So, is blog commenting a smart traffic strategy?

Well, it depends on how you do it. Let’s take a look.

Blog Comment Spamming Sucks!

There are A LOT of people out there who are trying to drive traffic to their own sites by posting spammy comments, manually or by using software, on other people’s blogs. If you’re one of those people, stop right now.

First of all, most blogs have “no-follows” scripted into their comments so that you’ll never get any search engine traffic from those postings.

Secondly, there’s not a REAL person on the planet that’s going to follow your link when you post some kind of ridiculous comment that doesn’t make any sense and only promotes your link.

People are smarter than that.

I seriously doubt that you’ll even get any curiosity clicks, so don’t waste your time.

Build Blog Commenting Relationships For Traffic

Now that we’ve gotten that whole spam thing out of the way, let’s talk about how you can use blog commenting to gain traffic. The key to success is to build relationships on any blog that you peruse.

If you’re the blog owner, it’s really a piece of cake to build relationships with your commenters.

But here’s a newsflash — you can build relationships as a commenter too!

Talk directly to the person who wrote the post, talk to other commenters, comment about other comments, and get involved in the blog.

Bloggers Build Community

It’s no secret that many of the people who comment on blogs, especially business oriented blogs, are bloggers themselves. That’s why relationship building on blogs is so important.

When you meaningfully participate in the community aspect of a blog, you’re creating relationships with other people who can send you a significant amount of traffic through blogs and other social media.

In other words, you have to give in order to receive.

Provide great content, post thoughtful and compelling comments, re-tweet posts, make comments about posts on facebook or other social outlets, and bookmark great posts. It all adds up to a lot of interaction with the blog community, gets the attention of the blog owner, and gives you credibility when you post a comment on that blog.

And other bloggers will reciprocate in kind.

That’s the way content REALLY spreads and how you get the kind of traffic that REALLY counts.

It takes time to build traffic this way, but it’s well-worth the effort because it becomes an unstoppable flood of traffic to your site or blog — traffic that converts.

In the end, blog commenting is a REALLY smart traffic strategy if you do it right!

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Tables were skewed, pictures half covered up, the drop down navigation didn’t work, etc.

I actually thought this guy was playing a trick on me — no one would EVER take this site seriously.

When I commented to the client that his little joke was “very funny,” I quickly found out that this was no joke.  That was his REAL site.

After talking to him a few minutes and pulling the site up in other browsers, it didn’t take too long to figure out that he was having some serious browser compatibility problems.  He had built the site for Internet Explorer, and it was a work of art in that browser platform, but it was all messed up on nearly every other browser I tried.

Despite all the advances of internet technology, all browsers are still not created equal when it comes to how your site is viewed.  Browser incompatibility represents a huge challenge for anyone building a website.  Browser compatibility issues can affect your images, JavaScript functions, style sheets, links, navigation, and page layout.

AND it can totally kill your website profits and subscription rates!

Internet explorer, for example, tries to figure out what you meant to put in your code and fills in the blanks.  In other words, if you’ve used incorrect HTML code in your webpage, Explorer will try to make the corrections or fill in the blanks resulting in a page layout that may not be what you intended.

So obviously, you’ve got to address this issue with your website — Which can be a total pain in the rear.

Your first stop should be to check your website in a variety of browsers.  There’s three ways you can go about checking browser compatibility:

1.  Download and install all those browsers onto your computer and view your website in each browser.  This would be a total pain in the neck and totally unnecessary.

2.  Purchase browser compatibility software or a service.  There are lots of great services out there to choose from if you Google it.  I wouldn’t suggest this option unless you have a lot of websites or your build websites for your clients.

3.  Use a free service online like www.browsershots.org.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you don’t really need to check your website in every browser in existence on the planet — that would be ridiculous!

The last time I checked, 99.2% of internet users only used seven browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6- 14.9%
• Internet Exploere 7 – 18.7%
• Internet Exploere 8 – 7.1%
• Firefox – 47.3%
• Google Chrome – 6%
• Safari – 3.1%
• Opera – 2.1%

Of course, these numbers change as new browsers come on the market, but it’s a pretty good place to start.

So I guess that I’m suggesting that even though technology continues to improve, browser compatibility STILL matters and you should definitely check your websites for compatibility!

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There’s really no secret.

I’ve been practicing attraction marketing for years in my own business.  If you’re successful, I bet you have too.

So here’s the big secret… Attraction marketing is any marketing strategy designed to “attract” people who are interested in your products, services, or business to you or your website like a magnet.

Frankly, I think attraction marketing and pre-selling are pretty much the same thing.

