them come back and earn me the steady $30 that they were? For me it is not, and as hard as it is I am just letting them die and won’t renew them.

Remember It’s Business Not Personal
It is very easy to hold onto sites, to keep on renewing the domains and saying to yourself that you will get around to working on that site soon. Then suddenly another renewal date is upon you and another $10 is spent.  Having a site that earns nothing and that in your heart you don’t think ever will make money (or else you would be working on it) is just a drag on your spirit.

Seeing the dead sites in my hosting list makes me sad, maybe I should just spend the day cleaning the site up and do some content..I mean its just one day.. To combat this I sometimes just kill the site off altogether, remove it from my hosting. I am even thinking of setting up another namecheap account and sending them there so I do not have to see them in my normal list of domains.

What About If I Want The Sites To Come Back To Life

So what can you do to save your site

• Update the site , change the theme, remove the ads that are plastered all over the top of the site
• Start adding good, varied content regularly
• Start building links that have real value (link value is a whole nother post)
• Try and kill off some of the worst links (if you can)
• Diversify your link profile drastically
• Create content to be shared
• Start a Facebook, G+, Pinterest account and work on them regularly

Does that sound like a lot of work? You know why? Because it is.

It takes time to create good content that people want to read and hopefully share across one of the many social platforms. It takes time to make videos to illustrate your content (even if you use something as simple as animoto it takes time). It takes time to leave sensible blog comments and do guest postings. A wise man once said to me that you can spend time or spend money to achieve the results you want.

Buying good content costs good money, sure you can buy articles in bulk from someone for 1c a word but I have seen GOOD writers (where the content will engage the reader) go for $5-$10 or more per 100 words. So a 500 word page of content for your blog is going to be $25-$50. This is ok for one page, but if you want to add regular content to your sites it can get expensive in a hurry.

Tools – People talk about how expensive Camtasia is and how you can use camstudio instead (it is free in a lot of places). If you want to make good videos that are easy to produce and share you should invest in Camtasia . Yes you can do it cheaper, yes you can get by..but think of how many $27, $47 and even $97 products you have that you never read, dont use anymore and could not even find on your pc if you had to.  If you hadn’t bought those you could have bought one good tool that you can use to make content for your site as well as videos to promote your site.

Buy tools, but buy the ones that help you build a good quality site and good backlinks not just huge amounts of content and huge amounts of links. Having a bazillion links may still help some at the moment but it also has the opportunity to hurt and link building is changing and soon the bazillion junk links could be even more of a hinderance than they already are.

What Is Your Market Worth?
I think this is what it really comes down to, what does your market spend and how much of it can you get? Is your site going to get a click or a amazon purchase and thats it? Or can you get them onto your list and sell them items again and again?

If your site is built around “mini under the counter fridges” then you are unlikely to be able to entice them onto a list to try and sell them anything else. If your site is a kitchen site that helps them design their ideal kitchen and talks about the latest and greatest kitchen gadgets you may be able to get them to come back again and again and buy something.

Business Not A Site
We really do need to take it to the next level when we are building sites now.  Look on it as a business, could you do videos on the subject, could you produce a book, could you give talks on it? If the answer is no way would anyone ever buy a book on the subject then you need to look at a new market.

Every time there is an update by Google the world goes nuts, the latest update “Penguin” has been aimed at affecting link spam/over optimization of link and seems to have hit people hard. Just the name drove some people I know to want to spit (someone suggested it should be called the Titanic update)

I actually thought all the time spent trying to name the update was some of the worst time wasting on the net. If you are doing this as a business then who cares what the update is called? All I care about is how it has hit me and people I work with.

My Thoughts on Off Page
Matt Cutts has spoken about over optimization recently, and I do not always believe what he says, and I think this update has (partly) slapped those of us who use blog networks and use lots of Exact Match Domains and pair them with exact match keywords. So you own yellowcreditcards.com and 90% of your links have the anchor text of “yellow credit cards” and you are in trouble (I actually think the % is much lower than 90 but you get the example).

I also think people who use lots of really poor links with their anchor text in are going to get hit harder than ones who just have a few. So that 3 page site with 200k profile links may take a while to sort out..

There has been so many posts by people talking about link profiles and how we need to mix the linking structure up that none of us should have been caught but we were. It is easy to see why, when you are paying for links to be built you want to make them earn you more and the best way to do that is to climb the rankings for a specific keyword. Paying for a link to be built when it is just going to use your url or maybe some random word seems to go against our nature as link builders doesn’t it?

So link profiles need to be sorted out and in my mind this means

- More links but ones with no keywords as anchor text – so links to thenewbiehelper.com rather than using keyword anchor text

- Delete crappy old links if you can

Is It Worth It?
I know I mention this in another post but it is worth talking about…Even if you can  do all the new links you need and get your link profile sorted it is going to take a couple of months (at least I think) for your site to recover in the rankings and my question is ..Is it all worth it?

