I slipped this little secret out today on a blogger’s site and figured I would post it on our blog to be fair. We buy a lot of ads for our managed accounts each month and there is an ordered process we follow, which is searching for similar themed sites and preferred partners. We’ve experienced a huge growth in partners the past couple of months and it helps if our staff is familiar with your site. “How can this be done” you ask?

linkHelp us create a buzz about LinkWorth! We have alerts for our name and as soon as they show up, everyone up here reads them. As our staff read these glowing write ups, they make note of the website url. Then as they’re buying for clients, the process is something like this: search for same themed preferred partners, search for partners who have written about us. This isn’t anything we’ve put in place internally, it’s just how we have noticed our account managers spending money lately.

In summary, here are a few things you can do to catch the eye’s of advertisers (and our staff)

1. Upgrade your listing to be “Featured” and stand out from the rest.
2. Make sure your pricing is competitive to others in your niche.
3. Make sure your site is fresh with content and readers.
4. Help create a buzz about LinkWorth on your site.

Changing your website design can sometimes be well worth it, sometimes be a wrong move and other times be a big waste of time. How do you know if it is the right thing to do? I’m definitely not here to tell you I know the exact answer, but I’ll definitely fill you in on what we did to decide it was time.

1. Ask your customers for suggestions to improve your site. If you find customers having a hard time getting around or quite a few make comments about the look and feel, it might be that time to either improve or redesign.
2. Track the traffic and conversions. If you notice you’re getting one conversion with thousands of visits, there is something that can be improved to convert a higher percentage and a new design could be the trick.
3. Compare your site to other sites within your market. I compare it to my senior year in high school when I was looking around at all of my friends hair styles one day during lunch and realized I was the only one sporting a mullet. At that point, I realized it was time for a redesign of my hair. If your site is the mullet of your market, stop feathering it and try a younger, more hip style.
4. Read up on new technologies and see if there is a more proficient way to display your content. For example, designing with tables is a thing of the past and CSS is now the cool kid on the block.
5. My last tip is a simple, but great idea. Ask a family member, friend or business associate that has no idea what your website does and have them to go through and make notes about parts they find confusing or difficult. This might cost you a case of beer or maybe a few bucks, but it is well worth it. As a webmaster, what might be trivial to you, could be the most complicated task to a typical visitor of your site.

As Matt mentioned in the previous post, we recently launched a new front end of our website. All of the suggestions above were used and it all pointed to the fact our old website just sucked. And to prove the differences between our old site and our new site, I pulled our tracking info we have for the month of May ’07 compared to the month of June ’07. We launched our new site on June 1st.

This first screen shot is for the month of May. You will see we had a fair amount of “pay per click” traffic over the month.

Now this next screen shot is for the month of June. Our new design was up and running on June 1, so this is our PPC conversions after we chopped the mullet off. Traffic is pretty much the same, but notice the conversion numbers:

So in summary, if you currently sport a mullet, I am not saying it doesn’t work for you. I’m just suggesting maybe you ask your friends how it looks and if they understand it. Oh yeah, (a shameless plug) make sure you notice the conversion rate of our LinkWords program. It is our highest conversion percentage of all marketing techniques we use.

After a long couple of days dealing with server issues, I thought it only seemed fitting to do a top 10 list of why I hate computers and the internet. Please feel free to add your own reasons below:

10. They get in my way of working out every day for 2 hours then running 10 miles . . .

9. Instead of making work easier, they actually create more work than I had before . . .

8. I find myself saying LOL instead of just laughing . . .

7. I’ve noticed that I’d rather hang out with the nerds instead of the jocks now . . .

6. Rather than get work done, I seem to Stumble through the night . . .

5. Where before I couldn’t find enough sex in life, now I find myself getting sick of being propositioned every other email . . .

4. Because of number 5, re-read number 10 and number 9 . . .

3. As far as technology has come, I feel more unorganized and lost than I did with no computer . . .

2. With number 3 in mind, how in the world did we survive before computers . . .

1. I can’t imagine my life without either of them!

I thought this would be a fun game to see how much Google is really worth. Sure we hear numbers thrown at us from time to time; we know their stock prices are ridiculous and that they’re one of the biggest companies in the world, but what does that mean to the average Joe? Let’s see how much we have to work with and what we can do with that money:

