AOL announced last week that they are making plans on redesigning Netscape.com into more of a social and news style portal. With these plans, they also plan on migrating their existing social news network over to Propeller.com.
I have been a registered member of Propeller.com for close to a year. Many of you know that I went through a phase of trying to push traffic to my blogs using social networks such as StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com and even Propeller.com.
Of all the social networks I participated in, Propeller.com was the lowest on the ranks in terms of driving traffic to my sites. However, recently about three weeks ago, I noticed that Propeller.com had a complete overhaul and new web design.
The new Propeller.com is very appealing and extremely fun and friendly to use. While I have been busy with other projects, I did make a note of newly updated Propeller.com web site and have full intentions to join back in.
With that said, I can now start to see why Propeller.com was redesigned as I am starting to see the bigger picture of what AOL is doing. They had Propeller.com redesigned towards taking their first steps with shifting their Netscape.com social news to it.
Soon, and this is just a prediction, I beleive that Propeller.com might be a more effective social network with much more traffic and an increased level of user interest. It might not be a bad idea to register and get a profile set up and start making friends.
I think with AOL’s plans to funnel traffic from Netscape.com to Propeller.com, that there may be a great opportunity for bloggers and publishers to contribute in a newly restructured social network that could very well have some decent traffic coming into it soon.
Keep in mind too my overall view of social networks. While many social networks can indeed funnel large amounts of traffic to your web pages, I found that this traffic doesn’t little for publishers who monetize their content.
What do you think? Do you think the new Propeller.com will pick up momentum after Netscape.com funnels traffic to it?
For me, it seems that the WordPress WP Super Cache Plugin is a very necessary plugin to have for blogs that have a lot of traffic. Many people fail to understand that running a WordPress blog is much different than running a typical or standard static HTML web site.
Running WordPress on a server is very demanding on system resources. Granted, WordPress by itself is very efficient; however, when you go adding things to it such as traffic, pictures, text, categories, tags, and a mile long list of other plugins, you can end up killing your blog real quick.
The WordPress WP Super Cache plugin helps reduce the amount of server system resources used by you WordPress blog simply by making static HTML copies of everything rather than allowing the program to pull queries direct from your MySQL database.
To me, this can indeed be a life saver for bloggers who have tons of traffic or even for bloggers who get the every once in awhile “Burst Fire” traffic caused from submitting content into social networks such as StumbleUpon.com or Digg.com.
The only issue I have with the Plugin is that it doesn’t work very well with advertisement serving WordPress Plugins such as OIO and MaxBannerAds.
This is simply due to the fact that these programs are designed to rotate ads while the WP Super Cache plugin is designed to keep things static and not dynamic. What happens when you run the WP Super Cache plugin when you are also displaying rotating banner advertisements is that they no longer rotate.
To learn more about the WordPress WP Super Cache Plugin and download it, click here.
Did you know that many of the more popular and even the less popular social bookmarking and networking sites steal traffic from your blog? It is true! If you don’t beleive me look at this screen shot:
In this screen shot, you will see that I wrote a post on my blog titled, Will Smoking Crack Help You Buy Better Domain Names?” However, and interestingly enough, in this screen shot you also see how many of the more popular social networking sites rank in the SERPs and actually compete against my listing in the search engines.
In this screen shot you will see that I have to compete with Digg, UrlFan, BlogCatalog and in many cases MyBlogLog and StumbleUpon (both not shown). While some people say that this is a good thing, I don’t believe so. Some people would say that I am totally dominating the SERP page. While that may seem true, keep in mind what the results of this page would look like if the social networks weren’t listed here with me. My listing would be competing with many of the second page results, which are very much less relevant, thus making my listing extremely noticable. Read more
You shouldn’t pack it up and call it a day after you write and publish a blog post. In fact, after you publish a blog post, you should look at it as being the beginning of your day rather than the end of the day. I’ll admit, this strategy is new for me; however, it works. My traffic has increased so much over the last few weeks and partly due to what I have done after I publish the post.
If getting traffic to your newly published article is important to you, then you’re going to need to reach out and pull people in to view your post. It is your blog and it is your responsibility to capture the attention of people. Again, that is assuming that you care about having people read your posts. Some bloggers just blog to pass the time and don’t care who or how many people read it.
First thing is that you really need to write something special. Your post really needs to reach out and grab someone within the first few seconds of reading. The blog post title is extremely important. In many cases, the post title is the deciding factor whether someone even gives your post a chance.
If your post title is hot, then you’ll get people to visit the page. However, very quickly thereafter - within the first few sentences - if your writing doesn’t continue to interest the person reading the post, they will quickly lose interest and not continue to read your post. The post title and the first paragraph of your posts have to be spot on and be an attention grabber. Read more
I was reading the most recent post from ShoeMoney.com this morning and saw that he had asked Joost de Valk to make a WordPress plugin that requires minimum character length to be written in a comment in order for it to be allowed to publish.
I thought that the plugin was very cool and so I got to snooping around Joost’s site a little more and soon realized that his blog was totally a place where I could learn how to tweak my blogs and web sites.
Joost de Valk is extremely talented and I really like the tips, tricks and free WordPress plugin downloads found on site. But also, I really enjoy how the blog is set up. It is extremely user friendly, very clean and very organized.
