Cribbed Content for April 18th
Some good stuff going on this week… and I’m going to throw in something fun that has some social media implications…
- Scott Jangro jumped into the podcasting world with a good set of rambles. He gets fairly personal, talking about the inspiration his daughter has given him & some general rambles about what’s going on in his life. I really like this type of podcasting. Great first effort… PodPress FTW! I hope more are coming.
- My new favorite term is Internet Rubbernecker. I may just changed this weekly post of mine from “Cribbed Content” to “Internet Rubbernecking”. The term was apparently coined by this article over at Wired.com (if it’s from somewhere else, my apologies – I’ve never heard it before). The article points out (yes, go READ it first) that this YouTube lash back video is probably not the best legal move the scorned wife could have made, but it makes me wonder how strong a factor the internet’s court of public opinion might now sway the case? Food for thought in this day & age of social media run rampant.
- Mark Wielgus from 45n5.com called out Joel Comm’s latest AdSense eBook marketing as shady and deceptive. The background basically is that all the ads say just $9.95 for this eBook but once you buy it you’re automatically enrolled in some other program that charges you $29.95 per month. NOT COOL and I have to agree with Mark’s assessment in his video.
I’m keeping it short & sweet this week and ended on what I hope is an uplifting note. Everyday I go to work and I have to reconcile two facets of myself to get through the day – the part of me that went to college and got my degree in theatre so I could make a living on my own terms – writing and telling stories and entertaining people – and the part of me that wants a better life than my parent’s had with more money and gadgets and opportunities and keeps me working in marketing- sitting at a desk all day working a set schedule on someone else’s terms. I know I’m not the only one out there with this daily grapple.
Earlier this week Sam Harrelson recorded an Affiliate Fortune Cookies episode that I just got around to listening to last night. In it, he describes his own college decisions, how high school superlatives have affected him, and how all that attempts to reconcile into who he is today. It was a tough listen for me only because of the state I was in on Thursday – wondering if this blog is worth putting so much energy into and assessing why I do this. This brought me to a good place and I’m okay with where I am… so if you’re finding yourself at a crisis of faith regarding your career, definitely give this a listen. At least you’ll understand that it’s not just you.
Read MoreAmusing Phrases
I’m a total media consumer, so in listening to things and reading this I’ve picked up a couple of highly amusing phrases that I’d like to share with you. It’s Saturday afternoon, not much else is going on! So let’s get a little silly while I share some things that have been absolutely cracking me up in the last few weeks.
“Keep it clean, Jangro’s listening” from the GeekCast (coined by Lisa Picarille I believe)
“It’s tough being a digital gangster” from Sam Harrelson of Affiliate Fortune Cookies
“NSFJ (not safe for Jangro) ” from Todd Crawford on Twitter
“I’d twit me.” from Shawn Collins on Geek Cast
Read MoreCribbed Content for March 28th
Here we are in the home stretch of March, getting ready for spring! I personally can’t wait, but in the meantime here are the links for the week.
- Shawn Collins over at Affiliate Summit already announced that Affiliate Summit West 2009 will once again be in Las Vegas at the Rio All-Suites Hotel & Casino. I’ve come to terms with this…next year I’ll know not to schedule any meetings with the phrase “meet me in the lobby”.
- Sam Harrelson does a great screen cast about creating a monetization plan over at Affiliate Fortune Cookies. He’s using a project of his Sci-Fi Tales as an example. Good stuff so far.
- In line with Sam’s project, ProBlogger has a great post today on 20 Types of pages that Every Blogger Should Consider. I know I’ll definitely be adding a few of those pages to this site.
- SEOBook is reporting that Google has officially listed Mahalo as spam. Of course, that’s how post author Aaron Wall is interpreting their internal spam document. But I have to say, he’s got a bit of a point.
So go out there and get your affiliate links set up, work on a monetization plan, throw up some pages, and make sure it’s not spam!
Read MoreNoFollow vs. DoFollow
First, the definition, courtesy of Dot Traffic Glossary:
Nofollow
A website can direct a search engine spider not to follow a link that appears on it. The idea being that the target website’s ranking will not influence the website indexed. Nofollow attribute values are most often used on sites with user generated content, like user comments and blogs.
Dofollow is basically the opposite of this. Many bloggers refer to this as link love. By allowing the search engine spiders to follow those links, you’re increasing their page rank status and allowing their ranks to influence your rank. Which is not what you want if you’re looking to increase your page rank, necessarily.
There’s a debate raging amongst bloggers and it seems like most smaller blogs are going the Dofollow route. By spreading the link love you’re helping out your fellow bloggers, who are more inclined to reciprocate. Blogroll’s are a prime opportunity for this. The larger bloggers don’t seem to be weighing in on the issue (at least not from what I’ve seen) so perhaps for a blogger with a larger audience they couldn’t care one way or the other.
Since this is a bit outside my expertise, I’ll admit, I posed the question to my 59 Twitterati followers for their opinions:
Shawn Collins of Affiliate Tip: “Event with nofollow in my blog comments, the comment monkeys constantly attack with their spam.”
Scott Jangro of MechMedia: “I’ve been fighting so hard with the spammers recently, I’m starting to question my own long-time use of dofollow.” He also added “I agree with Sam on the size of the blog though. Mine was until the past few days a PR6 which has me on every must-spam list.”
Sam Harrelson of ReveNews & Affiliate Fortune Cookies: “I’m all in favor of spreading the love, but there are SO many gamers out there that it makes DoFollow really unsustainable.” He followed up to say “Would just add that if it’s a small blog, you might make dofollow work. As it grows, it’s just too hard.”
Of course, these opinions totally fall in line with that I’ve observed in looking around. The little guys are all for dofollow to get the word out, but once you cross that line you become a “comment monkey” target. Scott Jangro wrote a really reflective post about it back in February called Attack of the Comment Monkeys (don’t know how I missed it from the RSS feed…).
I think one thing all bloggers and internet marketers in general can agree
on is that Spam is a problem. Not only is it definitely annoying, but it also pollutes the well (as Jason Calacanis pointed out in his keynote at Affiliate Summit West last month). It makes a lot of legitimate internet marketing look bad, and it’s a fine line before someone misunderstands persistent follow up and due diligence for the dreaded SPAM label.
Where do I stand? Long time readers of this blog will note that I use links a lot in my posts. Basically I do this for two reasons: 1. I like to give readers an easy reference of what or who I’m talking about. 2. It’s just nice karma. This blog is hosted by Blogger, and according to their Help Center they automatically add the nofollow tag to the templates. Which is probably why I have a page rank of 0.
So I’m going to edit my template as an experiment. For anyone else curious on how to do this for blogger, there’s a great tutorial online here. Let’s see what happens, shall we?
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