1. Currently, the market value of Google is right at $140 Billion. That’s $140,000,000,000.00.
2. That could make 140,000 people millionaires.
3. It would take someone making $50k annually, 2.8 million years to make that much.
4. It would take someone making $250k annually, 560,000 years to make that much.
5. You could buy every single song available at itunes, 40,000 times.
6. It could buy 530,303 average homes at the current value of $264k each.
7. They could give every single American $450 each and every human on earth $20 and still have some left over.
8. While it is a lot of money, it’s a mere 1.5% of the U.S. National Debt
9. It’s only half of the market value of Microsoft.
10. It could put over 4.5 million kids through a 4 year private college And put over 10.5 million kids through a 4 year public college.
11. It would pay over 28 million people’s health care for one year.
12. You could buy 9.3 billion hamburgers, which would equal 1.4 burgers for every human on the earth.
13. It could pay the NBA salaries for over 50 years.
14. It could pay for almost all online spending for one full year.
15. They could buy 3.5 billion text ads from LinkWorth for 1 month :).
16. They could have purchased over 93,000 Randfish proposals during the Super Bowl.
17. You could buy over half a million top end Lamborghini’s.
18. It would only pay for around 30% of the Iraq war.
19. They could pay for the next 350,000 years of current Presidential salaries.
20. And, it’s roughly $140 billion more dollars than I have!

Here are five tips from a Roofer SEO on how you can get noticed by others in your online market:

1. Create free tools that everyone can use.
   Think of something that would help you, have it put together, then offer it up for everyone else to use on your site or theirs.
2. Write reviews about other services within your market.
   If you can spend the time to learn all the other services in your market and give a constructive review, you’ll be surprised at how far flattery will get you.  Not to mention the social networks that may pick up your reviews and send loads of new readers.
3. Participate on your peers websites.
   Look for forums or blogs and interact with the owners and users on their website.  Make sure you use your name and include a link to your website in your profile.
4. Make public announcements through the press about your product or service.
   Use press releases and have them shown in popular news outlets like Yahoo and Google.  People like to keep up with the latest news related to their own market.
5. Network yourself through conferences.
   Most every industry will have some sort of conference or expo that will be full of people that are there to meet others and learn about products or services they may not have heard of.  Setup a booth and meet as many people as you can. You can also use webinar software to host your own online events
6. BONUS TIP:  Show up on the top of search results for keywords in your market.
   Anyone in your market will see who shows up first when potential customers enter your search terms.  If your website appears at the top for most search terms in your market, others in your market will try to figure out what you’re doing to capture most of the traffic. If you need WordPress support services, don’t hesitate to contact the experts at WebCitz.

These are obviously not the only solutions out there, but these will definitely get one going in the right direction.

With the greatness of StumbleUpon, a time killer in itself, making some kind of organization can sometimes help find the best of the best. So no more wasting time, here is my top 10:

1. Papervision3D – Click on the images and enjoy the craziness.
2. – This is one is a great time killer if you are into the night sky and what exactly is out there.
3. – Stellarium takes the sky-map above, to a whole new level. If you want to see exactly what you see when you look at any part of your sky at any time of the day, download and install the freeware software. It is open source and there are no ads or anything involved. Learn about all stars and constellations. You can even have falling stars while you’re gazing.
4. I’ve got a big bag of crabs – Something that puts you in a transe and you can’t take your eye’s off.
5. Killer Music Player – This is a very cool music tool that allows you to build your music and listen to it.
6. Unusual Deaths – this is a wiki version that has all of the popular deaths and how they died. It tends to focus on the real bizarre.
7. Super cool fast animated video’s of cosmos. Speed time up to see the future faster.
8. Wildcard – This is a definite time kill. There are 5 options to mess with down in the lower left corner.
9. Popular Links For All – Social bookmarking to a new level. Everything you could possibly need.
10. What song was on your birth date – Enter your birth date and see what music was the top hit on that day.

There are loads more, so I’ll try to do it 5 at a time since 10 takes too long. It took me a good hour to do this for being sidetracked.

First let us thank everyone that showed up to the Viva Las Vegas Lounge!  Although the live Sirius radio broadcast with guests like Lukas Rossi from Rockstar Supernova and the drummer from Guns-n-Roses, Steven Adler did get up a few feet away from us and go speak with them, no one could be out done by the comedian Jim Breuer.  We weren’t sure if Jim was a guest or if he’s part of the show, but he stayed the entire time and pretty much gave every one of us a headache for screaming into the mic continuously.  You could never even hear what the others were saying because he spoke over them, but then you couldn’t understand Jim because he screamed so loud it distorted the sound.  Absolute thumbs down to that station and their performance.  It could have been better, but oh well. 

On to the real matter at hand, our LinkWorth happy hour.  Matt and I both agreed Friday on the plane ride home that it was the absolute best part of the entire trip.  Pubcon was “ok”, but other than hearing the engines prove points or show us new releases we haven’t yet read on their blog already, it’s a bit a waste of our time and money to go sit in these seminars.  So this go ’round, Matt and I wanted to step outside of the norm and plan a gathering for our customers and other associates outside the actual convention.  This led to putting a small happy hour together at the Hard Rock Cafe where Matt and I were staying.  A way to get up and close to each and everyone that shows up listening to any and all feedback over a few drinks and see where things go.

