Well its that time again to tune up the computer, clutter your work space, and get ready for the 4th annual Thirty Day Challenge. This I would say is by far, one of the biggest free online training courses available for not only the beginner (newbie as we say) but also the more advanced marketer. You can’t help but learn some of the newest technics working today.

Scheduled to start August 1st 2008, the preseason warm up kicks off early this year mostly impart to saying goodby to an old friend. Yes it will be sad, but our trusty browser Firefox will be sitting on the sidelines this year.

Pre-Season starts June 1 2008 (Live from a new format)
Thirty Day Challenge TV

Hello to a new browser

This years 30 Day Challenge browser of choice will be Flock “the social web browser”.

I’ve been giving the flock browser a spin for about a week or so now and although I do see that allowing one to socialize and keep up to date with whats going down around the net, I’ll have to give it a little more trial time in the “work” department, mostly for the fact that the addons are not as numerous as for Firefox.

Also there is of course some new platforms to be added the the training, one of those being FriendFeed.
This is a great site to follow what your friends are doing around the web and share with them what you are up to at the sites you socialize.

So sharpen the pencils, go get acquainted with Flock, and take a click on over to friendFeed, joinup, and say Hi.
And be sure to be at the pre-season kickoff at the Thirty Day Challenge TV show June 1 2008 at 8pm EST

Are you using Flock yet? What do you think of it? Let me know your pros and cons.

If you had a chance to check out Swypefile than you probably found some pretty good information, if not than you may have saved yourself the bother.

What started out as a resource for marketers, to share Swypefiles (swipefiles) of ideas and information with the incentive of having your posts monetized by way of adsence sharing,
I suspect started getting out of hand.

As a result here is the greeting you’ll get if you go to the site:

“Unfortunately, swypefile has been shut down for the time being. Things weren’t going as planned, and we are re-thinking the swypefile concept. Thanks to everyone who supported what we were trying to do!”

Sadly what was possibly a good idea, but I suspect started becoming a spammers playground needs a little more planning

A widget is some what like a blog plugin, and I think most would say, its considered a standard implementation applied to a blog any more, mostly to arrange your sidebars in a simpler way.

They allow you to easily add such things as Categories, Archives, Recent Posts, and Recent Comments and of course various monetization methods, without having to do a days worth of coding, “But all may not be as it appears in widget land”.

Hiding behind the code

As with most things good, it seem there is always someone or something that will try to change or implement it in a unethical or sneaky way. Usually to game the system or scam the public for the sole purpose of profit.

Since websites, blog, videos, graphics, pretty much everything on the internet follows some kind of coding, it is the perfect way to sneak in some “not so nice of things” and because of that the little widget I have now had to…

Label with a warning

Ok I am by no means a pro blog designer (websites are built/designed a little differently) so I am always checking out the different plugins and widgets to help me put my blogs together they’re awesome. What I found the other day though has made me take a much closer look at them before they go on my blogs.

While at wordpress I came across this post that I thought I should pass on for those of you that may not have seen or heard of this sneaky widget yet.

The widget is called “Amazon showcase” (It is not made by amazon either) and as of this writing the code has not been changed. Heres what you will find

Note: the author states that the widget will insert their ID 10% of the time. but feel free to disable it. “But they state it in the code”

Unless you make a habit of proofing your chosen widget code, or worst yet you don’t even no how to open a php file to see the code, then you won’t even know about this.

Here’s the part that makes it happen:

A commenter on the post I mention above offers this solution

[I just set the code to "(rand(1, 10) == 0)". This should never select the author's ID.]

Or you could just disable or delete it

Do you have a widget to monetize your blog?
Is this a task (proofing code) we’ll have to start doing?

Alexa toolbar is a no-no, Alexa toolbar serves no purpose, Alexa toolbar is spyware.

With so much negative feedback about the Alexa toolbar all over, why on earth would anyone want to install it on their browser? This is a question I pondered and why I installed it anyway.

There is no question to the fact that nobody wants spyware on their computer, those tiny little bits of script that follow and log your surfing habits like a P.I. investigating a cheating spouse, and these days that is something that is not hard to prevent with the multitude of programs available for combating just that.

A great one that I use is by safer-networking .org called Spybot Search and Destroy . It is available for free and has kept my computer absolutely spyware free.

The Good Side Of Spyware

There are a lot of quotes that I could use here but the one that comes to mind first is “every thing has a good side”
Case in point is the Alexa toolbar. Now why in the heck would I tell you that there is a good side to a toolbar that in fact we know is spyware? Read on, it will all come together.

