infinite42

Are you proud of your social bookmarks? This might seem like a strange question, but bear with me.

Here’s an interesting question to ask yourself: would you share your bookmarks with a friend? How about 100 friends? How about 1000?

If the answer is no then don’t worry. It doesn’t make you a bad person. There are some good reasons why it can happen so read on…

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and stumbleupon allow internet users to vote on their favorite sites. You can even start your own based on Pligg. If these bookmarked sites get lots of votes (or tags, or diggs, or whatever you want to call them) they will make it to the top and get noticed. This is web2.0 in action.

How do you share your bookmarks? It’s very easy to do this. On most of these sites you have a profile page which stores all of the tags that you have created. Sharing or promoting your bookmarks is just a case of sending people to this page with a link.

So what would 100 people think of your bookmarks? Would they think you are a good Digger or a great citizen on StumbleUpon? Are you consistently tagging interesting sites that are relevant to the category that you choose? If so then the answer to the first question should be yes!

If the answer is no, it might be that:

1. You are bookmarking for the sake of it
2. You just Stumble your own stuff to get traffic. If you do, and it’s good stuff, then this seems OK to me. It can look a little self-centered though
3. You are bookmarking to try to raise your profile

Here’s an easier question: if you don’t feel happy sharing all your bookmarks with friends then how about sharing a subset of your bookmarks? Maybe they are tagged with the word “proud”, or “worth sharing”. Many of the bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, allow you to use tags.

If you can consistently show that you are finding interesting pages that are relevant to your group of online friends then you will get a good reputation and people will start to look at what you are up to. This leads to more visitors and more traffic to your own sites. That’s a good thing, and means you can say yes to the original question.

That’s too many double negatives, I know. Let’s try some examples:

• Your car dealer says she will call you back at the weekend. She doesn’t.
• You promise to get back to a prospect on Tuesday. You leave it til Thursday
• The spam email promises a discount on your favorite drugs but when you open it it’s just garbage
• Your latest blog comment promises useful feedback but it turns out to be just a bunch of link spam

Are you getting wound up? It’s probably because this seems very familiar. Promises get broken every day.

It’s the promises that people keep that you remember. If you break your promises people will forget you. Very quickly. Don’t forget that a promise could be a number of things:

• A Google AdWords Ad for your website
• A Google hit returned for a keyword from one of your pages
• Your book cover
• Your URL
• Your autoresponder delivery schedule

These all promise something to the visitors who clicks on your ad, or opens your book, or types in your URL, etc.

The words in an AdWords ad promise to show something relevant when your visitors arrive at your site. Your URL (include any file/pathnames here) promises some content related to the words that it includes.

If you promise to do something via any of these paths and then don’t do it, you will disappoint your customers and they may not come back.

No one likes a broken promise.

Are you in control of your website? Or do you feel like it controls you?

Does your site provide the profits that you want? Do you get enough visitors? Can you find yourself where you want to be on Google?

If the answer to these is no then I’m guessing you’re not getting the results you want from your site

What do you do about this? There’s plenty of help out there. 1000’s of websites and blogs and books all offering schemes to help you. Did I say 1000’s? Actually I meant millions.

And there’s the problem. Which tips and schemes do you choose? Which do you ignore? Which do you start first?

The solution is to read my guide. I’ve written about the ideas that I have used to make my websites work. They are all tried and tested and they all worked for me.

I’ll show you how to start taking control of your website and getting the results you want.

The guide is free and all I ask in return is some feedback from you and your email address so I can contact you.

So head on over to my signup page. It’ll only take you 5 minutes.

In this guide I’ll show you how to:

1. Build compelling content that search engines love and which keeps your visitors coming back for more
2. Get visitors to your site using AdWords without spending a fortune
3. Learn how to shape up your style - including the psychology behind great color schemes
4. Find out how all of this might be irrelevent if you don’t have a unique and compelling product
5. Stop losing visitors - improve your site navigation

Remember: you should be getting the results that YOU want from your site. It’s time to get back in control and get a Better Website

If you’ve never heard of the word webiste then read on.

A webiste is an artiste who works with the web. Its correct pronunciation is web-iste. It is often combined with other words like:

Webiste designer: an artiste who designs for the web

Free webiste: someone who does it for free

Family webiste: a webiste who is part of a family

Webiste development: what webistes do as they progress through their career

Do you believe any of this? I thought not. I invented the word purely to demonstrate that common words can often be spelled wrongly on the web. This happens a fair amount when people type queries into search engines such as Google. Why is this worth knowing?

