Populating New Forums

I’ve seen these question asked dozens of times on webmaster boards: “What’s the best way to drive traffic to new forums?  What’s the best way to get content on a new forum?”

The answers are typically, “make 10 posts a day under different names, ” or ,”buy a pay per post package from a company like ForumShock”.  I’ve done both before.  The first is tedious and the second costs money, so neither option is perfect.  However, I’ve got an idea for webmasters to quickly populate their new forum with lots of unique content for free.

We know that Google doesn’t index every page on the internet, right?  And we can also assume that if a site is somewhat outdate or if articles are very old and they haven’t been indexed yet, they’re not likely to all of a sudden get indexed.  So, Google can’t give you a duplicate content penalty if they don’t know you’re duplicating.   Great.

Visit other forums that operate in the same niche as you.  Try and find ones that are outdated and haven’t had posts in awhile.  Check to see how many pages they have indexed.  If it isn’t that many but there are some decent conversational posts, you’ve hit the jackpot.  Take it.

If you’re not a programmer, just sign on your board under an alias.  Copy/Paste the first thread of lots of posts.  Now make a new name, and copy/paste the second post from each of those same threads.  Nice… unique content (to google) that you didn’t even have to think about making.

If you could automate this process, set a tool to a homepage and have it scrape posts and repost them in your forum… you’d be pretty much golden.  I could use a tool like this and I might just have one developed when I have some spare cash to throw at it.

The only real problem with this is if the posts are time relevant, like “did you see the Ravens beat the Steelers 235245322 - 0? “  But, any relevant content is fine so the site isn’t a deserted island of zero posts.  And, you should probably scrape without any HTML code - because people often link to other threads in the forum, you might get their site deeper indexed and somehow screw yourself.  But then again, then maybe that would ensure that they get the duplicate content penalty and not you, even though they originated the content.  Hmmm.  Oh well I’m thinking too deep into this, you get the gist of what I’m saying.

Oh and if you make this tool, hook a brother up!

Forecasting Strong Domains

Well things haven’t been going ALL that great if you measure success my income and traffic numbers.  The growth hasn’t been substantial.  But, I can say, that I bought 3 domains based on Google Trends and while 1 of them was a one time traffic bust and ultimate fluke, the other two have tremendous potential to earn some big bucks come holiday season.

The two “good” domains are electronic products that were recently announced and if they are on the market by Christmas, and either one gets a lot of love, I could stand to make a nice income from them.  I’m on the first page of google for very relevant search terms for each and one of them brings in about 50 organic visits each day while the other brings in 10-15.  And, the products haven’t been released yet so I expect that to increase if I HOLD my position in the SERPS.  I want to move up, obviously.

In the past, I have tried to buy domains based on broad terms that could be generally applied to a niche.  This is really the first time I’ve purchased based on a speculation of how a term COULD perform in the future.  But, I think I picked a couple good ones.  I bought these based on Google Trends information.

Unfortunately, Google Trends also reminded me of a HUGE mistake I made.   A missed opportunity.  Several months ago I bough TWENTY domains based on speculation of a product to be released in the summer.  I read an article about it in the news.  Because I didn’t hear any hype it slipped to the back burner.  I lost interest and let the domains sit.  Then I SAW IT ATOP THE GOOGLE TRENDS LIST.  Now I’m struggling with how to balance working on all my projects with using these 20 domains as some type of link farm to get my top sites for this keyword listed.  Heck, I have so many domains for this niche I don’t even know which ones should be my “pointed to” sites.  Ughs.

Alright this is kind of a rant, I know.  It’s Friday and I had a rough week, I’ve had  a few drinks.  And althought the interview went very well and I’ve already been invited back for a second interview, I’m not sure I even want it.

(Abruptly Leaves and returns at 2:19pm the next day)

Wow, I forget to press publish.  Hmmm this post is even dumber than I thought.  Alright it’s cool, I’m about to write a good post right now that I thought of last night.

I Need Laptop Ergonomics

I always thought the idea of keyboard ergonomics was dumb.  Probably the same way little kids think stretching before sports is dumb or loosening up your arm before throwing is dumb.  But, the older you get the more your muscles, tendons, ligaments and nerves need that care from the wear and tear.

