All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Affiliates

GoDaddy Almost Drops Me As An Affiliate

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Okay, this time I have to admit I’m stunned.

I got a letter on Friday saying that as of the 14th I’ll be dropped as an affiliate from GoDaddy because of low sales. This one shocks me because over the years I’ve probably made the most money as a Commission Junction publisher from GoDaddy than I have from anyone else. I get all my domains from there. My friends mainly get their domains from there. I’ve recommended to my clients that if they want to get a new domain to go there.

Now I’m irked. I mean, if I’d made no money from them I still wouldn’t like it because, after all, it’s not costing anyone anything for me to help promote them. But when I’ve made some money for someone, and for myself, and then have them want to drop me… that just seems disingenuous. They did say I could write a letter explaining why I shouldn’t be dropped, which I did, but when someone only gives you a week to respond and you’re responding by email, and it has nothing to do with you as a customer, well, I don’t expect much.

Or at least I didn’t. I got a response back from them, saying they weren’t going to drop me after all. They appreciate me as a customer and publisher, and were looking for those who were no longer participating in the program. Whew! Talk about timing; this part is a rewrite of the original article that was going to post at this time, and I’m glad because I’ve always been a fan of GoDaddy, and for once it’s an affiliate that I’ve made money with.

So now I don’t need to find someone else who markets links, because I don’t work with anyone who decides I’m not good enough for me. I did that with Brookstone and have never gone into their store. I thought I was going to have to push domains through 1&1 instead, since that’s where I host my site. Nope, guess I’m good.

I’m glad it’s worked out for once in my favor. Now, let’s buy GoDaddy!

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Entertainment

Tribute To The Horne

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Lena Horne passed away Sunday night at age 92. That was one woman that most of us thought would never age at all. Even in her early 70’s she was stunning, and you wouldn’t have believe she was a day over 35 or 40.

That woman could sing. I don’t know anyone who ever heard Lena Horne who didn’t think she could sing. She was super good looking also; absolutely fabulous woman. Could she act? Well, that’s questionable, but she never really got a chance to do it.

She was classy and had pride. She refused to allow anyone to identify her as anything other than being black, and that was a big deal back in the day. Many early black baseball players used to be identified as Latino so they wouldn’t have to deal with as much racism as if they were straight up black. Lena Horne wasn’t having it, so it ended up limiting the movies she was in. Early civil rights activism killed many a career; she didn’t care, and that was another diamond in her favor.

This is a mini-tribute to the “Horne”, as she was sometimes known. I hope you enjoy these videos, which I also hope showcases just how talented she was.


Stormy Weather


You’d Better Love Me


If You Believe

The Incomparable Lena Horne

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SEO

The Myth Of Link Building

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Almost every SEO article you read talks about the importance of link building. They say that you have to create organic ways of getting people to link to you to build your prominence.


Chain Link

They say if you can get one way links that you’ll be in a much better position than trading links. Even Google said that they base their rankings, invalid as they are, on the number of people who link to you without your linking back to them.

What’s happened because of all this talk? I keep getting people writing me and wanting to link to many of my websites, including my business websites. They look at the PR (page rank) on those sites, which is pretty good, and think that by offering me the “opportunity” to trade links with them that it will work out great for me. They may even look at the Alexa rank, which is almost always better than theirs, even if they have high PR (that’s one reason why I question PR) and think they can snow me.

There are many myths that are related to link building. Many of the ideas people come up with don’t work. Some things people believe about link building aren’t true either. Let’s look at some of these things.

1. Link building will automatically boost your site’s prominence. That’s not quite true, although it is partially true. There’s this thing called relationship link building. That means if you link to a page on pink elephants and your blog or website is about quantum physics, you’re not going to get much bounce from that. Whereas if you link to a page that’s related to yours, you’ll get some benefit out of it.

Actually, sometimes linking to a site that doesn’t have much to do with your topic, but helps highlight something you want to be known for, is beneficial to you. For instance, on my business site, I tell people what I do, which works pretty well. However, I also wanted people to know I was based in Syracuse. So I linked to Syracuse and highlighted it, and if one looks me up and adds Syracuse I come up pretty high on the list as well.

