The first thing I wanted to do when I started blogging was to develop my own Wordpress blog template. I knew nothing about doing this kind of thing before November and today I would like to think that given a bit more artistic talent, I could start a Wordpress theme design company. I can take any template and break it up into a Wordpress theme. Not only does a self-made Wordpress template help you to stand out from the crowd but it also adds a nice level of individuality to your blog. I also get the satisfaction of knowing the my blog template is unique and nobody else has this template. I’m not bragging about my template…I know I am no artistic genius, but I like what I see and am satisfied with my work. When people come to this blog, I hope they recognize that this is not a run of the mill, flight by night kind of blog.

Another thing that instantly turns me off to a blog while browsing the Internet is the use of 3rd party plugins. I currently use 3 of them on my site; one of which I think will be gone soon. Some websites that I see, however, take what seems like 5 minutes to load. When all I want to do is read a certain article, I often end up closing the blog before it even loads because these gadgets take so long to load. There are blogs that probably only get 10 hits per day and they load up all kinds of widgets in the hopes of making money online. For those blogs out there, hear me: get the traffic first, then add the monetizing widgets. You can’t make money if people close your blog before it even loads.

As a rule of thumb, I think of my users before setting out a new design for the blog or before adding anything to the site. Is your blog ready for new things? Do you want people to remember your blog as a good one? Then don’t do what everyone else is doing! Think outside of the box and do something different. Don’t bog down your blog with useless widgets. Make your user’s experience memorable. Want your own Wordpress template? Stay tuned to this site and learn! In the coming posts I will show you, step by step, how to create your own Wordpress template from scratch.

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“WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans’ telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.”

I don’t know about you, but I like my privacy…or at least the perception of privacy. I don’t have anything to hide but I still would like to feel like nobody is looking into my business. With so many privacy breaches occurring these last few years, it is as though our privacy has been thrown out the window. Most of the times, the claim is that our privacy has been violated to help win “the war on terror” (think: unlawful wiretaps, etc…), but to me it feels more like it’s been breached because the policies that do exist were created for a different time and are very outdated. Policies need to change from the ground up, and this means stepping on some toes and laying down a well defined line of what things are acceptable and what things aren’t acceptable.

Do you like your privacy being invaded like this? Read this article and tell me what you think.

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Especially when talking about technology, eBay is (or used to be?) a prime marketplace to find great deals on good technology. However, as of late, the number of bad bidders and overpriced goods on eBay has caused me to look elsewhere for my tech needs. Firstly, it seems as though buyers don’t do research before bidding. Secondly, sellers are taking advantage of this and really marking up the price of new, refurbished, and used goods. As for me, I don’t like to pay more than retail price for used goods, so I haven’t used eBay in a while when buying electronics.

I am writing this article in the hopes that people will learn some of the finer points of using eBay. If you follow the steps listed below, you will not only be able to find the products you are looking for but you will also know what the “going rates” are for these products so that you know what you should pay, and you will learn a few tips on how you can save money by using eBay.

Do Your Research

Spending money on eBay is easy. Too easy, some will say. However, anybody who is buying anything on eBay should go in to an auction knowing what a fair price is for the certain product they want to buy. It doesn’t make sense to pay sticker price (sometimes people pay even more than sticker!) for something on eBay. It makes even less sense to pay full price for something that’s used or refurbished. So, how should you know what to pay for something? Easy. Let’s say you are looking for a USB turntable. Specifically, the ION iTTUSB turntable.

• Check Amazon’s price. Go to Amazon.com and search for the item you want. Chances are you’ll find a variety of goods in varying quantities. For example, check out this turntable (click to make it big):
  
  You can get it new for $109.97, but used from $87.73. Does it make sense to pay more than this from eBay? No, it doesn’t.
• Check Google’s price. Likewise, check out Google’s search results and click on “shopping” at the top of the page. You’ll see a listing similar to this:
  
  You can see that even Google finds deals for under $107. Does it make sense to pay more than $107 on eBay? No, it doesn’t.
• Check eBay auctions have gone for in the past. Now head on over to eBay’s site and do a search for the item you’re looking for, but before you click “search”, click on “advanced search”. You’ll see an option that lets you select “Completed listings only”. This means that your search results will only include those auctions that have already ended. You’ll have to log on to see the results, but it’s worth your keystrokes. You’ll get to see what others have recently paid for this item and you can know what to you should expect to pay for this item on eBay.
  After running this search, I see that people have paid roughly $89 and got free shipping for this item. So, in this case, buying this turntable on eBay is a good investment.

