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Ok you’ve come to the conclusion your blog or sites 20 backlinks aren’t going to help much. Building quality back links takes some time and effort and you’ve heard about the “no follow” tag that doesn’t give you any link juice.  You’re not a good link barterer so what to do. How about finding some “do follow” blogs in your niche or have posts that you can make a contribution to and write a quality comment and grab some link love that you’ve earned!

Here’s a place to start building some back links to your site. Please, take the time to contribute positive content when you comment on these “Do Follow” Blogs. You should be able to find the time to do some everyday. Make it happen. Contrary to popular opinion back links just don’t grow out of thin air. (Thanks Mom)

This DoFollow Blog list is courtesy of Courtney Tuttle and was created originally by Coleen as the D-List.

According to Compete (which tracks U.S. visitors only) Bing had 49.57 Million unique visitors for June 2009. That makes it the 13th largest website in terms of unique visitors in the U.S. for June. Larger than Digg’s 39 Million uniques and Twitter’s 23 Million for June. Just goes to show you a $100 Million Dollar advertising campaign can buy you some traction. It was beaten by it’s own big brother MSN Live (people still use their Hotmail accounts I suppose) but still the growth has been impressive to date. It will be interesting to see if this growth can continue.

Also it’s interesting to note that overall search volume was down across the board by 1.7% in June (Google lost .09% search queries). The tag team tandem of Bing/Live increased it’s search queries by 19 million. The only major search engine to do so. Incorporating Bing and Live as a PPC Tandem is something were going to be compelled to test. No doubt other Internet Marketers  will be doing the same.

Here’s Bing’s own comment on “Bing at month one” published by Bing today. – the June growth as well as additional information that can prove valuable. If your looking to drive traffic with Bing I recommend a trip to the Bing Toolbox. From the Bing Toolbox website.

“The Bing Toolbox” is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing™ community. It’s a one-stop portal to all of the services you need to drive traffic and increase engagement with your site and applications”

Bing Toolbox Website

Optimizing Your Website for Bing

Bing’s Marketing Slug when it was launched gives us a clue. “A Decision Engine not Search Engine” It really is a search engine despite it’s cute marketing angle, however it’s all about how Bing displays the result it’s algorithm says will have a certain level of relevancy as it relates to your “intent” when you enter the search query into it’s engine. Ultimately all search engines take an educated guess as to the intention behind your search query.

Modern search engines have a huge degree of data on “you” (the universal you) that’s giving them clues as to what best matches your intent and ranks results accordingly. They’ve followed you around your various travels on this thing we call the “internet” and they extrapolate “guess” accordingly.

Many of the methodologies search engines use within their “algorithms” are the result of what current sciences know to be true about such things as Networks, (like the small degree of separation between each of us {Think Kevin Bacon} not networking as in computers, although there are amazing similarities) Game Theory, Probability, Boolean Operations and various other data mining techniques.

Call it the Math of human knowledge if you will, we can simplify it as a math formula that takes a problem (the intent behind your query) as input and outputs a solution to the problem. The problem is and always has been to define the “original intent”. ” The Relevancy of output versus the original intent behind the input. So search engines fudge their results with the hope they’ve returned enough options to make you happy with the result and you will in turn continue to use their service. Ultimately the end user has the final say about what constitutes “original intent” .

In many ways we as marketers share the same problem faced by search engines. If we know the “original intent” of our chosen target market we can optimize our product and services and hence our profits and revenue. Often times we leave that work to the search engines and engage the aid of search engines to deliver to us the “market” we’ve predisposed had an “intention” towards our offerings. It’s no wonder we become obsessed with any undo change in how these “Search Engines” operate. Many of us attempt to “game the ” SERPS” (Search Engine Results Page) forgetting ultimately it’s the “Original Intent” that matters.

The search engines change in response to “Original Intent” and the greatest change taking place currently and what’s being lost by many IM’ers is people want more than the 10 Blue Links on Google’s SERP. They’re looking for video, images, podcasts, local information, related social media sites, relevant networks and other multi media forms. The Search Engines have responded accordingly i.e. Google’s “Universal Search” Ask’s recent redesign, Microsoft’s Bing, the launch of Wolfram-Alpha and RAIS. How we choose to view the “output” has morphed rapidly.

As a marketer when I’m asked; How should we optimize? my answer is Completely! Optimize everything, your text (you are sprinkling in “relevant keywords”?) optimize your images (use keywords in the alt tag) and Caption any on-page photo using the <strong> tag. Use SEO friendly tags for your video %$?demo1vid?/ is not search engine friendly. Please Universal Search isn’t going away.

Bing in particular uses a ton of 3rd party resources (content) when it displays “answers” These are things like review sites, shopping sites, blog posts and the like. These are your competitors so you should be getting 3rd party content on your site as well. Embed a well tagged video, write product reviews, do demo’s, organize and plan a well tagged image gallery.

These are things that people jump to from the 1st position to other search entries. One last hint, if you do a Product Search on Bing for HD Television you’ll find a ton of Bing CashBack Partners. Become one yourself!

All The Best

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• Bing To Google: Try Updating Your Index Once In A While (techcrunch.com)

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skydivedad on 12seconds.tv

Spring is in the air and so am I! Couldn’t come soon enough!

In the recent months, the internet marketing community has begun to take advantage of a new income opportunity known as Offline Gold. This method of making money is extremely easy to grasp, and it’s essentially a combination of online marketing skills and offline clients.