2. All related links to your page are going to boost your site’s prominence. You’d think this would be true, but in actuality it’s not always true. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten one of these requests from someone. Every once in awhile the subject on another site or blog seems like it might be a good fit. That is, until you take a good look at that site. Try to see if you can find the page they’re telling you they’re going to put you on from the main page. Most of the time you can’t because what they’ve done is thrown in a page that doesn’t link to any of their other pages, but is on their site. You don’t get any benefit from that at all; that’s one of those one-way link tricks that benefits them, and it’s sneaky.

3. If I don’t get enough external links, I’m not going to have any good rankings at all. That’s not true, and I’ll give you the perfect example. I’ve mentioned it before, but who’s checked out W3C? That stands for the World Wide Web Consortium, and they’re the folks who pretty much create and monitor the standards for how the web is supposed to work, including coding. They have almost no external links at all; pretty much everything they do is internal.

They’re the masters at internal linking, and the best example for the rest of us. When it comes to page rank, their main page is 10/10. Their Alexa rank, as of when I wrote this, is 479. It’s in looking at that page that I knew that internal linking was the way to go, which is why I often link to my own content on this blog. A few people use a WordPress plugin to do it, but I’d rather do it myself. This way I can bring up some very old posts or newer posts, and hopefully it’ll be more relevant if I do it myself than if software does it. Maybe not, though; sometimes you just have to get a little silly.

Link building is a big deal, but not in the way you might think it is. I’d start off working through your internal linking first, because it’s the main thing you can control. If you still feel the need to do backlink building, at least do it intelligently and ethically.

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Social Media

Facebook Says “Privacy? Pffbt!”

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All the talk lately has been about Facebook, and with good reason. With just a few strokes and almost no real notification, Facebook has pretty much said none of us deserve privacy anymore.


Moments Of Privacy

Luckily, I was alerted to the first thing that they were going to do, which was releasing all of our information to their marketers. I even got a fix from one of my friends, which I posted as a comment, but now I’ll post here:

On the first one, go to your account. Under Privacy Settings for Applications, if you click there, you’ll see “Instant Personalization.” Unclick the box and you’re all set; supposedly.

At the time I thought that was that, but nope. The next thing I knew, I was on the site doing something else when this window pops up, telling me that I get to select which of my interests I want to link to some big pages that they were putting together. I didn’t think much about it, but selected two items and went about my business. It wasn’t until I read a post on a blog called Cre8pc Usability & Holistic SEO titled Facebook Removes Profile Choices (Kim must be big time; even Matt Cutts commented on this one lol) that I had to go back and see that indeed they had removed everything I had put onto that site 2 years ago that I said I liked except for the two I kept, one of which went to a fairly nonexistent page. That irked me so I went in and removed the other two, which wasn’t easy to figure out but I finally got it done.

At the same time they were doing that, they were creating community profiles for everyone to link to as well. I live in Liverpool NY, and they popped something up there for me, as well as where I went to college, the industries I listed on my business, where I went to school, etc. I only hooked up with one of those and canceled the rest, but to date at least they haven’t deleted any of my business information.

We might also end up having to watch out for some of our photos being used for purposes outside of our posting them just for our friends to see. That’s one of the rumors that’s going around, and based on everything else I’ve seen, I don’t doubt that could come. So, for those of you who have embarrassing images that you thought only your closest friends might ever see, you might want to think about whether you want to keep them on the site or not.

To say I’m disgruntled would be to minimize my feelings. To say I’m at the point that Dan of Rocket.ly is at, which he expressed in his post titled Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook is would be overstating things a bit. At this point I still get more benefit out of Facebook than how much they’re irritating me, but it’s getting close to a point where it’ll be Sydney or the Bush (anyone who’s a long time Peanuts reader will understand that quote). The idea that we were all lured into something just to build up numbers so they could spring all of this on us bothers me, especially if it was always the plan. Facebook has almost turned into Google, since neither one believes that anyone should have any privacy whatsoever (I wonder if Sergey or or Larry will share their bank account numbers with me for a few days ), only Facebook got us to give it up voluntarily.