Ok, now you’re done with step 1. You know that it’s a good idea to buy a certain item on eBay. Now you MUST learn how to bid properly on eBay. You can’t just go into the auction when there are 6 days left, enter $89 and assume you’ve won the auction. If you do this, chances are almost 100% that you’ll enter into a bidding war and end up overpaying for the item. You need to learn the art of patience, aka “Snipping”. The fewer people that bid on an auction prior to its end, the lower that the item’s final price will be. So sit back, add that auction to your favorites, and check back when there are roughly 2 hours left for the auction. Don’t bid yet, either. Enter your bid with less than 30 seconds to go in the auction and your win is almost certain.

Now you know the proper way to eBay. Go on and start researching. Find those hot items and get them at a discount, but remember to do your research and most importantly, be patient with your bidding!

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Here’s the good news: You can succeed if you really want to. If you really really want to, you too can be a successful blogger but it won’t be easy. You’ll have to posses certain qualities in order win at this game, and I’m going to show you how to do it.

Build Relationships

If you’re a blogger, chances are you know of other blogs in your niche. You have your favorite blogs and know who your favorite bloggers are. You know what they write about, you know what you like and you know what you don’t like.  If you’re a good blogger and want to be successful, you need to build a relationship with these bloggers.  Send them an email and introduce yourself.  Participate in discussions with them on blogger forums.  Kiss up a little bit.  Swallow your pride if you have to.  These bloggers are people just like you and welcome communication with fans and people from that admire their work.  Get to a point where you feel comfortable with your writing and then ask them to do a guest post.  Keep in touch with them and maybe they’ll share the love with you. A guest post is a great way to build an audience and in the long run, your relationship with the bigger bloggers will only serve to strengthen your blog.

Don’t be Stuck Up

As a newbie blogger, you are already fighting an uphill battle. There are countless other bloggers just like you, likely talking about the very same things. If you come off as a stuck up blogger right from the start, then chances are your readership will flatline in no time and you might as well pack up quit blogging. Nobody wants to read from a newbie blogger who sounds stuck up and has no credibility to back their words. If you are going to be controversial and challenge your readers, you need to first prove yourself by providing real content and value to your readers. They are the ones to whom you need to cater. You need to have a helpful attitude, treat your readers like you really want them to be there, and make sure to cater your posts to your audience based on post comments and feedback they provide you. Keep your ears up and listen to what your audience has to say…without an audience you will be failing fast!

Stick to it!

Finally, the last thing you can do (and in my opinion, probably the most important) is to keep blogging. Even if your blog starts off slow. Even if you haven’t been able to meet a lot of other bloggers. Even if you get criticism from your readers. Keep doing it. This is the reasons why so many blogs just die. The author will get tired of writing and will stop at some point. When they get back to it they’ll notice that their audience has dwindled and their influence has gone down the drain. They’ll then notice that getting back into the swing of things will be more difficult than they expected so they’ll just give up. If you really want to make in blogging, then you’ll never give up. Don’t quit typing. Set a schedule and stick to it. Make yourself goals; be it a number of posts per week or a number of of people to contact. Keep your list of goals visible and handy, and keep yourself accountable.

This article was meant to give you a scare and a jolt. I wanted to write an article that would make you to realize that blogging is getting to be big business. There are millions of ad dollars to be made every year and you should realize right now, that blogging is a business. You have to have a certain entrepreneurial spirit, competitive drive, and “stick-to-it-iveness” in order to grab a piece of the advertising dollar pie. Do you have what it takes? Will your blog be around in a year? If you build it, they will come. But if you build it right, so will the advertisers.

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Working with Google and doing our best to give it the kinds of information it wants is probably the best way to perform well in Google’s search results. While I (at times) applaud Google for their work, I often feel as though so much more could be done to help people work better with it. They’re not very specific but at the same time they provide a lot of information to help newbies create crawlable content.

