My typical response is don’t worry about. I just emailed a client tonight:

I would not worry about Technorati. I don’t watch my Technorati ranking at all and advise clients to do the same. It would be a vanity contest – assuming that Technorat’s servers and systems were even up to indexing all blog content and the incoming links to blogs. With the failures of their systems their rankings mean little, if anything.

What is a “Technorati Ranking?” (per Technorati site)

A Technorati Ranking relates to the number of sources that point to a particular weblog relative to other weblogs. The more sources referencing a weblog, the higher the Technorati ranking. The Technorati Ranking for a blog is displaying in URL Search results, Blog search results, and is displayed in the account profile.

To me that says nothing more than we’ve created a vanity contest that will cause vain people (many bloggers) to return to Technorati as they try in vain to increase their blog ranking. Maybe we can even get people to post their ranking with our Technorati logo as a badge on their blog. Sounds like Web 2.0. ;)

Having an obligation to clients to find out if I’m right, I looked at what others were saying about Technorati rankings.

From Darren Rowse at Pro Blogger, one of the highest ranked blogs by Technorati, discussing his top 100 ranking:

Does it Increase Profile?

…I’m afraid to say that I’m not aware of any circumstance where any reporter or advertiser approached me as a result of seeing me as #3 on the Most Favorited list.

Does it give Egos a Boost?

It’s always nice to be included in a list and to be in the company of blogs like others featured in the list.

However it’s a somewhat empty achievement to be honest. While I appreciate my readers going to the trouble of marking me a favorite – it’s a list that I suspect will always be skewed in favor of blogs about blogging, web 2.0 and the web because it’s on a site whose users are largely bloggers who are more inclined to read such blogs.

Does the Technorati Top 100 Most Favorited Blog List Drive Traffic?

So does being #3 on this list drive thousands of visitors to ProBlogger?

A quick visit to my stats packages shows that in the scheme of things it’s hardly caused a blip on my traffic radar. Technorati does drive a few hundred readers per month to this blog – but not a single visitor came directly from that the Top 100 Favorites page.

From WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg in a blog comment:

Personally I think it’s silly to get worked up over a made-up ranking on a site full of spam that drives very little traffic, especially if you’re not in the top 100.

And finally from Steve Rubel in an audio interview where interviewer Andy Plesser mentioned being depressed by his low Technorati ranking:

You get depressed about your Technorati – (Laughs)

Well, you know, I really don’t try to think a lot about Technorati rankings because I think it’s just, you know, if you – again, if you’re providing, you know, high value content that people want, it doesn’t matter how many links you’re getting. It doesn’t matter. As long as you’re fulfilling the wishes of your audience. And I think that’s what you have to look at above and beyond everything and if you’re doing that and doing that consistently, you know, you will get links and accolades. But if you’re – if you’re doing it just for that, it’s the wrong reason. So I, you know, try not to pay attention to that and just really do – just put out there a good product that people want.

After this research, my opinions are stronger than ever. Any of you guys see value in a Technorati ranking?

Update from Steve Rubel’s tweet of this post: ‘General consensus from replies is that people don’t use T’Rati anymore. It’s not their fault. The web world simply changed.’

by kevin

7 slam-dunk tactics for building your email database:

Newsletters
Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly – delivering information relevant to your customer results in increased loyalty and future purchases. Position yourself and company as an expert with timely and relevant advice to your email database. Content is king here. If you’re delivering useful information, and on terms that your prospects request (timing, length, etc), your prospects are going to LOVE you for your efforts. This simple technique is a powerful positioning tool and will positively distinguish your company from the competitors.

Sweepstakes
The chance to win valuable prizes can be a highly effective lead generation tool. It can also be a great incentive for motivating people to share valuable market information such as intent to purchase timing and product preference. Just make sure you get permission for your future emails – let them know the value they will receive for subscribing (special rates, product updates, educational content, etc).