The idea is that you don’t want to SELL people your wares.  People hate to be “sold,” but they love to buy stuff when it hits their hot buttons and the buying experience is pleasurable.

In my mind, attraction marketing really comes in two parts… attracting interested people and enticing them to buy.  Let’s talk about each one separately.

1.  Attracting Interested People

The key to making a good living with your business, no matter what business you’re in, is to get your business in front of people who are interested in buying what you have to offer.  The more interested people who see what you’ve got, the more money you’re going to make — simple as that.

In the online world, there are lots and lots of easy ways to do that:

• Write great keyword rich content that attracts interested people through search engines.
• Write articles that will interest your target audience.
• Create videos that will attract interested people.
• Offer a free ebook, ecourse, or report to your target audience (lead capture).
• Advertise your free offer, rather than your products, services, or business.

You want to help interested people find you, but you don’t want to sell them.

You can practice attraction marketing in the offline world as well:

• Advertise a free offer on your website in newpapers, signs, flyers, billboards, etc.
• Create and advertise a recorded message about your business or products.
• Put a sign on your car.
• Use your own products publicly.

The essence of attraction marketing is that you want to give people who are interested in your products, services, or business a reason to be attracted to you and do it in a completely non-threatening way.

2.  Enticing People To Buy

First of all, you’ve got to get the dollar signs out of your eyes.  Too many people operate their business like a used car salesman.

Let me draw you a picture and you’ll see what I mean.

As you’re driving up on a car lot, you notice a group of salesmen sitting together near the entrance.  As your car turns in, all the salesmen turn towards you and you see the cold glint of dollar signs in their eyes.

You flinch just a little, but still find a parking spot and stop the car.

As you get out of the car, you notice that the salesmen are urgently talking amongst themselves until one of them puts on one of those fake smiles and starts walking towards you while the others quickly disperse.

“Hey what kind of car are we looking to buy today?”

YUK!  I hate that so much that I actually refuse to talk to sales people and make my husband deal with them.

No one likes to be treated that way in any situation.

But if you’re hard selling everyone who visits your website, then you’re acting like that money-hungry used car salesman and driving potential customers away.

You’ve heard it before, people buy from other people that they like and trust.

Your job is to give people the things that will attract them to your business, build a relationship with them, and then gently recommend your products, services, or business when they show an interest.

That’s the essence of attraction marketing.

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Buy Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time (Hardcover) at Amazon

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According to the author of The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet Version 2009, the Latest Edition is everything you’d Expect From A Beginner’s Guide To Starting An Online Business with over 1,250 pages of detailed, moneymaking strategies and techniques have been carefully laid out in bite-sized, easy to grab-and-apply sections, making it dead-easy to determine what you need, apply it to your business, and move onto the NEXT step.

The “Insider Secrets” system claims to carefully guide you through all the critical steps:

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The way the positive review stack up, you can’t go wrong… especially with that return policy!

Read more reviews of The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet Version 2009.

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The problem with the Republicans is that they need a better marketing strategy.

Here’s my three step plan for getting the GOP back on it’s feet through a solid marketing plan.

Read the rest of this article at http://www.Politegrity.com

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I came across an article written by Steve Hodson over at The Inquisitr called Is Twitter the next affiliate link hunting ground? In the article Steve talks about someone who placed an Amazon affiliate link in one of his Twitter posts using one of the “tiny link” services.

Apparently, it kind of ticked him off.

His argument against putting an affiliate link in the Twitter post is that:

“Affiliate sales are one of the largest money makers on the web but typically users visiting a site or blog will be able to tell that the links are indeed affiliate links; whether it by by disclaimers by the author or other means.  Sure there are the unscrupulous ones who do everything they can to hide them but in general most bloggers are up front about this sort of thing.”

What?!?

Since when do you need to put a big sign on every one of your affiliate links to let every visitor know that the link goes to a product that they might be interested in, but it’s not yours?

Obviously you have to have terms of service, legal, and privacy statements on your blog, which Twitter has too, but this guy is a bit over the top!

After all, no one is holding a gun to anybody’s head to make them click on those links!

On Twitter, if anyone was putting too much junk out there, no one would follow them and they would eventually lose out on any marketing momentum they gained from using Twitter in the first place.

“With Twitter though there is no room for disclaimers or notices about affiliate links regardless of how honourable the person posting might be – or might not be. how are we going to know that the link we just clicked isn’t going to take us to some marketing page that we never wanted to go to.”

I’m not sure you ever know, with absolute certainty, where any link is going to lead you.  It’s just part of internet life.

