Easy Link Manager

I’ve been spending today running Bookmarking Demon on my content site and learning how to use Easy Link Manager. It’s kind of funny that I’ve had this software since I bought the site from Bryan and haven’t even learned it yet. There was/is a lot to learn when I bought this site and it was hard to decide what items were most important.

Blast forward to about 3 weeks ago, someone made a comment that my affiliate links weren’t hidden and I could clean them up with a php redirect. Well, it turns out Easy Link Manager will do this for you. All I had to do was create the link (http://onemansgoal.com/easylinkmanager) and have that hide the messy affiliate link (http://easylinkmanager.com/index.html?id=marc25marc) that comes with the software.

This accomplishes two things:

1) It makes the link look less like an affiliate link and more like a page in my website
2) It stops my site from losing link juice to their affiliate page.

You can buy easy link manager through here through my affiliate link.

Web 2.0 Marketing - Are You Missing The Bus?

One of the more advanced strategies that I’m working on for my next blogging ebook, is the ability to market your blog using Web 2.0 sites. Web 2.0 is truly the direction that blogging, and web publishing in general, is heading, as it gives sites a great way to generate buzz and market themselves effectively to millions of other users.

When I say Web 2.0, the obvious choices of using Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit come to mind, but I be you didn’t know that there are thousands of these sites in existence. Although the big three are all sites that you should be submitting your articles to, you should take the time once a week or so to submit to the smaller ones. Although the smaller services aren’t going to bring you the traffic of a Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, or even Del.icio.us, they will provide valuable incoming links to your blog. And the best part? They usually come in the dozens!

The hard part about submitting to all of these sites is that it can be extremely time consuming. That’s why I recommend Bookmarking Demon. It’s a tool that allows you to create random user names to some of the best social bookmarking sites on the web, and submit your articles. Being that it automates the process, this saves you a ton of time, and you don’t have to worry about submitting your own articles and getting your accounts deleted… this software allows you to create new usernames on the fly so that you can avoid detection and possible deletion.

Remember, don’t miss the bus! Start submitting to social bookmarking sites immediately! Here is a list of Web 2.0 sites, courtesy of Lifehacker, for you to utilize.

i89.us offers a free service which allows you to submit and save your favorite articles, news, websites, and links at one location that can be accessed from anywhere. Here you can save your favorite online music/radio stations, save links/websites for cheap online shopping deals for your favorite items like dvd,ipod,computer,books, save links related to news, business, travel, entertainment, education, science, health, sports, technology etc.

Backflip.com -build your world on the Web. You can save all the Web pages yuo want and instantly find them again. From anywhere.

BibSonomy.com -is a system for sharing bookmarks and lists of literature. When discovering a bookmark or a publication on the web, you can store it on our server. You can add tags to your entry to retrieve it more easily. This is very similar to the bookmarks/favorites that you store within your browser. The advantage of BibSonomy is that you can access your data from whereever you are.

BlinkPro.com makes all of your vital Internet-based data available from any computer at any time: at work, at home, or on the road. And because its a subscription-based service, BlinkPro doesn’t bombard you with advertising or annoying email marketing. Today, BlinkPro is managing millions of bookmarks for its rapidly growing member base.

BlogMarks.net is a collaborative link management project based on sharing and key-word tagging. Build on a blog basis, BlogMarks is an open and free technology. Now, you can access your favorite URL’s from any computer. And with BlogMarks, you share your favourite with other users.

Bluedot.us a site about websites that are rated and organized by real people into a wide variety of topics. Dots have tags and ratings so they can be organized and prioritized across any number of topics. The content on Blue Dot is high quality because it has been rated by the Blue Dot community.You can also assemble your own community by inviting people to be your friend.

BmAccess.net is a bookmark a site where you can add tags, when you look up a tag, you get the names and a little thumbnail image of the site along with it.

BuddyMarks.com offers a storage for all your favorites on-line. You can import your current browser favorites in a snap, get to them from anywhere, add new favorites, share some or all of your favorites with your friends, use tags or categories or both to organize the web the way you want.