Hot Deals
Those who do not buy immediately may eventually become buyers. Why lose or risk the opportunity to stay in front of them? Take their name and let them know that you will notify them of any hot, unbeatable deals in the future. Maybe their situation, need, or inclination toward buying your product will change, and a great offer down the road may be just what they need to become a loyal customer.

Product Releases and Upgrades
It is important to keep your customer, whether current or potential, engaged and interactive with your business. Accomplish both by offering them the option of signing up to be notified about new things that might be of interest to them.

Quizzes
Curiosity and fun are always great ways to draw people in. Use this to your advantage and develop interactive quizzes and tests that can help you build aggregate views of your customers while you entertain them. These same people can be valuable prospects in the future.

Shopping Lists and Party Planners
Give your customers tools that encourage them to buy, buy, buy! Take advantage of the holiday season…any holiday season…and entice them to sign up for party planners, recipe tips, holiday games, shopping lists, reminders, or any other festive offer that works toward the ultimate goal – building loyalty!

Wish Lists
Encourage customers to register for gifts that they want and provide a means for their friends and relatives to view their choices. Wedding registries are a great example of the effectiveness of this tactic. Keeping the customer engaged and making the shopping experience personal to individual wants and needs is a good way to generate sales and leads.

Email marketing is the undisputed champion of high-response, cost-effective marketing vehicles. If you’re ready to take your company’s sales to the next level, start by building a thought-out database of customers and prospects email addresses. Then, communicate with them regularly and watch the conversion rates and sales launch off the charts!

So basically what you do is build a list of individuals who have like-minded desires as you do, and know less about some niche topic than you do, and who are willing to purchase some of that information from you at a price.

The most important thing for you to remember when you are list building for money is that you are in this for the money. You are not building a list for fun. You are not building a list to say that you have the biggest list. You are building a list so that you can sell things to that list. Call it what it is. Do not pretend to be a giver of free gifts, if your end result is that you want money. Make money.

So how do you list build for money? The first thing that you need to do is decide on a niche that you want to list build in. You must choose a niche that has high revenue potential. I do not concern myself with how much competition there is in a niche, although many do. I have discovered ways to generate traffic at low cost and high competition niches, and therefore high competition does not bother me.

The second thing that you need to do to list build for money is create a squeeze page and that website. A squeeze page is a webpage optimized exclusively for compelling people to opt in to your opt in e-mail list.

The third thing that you need to do to list build for money is to learn to write strong e-mails that develop relationships with people on your opt in e-mail list.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_Mize

The $60,000 question: What makes some affiliates earn thousands when other people struggle to earn hundreds?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with making $100 to $300 a month extra on the side. But wouldn’t it be better to make 10 to 20 times that amount?

Before we start, let me tell you the way it is:

• Everybody can’t make $5,000 to $10,000 a month doing affiliate marketing. There is too much competition.

• There is no easy money that will fall into your lap without you doing anything. (And in case there was any easy money I would keep that
  information to myself and not write it in an article read by thousands of people.)

• You will find the best working affiliate opportunities only by finding them yourself, either through testing and research or networking and business development.

With all this said, let me give you the three high-level keys to making money with affiliate programs on the Internet.

1. Google and Overture rock!

The days of free traffic are not completely over, but certainly fading away at a rapid pace.

Sure, you can work hard to create pages that score high in the search engines and build sweat equity into a site.

But by paying for clicks and focusing on Google and Overture you will have the top three positions on all search engines that really count on the
Internet.

If you want to generate traffic from Yahoo, you need to be on top of Google, it’s as simple as that.

Overture and especially Google are the best key drivers of qualified traffic on the Internet.

• Pay-per-click search engines let you quickly test different affiliate offers and new landing pages on your site.

• When it works, you can scale

• Stay away from top competitive keywords for $1 to $2 per click. Niche marketing on Overture and Google works.

2. Do you have your own email list yet?

Sending offers to your own email list is the true way to build freedom and residual income.

