A State Of Fusion. When Blogs, Forums and Social Bookmarking Sites Unite
The web is swarming with new ideas and new concepts. Web 2.0 is apparently more than a buzz word. Today I’ll highlight two websites that stand on a ground of their own and blur the limit between the various type of websites increasingly more:
The first website on our list is www.bumpal.com . As its main core, this is a social bookmarking website, but with a twist. While websites like digg, reddit or del.icio.us do not have a specific focus, bumpal is specialized in promoting forum threads. Given that the website is in its earliest stage, it is extremely easy now to push a thread on the first page. What attracted my attention though is the release of a social bookmarking plugin easily implemented in any forum and which will probably become extremely popular amongst forum webmasters. The choice was not to make the bookmark plugin work only with bumpal, but with all the major social bookmarking sites. Something tells me that in the near future we will see much more forum threads on the first page of Digg. The plugin is currently available only for PHPBB forums, with a release for vBulletin promised in the near future and can be downloaded here
The second website that is generating buzz nowadays is Lars Christian’s Bloggst. This is a forum aimed at the blogging community and given that it has been launched only a few weeks ago, it’s success is nothing short of phenomenal. Lars definitely knows his promotion. You can read more about the techniques he employed on his personal blog here
What other such start up, revolutionary websites you know? The world is moving and new ideas appear all the time
The AGLOCO Controversy. How Paid For Surf Scams Work
Every once in a while the media uncovers the shady world of online scamming. The AGLOCO scandal is the latest example. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at Lars’ post called Agloco hot or not and get the latest situation in this controversy.
What boggles my mind most is the fact that most people think that Agloco is something new. This couldn’t be further from truth, paid to surf programs or autosurf programs as they are also known have been with us almost since the inception of the World Wide Web.
Why are autosurfs scams? Well, the basic idea of the paid to surf programs, at least in its initial stage, was simple and straightforward. People were paid to view some online offers, in the hope that somehow they will be convinced to actually buy into them. It didn’t take very long though to observe that the conversion ratio for this sort of programs was extremely low and the interest of the advertisers quickly faded. This didn’t mean however that paid to surf had died, they would simply evolve into a much darker, complex stage and this where frauds began.
An Insight In The World Of Black Hat SEO: Why Does Link Spamming Work?
Warning: The post you are about to read contains description of some techniques which if used might bring penalties for your website and may actually lose you money. I do not endorse the use of Black Hat SEO techniques, but I think that absolutely every SEO marketer should know about them and how they work
Link spamming. An awful practice done by shady marketers. The technique includes adding spam posts in forums, spam comments in blogs and spam comments in guest books. You would think that such a technique would be useless as Google is not very likely to give these links too much importance as they come from an irrelevant context. Here is where you are wrong and I will show you why.
Mossad Meets MySpace. A PR Coup Or A PR Blunder?
Who’s female, 58 years old and is born under the sign of Taurus? If you answered the state of Israel award yourself a cookie. MySpace is the latest battleground for the Public Relations field and apparently some bright bulb in the Israeli Foreign Minister decided that countries too should have MySpace profiles. With all the latest scandals, like that poor chap caught in the streets of El Salvador buck naked, which unfortunately was also the Israeli ambassador, a scent of desperation can be felt.
So there you have it: A Crappy MySpace page that would make even an amateur web-designer blush in shame.
On the bright side though, the page itself focuses mostly on the cultural side of Israel. You can find heaps of Israeli musicians together with warm, fuzzy messages to end the cycle of violence. Something tells me though that the page won’t be such a big success in the Gaza strip. Not having electricity can do that to people.
It will also be quite interesting to see how long will they allow comments on the front page. This will probably be one of the most spammed pages there. The real, old school MySpace community though has pretty much accepted this brand new member together with their well known wittiness. There’s a comment there that says: “Where do you live?”. The agony oh the agony.
Monetizing Blogs. A Tale Of Traffic Services And Low Budgets
What is a blog? This question would’ve had an easy answer 5 years ago, nowadays though the barriers are blurring and you see more and more fusion between apparently disparate concepts is happening everywhere. The only thing that remained unchanged is the CMS (content management system). A blog contains posts. Hooray for Captain Obvious? When it comes to the content of these posts though Captain Obvious has a great deal of problems.
Let’s take ForumFame. Definitely a blog. But a blog about forums? Not quite. The owner, which happens to be a friend of mine has creatively found a niche which offers some unique monetizing venues. Just look at this post about Paid Posting Review. This guy is actually selling a service and through a blend of relevant information and sales pitch manages to brand the blog as an authority one and also boost sales.
Now don’t get me wrong, forum paid posting is anything but new. Advertising through a blog for this sort of service on the other hand is. There is a shift in the mind of the reader, he is not aware that he is reading sales copy, but rather he perceives that he is looking at a Forum Resource Blog
What this teaches us is the fact that the unique structure of a blog can be used to promote services in a very relevant context, create greater customer exposure through additional resources and also help establish in an easy fashion a degree of authority and all this with only a minimal investment.
Alternative SEO Approaches. Narrowing The Niche
To call the web today as mature would be an understatement. Overcrowding would be a much better word. A competition of around 1 million entries for a keyphrase is widely considered as weak and competition in the range of tens of millions is considered moderate.
What choices do you, as an SEO savvy webmaster have under this condition. Promotion is probably the first thing that comes up into your mind. An alternative is possible though. Instead of aiming for a very large niche you can aim only a small part of it.
As an example I propose that you visit this blog about Website optimization. You will probably not understand a thing. Why? Because it is written in Slovenian. The author chose to pursue a smaller crowd but with a much smaller competition. He has basically narrowed the niche to the point where he can bring in consistent search engine traffic for Slovenian keywords.
Of course narrowing the niche has its downside too. Only going for a small market share means that high traffic will never quite be achieved and that the base readership can never expand beyond Slovenian readers in this case. However with multiple sites of this sort you can build a network that enjoys a large share of the market, but with each of them going after a very small, easy to identify target.