Buzka is a free and easy way to share your favorite web stuff. You can save and organize all your favorite web pages by creating Spots on any interest or topic. Each Spot is a collection of pages that can be shared with family, friends, colleagues and anyone on the web.

Chipmark.com allows to get your bookmarks from any computer, anywhere, whether you’re at home, work, a library, or at school. It is a place where people can share their bookmarks with friends, family, and co-worker. Chipmark is a fun, flexible, and fast alternative to standard browser bookmarking.

Complore provides 10MB of file storage, public and private sharing, tag cloud, popular feeds and more. With it you can easily manage your research work online.

Connectbeam.com helps organizations and their employees increase their productivity and the quality of their work by solving these problems. Connectbeam is a simple new addition to the software tools you use every day to communicate and get your job done.

Connectedy is a web site where you can upload your bookmarked/favorite links from your browser into a free account. Connectedy users enjoy the convenience of keeping all their links online. It is indispensable if you change computers often or use multiple computers at home, work, and school. You can sort your links, search through them, and collect new ones as you surf the web. It is free to sign up, and you don’t have to install any new software.

Connotea.org is a themed social bookmarking site specifically for researchers, clinicians and scientists.

Diigo.com provides a virtual highlighter and digital sticky notes, so you can highlight and jot down your comments directly on any part of a webpage and scan through all your research findings quickly. Tags and full-text search on everything make it extremely easy to organize and find stuff - no need to fumble with folders and subfolders. Your bookmarked pages are archived to insure they are always available as originally seen.

Excites.com is a social bookmarking site. You can save and manage your bookmarks online and have access to them from any internet connected computer. Share your bookmarks with family, friends and the whole excites community while discovering new and exciting websites at the same time.

Feedmelinks.com stores your bookmarks online so you can get to them anywhere. Import your favorites and share your links with friends. Add tags to organize your links. Discover new things. Open-source your interests.

GetBoo.com is both a social and private bookmarking website which can be used to keep links to your favorite news, blogs, music, games, and more on GetBoo and access them from any computer on the web. You can import/export these links from your browser’s bookmarks and view them with the same hierarchy. Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.

Givealink.org is a social bookmarking site where people can donate their bookmarks to the Web community and to science. As an ongoing academic research project, our goal is to analyze bookmark files to build new Web mining techniques including new ways to search, recommend, personalize, and visualize the Web.

Hyperlinkomatic.com is an alternative to lists of favorites and bookmarks. You can grab links, makes notes, set multiple categories, search links, import links from web pages, upload bookmarks, create bookmarks files, share links, publish links. It is, in short, a place to keep your links.

Lilisto.com lets you store, manage and find your favorite links (or bookmarks) and removes the need to maintain them through your browser. Use Smart Categories to create custom link sets. Equipped with a multitude of search options, you can be as vague or specific as you want. Sort links by number of visits, date of addition, date of last visit and much, much more.

Linkroll.com is a free link blogging service.At a personal level you can bookmark, categorize and comment on all the great web pages/links you find. All your bookmarks are then sortable and searchable by category and date. All bookmarks are also accessible, by category and/or user, in the form of RSS feed (for your news aggregator), or JavaScript (for syndication on your own web site).

Ma.gnolia.com allows you to access your favorite websites from anywhere. Bookmarks in Ma.gnolia are more than just entries in a database. Each one tells a little story about the websites that they help you find again.

Mister-Wong.com allows to bookmark and tag, search for tags that interest you, make buddies with people who have interesting saved sites.

Netvouz.com is a social bookmarking service that allows you to save your favorite links online and access them from any computer, wherever you are. Organize your bookmarks in folders and tag each bookmark with keywords. Access them quickly on your own personalized bookmarks page. Share your bookmarks with others or password protect them for your own privacy. Netvouz is a great way to discover new interesting web sites.

Nextaris.com provides up to 100MB storage for free. It helps you search the Web, save what you find, share what you find, create journals (blogs), comment on what you find and have saved, and to optionally publish the information you have gathered.

StumbleUpon.com lets you “channel surf” the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great sites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.

TastyCooks is a place to store bookmarks of your favourite recipes online. Discover new recipes based on your preference.