Although I’ve had some interesting conversations with my buddy Blog Bloke over his post Privacy and Security in a Social Media World, I have to admit that he’s got it right on many aspects of what’s going on now. Not that I ever thought he was totally wrong; after all, Google has shown that it has the power to segregate whomever they decide they don’t like for whatever reason they don’t like (such as taking away my page rank), which destroys the aura of links and activity being the only determinant as to how well a person’s website is doing on the internet. It’s really just more of a warning to us all that Pandora’s Box is open, and none of that stuff is ever going back in.

For his part in this, Zuckerberg had this to say at f8: “It really has no privacy implications. I think this means people will be sharing less information when they don’t need to around the Web.” As Dr. Phil would say, “did someone write the word ‘stupid’ on my forehead?”

Decide now if you want to be online or not; it may be the only way you keep even a modicum of privacy in your life, because trust me, there’s a lot of information on almost everyone online already, whether you did anything or not.

Meanwhile, if you want to take a shot at protecting your information, check out the video below; if you’d rather read, follow this link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation site.

By the way, remember that tomorrow is Mother’s Day!
 

Research

Post #701 – A Period Of Balance

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Balance

Man, time certainly has flown. In almost exactly 4 months (actually, I’m writing this 5 days early so I actually beat 4 months), I have written my last 100 posts. From Post #601 to now, there has been some interesting changes, and some things I said I was going to get to that I haven’t gotten to. Oh well, let’s start off with some recaps.

First up, the topics I wrote on in the last 100 posts. I touched upon more topics this period than I ever have before 25 of them, and that means that the top 5 topics are going to show more balance that at any other period:

Blogging – 19

Personal – 13

Business – 10

Entertainment – 10

Social Media – 8

It’s the first time Social Media has made it into the top 5, but I think if I went back and classified some earlier posts that it would make an interesting resurgence, since I’d been writing about it but calling it something else.

Next, instead of going to my most popular posts first, I want to continue this theme of balance. Therefore, something new, just this once. It’s sometimes interesting to see where your traffic is coming from. If you looked at the numbers below on the pie chart that comes with Google Analytics, it looks almost perfectly balanced. Almost, that is; here are the actual numbers:

referring sites – 34.6%

search engines – 27.1%

direct traffic – 21.2%

other – 17.1%

I’ll tell you the truth, I have absolutely no idea what “other” refers to, but I’ll take what I can get.

Next, my post popular posts, and this time, the one in the lead is kind of freaking me out. You’ll see why when you look at the numbers:

Cleavage – Yeah, I’m Going There – 1,262

Getting Google Desktop To Index Thunderbird – 184

Top 100 Singers Of All Time – 143

Watch Out For Secret Shopper Scams – 109

Cuban Cars – 86

Every one of these posts are older posts; none of the new posts in the past 200 made the list. But look how far ahead that post on Cleavage is; wild! That Secret Shopper article is more than 2 years old; if this blog had Page Rank, that bad boy would probably be a 5! And the article on Google Desktop should be fading away as more people should have moved to new computers and should be on he 64-bit product by now. I’m stunned, to tell you the truth; just goes to show you never know what people are going to gravitate towards.

And finally, the posts with the most comments during this time period:

Sunday Question – Do You Take Care Of Your Physical Self? – 48

Cleavage – Yeah, I’m Going There – 44

Why Do You Revisit Some Blogs And Not Others? – 39

Are You A Lurker Or Participant In Life? – 39

My First Look At MS Office 2007 – 38

I didn’t change any of my marketing material over the past 4 months, but I did add the Facebook widget advertising my business page, and I added the badge to the right showing I’ve hooked up with Alliance P50 bloggers. Something I said I was going to do but didn’t do was create a widget that would highlight all the things I’ve specifically talked about as in a review, and I need to remember to add that. As I wrote that post about trust I was thinking that maybe I’ve built up enough trust in some people that the few things I’ve reviewed, as well as my little sales page (there next to me with the parrot), might get more visitors, and thus sales. Or not; we’ll see how it all goes.

And there we are. If things are going well, I’m at a hotel right now giving a presentation on customer service, which that sticky above is talking about. It will be down later this evening, as that event will be over, and I’m doubting there will be any last minute stragglers hoping to pop in on the webinar tomorrow. Anyway, here’s this update, and if I keep this pace up, we should see #800 come September, I guess.

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