If you look at a site that at its peak earned you $1 -$2 a day is it worth spending the time and money to do all this? Your time has value, is fixing the link profile on a EMD site pushing people towards an adsense click or some long tail item on Amazon for 4% worth it?

Which Sites To Work On
I know of one person who has dropped 10+ sites over the last few months and she told me that she is now looking at her sites and the first criteria is (if they have been hit in the latest update especially)

-Do they have less than six months left before renewal?
If the answer is yes she is just leaving them to their own devices and will see what they make between now and renewal but there is a good chance they are gonners. If they do have 6 months then the sites will get a look in at least.

Someone else is working on different criteria and this is quite an interesting idea. Mark Thompson said he is looking at his sites and thinking “Can i do content curation on them?” if not it sounds like they are for the chop.

Thinking about these two ideas you can see how it makes sense, if I have a site in a niche that I can use content curation on and it is at least six months before I have to pay to renew it maybe it is worth trying.

How To Recover My Site From Penguins
It is 2 steps really

1. Choose The Sites Worth Working On
2. Decide How You Are Going To Change The Way You Do Things

I know this is not a new idea but technology is making it easier

On Sunday I was in our local Target store with my wife and daughter, we had to look in the toy section because we were looking for a new mermaid doll (for my daughter not me by the way). While there I was looking at the discounted items on the end of an isle. They had loads of boxes from one line of toys, some single unit action figures and some bigger boxes with multiple figures in them and some extras.

They were all priced at $3.87..the single ones and the big ones all at that price and there were at least 20 of each thing (guessing Target were dumping them to clear shelf space for something else).

On my Android phone I have an free app that allows me to scan the barcode of an item and I can then see how much it sells for on Amazon. The smaller boxes were selling on Amazon for $6.99+$4.99 shipping.. So you will make $3 a sale after fees.. not exciting

The big ones are selling on Amazon for $24.99 + shipping.. so on those you could sell them at $19.99 and still make $15..

Now I know there is work involved and there is no certainty of a sale but if you are looking for something to sell on Amazon/ebay (didn’t check prices there, is there an app for that) this is something worth looking at.  These little alternate income streams are worth looking at as they can be a real help when something goes south online.

I know that the word is to build an online all digital business but there is nothing wrong with having multiple income streams.  If you have ideas or things we can share to help people try this out feel free to comment below.

I saw this over the weekend and thought it was clever. Someone organized a cashmob – read more on them here http://www.cashmob.com/ - to benefit a local business and it was mentioned in the local paper. Complete with a link to the organizers website.

His website is totally unrelated to the local business (a pizza place, which is actually a franchise) but the link from the newspaper is not going to hurt them at all.

I think that cashmobs are a good idea, especially for business’s like record shops where many of the attendees may not even be aware of the business before the mob. They can give local business a boost and if they like the service it could turn those one off visitors into regular customers.

Normally cashmobs are organized through facebook but with a bit of ingenuity (and coding) I imagine you could do the planning on your own site or on some central site where you then link out to the website for the business and your own site.

I haven’t really thought of all the ways you could get links, if you are a local web company you could certainly get your name out there. If you are in a service industry you could get some new local customers as well. Any links you do get should be good value as they are local ones and are unlikely to come from places that have been hammered with link requests. You could also build new friendships and relationships, the people who join cashmobs tend to be technologically savvy and have money.

Getting links or new customers of your own while also helping a local business is not a bad thing is it?

I am sure you can think of some ingenious ways to get links or new contacts using cashmobs, share your thoughts in the comments please.

Or is this too much on the dark side of link building?

This is one of those tools that no one really talks about because it is free and is something you only set up once. I consider it to be one of the building blocks for blog commenting and if you are doing any kind of blog commenting (even casually) you must have Gravatar set up.

This post is sponsored by 2 wonderful blogging tools (they are mine so I can say that)
http://commenthut.com/ - Search WordPress only – works on pc and mac – Just $9
http://commenthutpro.com/ - Searches multiple blog platforms – for PC and Mac -$37

Watch the video and if you have not set up gravatar yet go and do it now.

Oh and you can use gravatar to show author info as well on many themes and with some plugins.

I dont normally take any notice of the google blog updates it normally tells us of issues once we have already started experiencing them and lots of blather..

However these 2 things made me think, wonder, peruse and generally guess on what the hell they actually mean..

Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.

Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.

The first mentions a specific classifier (i.e., signal) that’s been turned off; the second mentions a new way (signals?) for determining anchor text relevance, my gut tells me this stuff matters I just can’t fully form how.

I know what I think but am not sure..what is your take on these two changes?

Content Curation is..

• New and wonderful
• Not spammy
• Going to make us all rich
• Google approved
• All The Above
• None of the Above

Over the last week or two it seems like the world has gone content curation mad. People are throwing out products left right and center , how to courses and software on top of software. Some of it is absolute junk but some of it is good stuff.

