slamboard

I was tipped off to when it was relatively new and I jumped at it because it appeared to have some good potential as far as connecting with other bloggers and gaining readership. My experience with the site was disappointing and I would have forgotten about it if I wasn’t on the mailing list.

It may be that sustained effort or a more eye-catching avatar would have resulted in some real benefit from this website. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who disagrees with my opinion that this site isn’t of much help to individual bloggers.

PPC Professional Steve Baker has a website that is devoted to helping people better understand how to run an effective adwords campaign. He has created a a comprehensive guide to . He guides you through the basics of keyword generation and grouping. He gives valuable advice about writing your text. He reveals some important details about creating a landing page that the Google will like. The thing that most novices are intimidated by is the bidding process. Obviously a campaign will usually have the goal of increasing your revenue so overbidding is asking for disappointment. Steve Baker has some great rules of thumb on how to start your bidding based on your goals and your budget. Adwords has built in tools to help you manage things. Steve points them out and explains them in language that a newcomer to the process can easily understand.

When you have adwords on the landing page associated with your ad campaign, your expenses will be offset by some increased revenue. If you look at the ads by Google that are on this page, you will probably see some that are relevant to the content of my site and some that are not as relevant. Some of the advertisers are getting a better return on their investment than others.

Everyone in Web Business and the Blogosphere have been sitting on pins and needles waiting for Google to run and update. Now that it has happened, there is a lot of emotional outpouring and ill-informed post game analysis going on. There is not really anything informative coming from the Google.

Truly important sites like Forbes.com and Washingtonpost.com suffered a drop in Page Rank.

Techcrunch.com is listed in an article on Forbes as one of the fallen. An early post on Techcrunch itself doesn’t seem to acknowledge any drop. The Techcrunch post used the word Jihad in its title and received many, many comments from people who were offended or pretended to be offended. I am offended by the Washington Redskins (or maybe I am just pretending).

If you are an outsider reading about all the Page Rank related anxiety and frustration, I will sum it up for you…It’s all about the money.

Have you ever mistyped a domain address into your browser and gone somewhere strange and new because somebody had the foresight to buy that domain ahead of the big guys and exploit it for some purpose, evil or otherwise?

Face-book.com has been owned by a company registered on the Isle of Man since before Facebook.com really caught on. It it what is called a link dump. Facebook.com has taken recourse. The WIPO has finally ruled in their favor. This is actually a great case to study because it shows the system working for an unquestionably valid complainant. Facebook paid the same amount that everyone pays to have this kind of thing dealt with, $1,500. That seems like just the right amount to prevent frivolous suits from bogging down the system. The process took a few months, the defendant made no effort to put forth their side.

Face-book.com appears to be gone. You can see what it looked like on the Wayback Machine.

I actually found a good site once when I mistyped Big-Boards.com. Bigboards.com sells whiteboards

I discovered ContestBlogger.com recently and I have been back just about every day. This is a site that gives added exposure to ongoing contests in the blogosphere.

I go there for two reasons. The first is to keep my eye out for contests that I would like to enter. The second reason is to find out what works and what doesn’t work as far as contests go. Bloggers who want to earn advertising revenue with their blogs need to work hard and/or smart in order to build traffic and incoming links. Holding a contest has the potential to improve traffic and links.

I have held three contests since I became a blogger. My success has ranged between nil and reasonable. I have won a contest or two as well. Some contests provide incoming links and relevant commentary as part of their prize. My friend Skeet has a mystery picture contest every Tuesday. The weekly prize is a post from her blog about the site of your choice with links. All weekly winners go into a monthly draw for a $10 certificate from Amazon or Starbucks. Since the contest involves making guesses in her comment section, the traffic benefit must be pretty significant as people go back to the post again and again to see if a correct guess has been submitted. I won this contest twice this year and I have taken a break from participating, but I still look every week.

If you have a contest on your blog, you can submit it to ContestBlogger.com for free. If you want it to really take off, you can pay $20 to have it FEATURED on the site. Features contests get a snazzy graphic thing, a sidebar link for the entire contest duration and a bigger, better mention in the blog. If I ever come up with a contest idea that is both unique and good, I may go for this.

