Internet Business Daily

Introduction
So I decided to do what many other bloggers have been doing in creating a link back opportunity for my readers. This idea originally started with Johnchow.com, but many others have successfully been using this marketing technique. It gives smaller blogs an easy way to get a free link (without the “no-follow” tag, which makes it useless for Google) on a site with a better PageRank.

How to Get a Free LinkBack
The rules are very simple. All you have to do is write a review of my blog, it doesn’t even have to be a good one! The requirements are as follows: 1) the review must be at least 175 words (thats not much)…2) you must link to my homepage using the anchor text “make money online” or “blogging for money” or “seo tips.” Any of these will do. And that’s it, that’s all you have to do to get a free link on internetbusinessdaily.net. I currently have a PR4 site so it is worth it for most people to enter this program. You will also get to choose what anchor text you want me to use, so all you SEO nuts out there need to choose wisely.

I can’t wait to read all the reviews, and have fun with it!

Looks like today has been a record traffic day for Internet Business Daily. With 20 more minutes left in the day, the site has received almost 400 uniques. This is double the number of uniques from last Monday. Here’s a graph (from statcounter.com) that shows my traffic over the past week. Let’s hope this trend continues!

Cause?
So what caused this record traffic day? There are a few things I believe played a part in this. First of all I received a large amount of traffic from Stumble Upon. This is a service that sends people to random websites of a specific genre. It is a way to find new sites one would have never known about.

The Digg Effect Continues
There is also another random event I believe had a part in my record traffic day. Because of all the media that digg.com has received due to the HD-DVD scandle, they have almost doubled their traffic over night. Since a few of my articles have hit the digg homepage (including how to hack a windows xp password and YouTube loses speed) those links have been getting more traffic now.

In-text advertising is basically ads that are targeted to the keywords on your web page. Each ad company highlights specific words on your web site in their own way and when a user hovers over the word, an ad appears. You can see examples of this on my website.

I had been using Vibrant Media for months, and it was doing well for a while. Then one day I had no revenue for about two weeks straight. This was very discouraging. I then noticed that many sites were using a new in-text advertiser called Kontera. At first glance I didn’t think that Kontera’s ads looked as good as Vibrant’s, but they were popping up everywhere so I decided to give them a try.

Comparison
The first difference I noticed was that you can have many more highlighted words on each web page. I think I had something like 15 ads on a page with Kontera and the limit for Vibrant is 7. This could be a good thing or a bad thing. Users might think you are being too spammy with the ads, and there is a fine line between quality content and just writing for advertisements. Some other differences obviously include the color of the underlined word, and the look of the ad. Personally I think Vibrant Media’s ads look much better than Kontera’s. Both companies I must admit have excellent customer service. They both receive my highest approval for their customer service.

Vibrant Media Ad:

Kontera Ad:

Revenue
So now the most important difference, revenue! When I started using Kontera, I was only getting a couple cents per click. I was getting many more clicks than I was with Vibrant, but they just weren’t paying as much. Let’s take a random sample of days as an example. One day I had over 30 clicks with Kontera, which made me about .40 cents. Yesterday with Vibrant I had 5 clicks, which made me over $2.50.

Winner: Vibrant Media
The obvious winner for a smaller blog such as my own is Vibrant. Kontera may be able to optimize for a bigger site much better, but I was not able to get the numbers I was looking for from Kontera. I have permanently switched back to Vibrant Media.

What Is PageRank?
I was just looking through all the stories I have been digging lately and noticed that my profile page has a PageRank! What does that mean exactly you ask? Well PageRank (PR) is the ranking system Google uses to determine how “important” a web page is. Every page that Google spiders get a PR, whether it is 0/10 (most pages) or 8/10 like Digg’s homepage. The higher the PR, basically the more traffic Google sends you.

Since I’ve been a digg user for quite some time, my profile page as been assigned a PR4. Granted this isn’t great, but it’s something. I can absolutely use this to my advantage.

How Can I Use This?
Since I control every single link that appears on my profile page, I can submit my own stories and they will all appear on my page. Without going too much into how Google ranks pages by linking, having my links on my PR4 profile page looks good in the eyes of Google. All I need to do now is create links to my article pages with the keywords I want. Even if the stories don’t hit homepage, at least they are on a PR4 page.

Downside?
There are a few downsides I see. First of all, you need to leave a link up long enough so that Google can come around and spider it. This means that if you digg a bunch of other people’s stories, your links will disappear quickly. Another possible problem is that Digg assigns a no-follow tag to the links and Google won’t count them. As far as I can see, they do not do this currently.

So without being too spammy, which is pretty much an oxymoron using this method, try it out!

I have not been updating my blog as much as I would like to. I have been very busy at work, including some side projects and consulting I have been doing. I am still trying to get out many SEO Tips segments because those are quick and useful to my readers. So what have I been up to you might ask?

Juicefeed – Celebrity Gossip Site
I have been still working on Juicefeed.com, trying to get that site to grow. It has been a little difficult however because of Google’s duplicate content filter. My partner and I have been trying to figure out ways around this, and the only thing we can come up with is to have our users write the content for us. The idea being that people reading the site will want to comment on the photo’s we have and that will count as original content. The only problem is that we don’t have many users, and basically no loyal users yet. So no one is commenting. Hopefully we will be able to get a loyal reader base so they will start writing for us as well.

Search Engine Optimization
Another thing I have been doing is consultation. I do some SEO work, some Adwords traffic driving, and some general Internet optimization techniques. I have been hired to help Ken Corre sell his book The Victim Donor, which is a medical fiction. This involves doing some SEO for him, and using adwords to drive targeted traffic to his site to sell his book. I just put the campaign live this morning with the keywords relating to “medical fiction.” I am going to track the conversions and everything else associated with selling something online. I also have another consultant gig coming up soon. Ken had referred me to this company who was in need of SEO and web standards optimization. I have not yet started that project, but hopefully we get the ball rolling asap.

Talkmatic
Talkmatic is another project I am working on but has slowed to a crawl. We will hopefully start growing that site out soon as well.

Internet Business Daily – Still Making Money Online
I want to start growing this blog more. I am going to dedicate more time to writing posts and hopefully I will gain some new readers. I very much enjoy sharing my knowledge and experiences with people online and reading their comments about it. Again, I am poor writer so it takes me a while to write a post but I will definitely be posting more original content in days to come. Thanks to the loyal readers right now and I welcome any new readers!