Unalog.com enables you to look at what various people and groups of people are reading on the web here. You can get an account and add your own links, and create and join groups here too. If you get an account, or create a group, either one can be made private, so nobody but you (if a private account) or your fellow group members (if a private group) can see your links.

WireFan.com is a search based and free website that contains the best information technology with a combination of social blogging, bookmarks, non-heirarchical editorial control and RSS. This is very exciting for account users since they can submit their own news and stories. Wirefand makes locating stories trouble-free so no need to jumble up stories in the web.

Xilinus.com lets you organize yours bookmarks by folders and unlimited sub-folders. Drag and drop directly on the main page to reorganize bookmarks and folders with no refresh.

Yahoo! My Web with one button click you can add your bookmarks to the search engine giants system, features duplicate detection to help you keep your bookmarks tidy.

AllMyFavorites.net allows to share your favorites/bookmarks with your friends. Just give your friends the link to your allmyfavorites web page and they can browse your favorites.

Social Bookmarking Sites With Clipping

BlinkList.com -lets you save sites for later reading, share your list or keep it private, even send your saved pages to your blog for wider sharing.

Clipclip.org is an online version of scrapbooks: when you find something on the web, you can cut out only the most interesting part preserving the look and feel rather than bookmarking bunch of links.

Clipmarks.com - Allows you to clip just the chosen bits of a webpage. Everything you clip is added to your own fully searchable library of things you find on the web. Clips can be saved privately or publicly. You can organize your clips by adding tags (keywords) to them, or by putting them in Collections.

del.icio.us is one of the most popular social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

Furl.net provides an easy way to save and share your online discoveries.With Furl, you can find Web sites that others have Furled, save a copy of any web page with one click, share anything you’ve Furled — or keep it private. Furl also lets you store and organize all of your bookmarks.

Linktopia.com is a free utility where you can keep all of your “favorites”, bookmarked web pages, and notes online. Create a “Friends List” and share your links exclusively with those members.

RawSugar.com is a place to save, share and discover your favorite content in an organized and highly flexible way. You can use RawSugar to bookmark, share and tag your favorite content. You can save and tag content (any URL) to your account in RawSugar. You can access your bookmarks anywhere in the world with just a web browser and an internet connection. You can share your bookmarks or keep them private. Organize your content in flexible hierarchies. You can think of hierarchies like the folders in your computer, but RawSugar hierarchies have lot more flexibility. For e.g. one of the feature is RSS feeds for a single category in the hierarchy (think like RSS feeds for a folder)

Simpy.com is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links and tags. You can be open and share your links with others, or keep them private. Simpy also helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interesting sites, publish your bookmarks, detect and eliminate link-rot, etc.

Spurl.net is a free on-line bookmarking service and search engine. It allows you to store and quickly access again all the interesting pages you find on the web from any Internet connected computer.

SyncOne.net Your favorite web site, webclips, books, music, links, podcasts, feeds, images and more in one place, organize and access from anywhere anytime. You are free to add a banner, adwords or any promotion to your page.

URLex.info enables you to leave a comment regarding any Internet link on any site. The comments are available either only to you and your friends, or anyone visiting the site. You now have an opportunity of expressing your thoughts regarding any information placed on the Internet. The system enables you to leave notes on the pages and sustain the conversation on a selected topic. You can enter communities, or create your own, exchange links there. You can restrict the access to your comments by creating a closed community and providing access to the information by issuing special invitation.

Social News

Blog-buzz.com is a blogger driven site, exclusively for bloggers like you, to share, discover and promote blog posts that you find interesting. After you submit content, other bloggers read your submission and buzz when they like it. If your post rocks and receives enough buzzes, it is promoted to the front page for more bloggers to see.

Digg.com is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.

Netscape.com is a a social news aggregator with voting of stories similar to Digg.

Newsvine.com is updated continuously by citizens like you. Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.

Reddit.com - vote up or down on a story making it move around on the home page.

Shoutwire.com - Similar to Digg, except instead of “Digging a story”, you “shout it”. Still a way to vote on unique Internet news stories.

