(via iJustine)

This is an excellent example of how to create a viral video. It was posted March 20, 2008 and it already has 84,071 views. He also has some more internet marketing related rap videos on his YouTube channel.

If you’re trying to create a viral video you should consider how you can make it entertaining – if you analyze some of the most popular videos you’ll see that many of them have at least some entertainment value. Think about “What would make people watch this?”.

Oh, by the way – did you see the new Gmail feature that Google announced? It could come in handy to be able to make your mail appear to have been sent earlier – even mark it as people had read it ;)

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Goodie Bag TV – Americans Love Lists

It’s true – lists are very popular online and I suspect people often write all kind of lists primarily as link bait – and it often works (to some degree). People like short, to-the-point bullet points that give them some interesting/entertaining information, right? But it’s not just online is it? Magazines often have articles that are based on lists – these two headlines were on the cover of October’s issue of FastCompany: “25 Widgets We Love” and “14 Designers To Watch”. And since it looks like it’s working – why stop? Like he says in the video: “We need more lists, we need lists of lists within a list” ;)

Another video I ran into today:

Here Comes Another Bubble – The Richter Scales

[Update: OK, it looks like the video has been taken down because of a copyright claim (of a photo used in the video). But apparently you can still watch the video here (at least for now)]

Pretty funny lyrics – and a catchy song too ;) Yeah, some people think there is another bubble going on. Perhaps – I mean, is Facebook really worth $15 billion?

This video is actually a pretty good link bait – and they even admit that it’s a link bait video: “won’t you blog about this song?” :)

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The site I was asked to review is Royal Tours Africa dot Com. I’m going to go over some SEO, design and monetization points – what’s cool and what can be done better. If you have a website yourself you can probably see if any of the things I cover fit your own website.

E-mail Marketing

In the left sidebar there is a “Montly Updates” box (sidenote: that’s actually a typo – it should be “Monthly”) where people can sign up for a newsletter. That’s very smart – it’s a good idea to collect your visitors’ information so you can contact them (get them to visit the site again, send them special offers or just some tips). But I would give this box more attention. Right now the background is transparent and I don’t think that looks so good – I would make the background white (like in the “Main Menu” box above). I would also list a few benefits – why should people sign up, what can they expect to receive? Also, having something like “I respect your privacy!” or “I will not spam you” should help get more people to sign up – risk removals always help with conversion. Another thing – I would add the optin form to as many pages as possible – not just the front page. Use every opportunity to get a new subscriber – people might not even see the front page first, for example if they come through the search engines.

Link Popularity

When I check the front page of royaltoursafrica.com my Live PageRank add-on tells me that page is only PageRank 1. I would definitely focus on increasing the PageRank. Getting it up to PR3 shouldn’t be that hard – just work on getting more sites to link to Royal Tours Africa – for example through submitting articles, press releases, finding related sites to exchange links, add a resource to the site that people want to link to (aka. linkbait), etc. The PageRank might even increase in the next PageRank update because royaltoursafrica.com is now a featured site on this blog.

One of the key phrases Felista (the owner) is targeting is Kenya safaris. I used SEO Elite to see where royaltoursafrica.com ranked for Kenya safaris: It’s #68 on Google and #7 on MSN (Live Search) – but it’s not in the top 100 on Yahoo. I would focus on ranking high on Google because that’s where the majority of people go when searching for something.

One way to increase your PageRank and increase your rankings in the search engines is through reciprocal links (although it’s not as effective as it used to be). I can see that they have a link directory with a lot of different categories. Although a link is always a link I would reduce the number of categories and try to get links from sites that are related to royaltoursafrica.com – anything related to tourism, travel, Africa, safaris, etc. But I’m not sure how people are supposed to submit their link to this directory – the “Exchange Links Now” link points to addyourlinks.com – this is probably something that needs to be updated.

On-page SEO

The on-page SEO is pretty good. The <title> is “: : Kenya Safaris:Animals in Kenya : Discount Travel : African Safaris” which includes the primary key phrase as well as a few related keywords – which is good. Personally I wouldn’t start the title with “: : ” – but that’s just me ;) There are two h1 tags: “Kenya Safaris” and “Montly Updates” – having your primary key phrase in an h1 tag is one of the oldest tricks in the book and it’s still important.

