cdcbbs blog

Blog marketing is one of the latest trends of marketing online that you are going to find. Blogs which are also known as web logs are very popular in this day and age. You can make a blog on any particular subject that you want and then publish it for the world to read.

If you are just beginning in internet marketing, you are going to find that starting a blog is very easy to do. Anyone can sign up for a free blog, and then proceed to market basically anything that they want to. Because blogs are free to have and make, this makes blog marketing even better. Where as if you have a website, and are wanting to market things that way, you would have to pay for your domain, pay for your hosting of the domain, and then know some HTML or hire a website designer.

Search engines love blogs, and are always pretty fast to index them. Getting yours out there for the world to see is not going to be hard. There is this cool tool that you can use every time you update your blog that is known as pinging. Pinging your blog after every entry that you make will let everyone know that your blog has a new entry and updated.

Depending on your overall goal with blog marketing, you can update your blog as frequently as you like. Which could be daily or weekly. Whichever you choose, just be consistent with it. If you start out updating daily, stick with it. This way your blog readers will know that they can check your blog daily for new postings.

If you are wondering exactly what you can market in a blog, you can market whatever you want to. However, it is best to stay within one market in your blog. If you have several different things that you would like to promote, and none of them really fit together well, you can create a blog for each market. Remember that if the markets are not related, do not mix them on your blog. For example, if you have a blog on vacuum cleaners, you will not want to also mix in television sets on the same blog. This is because both vacuum cleaners and televisions sets are two different markets. But, you could mix vacuum cleaners and handheld mini dust busters. Make sense?

There so many things that you can market in your blog. Whether you want to sell your own products and services or someone else?s and make a commission off of what you sell. The sky is the limit when it comes to marketing. Affiliate links work great in blogs as well. Signing up to sell other people?s products and then marketing them in your blog is a great idea.

If you are considering having both a blog and a website that will work if you have enough information to cover in both. Linking them both together is a great idea if you do decide to have both. You can always use the website to hold your main information and products, and the blog to promote them and discuss any issues regularly.

Wondering about hosting? If you have a website, you can either host your blog on the same server you use for your site, or you can leave it where it is. The choice is ultimately up to you, either way you can have successful blogs that will begin to bring in revenue to you.

Getting links to your blog is a good way to gain new readers. Another great tool you can use is the RSS feeds. When you use the RSS feeds, it allows people to publish your blog on their site, and in return it gets you more visitors.

Blog marketing can be pretty effective if it is done right. However, you cant just set up a blog and expect people to find it. Get your blog out there and make it known to others just as you would a website. Exchanging links with others will help, so will article marketing using your blog.

Blog marketing is easy and anyone that wants to can do it. Getting your blog out there and known will be your biggest challenge, but just know that the harder you work at it, it will pay off. Find sites that are related to the market you are promoting, but not in direct competition and ask for link exchanges.

Around the time Google announced “Big Daddy,” there was a new Googlebot roaming the web. Since then I’ve heard stories from clients of websites and servers going down and previously unindexed content getting indexed.

I started digging into this and you’d be surprised at what I found out.

First, let’s look at the timeline of events:

In Late September some astute spider watchers over at Webmasterworld spotted unique Googlebot activity. In fact, it was in this thread: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25897-9-10.htm that the bot was first reported on. It concerned some posters who thought that perhaps this could be regular users masquerading as the famous bot.

Early on it also appeared that the new bot wasn’t obeying the Robots.txt file. This is the protocol which allows or denies crawling to parts of a website.

Speculation grew on what the new crawler was until Matt Cutts mentioned a new Google test data center http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/good-magazines/#comment-5293. For those that don’t know, Matt Cutts is a senior engineer with Google and one of the few Google employees talking to us “regular folk.” This mention happened in November.

There wasn’t much mention of Big Daddy until early January of this year when Matt again blogged about it asking for feedback. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy/

Much feedback was given on the accuracy of the results. There were also those that asked if the Mozilla Googlebot (known as “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” in your visitor logs) and Big Daddy were related, but no response was made.

Now I’m going to begin some of my own speculation:

I do in fact believe the two are related. In fact, I think this new crawler will eventually replace the old crawlers just as Big Daddy will replace the current data infrastructure. http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blogs/comments/310_0_1_0_C/

Why is this important?

Based on my observations, this crawler may be able to do so much more than the old crawler.

For one, it emulates a newer browser. The old bot was based on the Lynx text based browser. While I’m sure Google added features as time went on, the basic Lynx browser is just that ? basic.

Which explains why Google couldn’t deal with things like JavaScript, CSS and Flash.

However, with the new spider, built on the Mozilla engine, there are so many possibilities.

Just look at what your Mozilla or Firefox browser can do itself ? render CSS, read and execute JavaScript and other scripting languages, even emulate other browsers.

But that’s not all.

I’ve talked to a few of my clients and their sites are getting hammered by this new spider. It has gotten so bad that some of their servers have gone down because of the volume of traffic from this one spider!

On the plus side, I have clients who went from a few hundred thousand indexed pages to over 10 million in just a few weeks! Literally since December, 2005 there’s been a 3500% increase in indexed pages over an 8 week period! Just so you know, this is also the client’s site that went down because of the huge volume of crawling happening.

But that’s still not all.

I have another client which uses IP recognition to serve content based on a person’s geographic location. If you live in the US you get American content and pricing; if you live in the UK you get UK content and pricing. As you may imagine, the UK, US, Canadian and Australian content is all very similar. In fact about the only thing noticeably different is the pricing aspect.

This is my concern ? if the duplicate content gets indexed by Google what will they do? There’s a good chance that the site would be penalized or even banned for violation of the webmaster quality guidelines set forth by Google here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality

This is why we implemented IP recognition ? so that Googlebot, which crawls from US IP addresses only sees one version of the site.

However, a review of the server logs shows that this new Googlebot has been visiting not only the US content but also the content of the other sections of the site. Naturally, I wanted to verify that the IP recognition was working. It is. This leads me to wonder then; can this browser spoof its location and/or use a proxy?

Imagine that ? the browser is smart enough to do some of its own testing by viewing the site from multiple IP addresses. If that’s the case then those who cloak sites are going to have problems.

In any case, from the limited observations I’ve made, this new Google ? both the data center and the spider ? are going to change the way we do things.