Socialising

The lesson for Day 17 was all about social bookmarking. Now in the scheme of things, when this days training was put up on the 30DC site none of the Tumblr drama had occurred. Still, maybe Ed and Dan had a suspicion as to what would happen, or maybe other challengers were posting questions about what happens when their keyword phrase is already taken as a URL for the Tumblr site. Whatever the reason, Ed and Dan made it clear that Tumblr was not the Holy Grail of hosting platforms. The reason they chose it was because it had a simple layout, it was very easy to sign up to, it was new on the scene but yet was ranking very well with Google (meaning it had been search engine optimized). That's not to say that there aren't plenty of other blogging sites, etc, that aren't just as good in comparison. Actually, one forum member put up a link to an incredible site called Go2Web20.net that lists all the sites in the Web 2.0 arena. You can then search for specifics, such as "blog" and it will give you all the blog sites out there. Great site, very useful.

So Ed and Dan made mention of some other hosting platforms but they did say that the best way to do this was to use a number of different ones. The way Ed put it was that you should never expect more than 10% of your income to come from one site, no more than 10% of traffic, also. There's nothing wrong with having more than one platform promote the same niche either. So if you had an ongoing Blogger blog regarding your niche, you could also have a static Squidoo lens focusing on one area of your niche, but with links back to your blog and your affiliate products. That's my plan now that I have gotten my first Blog up to the way I like it, I'll start putting together a Squidoo lens as well. Then I'll have a crack at my second niche in the same way.

The 2 videos for Day 17 were in regards to a social bookmarking, and creating backlinks. The first video went through the process of getting your site ranked in the social bookmarking sites, using Social Poster. This is a great utility for submitting a site to many social bookmarking sites at once. It has a long list of sites to submit to, and once you have your site name, URL, description and tags filled in you just have to post those details at each individual site. The only time consuming part really is that you must first register at each site you intend to submit to - but even this stage is greatly streamlined using Social Poster.

The next video was about submitting an article to Ezinearticles.com. This is a site where people write articles for use in PLR (Private Label Rights) material. This is copy that someone has written that they allow anyone to use on their website for content. The smart thing, if you're going to use PLR, is to change the text around, as other people may be using the same content on their site and Google doesn't like duplicate content. So if you get something free like that it's always a good idea to re-write it to some extent. Changing one or two words per sentence should do it. The purpose of us 30DCers submitting articles to Ezine is that we are able to include a backlink to our blog/lens/whatever in the bio section, which is shown with the article, and just may entice someone who is interested in our article to look for more content and/or products. It's another boost in the rankings, as we know that backlinks from reputable sites means that Google likes us just that little bit more. I must get onto writing an article sometime soon.

So this was the point really where someone could make their first sale, once the social bookmarking is done and traffic starts to flow. On the actual Day 17 I was still struggling with writing content, but now I'm actually working on Day 17 stuff I look forward to seeing just how quickly things start to happen...

EDIT: Just a quick note to say that, even without social bookmarking, the blog site for my first niche turned up at #9 in the Google search rankings for the phrase match. I published the blog at around 8:30pm, and when I checked at 2:00pm the next day there it was. I made some more tweaks on the site to make it look a little better, put images in and what not, and then started doing some social bookmarking. I didn't go crazy with it, though. I only posted my site to around 10 bookmarking places, as I didn't want a huge surge of traffic to my site alerting Google that something might be a little "spammy". I then put an email out to my fellow team members (who I haven't heard from in weeks), to give me some "link love" - votes through socialposter.com. Who knows if I'll hear back from them or what they are doing, but I thought it was worth a shot. In the next day or so I'll start hitting up my contacts on Skype for the same thing. It's all about making the traffic look natural. Like some people have found it and told their friends about it, and so on.

By the end of the day yesterday I had around 100 people visit my site, which was surprising but very cool. The social bookmarking works, but I know that is just a spike due to the new listing. The real aim is to make me look good in Google's eyes so that I can then rank naturally high, and people will find my site simply by searching for my keyword phrase, rather than by checking social bookmarking sites.

Actually, at this point I can reveal what my first niche is and the site address. My first niche was for "best Wii games" - as in Nintendo Wii. You can view the blog at http://best-wii-games.blogspot.com