The images have alt attributes with “Kenya safaris” or other related keywords – which is very good. The keyword density is pretty good. “Kenya” and “safari” is mentioned several times – that should definitely help in ranking for those keywords. On the front page there is a big “headline” that says: “RoyalToursAfrica” — I would split it up into “Royal Tours Africa” so the search engines will recognize each word.

Search engine crawling and navigation

Right now there are 162 pages indexed on Google from royaltoursafrica.com — that’s pretty good, but I don’t know the total number of pages on that domain so maybe there is something that can be done to help Google find the rest of the pages. There is a sitemap which is a good way to help the search engines find the pages on the domain – but that sitemap should perhaps link to more pages.

Having a good navigation also helps the search engine spiders crawl your site. The “Main Menu” looks pretty good – just make sure you’re covering all the main categories/sections of your site. On the front page there are also links to some keyword targeted content pages like Kenya Holidays, Why a Kenya safari, Kenya food, Kenya culture and Shopping in Kenya. Having sub-pages targeted at related long tail keywords is a good idea. The <title> of those sub-pages matches the targeted keyword so that’s also very good. But I think there is something missing on those sub-pages — What should people do next? Often if it’s not obvious where the visitor should go next he’ll just close the browser. Don’t make the visitor have to think – make it clear what you want him to do next. Something at the end of the article, like: Read another article (“Here are some related articles” might help), a link to a form to book a safari tour, etc.

Design

In the right sidebar on the front page there is a “Login Form” – I’m not sure what the purpose of this is. Can visitors sign up to get access to special material? If so, where do people sign up? It’s often a good idea to have the front page (and any other landing pages) as simple as possible – don’t have anything that will only confuse the visitor. It should be clear what you want the visitor to do (sign up for a membership, join the mailing list, visit a particular page, etc.).

I’m a big fan of large fonts – I think it make the page more readable and some people have a hard time reading small fonts. That’s why I think the font size of the body content could be a little bit bigger. Another thing – on the front page there is an “Air Travel Deals to Kenya” column with links to a few airlines that fly to Kenya. That’s a good idea – nice to provide this kind of a resource. But I would put it on a separate page and not on the front page – you don’t want to lose your visitor as soon as he arrives on your site. At least add target="_blank" to the links so they open in a new window ;)

Monetization

At the bottom of the front page there is a PayPal banner with an affiliate link – I don’t think that’s the best choice if they’re interested in earning a little bit more through affiliate marketing. I would find an offer that’s more suitable to the visitors of this site – something related to traveling, tourism, etc. Just search through the affiliate networks – like ClickBank (search the CBmall), Commission Junction, etc.

Other methods of monetization could be for example Google AdSense, selling links, CPM banners, optin co-registration, getting resale rights for eBooks related to travel and selling them on the site, etc… But I think affiliate marketing could be the best move. Although… it all depends on the focus of the site – how much is each visitor worth? Do you want to keep the visitor on the site as long as you can or are you willing to sell a click away from your site for a few cents/dollars?

Well, what did you think of this review? Anything else that I should have covered? Anything you want explained further or covered in more detail?

Do you want me to review your site/product/service? Let me know – we can probably work something out :)

Keywords: pagerank, website review, email marketing, optin, linkbait, landing pages, monetization, web design, search engines, key phrase, link popularity, alt tag, spiders, cpm, long tail, conversion, reciprocal links, resale rights

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Finally! I was just visiting my blog and noticed something new – a green bar on the Live PageRank extension that I have installed on Firefox. Because I launched this blog just after (or around) the previous PageRank update I hadn’t gotten a public PageRank yet. The front page of this blog is now officially a PageRank 4 web page – which I think is pretty good for a brand new website. I’m sure the My Name In My Domain list helped a little bit ;) Well, this is great news because having a high PageRank blog comes with a lot of benefits – for example; a lot of services use Google’s PageRank (PR) to evaluate your website. Now I can submit my blog to Text Link Ads and Review Me and I’ll be able to make more money than if I only had PR3 or PR2.