So here I am, having tingling sensations in my filanges, a little bit of throbbing and just an overall not very good sensation in my fingers, hands, wrist and sometimes even up to my elbows.  It has to be from being on my computer all day every day.  And since I’m trying to make a future out of computers, I better stop this problem before it gets any worse.

So the long and short of it is, I need ergonomic solutions for my laptop.  I have briefly explored some solutions, but in my opinion, a reference works best for something like this.  Have you had this problem?  What’s worked for you?  Please leave any comments on ergonomic tips and links to products that you would endorse.  You can even toss in your affiliate link… I don’t care - heck, I might even buy the product through it!

Hmmm, I just read that using arm rests while on your keyboard will help with the elbows and up type stuff.  But, I’m having trouble finding much else for laptops.  One product tilts the laptop’s keyboard at a 33 degree angle or so but does this really help?

False Job Advertising?

I had my interview today and I did a pretty bang up job… but it definitely was not what I expected.  First of all I did NOT use my idea of pre-creating a Wordpress blog - I thought it was a little bit too forward and could even be considered “infringing” on their territory or even seem desperate.  I’m keeping the idea in my back pocket as a “follow up” tactic if I am fighting to get the job.

That being said, I’m not really sure that I even WANT the job.  Why?  Because it’s not what it seemed to be in the job description.  They listed it as “someone who wears many hats” and the capabilities included work in radio as well as SEO and blogging experience.

The first 20 minutes was spent with the young lady explaining to me what the position was all about.  It was more of a “build relationships in the community” position where I find key leaders in different company’s, organizations and positions and build relationships that will help sell product/services in the future.  Essentially, it was sales without selling.  I would later pass them on to a sales team.  And while it did include a LITTLE bit of other things, it seemed like this responsibility was their focus.  Great.

I then met with their sales manager who also happened to be looking to hire.  No way would I take the sales job but I figured I would at least act pretend to be interested.   A 1-hour test full of hypothetical business scenarios followed where I was asked to come up with ideas and opportunities.  They will narrow it down in a week or two and invite about 3 people back.

I’m 99% sure I’ll be invited back but… do I want to be?  Not if the job entails mainly what we discussed.  So, I think I’ll bring up some specific points and ideas and say, “these are the types of programs I would be interested in implementing.”  The position is new - they just created it - so the role of the position is probably flexible.  If I can shape my roll for the company to lean towards my strengths and desires, I would be interested.  Otherwise, I’m hitting the highway.  But do I want to waste another day meeting with them if it’s not an opportunity?  Oh well, I guess I’ll have to see.

I was SOOO eager to go on this interview and was hoping it would go great and I’d have the job I really wanted.  Now I’m thinking about applying to dozens more jobs and son of a gun I hate that.  Mostly because it’s just less and less time I can spend on my sites.

Keep the obstacles coming… I’m a million to one shot… call me Eureky Balboa.

Job Interview Preperation

Happy Father’s Day everyone!  Since it’s Father’s Day, I won’t be getting much work done on my sites.  My Dad coaches my younger brother’s baseball team and they have a double header - I’m going to the first game, then going to the mall to find a present (impossible) bringing my sister home for a church function and then lounging around until we eat Father’s Day dinner at my folks place.  Since our family eats really late (9pm sometimes 10pm) I’ll have a few hours before dinner to do work.

In those couple hours, I’ll be preparing for a Job Interview that I have on Wednesday.  It’s a marketing position with a lot of responsibility but I’m unsure of how much it pays.  Either way, I really want to the job because I’m pretty much disgusted with my current position doing sales in the radio industry.  For lots of reasons I really don’t have the time to get into.  I got an e-mail last week saying they were impressed with my resume and invited me to meet with them for 2 hours and afterwards I would take a “test”.  How many people are applying to this job?  Who am I competing with?  Will I get an offer?  I’m incredibly confident I’m going to get the job and I don’t really know anything about it yet.  I have a great strategy and if you have a job interview, I suggest you try this out as well.   What is it?

Well the 2008 Presidential Election is around the corner and in reading about different candidates and their stances on various issues I thought to myself, “all these people are really doing is applying for a job.”  And what is the one thing that frustrates me more than anything about their websites?  On each issue, they don’t state what they are GOING to do to make improvements they simply cite their experience and state that since they have such a glowing record in regards to that issue they’ll certainly do a great job once elected President.