I Like This Image So I Used It!

I have seen a couple of people saying that content curation is “Google approved” – Unless they called Matt Cutts or one of his bosses and asked him specifically then it is not “google approved” (I checked with him at lunch yesterday and he said no one called him).

“Content Curation can not be used the same way auto blogging was, it is not spammy at all”..
Ok this kind of thing is great because it made me laugh really loud. You sell someone a tool, you can NEVER control how it is used, people will always use things in ways you do not intend…e.g

Mix this content curation software (which looks really good by the way , it is not mine and that is not an aff link)

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/569778-new-curation-software-manage-unlimited-authority-sites-publish-killer-content.html#1

and my easy spin intro plugin

http://easyspinintro.com/  - use your own clickbank ID to buy it and save some money - http://CLICKBANKID.easyspin.hop.clickbank.net

And after a bit or work setting it all up you could be posting unique and curated content to all your wordpress sites all day long. Or even better get your outsourcers to do it all for you.  If you have loads of sites and are wondering how you can ever add enough unique content to work with the freshness requirements of the latest algo changes this may be the answer.

Lot cheaper than getting content written by real people! I am not saying you should or should not do this, I am just sharing my ideas, you use (or dont use) my ideas as you see fit.

The quality of your feeds will determine the quality of the content you can curate, if you just get feeds from junk sites you will have junk to use. If your site is all about “left handed banana colored golf clubs” you will not get great info on that, go for feeds from bigger parts of the niche.

My Point
My real point is that content curation is just the same as everything else,  you can do it any way you want (I watched someone peel a banana in the strangest way the other day). Some people will go to great lengths to learn all about their market and will become market leaders and end up rich and famous, some people will just copy and paste their life away and end up working in a dark room in the basement surrounded by computers and whiteboards..hang on thats me..

Some people will take the middle road and do some curation with some unique content and they will do ok with it, I think this will be most people as it has a low entry point and is relatively easy. The right way to do content curation is the one you are happiest with, and hopefully it makes you some money as well.

Content Curation Is Not The Answer You Are Looking For
The thing to remember is that this is only one part of the puzzle, everyone is looking for the answer to making money online and like all answers to complicated questions (politics, religion, how does this TV remote work) it should be given in parts. Your site needs to be in the right market, you need to have good content, you need to have a plan to get traffic (seo, paid traffic, from lists) and you need to work out the best way to make sure that you earn the maximum roi.

Content curation is the buzz word in IM right now , part of that is due to the shock of the latest Google Link Network clampdowns  and part is because everyone wants the magic bullet. I appreciate that people want instant riches, but when you are building a business it takes time and work to become an overnight success.

You are building a business aren’t you?

Please let me know your thoughts on Content Curation, magic bullets, quick fixes and how you plan to build your business..

After Build my rank being deindexed I have read a lot (maybe too much) about it all. From sensible people ad other not so sensible stuff , some of it along the lines of “who cares all you BH people deserve it” and some of it with good advice on how to build your own network.

So the big question is what are the best Build My Rank Alternatives

I hate to pour water on anyones fire but I want you all to stop looking for any alternatives. We do not need

• New link building methods
• New networks to post to
• New ways to spin content

We need to start looking at the markets we are in and learning our trade all over again. If you are reading this I would say you have the knowledge you need, the problem is that it doesnt offer instant riches and to be honest it can be a bit of a slog.

For now I will leave you with two thoughts

• Stop looking for new quick fix
• List your top five niches and immerse yourself in them, if you don’t want to spend time in any of them, then its a sign that it is time to find new niches.

Making some money online is easy, making lots takes more work

Well further to my post about BMR yesterday -http://www.thenewbiehelper.com/bmr-closed-end-of-world-not-coming/

The fall out has started. Just had my first notification of a site being deinxed.

Log into Google Webmaster tools to see if you got the same, if you did not yet..well I hope you do not..

—————————–

Dear Site Owner or Webmaster of

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site, so that it meets our Quality Guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forumfor support.

Yours sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

——————————

Not sure where this will end, although if I had known that using BMR would get sites deindexed I would have used it on my competitors sites instead of my own!

Strangely enough this is not the site that i used BMR on the most. So does this mean that every site that was ever put into BMR is going to be deindexed? If that is the case we could be in for HUGE fall out..

Batten down the hatches boys and girls Stormy waters ahead..

UPDATE

Thought I would do a quick update as this is getting weirder..The site they gave me the message for is indeed still in the rankings (as Michelle M said her subscriber had experienced) one of the sites I used BMR on a lot is up one place.

I would advise that everyone just sit tight and not do any thing (other than remove the links from BMR) and not buy any new product in the heat of the moment which is released by people using the “bmr is gone use us” line.