But the last PageRank update was a bit shaky – so you might encounter some “bumps”. As an example it doesn’t seem like the public PageRank of Gary Lee’s blog has been updated (probably just because all the data centers haven’t been updated). How about your websites – did your PageRank go up or down? If you have a new website – what PageRank did you get?

If you increased your PageRank you shouldn’t expect a rush of traffic from Google all of a sudden. Because even though Google only updates the public PageRank every 3-4 months I’m pretty sure they update their algorithm calculations every day or so.

Keywords: PageRank, PageRank update, text link ads, review me, reviewme, text-link-ads, PR

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I was in the original “my name is my domain” list so it’s only logical that I make a post to keep the “list train” moving – hopefully this will create a second (or third or fourth…) wave that’ll bring in some additional links for everybody involved.

So, by posting this list on your own blog you can get a lot of new links to your blog if other bloggers pick up the list from there. Another reason why you should post this list on your blog is that you most likely will get the blog owners that you are linking to coming to your blog to check you out. Because a lot of blog owners check their Technorati stats to see what new blogs are linking to them. Especially those that use WordPress because they can see the latest links on the WP dashboard when they log in.

The Rules

As Gary said: the real name of the author must be included in the domain name. It doesn’t have to be your full name – but it can’t be in a subdomain of another domain. So…

Instructions

***Start Copying Here***

1) Write a short introduction paragraph about what how you found the list and include a link to the blog that referred you to the list.

2) COPY the ENTIRE List below and add it to your blog. To avoid duplicate content and increase the amount of keywords your site can accessible for, go ahead and change the titles of the blog. Just don’t change the links of the blog.

3) Take “My Adds” and move them into the “My Originals” list.

4) Add 3 Brand New Narcissistic Bloggers that you know of

My Adds
Gobala Krishnan
Jonathan Leger
I don’t remember any more bloggers with their name in the domain that haven’t already been added to this list by someone else – so I’m only adding 2.

My Originals

Gary Lee
Ed Lau
John Chow
Nate Whitehill
Stephen Fung
Freelance writing
Jeff Kee
Stuart Hannig
Make Money Online
Nomar
Jimi Morrison
Nathan Drach
Saman Sadeghi
***Stop Copying Here***

I think it’s also important to write about the rules of this list if you decide to participate and post this on your own blog – because I’ve noticed a few people posting this list on their blog but their name isn’t in the domain – but I won’t complain, a link is a link ;) — Also, it’s of course very important that you keep all the links in the list active and make sure the code isn’t broken or anything – I’ve seen a few blogs that mess up the list.

As you might have noticed I’ve changed the anchor text for my blog to “Make Money Online” – that just makes sense from an SEO point of view. If you’re on the original list and you want me to edit your listing let me know.

Hey, if you’re on this list and you’re visiting because you noticed a new link to your blog please say hi in the comments ;)

If you’re interested in viral marketing you might want to check out this Mark Joyner eBook. Mark is a legend in the internet marketing field and one of the pioneers of online viral marketing.

Keywords: viral, viral marketing, viral traffic, list, mark joyner, domain, name

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I just checked my RSS stats on the FeedBurner widget and it looks like I have 50 readers now – woohoo! – so I guess I have to give them something to read… I definitely don’t want to fall in the same pit as many new blogs do – be all excited and post regularly the first couple of months but then the blogger loses momentum (or something) and posts less and less frequently until the blog finally just fades away. No siree, not this blog – by the end of this year I want this to be a good resource for bloggers and people interested in making money online – and hopefully I’ll be blogging here for several years. On that note…

One of the points in the Get More People To Read Your Blog post was “Have a contest”. Contests are always fun and if you do it right it can really help your blog (or your normal website) get more website traffic and new readers. You can even use a contest for SEO purposes to get more links to your blog with a specific anchor text to increase your search engine rankings for those particular keywords. That’s what John Chow is doing with his Nintendo Wii contest.

John is trying to climb up the rankings for the highly competitive term make money online and it looks like it’s working for him. Just a few days after launching the contest he ranked #3 for make money online on Google.ca – and now I’m seeing him as #2 on Google.com. In just 2 weeks he managed to beat authority sites like ProBlogger, Squidoo and About.com that have been in the Top 10 for a while – Good job John!

