The Blog About Nothing Specific

Posted on August 23, 2007
Filed Under Thoughts & Ideas, uncategorized | 18 Comments

Nothing Specific

Some time ago, I decided to give my blog a slogan, making it easier for people to remember my page. Since a lot of bloggers are niche bloggers, they have an easy time, finding an appropriated catchphrase. This got me thinking about what I could use for my blog. If you have been following my blog, you know I am not a niche blogger, and I write about anything that hits me. What slogan should I use? Well it took me some time, and I came up with The Blog About Nothing Specific, which is exactly what this is. You may wonder why I even bothered to come up with one. Well, there is actually only one out of two reasons, why I got a slogan for my blog. The two reasons are: SEO and branding. Branding is the reason I got one. I want people to remember my page, and hopefully this move will have a positive effect.

Often you will see people use this in an SEO strategy as well. By using the slogan several times throughout the site, in titles, ulr’s, as links, etc. it suddenly has a high priority in an SEO strategy. Furthermore the slogan is often used as anchor text in other blogs, linking to you. If your slogan isn’t extremely competitive, and if you have been doing a bit of SEO, you will probably find yourself in a fairly good SERP. Obviously this is really useful if your slogan consist of a keyword phrase which has a high search volume and low competition.
Since I didn’t have any intention of using my slogan as an SEO aspect, I was surprised at the results from SEO digger. According to them, I rank as nr. one for the phrase in nothing specific and nr. two for nothing in specific. I went to Google and did a search on nothing specific and guess who is on top.

SERP

Although I have a good rank for this phrase, it does not affect my traffic stats much, since the phrase itself has a low search volume. Anyway, this should make it rather clear, what recipe you should follow, to get a good Google position.

The Un-Linking Rubber Bands

Posted on August 15, 2007
Filed Under uncategorized | 5 Comments

If you have thought about becoming a magician, but never really got started, I recommend you to read my post 10 steps to become a magician. As of today I have decided to write reviews and recommendations of different effects, which can be bought from magic dealers all around the world, for fair prices. These effects will make you look liked a skilled magician, and best of all, they will not require years of practice to master. This first effect we will look at is called Crazy Mans Handcuff. This effect was performed by David Copperfield, and it took the magic world by storm. It is a close-up effect, and it looks amazing. I always perform this when I am asked to do some magic. It does not require any setup, and the props needed, fits easily in your pocket. The effect goes like this:

A rubber band is stretched between the index finger and thumb of your left hand. A second rubber band, dangling from the right index finger is lowered into the half circle created by your left thumb and index finger. Your right thumb moves into the loop of the band dangling from your right index finger. This locks the bands together, stretched between the index fingers and thumbs of both hands.
There seems to be no way your hands could separate without taking the bands off the fingers. Yet that is exactly what happens!
With no cover or funny moves, the rubber bands seem to melt apart, one strand at a time!
The fact that you repeat it twice only adds to the mystery!!
Finally, the spectator himself holds onto one band as your band melts through his!

The effect looks exactly as described above. There is nothing added or taken away. It really does not get much cleaner than this. Below I have added a youtube video of a guy showing this trick, so you can see how it looks like in action.

It will take a bit of practice to get it right. But believe me, it is worth it. This is the perfect impromptu magic trick, which can be done anywhere. After you are done, the audience can look at the rubber bands. There is nothing special about them. This is definitely one of my favorites. Get it here.

Link Love To Old Posts

Posted on August 15, 2007
Filed Under uncategorized | 8 Comments

Linklove

Link love posts seems to more popular than ever before. People do this to show they appreciate other people’s post, to make people aware of their own blog, as well as hoping for a link back sooner or later. The idea is good, and getting inbound links is always nice. However, everyone seems to agree, that like love only should be done to new posts. Since so many bloggers are doing this, and everyone wants inbound links from A-bloggers, you can see where this is going. A lot of people are linking to the same blogs, and their newest posts. Hence, thousands of bloggers are linking to the same posts over and over again. Of course, a good post deserves a good amount of viral marketing, and this is what they get.