It’s clear to me that there are 2 sides to Google: The search side and what I call the “show” side. The search side is self explanatory. That’s the part of the site where millions of people go to every day and look for webpages and information that they want to find. Be it for research or entertainment, Google’s search side of things is a well-oiled machine that is super easy to use and relatively easy to find the information that you’re looking for. Technicalities aside (this is a topic for another post), Google gives its search users what they want in a simple, quick, and relevant fashion. The “show” side, on the other hand, is not as simple to define but I claim that this side includes the Google Adwords ads, and every page that is displayed with a search result, including the search snippets and word highlighting.

As a publisher, it is obvious that whenever I make a web page I want it to appear above everybody else’s result. Regardless of whether the page is unique or has 10,000,000 competitors, I want searchers to find my page because I either think it’s relevant and will make their lives better or I stand to make money from it. Sometimes it is a combination of both. This page can be found through regular search or through ad placement via Adwords. This is where Google’s Catch-22 comes in. How doe Google qualify a page such that it ranks it above or below other pages? How does Google use its algorithm to place certain Adwords ads above or below other similarly priced ads? How does Google determine what to charge and Adwords advertiser?

The rest of this post will focus on the organic search results. The Adwords questions will have to wait for another post.

Although the answers to these questions are not clear nor are they stated anywhere officially, I have come up with a set of criteria that I believe help the user to figure out how to maneuver so that their results receive better treatment from Google. I do not claim that these are 100% original nor do I expect these to be 100% accurate; these are my speculations and opinions and I reserve the right to be wrong.

As you can see I believe that Google places the most emphasis on incoming links, followed by keyword density and lastly by readability. There are other factors too such as age of site and freshness of content, but I don’t believe they are weight too heavily so I allocated 5% for all of those items.

Incoming Links

I believe that incoming links account for 50% of your website’s SERP. Case and point: I have a website that has not been worked on very recently, but right after I bought the domain I spent a few weeks adding it to as many directories as I could. The directories were all semi-relevant to the domain name and I managed to add roughly 75 incoming links to the site in about a month. Even though I am able to see all but a few of those links when searching for them (using the “link:domain name” command while performing a search query on the Google site), the site still shows up in the top 100 for a keyword with medium competition. The content for the site is readable, but its keyword density is scattered and not focused. I believe that if I spent a few days boning up the content, that site would perform much better than it is currently. Hence my belief that incoming links account for 50% of your SERP score.

Keyword Density

Coming in at number 2, I think that there is a fine balance between too many and not enough keywords on a website to rank well for a page. I want to venture a guess that a page may not be stuffed with more than 4% and no less than 1% in order for the keyword density to be in the “safe” zone. If you have too many keywords, your site could be thought of as spam. If you don’t have enough keywords sprinkled throughout your text, your site may not show up at all in the results. There’s a fine balance and I believe that it is more science than art or luck.

Readability

Google wants people to be able to use the site, not robots. For this reason, they have created a set of murky guidelines that “help” webmasters to know how they should be designing and developing their websites. Within these guidelines, Google recommends:

“Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.”

This means that the crawler looks for text and text only. If you have too many flashy things going on with the site, Google may not be able to “understand” your page and in turn, it won’t be ranked correctly.

Other

This last category is pretty open-ended. There are several things that belong here such as content freshness, how relevant your domain name is to your content, age of the domain and relevancy of links, meta tags, and others. Since this area is not clear, I won’t go too far into this topic but will say that Google does care about those factors. I may not be giving enough importance to these, or I may be giving too much importance to these. Regardless, those are tidbits that I have picked up from reading the webmaster guidelines and have not seen them play too much of a role in the SERP of my sites.

Conclusion

So, in an effort to please the searchers and work with the publishers, Google is on a never ending quest to beat spammers, while the spammers are on a never ending quest to beat Google. This catch-22 will, I believe, in the long run hurt the “litte guy” like me. I’m not necessarily trying to make a ton of money from organic search results on Google with this page. I’m not promoting “enhancement” products nor am I trying to sell you anything. However, my site will remain lower on the list than someone with more links than me or someone that has a higher keyword density than me. I’ll continue to build links and do my best to write for content and not search engines, but I just can’t help myself at being frustrated at Google for not spelling out how it is that they work. Better SERP is everyone’s goal, but I think if Google provided more clear guidelines, not only would they have less SPAM but they would also have a better way at filtering it.