As marketers, one of the rituals we constantly work on is traffic generation to our sites because more traffic of course as we know means potentiallty more sales, but it also increases the value of our sites traffic rankings that is very beneficial in the event you sell your site. A site with a high traffic rank is a definite plus when selling a site.

There are many ways that one can go about generating a better traffic ranking to our sites all of which are full topics of there own. In this post I would like to bring to your attention one way that I think many do not consider. The Alexa toolbar, yes a form of spyware, does though in fact have a big influence on how the search engines rank our sites because of the information it collects. That of course is traffic visiting your site.

Getting the benefits from Alexa

Every time someone with the Alexa toolbar on their browser visits your site, Alexa records that visit thus adding another traffic point/visit to your sites traffic rank. Of course now like with any system out there, the number are general and not absolute. But…Those numbers do have a bearing on how google ranks your site.

One concept that is important to understand is that Alexa’s rankings are calculated using a three month moving average. This means that Alexa calculates an average ranking over the previous three months.

Here are a few ways that you may want to utilize Alexa to help increase your traffic ratings and how google ranks you.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar and visit your sites.
If you don’t like the fact that Alexa also follows your other surfing habits install it on your secondary browser. Firefox is my main browser and I use IE 7 as my secondary.
(nothing against Internet Explorer but Firefox allows me to do so much more with my online marketing and research).

2.Have your friends and family use the toolbar and visit your site periodically.
Or here’s a thought, have everyone on your love link group use the toolbar when they visit your site(s) for some love linking, and of course you return the favor

3 Another way that you can benefit from Alexa is to use the Alexa widget on your site.
Installing the widget is pretty easy. All you have to do is go to the Alexa widget page, type in your URL and click ‘build widget’. Alexa will then give you the code that you can paste into your site.
The widget shows off your ranking and it also adds to your Alexa stats when people click on it.

Alexa…Spyware or ranking booster? Sometimes even a perceived bad guy ain’t so bad.

I got into a little marketing chat this weekend with a couple of friends, both of which had only a short invested amount of time with online marketing, so you would have to consider them newbies. I like elementary marketers myself, but either way they were fairly new to marketing online.

Ok you can stop with the ahhh that’s sweet stuff. it gets better.

As we sat around chit chatting and kind of semi brainstorming, one of them threw out a question, or should I say more of what they thought to be a educated understanding, of the whole process of starting a niche marketing project. Sadly through they still had not really got it, and had the belief that all a person needed to get listed on the search engine was quality content, a good headline and backlinks. Ok well I would say partially right and grade that with a C.

But what about minimizing the competition ?

A few details ignored

Let me give a quick summary of what my friend said,

You start with the noticing phase, getting ideas of possible markets in the broad sense.Then you move into the analysis phase, gathering stats on traffic, competition, etc. Then you check if there are products to sell say as a affiliate, or if one could easily be created for the market?… Then
Once you have chosen a niche, you just need to create some good content with your keywords, a killer headline, make a blog, and start getting backlinks to it. Right?

Woa there! Back the wagon up bud. I had a feeling my friend was about to emerge into the battle field highly out numbered by competing pages unless they spent a little more time and aleast did a few minor tweaks.

S.E.O. The little things can make a big change

My friend (as far as I could tell) did not really think optimization was all that important as long as they had good content, that killer headline, and lots of backlinks.
Well I knew my words alone probably won’t stick, because what goes in one ear usually goes out the other. I needed to show my friend different.

The best way to actually prove to my friend that even a little SEO work on their content could make a difference, I decided to let google speak for me. Here is what I showed to my friend.

Using the keyword phrase speed reading, I did a few hack searches to display what the page competition would be when that phrase was included in your content at a few key areas.

I started with just the broad term: speed reading results- 37,500,000 pages

Next I searched using the match phrase “speed reading”: Pages- 1,390,00 Better!

Now lets check if I make sure its in the title as a match phrase: intitle: “speed reading”
Pages- 51,300 This is looking good

Ok lets hit it up with intitle: inanchor: inurl: all “match phrase”

Competitor pages: 9,830 WOW

I would say a little optimization makes a difference.

Will this guarantee a #1 place or even first page listing? I think you know I can’t guarantee what happens when it comes to the search engines, but I will say it could make the difference (as in this case) of about 27,670,000 competing pages