October, 2007

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Can Old People Make Money Online?

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

Recently USA Today did an article on Gray Googlers – people in their older years making money with Google’s AdSense program.

The article profiles several older people who have started niche websites and have put AdSense on their sites to generate income. One man claims to be a handyman that now makes $250k/year in adsense revenue. True? Probably.

What’s the catch? Quality content often. You can’t think you can put up a site and it’ll start bringing in the dough. You’ve got to put new content up, and you’ve got to do it a lot. It’s a lot of work, don’t let the numbers fool you.

Use FeedBurner’s FeedFlare to Get Your Visitors to Promote Your Content

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

This is a guest post by Jason Bartholme

FeedBurner is vastly popular with bloggers and content providers. Sure it tracks subscribers to feeds. But, are you using it make it easy for your visitors to promote and share your site’s content?

What is FeedFlare?

FeedFlare is an often overlooked feature that is included with all FeedBurner accounts. It is a service which gives additional functionality to your existing feed. Choose from basic features like emailing your item. showing the number of comments, as well as the number of saves or links on a number of social bookmarking sites. FeedBurner allows you to create your own “flare” if you would like. FeedFlare is also a good alternative to having graphical widgets in your content area taking up real estate. Also, if you are using a blogging platform, your flare will show up on the psot summaries on the home page, in the full post, and the feed.

Configuring FeedFlare

FeedFlare is fairly easy to implement. Once you log into your FeedBurner account, click on “Optimize” then you will see it listed under “Services”.

You have the option to inlclude features in either/or your site or your feed. I prefer to include more of the features on my site than the feed. My reasoning is that more people are going to see the site than the feed. Once you have choosen the flare for your site and feed, you can use a click-and-drag function to rearrange the flare so they will appear in the presidence that you prefer.

Click to continue »

Who Said the Pagerank Update from Google was Related to Paid Links?

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon saying that the PR update is directly related to paid links. Yet, many sites that clearly do not have paid links are also suffering from a PR drop. So who’s to say the message is clear?

There could be umpteen reasons why there’s another update. Maybe the engineers over at Google fucked up the first time. Maybe its a plethora of reasons. Maybe there really is no update.

Welcome, lemmings.

And since when are you so concerned about your PR anyway?

Ranking Local: So Easy a Cavegeek Can Do It

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

For those of you who are confident enough to start offering SEO services to businesses, I suggest you start off with a local small business that is willing to spend a few bucks on the web. Of course, finding those clients isn’t exactly easy, but once you get one hooked, you’re in for a fun ride.

Geek CavemanThe reason that most local small businesses don’t want to spend an actual budget on “Internet stuff” is most likely because they have a few reservations.

  1. They don’t understand the Internet’s potential for their business
  2. They probably think you’re going to screw them
  3. They think their small monthly marketing budget (if such thing even exists) is better spent the old-fashioned way – newspapers and yellow book ads.
  4. They don’t understand the Internet’s potential for their business. – Oh wait, did I mention that already?

So let’s say you’ve got one hooked for a hypothetical $1000 monthly budget, for six months. Congrats. Now for the fun. Click to continue »