Interestingly enough, that same issue probably makes the task of hiring a full time employee a very tough job.  Looking over resumes, who everybody is fluffing up to make them sound like all that and a bag of chips, can sound misleading.  Granted, they want to see my “portfolio” or “work examples” but I’m going to take it one step further.  They’re expecting me to bring in “stuff” from previous jobs but I’m going to absolutely WOW them… I’m going to put up a website showing what I WILL do once I’m in that position.

Part of the job description includes utilizing the internet, blogs and social media to generate traffic, increase exposure and build the brand.  I have a TON of experience in this field, but it’s the type of thing I do in my spare time… for fun.  So I spent $1.99 on a dot info domain name using relevant keywords for the company’s industry (found a great name actually) and I’m going to make a fully functional wordpress site to showcase my initial marketing ideas I would hope to initiate.  One thing I will do is document every step of installing the blog and optimizing it for SEO purposes to show them I really know what I’m doing.  Then I’ll be visiting their site and their competitors sites to come up with specific ideas I would hope to put into practice that could really build the marketing efforts up.  I’ll also feature some “out of the box” ideas that, while some may be a bit impractical, suggest that I can “think big” and can open a dialogue and engage in debate to create some fantastic initiatives they might not think of without me.

This is a tremendously proactive approach and that’s exactly what employers want to see: taking initiative, following through and commanding ownership of your projects.  I’m not sure if other people have done this in the past but I’m telling you, it’s going to work and I honestly think if you play your cards right, you could get 90% of the jobs you apply for using this tactic.  Why?  Because you’re going the extra mile… your competitors won’t be doing this and you’ll stand out from the crowd.  While others might make efforts to “stand out” nothing will be as comprehensive as a website based around your ideas and plans for that specific position, which inherently showcase your abilities for the position.  Essentially, you’ve already started working for them and you’re doing the work now to get paid later.  It shows committment.

Unfortunately, there are a few wildcards.  I still have to compose myself well, be likeable, conversational and find my “groove” in terms of discussion.  But on the flip side, I’m in sales so talking is my job and with this website I create I’ll have an unlimited amount of talking points that would help establish well over 2 hours of marketing conversation.  Two more wild cards though are their timeline and the salary.  They’ll have to do their “due process” and interview enough candidates to get a good idea of who is out there… hopefully I can impress them enough to make a quick turn around time - sorry bout it but I pretty much hate my current job.  And because of it, I’m willing to take a salary decrease but I’m really interested in the pay grade, benefits and scope of this position’s responsibility.  I hope I’m not overqualified - that’s the only thing I can see scaring them away.  And I’m not saying I’m some kind of genious, but you never know, this could be an entry-level type of position where they just heaped up the responsibility/requirements to lure in a sucker like me.  But because the company is a huge, reputable company I can’t see this happening.

That reminds me, I have to bring my suits/shirts to the dry cleaners so I can look super fresh and clean for the interview.  Wish me good luck and keep your fingers crossed for me… the interview is this Wednesday.

In the meantime, have an awesome Father’s Day and make sure you at least call your pops and tell em you love him.  That’s right… real men can say “love” when talking to other men.  It’s your flippin father - you owe your entire life to the man, show some respect.  And if you can, go to the mall, pick up a card and present and go have dinner with your old man.  In fact, maybe you should register HisName.com and make a fan site for him… or create a wordpress blog that automatically updates with feeds from his favorite news sources and topics.  And then monetize it! Haha I’m playing around but I guess in summing this whole thing up, the skills I’ve learned in the past year are helping me in much more than just website building.  I can apply these skills to my everyday life for everything from getting a job to giving a killer unique present.

Now the fun starts… I have to spend the next couple days building a new website that I can’t even monetize!  Actually, that’s not a bad idea… I can monetize it after I get/don’t get the job…. hmmm, nice now I’m really motivated to put some good work into this.

Here goes nothing!

Trouble Posting YouTube Videos in Wordpress

I had this problem awhile back, but for some reason, it hasn’t come up in awhile.  The way Wordpress works with it’s Visual Editor and Code View, if you try and embed YouTube videos you could run into some difficulty.  This problem is exacerbated if you’re switching between visual and code view.  For example, you switch to code view to embed the YouTube code, publish the post, it doesn’t appear, you go back to manage/edit the post and the code has vanished.  You repeat 314 times until you’re inches from bashing your laptop to bits.