Since Twitter is built on a social system where no one gets noticed (followed, indexed, etc.) unless others are following them, spammers will never really make any headway there.  Twitter has been around since April 2007, so if the spammers were going to really sink their teeth into it, they would have already.

I think the idea of putting affiliate links on Twitter is kind of rude, but it doesn’t really bother me when it only happens once in a while…  What do you think?

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Here are the top 10 factors with the ones related to links highlighted:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

Clearly, link building is hugely important and it’s something that we all need to pay attention to.  That’s why I wanted to tell you about an article written by Wiep Knol over at Wiep.net.  He has compiled a list of  69 link building strategies for 2009 that’s very inclusive and provides a lot of great link building tips.

Here’s how he breaks the list down:

• 7 internal link building strategies
• 10 beginner strategies
• 12 places to submit your site to
• 12 old school link building techniques
• 12 ways to make people write about you
• 12 common business tactics
• 4 important considerations

Probably my most favorite part of this article is the end…  Advanced Linking Strategies.  It’s my favorite because there aren’t any listed!

“There is no such thing as advanced link building. While this list already sums up quite a few different strategies, I’m pretty sure that you can easily come up with a dozen more, that are specifically suitable for your company or industry.

Eric Ward once said that link building is “one part marketing, two parts public relations, and three parts common sense”. I’d say that link building is 10% basic SEO knowledge, 20% business thinking, 30% creativity and 40% perseverance. Either way, there’s nothing advanced to it.”

Read the entire article at: Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics For 2009

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I’ve spent the better part of the last week analyzing my business.

I’ve delved deeply into my stats, tracked where the revenue is coming from, and analyzed my websites and traffic. Here’s what I actually came up with.

1. The majority of my traffic is not coming from my blogs.

In fact, they are generating significantly less traffic and revenue than my SBI websites… like 70% less. Huge shocker for me. You see, I started blogging because it seemed to hold the promise of more traffic than traditional websites because of the constant pinging of your content from the blog updating services.

I’m a long time SBI’er (since 2002). I love SBI, but some aspects of the hosting service is a pain… like not having direct ftp access. So when blogging came out, I thought it would be great to have an easier content manager. Plus blogs held the promise of as much traffic as my SBI sites were bringing in.

I’ve totally dispelled that little myth… at least for my particular business.

2. Blogging is coming up short in all my niches.

This was another big surprise to me. As you probably already know, my business includes several other niches. I’ve been evaluating all my websites, not just the business oriented ones, and the blogs are losing.

In fact, I took a look at one niche where my SBI website and my blog were started at virtually the same time. That means that both sites were about the same age. In this case, I posted new content to the blog 3-5 times per week and I posted new content on the SBI site about once per week (several articles). The content was virtually the same, including the same keyword optimization.

SBI won again!

3. My blogs generally had a lower conversion rate.

My last criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of my blogs was to take a look at the revenue generated and the conversion rates. Again, my blogs came up short.

When I compared blogs and SBI websites, in non-business niches, the SBI websites averaged a 42% higher conversion rate. In my business related niches, the SBI websites converted an average of 67% more visitors into buyers than the blogs did.

4. My blogs convert fewer visitors into subscribers.

This one kind of goes along with the conversion rates above, but I thought it was worth mentioning. About 80% of my newsletter/ezine subscribers come from my SBI websites… not my blogs. Initially, I thought that made sense because they were probably subscribing to my rss feed instead.

Nope.

Visitors to my blog just aren’t bothering to subscribe at all.

I even compared a blog to a SBI site that had virtually the same layout with the same subscribe box in the same place on the page. SBI still converted over 80% more visitors into subscribers.

Why are my traditional websites out-performing my blogs?

This is the fundamental question that I’ve been asking myself since I started doing this in depth evaluation… why are my SBI websites out-performing my blogs by such a huge margin?

After all, the content on comparable sites is virtually the same (not duplicate content however). The age of the sites I compared was nearly identical. Keywords were used on both types of sites.

And yet, my SBI websites have far more traffic, a higher PR, higher sales conversions, and more subscriptions.

Why???

That’s when I started looking into the actual traffic that comes to both types of sites. Who are these people? What are they expecting when they visit?

At first, it was very frustrating because I thought they should be basically looking for the same things when they visit either type of site since the content is similar.

But that’s when it dawned on me.

Visitors have a vastly different expectation when they visit a blog than when they visit a traditional website.

1. Blog visitors expect to see frequent posts… usually daily. Visitors to blogs can see the date of all your posts, how long your blog has been around, and how many others have bothered to make comments about your posts. All of this puts your visitors in a particular mindset.