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What an awesome, long weekend it was! I’m not really sure what to say about it because there are some legal issues to resolve before our product can go live, but we were able to accomplish something that I think is very cool.

In the span of 54 hours, lasting from Friday evening until Sunday night, I was with a group of like minded technologists, marketers, business developers and lawyers and we managed to come up with an idea, develop it, and are ready to launch it. I feel great pride in the work we did, especially because I was able to go from group to group and contribute a lot to each aspect of the project.

I started in the user experience / usability group and we worked hard Friday night until about 2am on Saturday to define the product. Saturday morning 8am was our next meeting time and it came around way too quickly. I met up with other UX people at a coffee shop to start working on wireframe models of how we envisioned the site to look, how we envisioned it to work, and how we envisioned the user’s experience to flow. The group was working well and we fed off of each other to come up with new ideas and flesh out details of our master plan. It was pretty impressive, especially because we had just met each other the night before. Some of the team already knew each other from school but for the most part we had all just met. By noon we had everything pretty much mapped and sketched out. It was time to pass our plan over to the legal department, the business development team, the marketers, and of course the coders and developers.

Meeting with each team was a bit of a challenge as we were not able to have 1 representative talk to each group; this process was so time-sensitive that we needed to have different people talk to each group and in the end some details got a bit skewed and there was a bit of confusion among the groups but that was quickly fixed and all the different teams got our vision and got to work on their respective tasks.

At this point, the UX team started thinking about usability tests for users and I decided to move to the marketing group. The marketing group was composed of some really talented individuals who are true professional marketing people. They do marketing campaigns for a living and also do graphic design and copy writing for a living. I was glad to be part of that group and I got to brainstorm and contribute valuable content to the copy writers and helped out with the marketing campaign by brainstorming taglines and ideas. The day quickly came to a close and I went home to catch up with my wife and our friends. They brought over a nice growler of Bloomington Brewing Company’s new Brown beer. It was delicious and hit the spot. Bed felt great and Sunday morning arrived before long.

Sunday was a fantastic day for me. The marketing campaign was going well, the UX team had their plans in place and I headed over to the development team because they needed a few coders. I was intimidated at first. After all, I don’t code too much anymore and these guys are all professionals. There was a front end developer and several backend PHP people. I joined the PHP team and was assigned a few tasks. After shaking the rust off my fingers, I was once again in my element and helping code the pages that will go live in the next few weeks. A day’s worth of coding always goes by fast and so the day flew by.

After getting home I got to reflect on the experience of the weekend and one thing is certain: I’m glad I went. I made some great contacts in the SEM industry, the SEO industry, met new school colleagues, met a few alumni from my program, and talked shop with people that I would probably otherwise not have met. Highlights included meeting the founder of Startup Weekend, Andre Hyde, seeing and playing with my first Macbook Air, being outnumbered by Mac’s (I’d say 80% of people at this conference had a Mac), being surrounded by iPhones, meeting new people, learning new things, and founding a company!

This experience was fantastic and I’m looking forward to the day the lawyers give the “go ahead” to launch our product. It’s not as revolutionary as Digg or Twitter, but I’m confident that it’ll make the lives of some individuals a bit better.

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I’m becoming a fan of Apple and the Macintosh more and more every day. Software compatibility is getting much better, especially with the new version of Microsoft Office for the Mac. I believe that compatibility has been a (if not THE) major issue and the reason why people were hesitant to switch to the Mac. Now that Apple switched to the Intel architecture, their performance has increased even more and it also made it possible for people to run Windows on the Mac, therefore getting rid of the compatibility issue.

Now that the Mac can run Windows and Windows applications, there is no reason for people not to buy a Mac. With the price of entry so low, your next computer can easily be a Mac. Mac Mini’s pack a nice punch and cost roughly $600. You provide the mouse, keyboard, and monitor and you’ll be ready to roll.