Stirrdup has a unique system that promotes the interesting and controversial stories you guys discover. Stirrdup is about promoting content that encourages spirited conversation. You submit all the great stories you find on the internet. We calculate interest in them using our passive-voting system and promote the ones that are stirring the proverbial pot. The system is designed to eliminate the group censorship and stagnation that plagues other sites.

Thoof.com will show you interesting news, websites, videos, and other links, personalized to your individual tastes. Just click on the stories that interest you, and let Thoof do the rest. If you don’t like the way a story is described, just click edit and propose a change to it.

SeoMeter.Com - My Thoughts

I was approached by the webmaster at SeoMeter.Com and encouraged to try out the site. I did, so I thought I’d share my findings with you.

First of all, I’d like to thank the webmaster for pointing out this service to me.  As you all know, lately I’ve teamed up with Robert Holland to focus, and optimize my blog for better search engine rankings.  This site will help a ton.

The basic idea of Seo Meter is to give you an avenue to track how often Google’s spiders crawl your blog.   This is important because it lets you know the areas that you need to work on when optimizing your blog for great SERP’s.  The key is to get Google’s spiders to your site as often as possible, and to make it easy for the spiders to follow every link on your site back and forth to one another.  This is accomplished by using proper internal linking methods, and having a Google sitemap.

The easier it is for Google to crawl your site, the better the chance that you will achieve your high SERP’s.

After signing up for Seo Meter, I learned that I need to get Google to my site more often.  On average, the Google spiders visit my site 1.5 times a day.  This isn’t bad considering some days I don’t update, but like I said, the more often I can get the spiders here… the better my chances for high SERP’s are.

The thing I like best about Seo Meter is it’s ability to break down statistics so that they are easy for everyone to understand.  After you sign up you’ll get an easy to read graph, and a statistical analysis of how often the Google spiders visit your page.  This shows you the current crawl rate (with a number that represents current daily crawl rate), one month average, three month average, and then a percentage that shows  whether the average is increasing or decreasing based on your previous data.

I recommend that everyone give it a try.  It’ll definitely help with your SEO efforts, and best of all… it’s absolutely FREE!  What do you have to lose?

Slow Down With The PageRank Hype

Many of you have probably heard that Google did a PageRank update… don’t get too excited! You see, after scouring countless blogs, forums, and emails from my readers - Google hasn’t completed the PageRank update yet.

Whatever is going on is either a glitch, or it’s a PageRank update in progress. It is not, I repeat- IS NOT - finished.

Most sites that have received a PageRank update quickly had it removed by Google. Some blogs reported a PageRank increase of 2-3 points, and then had it back to normal by the next day. The datacenters seem to be acting somewhat normal (although some of them are down, which could be an indicator), and in general, most blogs HAVE NOT seen a PageRank update.

This leads me to believe that we are about to get a PageRank update, but Google has not yet completed the PageRank update process. But keep looking, it could happen any time now.

Replace Google Blog Search With Technorati For Incoming Link Search

Well, if that wasn’t a long title then I’ll try harder next time. I was doing a little snooping today, and I managed to find this juicy bit of code on a forum. It allows you to switch from Google Blog Search to Technorati in the incoming link section of your Wordpress 2.3+ admin panel.

I’m glad I found this, because personally, I liked it much better when I could check my incoming links in my admin panel using Technorati. Google blog search is dull, and it doesn’t update as quickly as Technorati, so this was a fantastic find for me.

If you’d like to make the switch back to Technorati, then you can follow these simple instructions.

Download the latest version of Wordpress. Unzip it and find the file that is called index-extra.php. Open this in a text editor like dreamweaver or one of the free ones you can find on downloads.cnet.com. You need to find these two strings of code (located on line 11 or 12).

$rss_feed = apply_filters( 'dashboard_incoming_links_feed', 'http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&
ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss&partner=wordpress&q=link:' . trailingslashit( get_option('home') ) );

$more_link = apply_filters( 'dashboard_incoming_links_link', 'http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&
partner=wordpress&q=link:' . trailingslashit( get_option('home') ) );

Now that you have found those… You need to remove -

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&
ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss&partner=wordpress&q=link:

And replace it with -

http://feeds.technorati.com/cosmos/rss/?url=

Do the same with this piece of code from the second snippet above… Find this -

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&
partner=wordpress&q=link:

And replace it with this -

http://www.technorati.com/search/

Now close the file (make sure to save it). And use your ftp software to upload it to your server. Select “overwrite” when the question is asked.