All I can say is, “SUCCESS!”  From the initial first arrival “Dazzlin Donna” all the way down to the “American Muscle” crew, we were able to speak, face to face, with some of our long time advertisers and partners who have been with us since we initially launched.  The theme was “what is your account id?” in hopes of becoming the lowest account id in attendance.  I believe M_Reider at account 24 was the lowest (other than my account 1 😀 ), however, I didn’t hear of one that was over 100.  It was definitely very special to us in putting faces to names and creating a more personal working relationship with all of you.

Initially, we were worried people would have a hard time finding us because some tables that were supposed to be roped off, wound up not being so at the last minute and we couldn’t do much with it.  We did notice that most visitors found us quickly.  If you looked for us and did not find our table, we deeply apologize and next time will be much more organized! 

Once the drinking began, a shot here or there and then inhibitions started being dropped like our money in the local slot machines.  As our drinks kept coming and a few visitors moved on to bed or “other things”, our group dwindled down to Steve and his crew along with Matt and I.  One of the guys “Dave” had a few martini’s dry on the rocks and had a great idea to possibly put our LinkWorth Logo on the outside of his left shoulder.  Matt, being one that rarely backs down from a bet, says, “If you will do that, no only will LinkWorth pay for your tattoo, but I’ll get one with you!”

After some careful consideration and thought about the idea, I closed our tab at the bar and called up a nice big limo to take us all down to Vince Neil’s ink parlor.  The two gave things one last consideration and didn’t even think twice about it.  Next thing you see is both guys headed back.  Unforutnately, Dave’s room was not on the outside window for us to watch, but Matt’s was.  We had a camera with video making her way to the back to catch Dave. 

So the final outcome was the simple logo on our business cards.  Matt placed his on the underneath of his left bicep (OUCH!) and it actually looks like a very cool and trendy tattoo.  Dave threw a little fit at first for the size and wanted it TWICE AS BIG! !  On the outside of his shoulder/arm, so his is a little larger.

After the fact someone brought it up to go over to the Hart & Huntington ink parlor and try to be on their reality show, but at that point in the night, we wanted to make sure it went through before changing of minds and get it done.  The TV aspect would have been interesting enough to qualify for the show, but I’m just as happy with the memory and the pictures and videos we have.

The pictures and videos of Dave (our client) getting our LinkWorth Logo tattooed will be up very soon.  Hang tight, they’re well worth it.  I think we all deemed it the most exciting time of the entire conference that night.  GREAT stuff.  Thank you Matt & Dave!  Expect the video’s and Pics this next week.

These are ten factors one can check when trying to decide if a particular website is worth the link:

10: High link popularity score (more inbound links) run site: (siteurl).

9: High PageRank in Google toolbar. 4-5 up to 7 or 8. (mean’s they’re indexed well, usually)
8: Well laid out site with easy navigation from page to page throughout the site.

7: Pages full of content with regard to the site theme.

6: The page has a well indexed cache stored on Google/Yahoo/MSN, along with recent date.

5: The inbound/backlinks are mostly from sites on topic and are full of relative content.

4: The partner site has only outbound links to other same theme sites.

3: The outbound links are very limited. Below 10 is good, but preferrably below 5 outbounds.

2: The partner website/domain has an age minimum of 2-3 years old through registrar.

1: The price is relatively competitive and the partner is trustworthy.

Just like any list, there are many additional steps that one can follow, but these are the 10 we’ve decide to make for this list. The best way to finalize your own steps, is to run and test campaigns on your own.

There are many mistakes one can make when link building, but these are the top ten mistakes we’ve compiled:

1. Buy links solely for high PageRank.
2. Buy links on unlike/non-relevant themed sites.
3. Buy a “100 links for $50” deal. If it seems too good to be true, it is!
4. Buy links today for top placement tomorrow.
5. Reciprocate links with a linking neighborhood.
6. Reciprocate links in a 3 way trade trying to disguise the swap. They’re smarter than that.
7. Acquire a link from a website who has no cache or backlinks or PageRank. Could be in trouble.
8. Acquiring a link from a keyword stuffed site and tens of thousands of pages that are built solely for placement.
9. Not using the best anchor text that pertains to your website and it’s goods and services.
10. Having the links setup with non static html code. (ie… javascript, java, marquee … and so on)

It really comes down to making the best decision for you and your website. What might work for Google.com, will be on the other side of the world for Yahoo.com. So think ahead of offers. Consider how things might be 2 month’s down the road and make a decision on what you see in the future. It might just save you from some of these common mistakes.