Instead of just sending traffic away and hoping for the best, you should have your own email list to which you can send multiple offers.

• Use subscription forms on your web site.

• Use co-registrations or co-op marketing campaigns.

• Buy email lists.

3. Consider starting your own affiliate program and/or your own unique offer.

If you know that each filled out form on your web site generates $0.50 in revenue, would you be willing to pay someone else $0.25 to generate that
lead?

Probably the most overlooked way of generating traffic is to have other people generate it for you.

• The only thing you need is a destination site that is profitable. It can even be with other affiliate programs as the back-end.

• Identify companies that pay well for co-registration leads and bundle 3-4 offers together with your own subscription form (for your own email list, remember?).

• Find a successful company and recruit new affiliates for them and make a commission on their sales. Brokering deals (unique deals) can make you quite an income.

The bottom line:

What do all these three techniques have in common?

It involves paying for traffic in one shape or another. To accelerate your income, you need to invest smartly in advertising.

Spend limited amounts of money to test offers.

When you find something that works – scale it. And repeat.

To your success!

Ola Edvardsson
olae (at) affiliatetips.com

About Ola

Ola Edvardsson is one of the world’s top experts on affiliate marketing.

Clients ranging from small Internet start-ups that survived “the dot-com era” to Fortune 100 corporations turn to Ola for successful strategies and hands-on advice and coaching.

He has trained hundreds of corporations and thousands of webmasters since 1999 on affiliate programs and performance-based marketing through his educational publications.

An internationally sought after speaker, he has addressed audiences in the United States, Europe and Asia. Ola’s appearances range from large Internet marketing conferences such as Internet World to private exclusive seminars.

He is the CEO of Performancy, a Michigan-based Internet marketing agency focused on b2b and financial services.

Here are five things you must avoid to prevent getting in trouble with the search engines:

1. Never Keyword Spam

Don’t spam or hide your pages with the keywords you are attempting to target. Search engines are smarter nowadays and can smell your intentions from afar. If they think you are spamming, your site could be penalized badly in the rankings or even removed from their listings.

2. Don’t Use Frames

Websites which have frames are also unfriendly to search engines and will prevent from getting a good ranking. Try to avoid using frames whenever possible. A good tip is to add “no frames” tags between the “Head” tags.

3. Don’t Use Flash Or Javascript

If possible, refrain from using Flash or Javascript elements. These dynamic scripts don’t contain much content in terms of words and the search engines generally do not like them. If in doubt, always put content ahead of fancy graphics or effects. Besides, your visitors will love you for it.

4. Don’t Submit Your Site Too Often

A few people I know, who after finding that their site was not indexed after one week, re-submitted their site to the search engines. This is not recommended! If you do this too often, the search engines will think you are spamming.

5. Never Use Unrelated Keywords In Your Meta Tags

If you are selling sofa sets, don’t place the name of a popular person or product in your “Keywords” meta tag. Some webmasters use popular keywords in their meta tags in an attempt to attract more traffic, but this does not work, as the search engines only look at their relevance to your web page. If you sell sofas, place only words related to sofas in your meta tag.

Avoid these five pitfalls that a lot of new webmasters make, and you can prevent your site from suffering an early search engine death. After all, as the cliché goes, prevention is better than cure!

Fabian Tan is an established Internet entrepreneur who has built many online businesses. Find out how he used a popular Search Engine Optimization tool called SEO Elite to boost his search engine rankings almost overnight at SEO Elite Exposed

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Fabian_Tan

Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site. Here is an example of deep linking, in this case to my personal happiness workbook.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

Article exchanges. You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Not anchor text. Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation – something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.

Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It’s called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?

There you have it: 10 of the 52 Top SEO Tips, a free tip sheet that comes with Don’t Get Banned By the Search Engines.

There is a lot more to search engine optimization, and there are always more details when looking at an individual site. But these tips should help any website significantly improve its rankings.