I think that Apple will continue to grow its audience and users, but I believe that it could really experience exponential and explosive growth if they would release Mac OS for the PC. Although the software would cost less than a new piece of hardware, they could instantly grab millions of users who want to try out the Mac OS for themselves. The Mac operating system is already running on the Intel platform, so why not make it available to those of us who still have a PC? I believe that if Apple were to to this, they would become the number one software giant, hands down. Computer users don’t want another version of a bloated software that hogs more resources and requires more attention to use (Vista, anyone?). Computer users are at a point now where they need something fast that allows them to run applications securely and reliably. I predict that in the near future, Apple will release a version of their OS for PC users. What do you think?
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Last week I made a post about people who use Entrecard precariously and place their widgets above the fold. I do not agree with this strategy and claimed that it takes up valuable space that could be used to monetize your website. Divablogger took the bait and issued a nicely written response to my argument. The following post is my retort.

Let’s start with the first comment that got my attention:

“placing it somewhere more accessible makes it convenient for people to drop their cards”

I agree completely with you. This statement is actually helping me to prove my point. You see, although I do like Entrecard for its potential to generate a fair amount of traffic to a website, the advertisements on the widgets are still free and cost $0 in real world money. So why would you sacrifice space on your website where you could be making real money in order to promote somebody else’s site who is just using you for your widget? Don’t you feel so….used? You are willingly giving up the potential to sell ad space on your site and make money online for a silly Entrecard point. I’m no economist but I would call this “negative equity”. You are not gaining anything valuable by giving away prime real estate on your blog nor are you being properly compensated for it. If ever in doubt, just repeat this mantra: “What Would John Chow Do?”.

You also stated the following:

“Being in directories (which are strongly promoted by the creators) is like being a part of the daily life of entrecarders who use these directories and are too lazy to create their own.”

I’m not entirely sure what you meant by that statement. Firstly, of course directories will be promoted by their creators! I promote all kinds of things that I make; this started in kindergarten when I made my first hand print on paint then had my parents hang it on their refrigerator. It’s just plain simple to understand. Secondly, although Entrecard is a fantastic avenue to reach a wide readership and gain an audience, I don’t necessarily want to be in a directory of lazy people. “Dress for success”, as they say. I would rather have proactive Entrecarders and Bloggers like my sponsor JasonBoom that participate and support my site. He is obviously working hard at promoting his brand and blog and is not a “lazy” blogger. If you take away all of the lazy bloggers, I believe that the web would be filled with content that is of much higher in quality than what is available today.

I guess we could go around and around in this argument. You believe that placing your Entrecard widget, which gives away a free link and takes away space for paid advertisers “above the fold” is the smarter and better thing to do. I believe that placing the free link widget that still brings me traffic “below the fold”, thus saving more prominent spaces for paid advertisers is the smarter thing to do. The point I was trying to make is a financial one, where as you were making a point about quantity of traffic. In the end it is just a question of “quality versus quantity”. I would much rather have 1000 daily visitors who found my site through other quality “non-lazy” blogger’s websites. These visitors would probably read multiple posts and pages per visit, leave comments, become advertisers, and even help me out by clicking and following my affiliate links. It seems to me that you, on the other hand, would be satisfied with 1000 daily visitors who get to your site, click the widget and leave. I’m in this for the quality, but if that’s the kind of visitor that you want going to your site, then I hope your strategy works out for you. To me, it’s a no-brainer.

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I want to take this time to talk to you all about a little something I call “common sense”. This letter is not intended for EVERY Entrecard user, just the vast majority of them that make my life really easy.

In the last few days, I have been using Entrecard (henceforth known as ‘ec’) more and more in order to rack up credits so that I can spend them on certain things for this site. Recently I have traded 500 ec’s for a header design that is being worked on right now. With so many other interesting things in the ec marketplace, it makes good sense to rack up a ton of points and spend them on things that will help make your site better, more interesting, or more visible.

As you know, it is possible to get ec credits either by dropping your card at other websites or by ‘charging’ people to advertise on your site. The thing I love about advertising with ec, and no doubt one reason why so many people love it, is that in reality the advertisement is free. The point of ec is to get you to visit other websites and check out the work of other bloggers in your niche or in new niches all together. The truth of the fact is that most people (myself included) will sometimes just load up 20 pages at a time, drop their cards, and leave.

