Internet Business Daily

I’m just going to write this short post to tell everyone I just installed a new plugin called Popularity Contest, which can be downloaded at that link. It constantly monitors the popularity of each blog post (based on views I’m guessing) and ranks each one. This data can be found in the WordPress dashboard, and can be displayed in a sidebar widget as shown to the right. In addition, it shows the popularity of each post at the bottom of each article in percentage form. Thanks to Alexking.org for this one.

Instructions
1. Download the plugin.
2. Upload the plugin to your plugins directory on your server.
3. Activate the plugin in your WordPress plugins page.

Everything should be tracking now. If you want to display your top posts in a sidebar widget like I have, just create a PHP widget and include this code:

<li><h2>Most Popular Posts</h2>
   <ul>
   <?php akpc_most_popular(); ?>
   </ul>
</li>

This should display your top posts in a nicely made sidebar widget. Thanks again to the creator for this great plugin. The great thing about this feature is that you can show off your most popular posts, and therefore get more clicks per user when they see more articles they may want to read.

**UPDATE: I switched back to my old theme, the web2.0 theme did not match the topic of IBD…oh and I miss the picture of Santa Cruz.

As I am sure most frequent readers have noticed, I have installed a new WordPress theme last night. I wanted to go in a totally different direction with this look, and I think I accomplished it. I went very Web2.0′ish with this theme so I hope people like it and don’t think it is not business-like enough.

Changes to Come
I’m still doing more custom coding and design on it to fit all my needs, but so far I think it looks great. I am going to have a logo designed for the top left, and either a picture or an ad in the 468×60 spot at the top center. I also need to add in my Feedburner plugin and a few other little things.

Sweet Link-Lovin
On a separate note, a couple people have been helping me accomplish my goal of getting the #1 spot in Google for Matthew Berman. I thought since they were giving me link love, why not share the love back. StuntDubl, and SEOMumbai are among the first to help me get #1 SERPS for Matthew Berman, and I will list more as they come. Thanks so much!

I have been doing a lot of reading lately, trying to keep up with everything going on in the Internet industry. I wanted to share what I have been reading lately. As I mentioned in my last post, I started using Google Reader to feed all the sites I read to one useful page. You can see what I read here. These are the articles I have chosen specifically to share with everyone.

Google buys Feedburner for $100mil
In addition to that, I would like to list a few stories that are worth mentioning. First is the Feedburner story. Google has finalized a deal to purchase Feedburner (which I use as my RSS feeder on this website) for $100million. This was a very smart move for Google for a few reasons. They already dominate the text ad market, and with the purchase of DoubleClick they will dominate the display ad market. RSS feeds are another outlet for advertisers, and Feedburner is the number one overall feed site.

.cm Domain Name Scandal
Another big story to break was the .cm domain name scandal. Basically what a domainer (wiki that term if you don’t know what it is) figured out is that the .cm domain names were just one mistype away from the .com money makers. The .cm domains belong to Cameroon, a country in Africa. Kevin Ham worked out a deal with the Cameroon government to send any traffic that went to a .cm domain that had not been registered to agoga.com, his website. This website would serve ads from Yahoo! and he made large amounts of money. He never actually registered any of the domain names, so he was free of any copyright issues. Smart man I must say.

These are the big stories I have been reading lately. Stay tuned for more noteworthy news.

I decided to finally setup my Google Reader for all the websites I read on a regular basis. These websites give me ideas every single day on how to make money online and improve my search engine optimization. Here is a quick list of the sites I read, which can also be found at my Google Reader Page, which also has a RSS Feed that only shows articles of my chosing.

• Engadget
• Mashable
• Tech Crunch
• John Chow
• BlueHatSeo
• Matt Cutts
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Pedia
• SEO Moz

These are just some of the good ones. I have many feeds about SEO, but not as many about Internet business as I would like. If anyone has suggestions for good Internet business blogs or any marketing, or SEO blogs please send them my way! For now just check these out.

I am a huge Meebo user and first thing this morning I noticed a significant addition to the main screen. A new feature called “rooms” has been implemented. Basically what a room is, is a place where people can come and chat about a particular subject. Anyone can create a room. Not more than 5 minutes after noticing this new feature, my boss emailed the marketing team asking them to build a room for our company to promote our websites. This is a great idea to get in early, because Meebo is the first and only web-based chat application that I know of. Here is what it looks like:

It is just a small visual addition at the bottom of the meebo browser window. I am not sure how well chat rooms will do in general because not a whole lot of people use them. It kind of reminds me of old school AOL chat rooms. Anyways check it out and let me know what everyone thinks.

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.

News today came of Microsoft offering Yahoo! Inc. $50 billion for the purchase. This would mean that Microsoft basically owns Yahoo. This move shows how scared Microsoft really is of Google. Microsoft has a fraction of the online advertising revenue that Google does, and they want some of that action.

Google has also been making a move into the online application market. They are setting up to be direct rivals of software like Microsoft Office, and the many other desktop applications that Microsoft controls. Microsoft is definitely feeling the pressure of Google, which is good because MS has had a strangle hold on software for about 15 years now. Google has already been moving into the application market with online software such as Google documents.

Google’s baby is still adsense/adwords. When Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) was asked to describe Google in a few words, he didn’t say search engine first. The very first thing he said was advertising giant. Something like 80% of Google’s revenue comes from adsense and adwords, and allows them to offer all of the free services that they do today. Microsoft has a fraction of this revenue with their version of adwords, Microsoft Adcenter.

This potential merger is history in the making. Even if the merger went through, Yahoosoft (hehe) is probably still not even as powerful as Google. I do not like one company to have all the power, so I am going to sit back and enjoy the show as Microsoft and Yahoo try to compete with the new giant of IT.

Google has finally fully updated their PageRank for all sites. Internetbusinessdaily.net has moved up 1 position to PR4! Juicefeed.com finally received a PageRank and surprisingly has jumped to PR4 after only being online for about 2 months.

A bunch of my mini-niche sites also got PR3, which is good. They include: Cheap Dishwasher, In Stock Wii, and DSC Cybershot.

A better PR (PageRank) will give my sites more traffic, better leverage on link exchanges, and better search results. Check out your site’s new PR, but be sure to check the difference between www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com! You can goto Google’s webmaster tools to set the preferred domain to make them have the same PR.

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.