You, the internet marketer, provide a set of services such as local search engine optimization and website optimization to a local business owner. In this case, you are considered to be an internet marketing consultant. By providing just those two services for that business, they have the potential to gain more customers because you are helping them to take advantage of the local search opportunities that the internet provides. Although this is only an example of how the Offline Gold method would work, it’s a very accurate representation of how you could start making money in this arena.

Being an internet marketing consultant doesn’t require you to have a college degree nor do you have to have ‘guru’ status as an internet marketer. If you have had some success with internet marketing, whether it be in terms of search engine rankings or pay per click advertising, you can offer those services with which you have experience to local business owners.

Most brick-and-mortar business owners don’t have a website, so of course, they don’t know the potential boost in business that the internet could bring to them. You, on the other hand, are very aware of the local search opportunities available on the internet and they could very well bring new customers to these businesses by the dozens.

Nowadays, most print materials such the Yellow Pages or other phone books are available in digital format so when people want to buy something or are in need of a particular service, they will turn to the internet to find it.

Most people have the habit of typing in something like ‘my local area search term’, and this will bring up all the results for that type of business in their area. If you were to go into one of your local businesses today and ask the owner to do the same in reference to their own business, they’d likely be nowhere to be found in any of the listings. This could be because they don’t have a website, or if they do, there has been nothing done to make sure that website can be found by the search engines. As an internet marketing consultant, you would be able to improve upon this matter, and likely with extreme ease.

Business owners would probably be surprised to find out just how many local search opportunities they are missing by not putting the internet to use for their businesses. Google, for example, is one of the most widely used search engines, and millions of people turn to it looking for information everyday. Depending on the population of your locale, and the number of each kind of business in that area, many business owners could stand to gain a phenomenal increase to their bottom line just by taking advantage of a local business listing.

For instance, if you met with a local business owner who had a simple website but they didn’t have a local business listing in Google, you could offer to get them listed for a fee. This is a very basic service to offer, but it’s something that their business needs. In addition to the listing, you could also offer to revamp their website and perform some search engine optimization to help them garner rank in the search engines. Acting as an internet marketing consultant, you would be providing a service of extreme value to the business owner, and because of that, they will be more than happy to pay you for your time.

One good thing about the Offline Gold method is that it’s not very hard to build a customer base. Nearly every local business owner in your area probably has some use for the services you can offer, so you don’t really have to do a lot of searching for clients. Most internet marketers will tell you that they just walked into random businesses as they were out running errands and just began talking with the owners.

This is one very effective way to position yourself as an internet marketing consultant and a great way to get your feet wet. You already know what you’re good at doing, and if a business owner mentions something you’re not so familiar with, you can always outsource the task. Many have reported making several hundreds or even a few thousand dollars their first day of working the Offline Gold method. You could be doing the same, all you need to do is take action

We’re developing some amazing tools here at Blue Sky Publishing, LLC that are going to launch soon. They’re going to revolutionize the Offline Gold Business! So stay tuned……

to be continued

Just a quick post as I’m buried in catch up mode over here. My internet connection failed right at the start of a weekend I had planned out research and online surfing. When it’s -8 below F. what else is there to do but watch movies or surf the web. I’m right in the middle of several major projects and losing internet access just buried me. It’s amazing how reliant I’ve become.

So, the ISP finally gets it fixed (whatever a Stage 2 outage is) just in time for the start of a new work week. I find myself totally buried in work. I get a tab unraveled when I lose control of my schedule. SO I’ll do some thinking and find a way where my schedule is less vulnerable to ISP interruption. There has to be a lesson or Product here somewhere as I would hate to think this disruption won’t bare fruit somehow.

There’s a new virus floating around out there thats already infected 9 Million Machines. I had a heads up earlier in the day and Microsoft released a patch for this on Tuesday.

I was harmlessly surfing the web and went to a site burid in the SERP’s on page 24. I quite often look at pages buried i the SERP’s when I am researching keywords. As soon as I opened that page 4 count them 4 viciously flashing pop-ups started going wild on my screen.

I didn’t click a thing but launched task manager and immediately shut down the browser. I than  ran a virus scan using my up to date McAfee Security Suite. It found nothing so I than used the awesome online scan provided by Trend Micro which also came up clean. phew… Tricky stuff and a vicious virus.

The Trend Micro “Housecall” online scan is something I highly recommend you use in addition to your regular virus scan software. It’s saved my bacon more than once. Thanks for the heads up earlier today Thankfully I wasn’t unprepared. Note to self. Don’t click on any part of these pop-ups.

Microsoft issued a security update Tuesday to deal with the so-called “Downadup” or “Conficker” virus, which appears to be a new version of a bug that popped up in October.

Microsoft said the virus is spreading by gaining access to one computer and then guessing at passwords of other users in the same network: “If the password is weak, it may succeed.”

I’m finished making a new set of backups for all my fills and I have made a complete image backup using this awesome freeto use Backup software called DriveImageXML. DriveImageXML makes an image file backup of your entire drive or selected files ad folders and it uses an XML file which means in case of a crash you won’t have to be digging around for money to reinstall your image with some propriety file format from a piece of software.

Moral of the story, scan your computer with more than 1 piece of software and you can never have enough backups.  Spend some time soon doing both!

All The Best

Paul