Yeah, this happened to me.  Then I found an AWESOME solution which I think could help out a lot of people here.  It’s a plugin called Anarchy Media Player and it creates a little icon next to your “link, picture, spell check” and all those icons in the writing interface.  Simply click the yellow anarchy tab, paste the URL of the media you want to embed and click okay.  It works every single time and I’ve had zero problems embedding YouTube with it.  I can proudly say I no longer want to break my laptop.  Well, I do… but for other reasons to be named (possibly) at a later date.

Anarchy Media Player works for regular installations of Wordpress as well as Wordpress MU.  Installation is painless and simple.  But I must warn you… I labored for a good hour after installing on MU because for some reason, the little Anarchy button would not appear on my visual editor although the plugin was installed properly.  If this happens to you, save yourself an hour by logging OUT of the admin panel completely (signing off) and closing your browser.  Re-open and that should do the job!

Good luck and here is the Anarchy Media Player Download Page!

Using Wordpress MU for Big Ideas

I’ve been a big proponent of Wordpress over the past 6 months, using it to support the vast majority of websites/domains I own that aren’t forum based.  For those, I use vBulletin.  But for a recent project I’m now developing, I couldn’t get my arms around a logical setup.  I tried to map it out time and time again to exist with a single wordpress installation… it simply wouldn’t work well enough.

Son of a gun… what do I do now?  I have about 30 sub-niches that each need their own “interface” and can’t merely be given a “category” or “page  nest”.  Would I have to create a folder for each under my main domain name and conduct a seperate wordpress installation for each?  Not a chance, thanks to Wordpress MU.  The MU stands for Multi-User and let me tell you, this thing works like magic.

I followed a few simple commands, asked my web host to change a CHMOD setting and bang, I’m up and running.  The Wordpress MU interface is virtually the EXACT same interface as a single wordpress installation.  The only difference is, there is a new tab called “Site Admin” where you can add blogs with the click of a button (no cpanel needed), add users on the fly,  activate plugins and themes sitewide or choose individual settings on each blog.  Really, really fabulous CMS.

wordpress mu

Here is an example of a GREAT use for Wordpress MU.  You want to create a blog network for major league baseball teams.  So, you register a domain like BaseballCoolio.com.  You install wordpress MU into the root directory and use the one click blog creation to create a seperate blog for each team.  Within a matter of about 10 minutes you’ll have a seperate blog for every single MLB team with names such as RedSox.BaseballCoolio.com.  Alternatively, you could have them setup as www.baseballcoolio.com/redsox.  It’s all a matter of preference.

One thing I will say, however, is that Eli at BlueHatSEO, among others, has stated that sub domains are treated by search engines as their own entity.  So personally, I would prefer making a subdomain for each account whereby Wordpress MU has essentially allowed me to create a “network” of 32 interlinking websites.  Unfortunately, my main website is a forum and upon asking for help in the Wordpress Forums I was told it is impossible to setup something like Keyword.DomainName.Com using Wordpress MU if I don’t install MU in my root directory.  I have vB installed in my root directory so instead, I have my domain setup as something like Blog.MyDomain.com/Keyword… much better than the alternative of Keyword.Blog.MyDomain.Com which just seems and looks stupid.

In any case, if you’ve got a big idea that has lots of different angles and subjects and you’re head is about to explode thinking about the organizational structure of your blog/site - I would definitely recommend giving Wordpress MU a closer look.

Need Ideas for your Websites?

You’ve got a bunch of websites but you’re struggling to come up with ideas for new content, offers to push or finding ways to grow your site further.  What to do?  This is such an OBVIOUS idea, I’m sure many of you are already using it.  But at the same time, sometime the little things slip by us.

Here’s what you do:

  1. Sign up for a free e-mail account with yahoo
  2. Visit lots of websites serving the same niche as you
  3. Subscribe to their newsletters

Sweet… an inbox loaded full of information on how to make your sites better.  Best of all, it’s not mixed in with your regular e-mail.  Once every few days, check into your newsletter account to see what’s going on in your market and pull the good ideas/concepts for use on your own sites.

Random Thursday Thoughts

I’m in a random mood and have a few things to share with you: (1) My FeedBurner Stats,  (2) Weekend Plans and (3) Some posts on other blogs that you should read.