If you reverse engineer what he’s done you can see that his contest post has received 222 comments and trackbanks/pingbacks so far. There are a lot of comments on that post but it looks like the majority is trackbacks from blogs participating in the contest and linking to John with the “make money online” anchor text. Does that mean that you need less than 200 websites linking to your site using “make money online” as anchor text to rank #2 for that key phrase? Maybe, but there are probably several blogs that didn’t ping John’s post which don’t count towards the 222 number. Also, it depends on what kind of sites are linking to you – what’s their PageRank, are they authority sites, is the topic on those websites related to make money online, etc?

Also, John did some other clever on-page SEO tricks to increase his rankings even more – Like changing the title of the front page to “Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com”, renaming the category “Making Money From A Blog” to “Make Money Online” and just stuffing the key phrase anywhere he can ;) He often uses make money online in the title of blog posts and makes sure the keyword density for “make money online” is high.

Oh, I almost forgot – he also changed the rules for his “review my blog for a linkback” scheme – now people that are reviewing his blog must link to him using… what do you think? …you guessed it, “make money online” as anchor text ;) I think he’s already received over 10 batches of reviews since he changed those rules – so that’s an additional 100+ links with that anchor text.

Another thing that I just remembered – John called this the “Root Of All Evil Nintendo Wii contest” because he initially wanted people to link to him using the anchor text root of all evil. So the initial batch of contest participants linked to John using that anchor text and not “make money online”. I guess he realized that he wouldn’t benefit a great deal by having a high ranking for “root of all evil” so he changed the rules.

Another requirement to participate in the contest is that you must link to 1234pens.com using promotional pens as anchor text. 1234pens.com is the sponsor of this contest – they gave John Chow a Nintendo Wii to give to one lucky winner. Promotional pens is also a pretty competitive key phrase but they’re now ranked #3 on Google – so this contest also worked great for the sponsor. I believe Nintendo Wii costs about $300 so that’s not an expensive way to rank high for a competitive term. Some people spend $100 a month buying links to increase their rankings temporarily – being a contest sponsor might be a smarter move. Perhaps I should try being a sponsor for a contest on a popular blog? Maybe I wouldn’t even have to buy a Wii or an Xbox – cash prizes are probably more appealing since people can just buy whatever they want. What do you think?

One thing though, I think it makes sense for the sponsor to donate something related to his website/business – I’m not sure why 1234pens.com doesn’t also throw in some promotional pens for the winner (and even 5-10 random participants).

I just have one concern with John’s aggressive campaign – Google wants websites to be “natural” – they should build links naturally (with various anchor texts) and add “natural” content (that’s written for the reader, not the search engines). Right now John is almost keyword stuffing his blog with “make money online” (I’m pretty sure Google looks at keyword stuffing as spamming) and Google might look at those hundreds of links using the same anchor text that came out of nowhere as spamming/Google bombing. So there is a possibility that Google will devalue those hundreds of links and decrease John’s rankings – but only time will tell. I think he should maybe be a little more flexible in his “review link exchange” rules and give people the option of 3-5 anchor texts to choose from when linking to him.

An interesting side note: I remember Engadget (one of the most popular blogs in the world – it’s #1 on the Technorati Top 100) launched their sister blog Engadget HD a few months ago. They had a few contests and the prizes were pretty impressive – one of the things they were giving away was a 42-inch plasma HDTV – and all you had to do was leave a comment on that post. It doesn’t get any easier than that… and it was no surprise that they got over 15,000 comments! Just think if they had required a linkback instead? They probably could have gotten Top 5 search engine rankings for any key phrase.

Have you had a contest on your blog? Was it successful? Also, what kind of contests do you like the most? I’m going to come up with a good idea for a contest – not sure if I should have a physical prize or just start with a digital prize…

Well, there you go – a fairly long and (hopefully) interesting/educational post :) Come to think of it, instead of making you wait 12 long days for a new post I probably should have just posted a filler like the bLaugh comic I did a while back – or just post a funny/interesting video. What do you think? Is filler better than nothing?

Keywords: contests, competitions, nintendo, Wii, John Chow, make money online, PageRank, ProBlogger, About.com, Squidoo, Google bombing, keyword stuffing, keywords, key phrase, filler, anchor text, case study, search engine optimization, engadget, spam, spamming, Google

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