Now you’ll have Technorati handling the incoming links on your Wordpress 2.3+ dashboard. Congrats!

If you can’t figure out how to work this, use the contact me section and send me an email. I’ll send you a file that already has the code replaced.

“Give or Get” Domain Name Suggestions

A little over a year ago, our company had a brainstorming session to choose a name for a new venture we were starting. Since we wanted everyone to feel ownership in what we were undertaking, it was only fitting that everyone be involved in the name choice. Sounds good right? Wrong. Everyone suggested their favorite names, only to find that the ones they suggested were already taken, time and time again. Few liked anyone else’s ideas. We settled on our first choice, with “MY” in front of the name… Not ideal as the name without the “MY” would easily have been confused with our service.

It’s so important to find the right domain name, and finding ones that are available at $7.95 through GoDaddy instead of $3,000 through Sedo.com. But it can be easy to settle when you don’t find just the right one.

I recently found a site which is SOOOOO awesome! It’s basically a person-to-person domain name suggestion service - where you can earn money by suggesting great names, or have great names suggested to you, paying only when you have chosen just the right one. The service is called PickyDomains.com.

The way it goes is this: A person who wants a domain name deposits $50 and writes specifications about the desired domain. After that the order is added to the database. Now anyone can see that order and submit his or her ideas for the domain name. If a name is registered, contributor who suggested the name gets $25 via PayPal (the other half goes to

PickyDomains.Com). If none of the suggestions are deemed usable, the client promptly gets $50 deposit back upon request.

This is awesome! What an awesome idea. I’m sick of other people coming up with these awesome ideas…

At $50, and that only if you choose one of the suggested domain names, what is to lose, honestly? With the amount of time, effort and money you’ll spend on your site, I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to “settle”. Why not use a service like this to help suggest some good names, and see what you get?

And to earn $25.00 as a domain name suggester if someone buys a name you suggest? That sounds like something fun to do while your significant other watches Dancing With the Stars or something… A way to make money, but by doing something that many of us here like to do… Look for good available domain names.

Check out PickyDomains, and for heaven’s sake, people, please stop coming up with these awesome ideas without me.

Buy Me a (Root) Beer Plugin

I have to confess… I have actually donated to a website before using the “Buy Me a Beer” plugin. I mean, we all have right? Right? RIGHT? (crickets chirping)

Do many people donate? Well I believe they’re out there, if only for the fact that I’ve donated using these plugins.

But not every blog’s readers are the beer buying type. And the default options of “Buy Me a Beer” or “Buy Me a Coffee?” may not easily fit your blog’s personality. So? Change it so that it does!

Consider changing the icons and text for the plugin, to read “Like this article? Buy Me a Shea Stadium Hotdog.” if you’re a sports writer. Replace the beer graphic with one for a ballpark dog. Hey - it’s personal, and a way for a reader to feel they’ve connected with you, or paid you back for bringing them an article they really enjoyed.

On Ratcage.com, I added the plugin with “Buy Me a Disneyland Mint Julep.” (For those who are die hard Disneyland fans, the mint juleps available in New Orleans Square are as much a part of the park as some rides).

Find a way to allow your readers to support you with small dollar donations, and let them imagine themselves treating you to your morning coffee. Experiment with the “Buy Me a Beer” plugin. In just 20 minutes, you can have the plugin installed, icon changed out, and displayed on each of your posts.

Link to the Buy Me a Beer Plugin.

Father Tim Would Approve of BaseCampHQ

Tim Ferris, in his revolutionary Manifesto, “The Four Hour Work Week“, instructs us, among other things, to outsource to others what we can, in order that we focus on what is essential that WE focus on, AND to free up our time to do the things that are most worthwhile (both for our business, and for ourselves).

It’s easy now to work with people from all over the world. From Mturk.com, to Elance, RentaCoder, to even the forums at DigitalPoint.com and elsewhere. We all know this. We may have tried working to some limited extent to work with overseas coders, writers, linkbuilders, and blog commenters. (And boy do we see a lot of paid blog commenters… The joys of being a “do follow” blog….)