2. Blogs don’t carry the same weight as traditional websites because literally anybody can have a blog these days. If they’re not held in as high esteem, then it makes sense why they wouldn’t convert as well. Having a traditional website is a bit more complicated than a blog, therefore it seems more important in the eyes of visitors.

3. Blogs are much more about opinions and experiences than they are about pure information, so that’s what visitors expect to see. Therefore, if your blog posts are nothing but informational, you aren’t soliciting comments, engaging your visitors in your blog, or creating a following.

In other words, the best blogs need to carefully weave the information into the fabric of a social conversation. Traditional websites, on the other hand, are the perfect platform for pure information.

And that’s where I’ve been going all wrong!

I’ve been posting waaay too much pure information and not enough conversation on my blogs. Which, by the way, has made blogging a chore!

What I should have been doing all along was treating my blogs and my SBI websites as the completely different entities that they are. (Can you see the light bulb burning brightly over my head?) After all, I have opinions about just about everything on the planet… just ask my husband. It will be fun, I think, to have a forum for all those opinions and thoughts.

Now that I’m employing this new philosophy, meet me here in a couple of months when I re-evaluate the situation again. We’ll see if my blogging insights prove out or not!

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I call this astounding news because the only reason that I’ve heard sited for bumping it back was so that the studio could make more money.

In other words, they made a killing on The Dark Knight and so they didn’t need a big blockbuster this fall to end out the year… so why not push it back so that they can seed their profits for next year? In addition, the kids are out of school and movies are more accessible to them, and they’ve also got the DVD/Christmas season release to consider.

HUGE mistake.

Let me tell you why I think the studio has really messed up on this one…

What Are They Saying To Loyal Fans?

Look, the Harry Potter franchise is a business… first and foremost. Believe me, I totally get that, so I understand that it may be better for the studio to release the movie in July… provided that was their original game plan. It makes sense from a business stand point.

Hind sight is 20/20, so they may even wish that they had planned for a Summer 2009 release.

However, if you have children, you know that Harry Potter isn’t a franchise or a business to the millions of loyal fans of the series. It’s a story that people all over the world, across every age group, deeply identify with.

Harry has become an icon.

Movie studios shouldn’t mess with icons. Studios also shouldn’t tell fans that they’re trying to dig a little deeper into their pockets while handing them a huge disappointment with a bump in the release.

Beyond the fact that I think it’s morally wrong, it’s also really stupid from a PR perspective. After all, the movie has already been completed and is ready for release… they’ve even started running trailers and getting sneak peaks in several magazines.

Fans know it’s all about the money… and I think they’ll remember when it comes time to buy some of the movie paraphernalia (at least I know this parent will!).

Here’s a couple of quotes I’ve read from fans:

“I have to wonder if this isn’t just some big ploy on Warner Bros. part to create a big controversy to draw even more attention to the movie. They make this big announcement that they’re moving the release date to next summer, we all freak out, the press publishes tons of articles on the topic, pressuring Warner Bros. to move the release date back to November, we all rejoice because we “won” and we all see the movie five times instead of once or not at all, like we’re threatening here. I mean, the movie’s finished. Perhaps this is just a big marketing/publicity experiment. With the same end for WB, of course: to make MORE MONEY.”

That was a possibility that I hadn’t thought of . Here’s another telling quote:

“This is absolutely disgusting. You have done this, not so kids can enjoy it during the holiday or so that it doesn’t clash with your other titles or make the audience sick of the sameness. You have done this so you can get a DVD release for Christmas 2009 because you left it too late for this year – you make me absolutely sick – you cannot expect your public (paying public and paying heavily I may add) to be messed around like this. This is really bang out of order. I will watch, of course I will because I am a potter fan but I will seriously think about funding your empire by watching any other WB movies or buying any of your future merchandise. You really do suck – big time. I hope it all backfires on you and someone steals it from you and plays it on the net or something – you deserve it for disappointing fans who have anticipated this release for a very long time. Boo warner Bros – Boo boo boo – you should be ashamed”

Of course I could go on and on with quotes from angry Harry Potter fans… there are thousands of people reacting on blogs and forums everywhere…

Frankly, WB would have been better off to create some kind of controversy or the need for additional scene filming that would delay the film release. Fans wouldn’t have liked it, but it would have been a much easier pill to swallow… especially since studios pull that kind of bunk all the time.

But they didn’t do that… they alienated their customers by telling them the truth. It’s all about money.

When you’ve worked so hard to build a fan base and create deeply felt rapport with your customers, why would you jeopardize all that with such a move?

If Warner Brothers moved the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as purely a business decision, then they should fire the guy who made that decision… it’s very bad business.

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