When I was a kid, my mom always wanted me to have a clean room. Well, Joost’s blog is an example of a blog that looks like how my mom would have wanted my room to look. It’s nice. Very nice….
yoast.com is amazingly simply to use towards finding any and all of his current and previous writings and works. One of the neat features of the site that I think is rare to see in WordPress blogs is Joost’s use of breadcrumb navigation links found on the top of every page within the body content. I know where I am at on his site at all times.
The term, “Viral Video” is spreading like wildfire just as much as the term, “Make Money Online”, or “Search Engine Optimization”. The problem with viral videos is that I believe that people are getting the wrong idea of them. Wikipedia describes a viral video as a “video that refers to video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites. Viral videos are often humorous in nature and include televised comedy sketches… - source.” To me though, most all videos that go viral are very low in quality and tend to not better an individual.
With the Internet marketing and make money online niche, viral videos are created and abused mainly for the purpose of scoring traffic to a web site, blog, or product page being promoted. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with creating videos for the purpose of going viral. But where I have a bone to pick is when people create viral videos for ill purposes in mind. There is nothing wrong with earning traffic, there is nothing wrong with creating videos that can go viral, but to me, I think videos that are created for this purpose should have a message in them. I think that some how they should help others which also providing a balance in entertainment and attractiveness.
I have had a Facebook account for awhile but never really used it. Just a few days ago I started getting into it and I am really having a lot of fun with it. For me, Facebook is great because it allows me to interact with all the people that I have discovered on my blog and get a more personal glimpse of their interests and what they enjoy doing on the Internet. For me, my blog is a very shallow blog, I talk about ONE thing, “how to make money online.” However, I have so many more things that interest me and I am very interested in learning more about the interests of other people. Facebook has been a great place so far that allows me to connect with people and make friends.
Recently, I was able to find Normal Joe on Facebook and quickly I found that he shares similar interests with me. One thing that I quickly found was that he also knew about the SEO Rapper and enjoyed his work very much. I thought that this was really cool, because I knew how much I really enjoyed the SEO Rapper’s work as well. On March 29th 2008 I wrote a rather lengthy comment about the SEO Rapper and I don’t think many people saw it, so today I am republishing my comment into a blog post to share with you. Read more
Internet marketers are very big on building up their opt in mailing lists. You may often wonder how folks like Joel Comm, Aaron Abber and others have built up their lists. All in all, it takes time and careful focus on growing your list. Now with that said, I’ll freely admit that I am NOT an email marketing guru. I don’t know too much about it like these other guys do. However, I do know a lot about practical and common sense things.
So for me, an inspiring email list marketer, one of the ways that I am doing to actively growing my opt in list is with targeting the social networks. While so many bloggers think about using the social networks to score free traffic to their blogs, I look at it as a way to score opt in entries to my mailing list. Gaining new entries to my mailing list using social networks is actually quite simple and you’ll probably kick yourself for not thinking about this too.
Most all social networks such as, Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, and Propeller require registration for a free user account. These user accounts give people a profile page. On the profile page there is a field that allows you to enter your website URL or blog URL. Most all people totally take full advantage of this thinking that this will score them an added backlink. Read more
I spend way too much time trolling around these social networks. But you know what? I have fun and I find a lot of pretty interesting things doing so.
So what is your favorite social network and why? Also… I could care less about traffic. When I ask you this question, I want you to assume that you’re NOT in it for trying to score traffic to your blog. Many people including myself kinda are in it for the traffic. However, I have to say that many of the social networks are actually starting to grow on me a little bit. So anyway, traffic is OUT you can’t base your decision on traffic.
Man this hard for me to answer even… Ok, with the ones listed above, if I could ONLY choose ONE, I would have to choose FriendFeed. The reason I would choose friendfeed is because for one, I can tie in all my other network activity including all of my blogs into one centralized location. In fact, I have already done this. The 11 profiles listed above all have an RSS feed which I have pulled into my FriendFeed.
Second reason why I would Choose FriendFeed over the rest is because everyone else seems to also place a lot of value in their FriendFeed accounts. So, with that being said, there is really an endless about of information flowing in and out of FriendFeed.com.
So… what is your favorite social networking site and why?
Forest (Ian) Parks is a very creative individual who is inspired to make money online. Formally a print graphic designer of ten years, recently within the last year, Forest set out to learn the business of making money online with niche blogs. Forest invested time into learning about email list building, search engine marketing, the inner workings of WordPress and on WordPress themes. The only element Forest had coming into this venture was his graphic design skills and the strong desire to find success with making money on the Internet.
I first met Forest Parks back on October 22nd, 2007 when he shared his thoughts with me about his Google AdSense earnings in a comment on a post I wrote titled, Would You Walk A Mile For An AdSense Click. A lot has changed since that time and I am very happy to see how much Forest has learned in just under one year. Today, I want to share with you what I consider a success story. Read more
Lately I have been building up my social bookmarking sites by spending some time in checking out the articles that you have been publishing on your blog. Over the last few days I have been working with a few various WordPress plugins and SimplePie towards developing a “Live Stream” page that syndicates my all the contributions I do on many of the social networking sites I participate on.
For the time being, I want to invite you to view my Subscribe and Join section on my sidebar. These section has direct links to my various profiles on many of the social networks such as Sphinn, StumbleUpon and Mixx. Read more
Most Recent Comments