Not sure where I’m going with this yet? Hold on, it’s coming.

If you look at my site, or countless other successful blogs, you’ll see a sidebar with a few paid advertisements on them. I’m working on selling more ads on my site and the requests will come in soon, I’m sure. Those paid sponsors become acquaintances in the short term and possibly business partners and friends in the long run. They get to know the blogger and vice versa. So, here we go. Why on earth would you, as a blogger and web designer, place your Entrecard widget above the paid links and in a place that is really easy to find on your site?! You are basically giving away PRIME real estate on your site for people to quickly find the widget, click it, and leave your site. They basically “hit it and quit it”, if you know what I mean. They love you and leave you. They hunt you and dump you. Do you see where I’m going now?

Another reason why you should NOT place your ads front and center is that, in the long run, advertisers will get mad and leave you. Why should they pay a premium to advertise on your site if you are giving away free advertisement in a space that is even better than theirs?

USE YOUR HEAD, PEOPLE!!

I’m not mad at you. In fact, I love you because you make my life easier. I just wanted to tell you my thoughts on your decision. I probably don’t remember who you are, what your blog is, or what it’s about but I do thank you for the credit.

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Let’s face it. Change is a part of life. You do things differently today than you did months ago. Chances are that you made some new year’s resolution that required some change on your part. Unfortunately, change is not always easy. I’ll go as far as to say that change is hard! Nobody likes to change…we have so much momentum going in our current direction that in order for us to stop, analyze or realize that something needs correction and then to apply the necessary change takes a whole lot of time and effort from us.The thing that even trumps effort is the fact that change is hard. Creating new habits, inventing new processes, embracing our creativity and all the other things that comes with change is not easy for most people. Below I outline the top 5 things that make change difficult. Learn these things and be aware of them so that next time change is necessitated on your part, you’ll recognize these items and be better prepared to make a successful transition!

1. Change is difficult. Any kind of change is difficult because you have to start doing things differently. It means letting go of your old way of doing things; a new way of life, so to speak. If change is to be successful, you must persevere and agree to do things differently for a certain time period. Commitment to change is key to success.
2. You may be happy with the way things are. The “status-quo” is a comfortable place. You know how things work, you know why things exist and you know how to get things done. The thing is that if you wish to make things better, easier, more efficient, and more streamlined then you need to let go of the way things “used to be”. One of the hardest aspects of change for me is learning (or figuring out) how to do things better. This usually means doing things differently and this process is normally confusing and uncomfortable.
3. You many not be ready for change. Some people or websites are too quick on the trigger and make changes before the blog or business site is ready for change. I’ve made that mistake in the past. That is, shortly after creating a website that was on its way to making me a little money I decided to completely redesign the site. After the redesign, visitors were not clicking through nor making purchases and my online income suffered. The site wasn’t ready for change and by me forcing a new design, things turned sour.
4. You may not understand what needs to be changed. Everything has a learning curve, even blogging. To be successful, I believe that you should use the “review and revise” method so that you’re always looking back and changing the bad for good. This can be a web design or a process that you do on a daily basis. The hard part is recognizing what is bad and what is good. Understanding the difference is hard and adds a degree of difficulty to change.
5. You may be threatened by change. When people give you suggestions or critiques, or when you realize that some kind of change is necessary, one of your first reactions will be to either be defensive or to be intimidated by change. This is because you may not have been aware that such a change was necessary or because you may not even have known that anything was wrong in the first place. Don’t be threatened by comments or critiques, but rather, look at them as a chance to make your site just that much better!

Aside from the fact that change is hard, change is a powerful and positive force in everything we do. When we do things differently, we realize that there are different options in the things we do and therefore figure out a way to make our lives easier or better. I encourage you, in your blog, business or personal life, to find something to change and just do it. Do you normally wake up at 8 in the morning to get to work by 8:30? Then change and start waking up at 7. See what kind of a difference an extra hour can make in your day. Do you spell check your blog posts? Start checking them to see what kind of a difference that makes to your readers. Do you want to do better in your business life? Then go to the book store and take a look at the new books out there and buy one or find a friend so that you bounce ideas off of each other. Like the old “Nike” ad said, “just do it!” You’ll be better for it!

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