Will Hanke

Local Search Engine Marketing and Optimization
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February 22, 2008

Use Girl Power to Promote Your Biz    Author: Will


Posted in content, demographics | |

The New York Times has an interesting article on girls and the Internet.  The article states that a recent Pew study found that more girls ages 13-22 are creating online content than boys.

If you’ve got a product that targets the female demo from 13-22, you’ve got an audience just waiting to tell the world about your product.

Being the father of a 13 year old girl with a blog, let me tell you something.  There is nothing she would like more than to receive a free girl related widget in the mail.  She’d tell all her friends, and of course blog about it on her site.  The small cost and time it’d take for the widget manufacturer to search these girls out could hugely compensate for the reviews they’d get in return.

Heck, a smart company could even go a step further and give the girls an affiliate ID of sorts.  Tell them when they show their friends that they should use this ’special URL’ which will pay them $x per sale.  Now there are probably some legal issues there, but I’m still betting a smart company could figure something out.  ‘Pay’ them in iTunes coupons or something…

So what ideas can you come up with to get these active girls on your side?

October 30, 2007

Can Old People Make Money Online?    Author: Will

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.


Posted in Marketing, RSS, content, feedburner | |

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.

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July 26, 2007

A Few .htaccess Modifications You Should Use    Author: Will


Posted in SEO, content, hosting | |

When putting up a website, there are a few modifications to the .htaccess file that you should consider.

1. Your site usually has two defaults that work:

  • http://yoursite.com
  • http://www.yoursite.com

Now, that’s cool that you can get to it two ways. Problem is, the search engines see this as two separate websites, both with the exact same content. Problem. You definitely want to avoid the duplicate content penalty. So, to fix that, we need to add a few lines of test to your .htaccess file.

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March 9, 2007

Finding Cheap Article Writers for Your Niche    Author: Will


Posted in Marketing, content, niches | |

Everyone knows that getting and publishing articles on your niche is a great way to:

  1. Provide unique content
  2. Get backlinks
  3. Increase the number of pages of your site

Finding decent (and cheap) writers can be a lot easier than you think. Here’s a few ideas:

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