Categories
seo

Free Link Bait

Short and comprehensive guide – how to create a link bait on your site. Thanks to members of SitePoint and DigitalPoint forums this all have been gathered.

  1. Put together a list of web resources (forums, blogs) that are relevant to your topic
  2. Put together a good post or article or eBook or anything of the real value. Give it out for free from your resource
  3. Write a brief about your value post. Call it a press-release and submit it to proper catalogs (they called press release web sites)
  4. Contact blogs you have gathered in step one. Give them the link to your content and press release.
  5. Register or open new thread on forums you gathered in step one. Provide link to the content you have created. Answer questions. Be a good forum member. Don’t forget to put a link to your content in your signature.
  6. Write couple of articles about whatever you have created. Use title of your free content as anchor text. Submit these articles to article directories.
  7. Stumble, Digg, Reddit, put it on del.icio.us. If it’s a video, can be shown on video or can be featured in video – put it on YouTube. Don’t waste your time on Netscape, by the time you read this it’s probably long gone dead.
  8. Guest-post on other blogs. Explain what and why you have created your content. Create buzz.
  9. If you have ties via social web sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, etc.) promote your content there.

Most of these bullet points are very obvious to anyone who ever tried to get a decent amount of traffic to the web site. Still, not everyone manages to follow through these simple steps. In any case – this would be a good reference point.

Categories
software

Protecting WordPress

In order to protect your WordPress installation the following steps are mandatory.

Step 1: Read this post from Matt Cutts on protecting your WordPress installation. If you don’t know what the .htaccess file is or does – read this or this.

Step 2: If you have access t0 cPanel or any other hosting management script installed – login to your hosting management console and turn off indexes for your web directory. If you don’t know what I am talking about – make sure you repeat step 2 from the article mentioned above for all folders where no index.php file exists.

Step 3: Instead of denying IPs you can simply password-protect the /wp-admin/ directory. On my installations it has weird effect of redirecting straight to index page instead of asking for login/password. Even better – no password to remember and you still can use one of the blog editors to upload content.

Categories
blog

Blogging Away

At the earliest convenience registered myself at some other paying services such as ReviewMe, Smorty, Zookoda, TNX. Research shows that you have to have established blog with good pagerank if you really want to get any real money off of paid posts. However, links in those posts matter much more then actual content. The real problem, of course, is that Google doesn’t like paid links. So, there is a real dilemma – how to get good writing gigs without damaging your Google score (that is PageRank).

Some interesting ideas have been flowing through recently. We’re designing a software utility that will automate certain things in blog management, as well as create some unique opportunities in Search Engine Optimization. More on that later.