Home Business Blog

This is a quick piece on why you should always moderate and take care of spam comments to bad neighborhoods on your blogs.

People like myself like to sell. I don’t care much for maintenance be it a website or mowing my lawn. As a result I rarely do either. I was flipping through some sites and found unholy amounts of spam comments both in moderation and live on my site.

The comments here are dofollow because I’ve never gotten around to making them “nofollow” whether I think comments should be follow or nofollow is irrelevant but if you leave them as dofollow (standard with wordpress install) you best mind your comments.

We all know linking to bad neighborhoods aka the internet ghetto’s aka the internet slums can affect how engines treat your site. After all online is much like life you’re compared to those you hang out with or even “judged” at times by those who think they are better but most likely are just more insecure.

If you let your blog become a link farm for crappy c1al1s and v1@gr@ sites and such you’re bound to feel the wrath of “Uncle Search Engine” and why not? Why should you have special trust bestowed when you’re doing nothing to earn it / keep that trust? “You are who you link to”.

Why am I bringing this up? Is it because it’s a Friday night and I have nothing better to do? Perhaps. Or I just felt like blogging for the sake of blogging and unlike many of my bloggeries this has a clear message. The message is mind your comments and other outbound links on your site or the engines may give you a stern reprimanding.

Would you allow links to bad neighborhoods in your bloggerie(posts) themselves? Heck no; then why is it ok to leave dozens or hundreds (sigh) from your blog? It’s basically the same thing and equally as reprehensible.

There was a PR update recently and this little piggy got none. Ironically we’re still crushing our main keyword but we don’t have the power to pass on trust because we haven’t done squat to keep it.

Keep working for yourself,

Rob

So we’re entering a recession and those buying most into the doom and gloom are calling it a depression. Frankly I have no clue what will happen but I know it’s not good.

Image via Wikipedia

Just visit this chart of the Dow Jones and see for yourself. Now set it to see the chart over 10 years - look at that “free fall“.

Businesses are losing money, people are losing jobs. If you have a business and for the point of this post a home business, now is not the time to get scared and stop building your business. In fact it’s time to stick to your core competencies and keep doing what you’re doing.

Many of these companies are in trouble because they over expanded, took out ridiculously large lines of credits and basically didn’t plan for a “rainy day”. They got too big, too bloated! Those companies that are still in good shape have the opportunity to expand and buy assets and marketing at pennies on the dollar.

Since there is a lot of doom and gloom now is a good time to buy advertising spots; approach people who aren’t earning their usual ad revenues and offer them what you feel their service is worth (private ads). Also a good time to hunt out cheap pay per click(PPC) campaigns and more.

Below is a list of a few places you can get cheap advertising. If you do go PPC make sure you adjust your max bid price. They always start you off at a ridiculously high one. I keep lowering my price until it’s as low as it can go to still be on the first page. I was paying ~$0.40 a click for a top spot while I can get away with ~$0.06 a click for a lower spot on the same page. Do the math.

http://www.cmfads.com

http://www.projectwonderful.com

http://www.performancingads.com

http://adwords.google.com

http://advertising.yahoo.com/

https://adcenter.microsoft.com/

http://www.adbrite.com/

Furthermore with all the layoffs happening there will continue to be a wave of displaced workers looking online for solutions and income… Out of every crisis come opportunities. Don’t follow the herd and become paralyzed by fear. Keep your head down and keep pushing forward.

Keep working from home,

Rob

If you’re doing work on the web and using Firefox then you need the “SEO Toolbar“.

The reason I really like this toolbar is that it gives me several bits of data that I’m always curious about in a well presented non intrusive way. The data I’m always curious about are: age of the domain, dmoz listings, yahoo listings, indexed pages, number of inbound links and of course compete score to name a few. Most of this data on it’s own will give you a bit of an idea about the site in question but all together it helps give you a somewhat realistic picture.

Once you’ve downloaded it if you want further data be sure to click the “i” button which is blue next to SEOBOOK on the toolbar.

I’m writing this quickly as I just realized a laptop of mine does not have the toolbar so installing it. You should definitely try this out if the type of information I listed is something you like to be conscious of when navigating the web.

Keep working for yourself,

-Rob