FeedBurner
I finally decided to give a hoot about those little orange buttons in the upper right hand corner of my blog reading feed on posts and comments.  Sure, I knew what they were but I didn’t really care the same way I didn’t care about monetizing this blog.  It’s interesting to hear so many people obsess over their Technorati Rank, FeedBurner Subscribers and other various measurement tools of blog success.

But then I realized, this blog is a reflection of who I am as an Internet Marketer and who I am as a person.  While I started it as a “diary” for simply “thinking out loud”, I would like it to be more than that.  There are a couple other blogs that I go back to every couple days simply because they suck so bad and are funny to read.  And upon setting up my FeedBurner account, I saw these idiots had more subscribers than myself.  That made me feel more dumb than an idiot (please note sarcasm).

So the long and short of it is there’s a new sheriff in town.  While this blog will still focus on my Internet Marketing efforts and my goals to become a self sufficient website owner, it will be fused with blurbs and articles on other issues as well.  Funny, interesting, political, motivating… we’ll see how it goes.

That being said, feel free to subscribe to Eureka Diary by clicking that little orange feed button in the upper right!

Other Blogs
There are only a handful of blogs I read on a regular basis, but every once and awhile I’ll peak around and see what other people are posting about.  Here are some recent posts that I think are worth reading with a quick descrip:

I’ll link you all to more posts I find interesting more regularly.  I think it’d be good practice to point people in the direction of good material you might not have found otherwise.

Weekend Plans
My roomate is gone for the weekend and I pretty much have no plans.  So I’m planning a work filled website weekend! Uhoh… I just realized my friend is having a huge party on Saturday. To go or not to go?  Oh well even so I have all Friday night and all Sunday at the very least.  I’ve been doing a decent job getting work done the past couple days so I’m eager to keep it going.

10 Dumbest & Gayest Cities

What is the epitome of dumb? If you ask me, it’s visiting Google or Yahoo and actually SEARCHING for Google.com or Yahoo.com. Where do all these idiots come from? That’s not a rhetorical question… with the help of Google Trends we set out to discover just that.

Google Trends is a keyword analyzer that takes whatever terms you enter and provides specific data about search trends and history. Among other data, it pinpoints relevant news articles, displays a line graph, and get this: it ranks the top 10 regions and cities for these search terms. Alright dumb people, you can search but you can’t hide!

10dumbest

Remind me never to visit the dumb idiots in Irvine, California. And at #2 is New York City? Alright, so maybe this particular piece of data is a bit skewed based on the mere size of New York City. When you look at the data by REGION, you’ll find India and the Phillipines are much dumber than the United States and hey Nigerians… how much dumber can you get?

It may be important to note that this is ranked by someone visiting Google.com and searching for Google.com. While it’s feasible, it’s only slightly more stupid to search for Yahoo.com while at Google. Alright, not surefire evidence that these are the dumbest cities in the world but we wouldn’t be surprised. On the other hand, let’s try a more direct approach at identifying the gayest cities in the world, shall we?

I think we can be confident that a pretty gay thing to do is visit Google and search for “I am gay.” And while I had to search for “I am gay” in Google Trends to verify my hypothesis it was merely a part of the research method and I’m not gay. If you think I am, than you are probably from Irvine, California.

And the polls are in: Wow, you bloody Brits are bunch of queers!

10gayest

The Top 10 Cities searching for “I am gay” are all in the United Kingdom. Judging from my computations, if you were born in the United Kingdom you are probably a cigarette. Not only that, but you are probably a transvestite homosexual. The Top 10 cities searching for Transvestites are ALSO in the United Kingdom. But were these gay transvestites born gay? Nope… not at all and we’ve got strong evidence showing they started tucking it under simply because they were bored. A simple search for “I am bored” shows that 9 of the 10 most bored cities make their home in the UK.

DISCLAIMER: The use of alcohol can and will impair your judgement. While the gayest tranny’s call Elizabeth their queen, Ireland outdid all other regions for the search term “transvestites”. Have fun blacking out.

Utilizing Google Trends in this manner was just too fun, so we tried a few more to see what stereotypical generalizations we could make about our great world. Here were some of the more interesting finds:

And some more quickies:

We could keep going and going, it’s actually a lot of fun to look at the different connections. Have you found any funny, disgusting, weird, or interesting nuggets of info? Leave a comment!

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