I was sitting in a waiting room once many years ago and I ended up reading this fascinating magazine article chronicling one of Bill Gates’ regular retreats to his secluded cabin. I was a bit naive as I began reading. Once I got to the part about the dumb waiter that brings the cold soft drinks up from the ground floor, I realized that he and I didn’t have the same idea as to the meaning of rustic.

The founder of Thoof is on the same page as I am in this regard. He thought that Bill Gates’ thinking retreats were worth replicating, even if they had to be on a shoestring budget. He rented a one room cabin out in the forest and he was holed up there one snowy weekend trying to think of the perfect name for his new website. He was up all night tossing and turning. As the first rays of dawn creeped through the window, he suddenly was struck with an idea. He would let nature name his site for him. His plan was to go outside and listen for some sound in the forest that would be the name of a great new personalized news page.

He stood up, still wrapped in his sleeping bag and hopped over to the door. Opening was a bit awkward, but he managed it eventually. He then took the that one small hop for mankind….

THOOF!!!

All the hopping had loosened the snow on the roof and it all came sliding down on top of the founder of what is now known to one and all as thoof.com.

You may have noticed the Thoof badge on some posts around the blogosphere. The ranking lets you know how popular a particular article or post is on Thoof.

Thoof is primarily used as a source of personalized news. I have blogged before about its features from the point of view of a source of information.

If you are a blogger and you have any ego at all, you tend to consider your very own self as a valuable source of information. Thoof can be used to put your blog posts up the proverbial flag pole. It is really easy to submit a post or article to Thoof. Once you have added your post, you receive an embed code that you can use to place a badge on your blog. It seems that every different bookmarking site likes to use a different terms for stuff. Technorati recently began using the term AUTHORITY. Thoof uses the new word ThoofRank. I don’t think they have to worry about any redundancy with that mouthful.

I chose to submit the first part of my Kimkins series on Thoof. It will be interesting to see if that brings in a broader audience. I will know if it is getting any traction just by looking at the rank on my badge. I’ve been looking at the way Thoof works and trying to decide if it is more or less susceptible to subversion and gaming. I think that it will not be quite as skewed by those activities for now, just because it is such a new site.

The process of joining and submitting a post was very simple and fast.

This blog is not a “do follow” blog. I had actually intended to install a plugin that removes the “no follow” tags when the trend was very popular. I had some technical difficulty and, being the lazy person that I am, I decided not to bother. It wasn’t just laziness though. I was a bit apprehensive about the idea.

I went ahead and installed the plugin on my personal blog. I even activated a spam filter and turned of comment moderation.

The idea behind the “do follow” movement, which is called “I follow” by some, is that providing bloggers who comment on your blog with an incoming link that has real SEO benefits will encourage traffic and also discussion. Most people, no doubt were most interested in the traffic, while saying that it was the discussion that made them happy. There is also a quid pro quo element. Bloggers who remove the “no follow” tags from their comments join a blogroll and make a point of commenting with some regularity on those blogs.

Here is the snag. People seeking to improve page rank for websites, whether they are a blog or just an affiliate portal or online store, would leave volumes of comments on these Do Follow blogs. These comments would invariably be painfully transparent in their lack of insight into the blog post subject. I left the majority of these irritating comments on my other blog. Sometimes I would remove extra links. Obviously, blogs with higher PR would be targeted more intensely by these comments that have been dubbed “human created comment spam”.

I think the line between bloggers who are being overzealous in taking advantage of the movement and bloggers or SEO types who are subverting it entirely is a bit blurry. I also think it is interesting that bloggers are getting disenchanted with the altruistic aspect of the movement just as a Google Pr update is inevitable.

Nobody is going to read my blog today unless I am talking about the iPhone. Just about every blogger on the planet will be posting about the iPhone, so my comments will be lost in an ocean of commentary. Ironically, I have just arrived at the point of not caring anymore about the iPhone.

I’m sure it is very nice.

Everybody is talking about iPhones. Some people are really excited. Other people are just hoping to make gains in traffice and rankings by talking about a very hot topic.

For the record, I have been blogging about it off and on for months…see?