Well, you can probably get a small-ish amount of visitors to your site by targeting a few common keyword mis-spellings. Webiste is just website with two swapped letters. There are a few searches performed each day on the mis-spelled version. Its only a few but this is a fairly common technique referred to as targeting the long tail of search engine enquiries.

Try targeting a few mis-spellings of you website keywords and see if you get any hits from the search engines. Let me know if it works!

Don’t link to other blogs.

If you can avoid making any references to other blogs then should be able to limit the chances of:

1. Anyone else finding out about you
2. Learning about other interesting topics to blog about
3. Your Google Ranking ever increasing
4. Helping out your visitors by referring them to other useful information

You don’t want anybody to find you anyway, right? If you don’t need links to other blogs then this avoids the need to read other blogs, so this will save you a ton of time. Also don’t forget that Google values pages that link out to other relevant pages. You don’t want Google to think you are valuable, do you?

Finally, your blog is just for you anyway, isn’t it? Why should you help your visitors when they do find you?

I’m a newbie on Squidoo so I was overjoyed today when I earned $0.07 in royalties!!

It’s a great place for building focussed content and promoting it. Squidoo rates pretty high in Google and your pages can appear high up in search results.

It’s pretty easy to set up a lens and build some content, but making it successful and getting a good lens rank is a little bit harder. You can make some money if visitors click on the AdSense links which feature on your lens. This is what happened today!

I do know a Giant Squid and you can check out some of her lenses at EverythingMouse on Squidoo. A Giant Squid award is given by the folks at Squidoo to someone who creates top notch lenses (and lots of them). I’ll be following her lead as I develop more lenses and get started on promoting them.

The Google Search Engine can take a while to adjust the PageRank of your site. Here’s some alternative activities to think about while you’re waiting (none of them including meditation):

1. Obsessively check your website stats

2. Book a round-the-world-tour

3. Go on your round-the-world-tour

4. Set up an AdWords campaign

5. Obsessively check your AdWords clicks and costs

6. Keep chasing links to your site

7. Watch an entire season of American Idol

What do you like to do while you’re waiting for Google? Leave a comment or you can Vote for your own ideas on my Google Alternatives Squidoo Lens

Do you have affiliate links on your website? How do you know if they are working for you? Which ones make you money?

Part of the answer is to check in with your affiliate (or their provider) and look at your impressions, clicks and sales. But this is only part of the answer.

To get the complete picture you need to use your web analytics tool to track some key things on your site:

1. Page views on the pages with the affiliate links
2. How visitors navigated to these pages
3. Clicks on the links through to the affiliate sites

Why do you need to check these too? I knew you’d ask.

Page views should be approximately the same as the impressions reported by your affiliate. Hopefully your affiliate will report a higher number of impressions as visitors return to their site with the same cookie set. It certainly should not be less - this could be a sign that your tracking code is wrong

Navigation to these pages is useful to know because you want to know where visitors come from and which referrers are working for you. Your web analytics tool should be able to show which is the most successful, whether it’s organic search (Google etc) or direct referrers.

It’s good to start tracking the clicks out of your site. If you don’t track them they will just be reported as exits by your web analytics system. This will give you a terrible click through rate and make your efforts seem worthless! You can add tracking to your outbound links using Javascript onclick functions, or you can insert your own gateway pages that have their own tracking code.

If you can get started with these metrics then you can start to really understand your traffic and what it is doing for you.

Otherwise you’re just working in the dark…

Is your website design too complicated? Do you have too much technology? Or, is it easy to understand what your site is about and is it easy to use?

With all this web technology around competing for your attention its easy to get distracted by what you can put on your website, rather than what you should put on your website. These days it’s not hard to get some flash animation or even a soundtrack. But do these actually help your website? Do they help to attract and retain visitors? Do they help add lots of useful content so you’ll be indexed by Google and the other search engines?

Don’t get me wrong, some of the best websites are able to combine great technology with compelling content. They are also successful. For your website though, don’t be too distracted by these until you’ve made sure you’ve developed something that’s really useful for your visitors. They may be initially impressed by your flash intro (maybe) but it may not keep them coming back for more.

The saga completes tomorrow!