Yes, it’s easy to work with people from all over the world… Or is it?

Exact project requirements can be lost in translation, deadlines can come and go with no sign of finished product, “original” articles set off Google duplicate content flags. Too bad it wasn’t easier to get on the exact same page with our overseas partners and virtual assistants and make this a little easier to work together.

BaseCampHQ is a web-based project management system that I’m using, and with how difficult to use other project management systems have been, I’m surprised that they got through to me.

First, as soon as I can get a project off of the Elance, Digitalpoint or other messageboard, the better. Why have to go to one place to message, another place to check for files, refer back to old emails to find out what timelines you’d discussed, arrange a time to get on MSN or Yahoo messenger together. BaseCampHQ takes care of all of that for you - and allows team members to work together at the same time on all of these things.

BaseCampHQ lets you create multiple projects, and invite different team members to participate in each. You can create To Do lists, and assign different team members different tasks. You can share files, chat, set deadlines and track performance, even the amount of time tasks take. One feature I especially like is the “WriteBoard” feature, which allows multiple team members to collaborate on different writing assignments, and it tracks the history of all editing, so you can see what changes different members have made. That’d be great for any type of collaborative writing.

Since I’m not Mr. Organization, I’m appreciating being able to give a virtual assistant access to the project, and setting him to work with a to do list. If he gets done with one thing, he won’t have to wait for me to come up with his next task, he can just keep moving down the list. That way I can post the expected To Dos for a project, and *I* won’t be the hold up if I don’t get back in touch with my VA each time he’s done with a task.

Here’s the pricing. I signed up for the basic because even if I listed scraping the ice off my windshield, I still wouldn’t have 35 projects going at once. $24 is a low enough investment, and *successfully* working with partners(not just overseas) is important enough, that I highly recommend giving BaseCampHQ a try.

We’re creative. We have good ideas. But we need workers. People that know their way around a hammer and a sickle. And BaseCampHQ can be our People’s Headquarters where we can indoctrinate them with the specifics of a project, the steps to accomplish the different milestones, where we can coordinate our work - and make collaborative work… well…. work.

Take advantage of BaseCampHQ’s 30 day free trial today before you end up in the gulag of procrastination.

¡Viva la revolucion!

PS: In case you were wondering this is an unsolicited testimonial for this product. (In Homer’s whisper voice: that means I’m not being PAID for it…)

How To Game Alexa

You obviously came here because you are trying to find out how to game Alexa. Well, I have to tell you that when it comes to how to game Alexa, it’s probably the easiest service on the web to manipulate. Gaming Alexa all starts with downloading the Alexa toolbar.

*In order to game Alexa, you need to install the Alexa toolbar - Then you need to set your Blog or site as your homepage. When trying to game Alexa, this is obviously the first step.

*Put the Alexa widget on your site - This will help you to game Alexa because every time someone clicks it to check your site stats, it counts towards your Alexa ranking, even if they don’t have the Alexa toolbar installed.

*Make friends and do some promotion - Start your own “inner circle” so that people with the Alexa toolbar visit your site more often. Start exchanging visits, and as long as every party has the Alexa toolbar installed, the hits will improve your Alexa ranking. See how easy it is to game Alexa? We are just getting started…

*Go to a webmaster forum and post often - These guys are almost certain to have the Alexa toolbar installed. If you want to game Alexa, or learn how to game Alexa, webmasters are your best friends.

*Leverage social bookmarking traffic - You can use this method just like you used the webmaster forum tip. Write an article directed to webmasters, and submit it in the “webmasters” category. Watch the Alexa rank soar! Want to know more about how to game Alexa? Keep reading…

*Write good content, and keep promoting your blog - Learning how to game Alexa is just part of the battle. You have to keep visitors coming back if you want to keep the Alexa ranking. When learning how to game Alexa, most of us forget that unless we keep this traffic, it will just provide a momentary spike. This isn’t how to game Alexa. This is how to create an Alexa spike.

