BookMark Money

Social Networking and Black Hat Tactics

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:27:14 -0400

SEO Black Hat tipped me off to the article “Messing With Digg” from David Naylor. If you’re using the Digg angle in your marketing efforts, these tricks might come in handy.

Security of the 'Press

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:53:57 -0400

BookMarkMoney.com found a great tutorial on securing your webserver:

Thanks to a great tip entitled “Turn Off Directory Browsing to Protect Your Content” posted by Gobala Krishnan, my content is a little bit safer (not that anybody is interested in stealing it) today. I had always assumed that Directory Browsing was disabled by default, and found out how wrong I was today.

More goodies at the BookMarkMoney.com Blog

Open Your Eyes to FaceBook

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:29:00 -0400

BookMarkMoney.com has the goods on behind the scenes ways to use FaceBook.com, pointing out that:

Guy Kawasaki’s blog entitled 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Facebook.

Dive into Wordpress 2.5

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:30:00 -0400

Jotun at BookMarkMoney.com weighed in on the new version of WordPress:

If you’re at all familiar with WordPress, you noticed that version 2.5 was released. If you’re like me, your WordPress Dashboard is nagging you incessantly about upgrading. Seeing as how the new version is a feature release, not a security release, I don’t truly feel compelled to update to version 2.5 yet. I’ve spent almost two months hammering this site into a shape that I like, and until I know that the plugins I use are compatible with the new release, I think I can resist the temptation fo upgrade.

The Roundup:

Dougal Campbell
Peter Westwood
WordPress DevBlog
Lorelle on WP
Weblog Tools Collection

Developer Alex King has been hard at work updating his plugins. I expect a lot more updates from various developers are in the works.

40 Websites You MUST Visit

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:03:42 -0400

The hits keep coming at BookmarkMoney.com

SEO 4 Expert has a roundup of 40 Unusual Websites for you to visit. To paraphrase, this page lists “under the radar web services that are original, unique, unusual, useful, free, and of the must-be bookmarked type.” Some of the sites listed are built around some very unique ideas.

When Doing Less is More

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:12:32 -0400

This just in from BookmarkMoney.com

Alicia Forest at Solo E has written an article entitled When Doing Less is More in Your Business, and reminds us that sometimes you shouldn’t do things just because you can. If your energy is being misdirected into ventures that are beneath your skill level, you’re wasting time, money, and effort. This short list will help you refocus and see that sometimes doing less is more. This just in from

Affiliate Marketing Mashups

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:58:38 -0400

Originally posted at The BookMarkMoney.com Blog

First off, I’d like to extend congratulations to Ruck, at Cash Tactics. This week he announced that his first daughter was born. It sounds like everything is going well, so I’d like to welcome him to a new world of concern. As the old saying goes: If you have a son you only need to worry about one prick. If you have a daughter, you need to worry about every prick in town. My daughter is only 17 months old, and already the boys her age are giving her the eye. I fear that it will only get worse from here.

Now, on to the goodies.

Affiliate Marketing

For those just getting started in affiliate marketing, Sean at the Warrior Blog has a tutorial that takes you through all of the steps - researching, locating, and then finally cashing the checks. I wish I had known about this when I had first started out. Your First Clickbank Sale.

Build a Niche Store (BANS) is something I’ve been looking into for a while. When my wife goes back to work, I may just break down and purchase it, since I’ve heard noting but good things about it. Affiliate Confession has a 7 part series on setting up and using BANS. A very good place to start if you want an easier entry into affiliate marketing.

Build A Niche Store Tutorials Overview - Parts 1-7
Part 1 - What BANS Does And Does Not Do
Part 2 - Niche Brainstorming And Getting A Domain Name
Part 3 - Installing And Setting Up Your BANS Affiliate Store
Part 4 - Tweaking Your eBay Affiliate Store
Part 5 - Adding Some Content To Your eBay Store
Part 6 - Article Marketing And Getting Links
Part 7 - Using USFreeAds.com For Traffic And Getting More Links

Article Marketing

The Warrior Blog has a tutorial on Article Marketing for promotional purposes. I know that a lot of people recommend doing article marketing, but it seems like a lot of work, that I’d be better off channeling elsewhere.

Mashups

Although it’s over a year old, Paul O’Brien’s list of Mashups created with Yahoo! Pipes is still a pretty good read to help inspire ideas for your own mashup.

I’m not sure of the date on this one, but SEO Book had a nice roundup of specific Pipes.

If you’ve been dying to create a mashup, but can’t program and can’t afford a program, Open Kapow may be for you. Using their simple tools, literally anyone can create a mashup in minutes just by pointing and clicking. Extremely useful if you want to use data from sites that don’t provide an Application Programming Interface (API) or Ready Site Syndication (RSS) feed.

Black Hat

If you have a Wordpress Blog, then Jimmy at Seeds for Wealth has a technique for raping Digg’s traffic. At best this trick is grey hat, at worst it’s black hat, but getting links from Digg is never a bad thing.

Continuing along the path to the Dark Side, Jimmy has tips on getting big trafic from BlogCatalog, and another one for using your avatar as visitor bait.

If you’ve been wondering how certain sellers always rank so high on eBay’s Pulse page, someone placed them under the magnifying glass, and found out that there’s a lot of cheating going on behind the scenes. estreet at Watched Item watched some top sellers on eBay Pulse, and gathered some compelling evidence that there is rampant cheating going on.

Datafeeds

5 Star Affiliate Programs has a pretty extensive list of affiliate datafeeds ready for integration into your website. Affiliate Datafeeds are great, because they help generate a lot of content for search engines to spider, as well as helping to monetize your website.

Extensive Squidoo Lens on Datafeeds

Tools

Marc Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection posted this week introducing us to Zemanta. Zemanta is a contextual content suggestion engine that works with Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted WordPress installations.Zemanta is a simple FireFox extension that creates a little AJAX box on the side of your write panel in WordPress, and makes real-time suggestions for related news stories, Wikipedia articles, and Flickr photos. I’m very excited to start using this. You can also keep up to date with the latest happenings at Zemanta’s Blog.

WordPress Plugins

Jeffro2pt0 at Weblog Tools Collection rounded up 10 WP plugins that fight comment spam. I personally use WP Spam Free from Hybrid 6, and have no complaints with it. I do disable it every so often to see how much it actually stops, and It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes.

Freebies

Since I like free stuff, here’s my link to Robbing Craigslist. If you want a free copy, just link to it from your blog too.

Emarket Scout tipped me off the the following: Freebies for Writers, Authors, and Screenwriters., Self Growth Freebies, and Free stuff for Windows Power Users.