But how about linking to the unknown blogs, the very new ones? A lot of these bloggers have just as much interesting stuff to share. Sure they might have a low pagerank, but hopefully they will keep blogging, and the value of a link back from them, will increase. Helping the new guy will be worth much more for him, then giving an A-blogger another link. Think back to the moment when you got your first inbound link. I am sure you will agree that this was fairly motivating.

If you want to link to an A-blogger, how about linking to some of their old posts? How many people have actually read the very first post on John Chow’s Blog? Because he was new to blogging at that time, does not indicate he didn’t have anything interesting to share. Of course there is a limit to how many old posts you can link to, but there is enough to keep all of us going, for a long time.

Talking about linkbait, you should take a look at this post, Linkbaits Drive Traffic And Angry People, from the blog Marketfederation. Yes this is his latest post, but I feel like giving Daniel some attention and this post seem to fit rather good with my thoughts on link love. Marketfederation has been around for some time now, it is updated daily, and there is a lot of interesting articles there. Don’t look at the pagerank, but the content of the blog. This is what matters.

eCPM update

Posted on August 13, 2007
Filed Under Thoughts & Ideas | 12 Comments

AdSense

As some of you probably remember, I wrote a post about eCPM some time ago, and I promised I would give you some more information, when I had been in contact with Google about it. First of all, if you have not yet read the post, you should do so right here: how to increase eCPM. You should also take a look at the thread started by Leet, over at DP.

Okay, so first of all, I wrote an email to Google, asking if we are allowed to actually remove the pub-id, since several websites already do so (digital point, PlugIm, etc.). According to the AdSense TOS, it is not allowed to modify the AdSense code, and I was fairly sure that removing the pub-id would be a violation, according to their policy. I was connected to a Danish guy called Thomas, and here is my translation of his answer:

The ad publisher is allowed to place different pub-id’s from several different users, on one page, as long as the page don’t’ violate Google’s policy, and shows no more ad’s than what is allowed according to the AdSense TOS.

This answer seems a bit odd, when it is compared to the TOS. Check this out. Here is what is announced in the AdSense TOS:

Any AdSense code must be pasted directly into webpage’s without modification. AdSense participants are not allowed to alter any portion of the code or change the behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads. For instance, clicks on Google ads may not result in a new browser window being launched.

How is this possible? In order to use a different pub-id, you simply have to alter the code. So according to Thomas, it is allowed to change the code, as long as you don’t violate the TOS. But the TOS tells us, that we cannot alter the code. Anyway, I got this email, where Thomas is confirming it. We have seen a bunch of pages do this already, and they are still doing fine, so if you really want to try this, I guess you should just do so. I don’t think Google will do anything about it. The thread over at Digital Point is still alive, and people are asking the same questions. People are not sure is this is allowed or not. Judging from this email, I would say, it’s worth a shot. However, I still doubt it will have any effect, but I guess I should try it, before I write more about that. Please feel free to share you own results.

No-Follow-Do-Follow

Posted on August 9, 2007
Filed Under Thoughts & Ideas | 7 Comments

Follow

After visiting Randa Clay’s blog, and her post about the “I Follow Movement”, I have decided to turn off the No-Follow function from my comments. So every time you make a comment here on my blog, you will get a do-follow link back. Here is what Randa has to say about it:

Almost all blog platforms by default are set up so that a “dead end” piece of code is inserted wherever there is a link in a comment, so that search engines will not “count” the link as they are crawling the internet. This was originally designed to help stop comment spam, but it doesn’t work. What it does is remove some of the incentive for your readers contribute to your site by commenting on your posts.
What can you do about it? Turn off “nofollow”. Show your commenters that you appreciate them. Spread the link love.

I think this makes sense, which is why I have decided to do the same. If you want to be in this as well, simply go to semiologic to download the do-follow plug-in, upload it to your WordPress plug-in folder, go into the WordPress control panel and activate it, under plug-in. That’s it. Give other bloggers more inbound links and get more comments on your blog. This has got to be a win-win situation.

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