*Write an article about how to game Alexa, and make it keyword dense. The more I use the term “how to game Alexa”, the better my search engine rankings will be. This all falls into the basic seo strategy.

*Get people to link to you using “How To Game Alexa” as the anchor text. If you want to achieve high rankings for that keyword, you need links to prove to Google that you are relevant for the search term. So did you learn how to game Alexa?

Keep plugging away with these tips and you’ll be there in no time.

What Everybody Ought To Know About StumbleUpon

Only recently have I really taken advantage of the social bookmarking world. In my short existence, I’ve seen thousands of unique visitors from social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. I’ve even managed a front page spot on Digg once. Lot’s of traffic followed. I’ll get into the other social bookmarking sites in another post, but let’s start with my favorite… StumbleUpon!

Why is StumbleUpon my favorite?

Because it sends GOBS of traffic and it doesn’t take a lot of “votes” to do so. Did you know that StumbleUpon can send you thousands of visitors with a relatively small amount of stumbles? I’ve seen days with 1,500+ pageloads and only a few stumbles. You can consistently hit the 1k pageload mark if you become a proficient StumbleUpon user, or a “stumbler”.

I’ve tried StumbleUpon with little success, what am I doing wrong?

First, here are some little known facts about StumbleUpon.

1. It’s not how many stumbles you get, but the quality of the stumbles that counts. Stumbles are actually a weighted tool. Just like PageRank, some stumbles are worth more than others. It’s StumbleUpon’s way of saying “this is a trusted stumbler”. The more pages you stumble, the more “trusted” you become, therefore your stumbles mean more than others.
2. The number of times people click “I like it” doesn’t matter as much as how fast they do it. For example, if someone clicks the thumbs up button on their StumbleUpon toolbar it counts as a vote for your site. It’s someone saying - “I like this article”. But one of the deciding factors on how many stumbles you receive, is actually how fast you get stumbled. You’ll get more visitors if the stumbles come at a fast pace. If you get a thumbs up, and then a few minutes later you get another one, and then another one… you are well on your way to THOUSANDS of pageviews. Getting 10 stumbles within an hour could potentially bring you more traffic than getting 15 stumbles over a 24 hour span. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.
3. StumbleUpon traffic comes in waves. It’s all up to the stumblers when it comes to determining how many pageviews StumbleUpon will bring you. If it’s coming in huge waves, and then you get a few “thumbs down” (the viewer didn’t like it), it will slow to a crawl. But as soon as you start getting thumbs up again, it starts all over.

The easiest way to get a ton of StumbleUpon traffic is to have your friends stumble all of your posts. I would be absolutely thrilled if every reader of One Man’s Goal would take the 2 seconds to click the “thumbs up” icon on their StumbleUpon toolbar. It takes only a few seconds, and the traffic it delivers is incredible. Another easy method for StumbleUpon traffic is to join a forum like this one, and post the URL’s that you would like stumbled. Include keywords and a description, and these folks will do all of the work for you. The only thing you have to do in return? Stumble their posts too! In case you were wondering, the StumbleUpon section of the forum won’t show up until after you sign up for a free username and password.

What else should I know about StumbleUpon?

• If you join the Stumble forum, don’t post ALL of your articles. Just the ones that you think will do well by StumbleUpon users. Remember, you can get a few hits by submitting to the forum and having other users stumble it, but your fate is ultimately in the hands of StumbleUpon users. If they start to click “thumbs down” your post gets buried, and you’ll see very little traffic from it.
• Stumblers are a fickle crowd. You have to catch their eye within a few seconds or else you are going to get passed over. A catchy headline, a great picture, or something shiny should do the trick.
• Another easy way to get stumbles is to be active in the StumbleUpon community. For those of you using the StumbleUpon toolbar (if you aren’t… what are you thinking?) click the little white speech bubble next to the “send to” button (right of the thumbs up and thumbs down icons) to comment on someones post. This isn’t the same as commenting on a blog, it actually saves your thoughts on their post for other stumblers to see. Commenting is a great way to build relationships with stumblers.
• Get out there and stumble! Remember, the more sites you stumble.. the more your stumbles are worth. Get out there and use the “thumbs up” icon… you can start with this article!!!