Why You Absolutely Need to Join The Keyword Academy (Even Though The Owner Does Everything in His Power to Stop You)

Previously I reviewed the site and service of The Keyword Academy. At the time I had just unsubscribed from their service, deciding to use my own tools and, frankly, the knowledge I had gained from their site, while avoiding the ‘information overload’ that can sometimes be a problem in this business, especially when you’re new. (Plus, we were busy selling everything we owned and moving into our car for a 7-month camping trip.) Any way, I recently noticed that people were still signing up to The Keyword Academy using links from my previous review, so I thought I would check back in with Mark and Court and their Keyword Academy to see what may have changed and to see if I could pick up any ideas to get my increase my online income.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Early Retirement, Passive Income, Social Media | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Holy Crap, I’m an Affiliate Marketer!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been toying with affiliate links for years now, but I was never serious before. I guess I had no strategy, no framework. Oh, and I really didn’t have that much traffic either. Traffic helps . :)

So for years I’ve struggled with all of this. I was running Adsense for awhile, several years ago. More recently I spent a lot of time doing article marketing, attempting to exchange articles with others for backlinks. It was a lot of work, and the end result was just, well, backlinks! The only real result I could see was that one of my sites dropped from PR4 to PR2, supposedly due to poor quality links. Who knows. Continue reading “Holy Crap, I’m an Affiliate Marketer!” »

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Facebook vs Google Plus: A Stream Comparison

Just for kicks, I thought I’d compare the last ten things in my main news feed/stream on both services. To try to be fair, I am using the broadest stream, not some narrower, more selective stream, and I’m not including things I share myself. Also, Google+ brings things back to the top of the list if there is an updated comment, so that might skew things a bit….

In summary, it is as I suspected – Facebook is sending me more humor/silliness than I see on Google+, but the difference in these ten posts is not as great as my perception. Perhaps a larger sample would be helpful? Any way, not sure if I proved anything or not. Maybe you could do a similar test and see what you think? Are you seeing similar results? Continue reading “Facebook vs Google Plus: A Stream Comparison” »

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Is Google Plus the Ultimate Virtual Man-Cave?

XKCD Comic on Google Plus

XKCD Comic on Google Plus

A lot of people are writing about the recent big moves in social media. Google Plus just transitioned from invite-only to public beta, and Facebook just announced their first ever massive redesign at their recent f8 conference. I’ve been on Facebook for almost six years (wow!) and Google Plus for almost 90 days now. Google Plus is, obviously, different than Facebook. However, it has been difficult to pinpoint exactly how it is different. And then I ran across some gender statistics and it made me wonder if Google Plus was just a big, virtual man-cave!

Boys vs Girls

Back in July while Google Plus was still in beta the ratio of early adopters was about 86% male, 14% female. As of early September those numbers have started to shift, but it is still 67% male, 33% female. That’s a 2-to-1 ratio. This has a big impact on the posting content and interaction. [Insert your favorite gender-based jokes here...]

Nerds vs Normal People

Google Plus is also definitely nerdy. Google has a lot of apps out there, and a lot of people use them. However, most are geared toward the tech-savvy among us. Maps, Documents, Gmail, Calendar, Reader and the Chrome browser. Those of us with a background in high-tech fields or I.T. use these on a daily basis. Google Plus is a natural extension of this. And since the tech field is still largely male-dominated it is natural that the early Plus adopters skew largely to guys. Nerdy guys.

Addiction

Addiction

Friends vs Strangers

One other thing that is definitely different about Google Plus is that most of my contacts are people I don’t actually know. Sure, I have lots of friends and acquaintances in my circles (25 out of 82) but so far most of them don’t use G+ a lot. So most of my interaction there is with people I have never met in person. Compare that to Facebook, where the vast majority of my friends are those I know personally, and thus my interactions there reflect that. And since you don’t have to ‘friend’ people on G+ the associations are based much more on shared interests or pasts, not shared work or school or family history. Indeed, I have a few family members who have signed up but I don’t think they have posted one single item yet.

Gossip vs Conversation

All of this adds up. With a user profile skewed to male nerds, the typical conversation is definitely different. Lots of tech and internet-related discussions, lots of geeky and sophomoric humor. Less celebrity gossip, less cute video-of-the-day, and NO game updates! And the end result of this is that the conversations are much more the type of conversation I enjoy. I learn, I interact with my fellow nerds, I enjoy. And this means that I’m spending a lot more time on Google Plus lately.

Unlike a true man-cave, sports is not something I discuss a lot on G+. So maybe it’s the nerd version of man-cave. A nerd-cave!

Oh god, that just sounds so wrong in so many ways…

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How I Found Triberr and Why I’m Begging For an Invitation!

Have you ever stumbled across something on the internet and later are unable to remember how you found it? That happens to me all the time, as in two or three times an hour. It’s how my brain works functions. (it’s an ADHD thing) Here is how I ended up finding the awesome automated Triberr system. It was quite by accident…

So two days ago I was getting ready to shave. (yes, it’s that kind of story) It was our 21st Anniversary! And since I was long overdue for a good shave I knew it would take about ten minutes. That’s plenty of time to do some good audio listening, and I had been on a bit of a tear with my web sites and social marketing, so I began a quick search for a podcast. (ahem) OK, so I have a hard time with ‘quick.’ So sue me. Any way, I did a Google search for “blogger seo podcast” and found one that looked interesting over on Dino Dogan’s blog. It was an interview he did with Dan Cristo back in January of 2011.

So I listened and shaved my head and my face. I learned. It was interesting stuff. Nothing mind-blowing, no major epiphanies, but good. And since I finished shaving before the podcast was over, I kept the web page open in my browser. All this was on Thursday.

Fast forward to this morning, Saturday. I’m up at the crack of 9:30 after a late-night session of Super Mario Bros. Wii on a big-screen rear-projection TV at my sister-in-law’s house in Michigan. We were up till 2:30AM. I think I have gamer thumb. Oh, and at 50 I’m the youngest of the three gamers! I know, sad, right? LOL Any way, so I am clicking back through a few open tabs to find something to read, and I start exploring Dino’s blog. I found a blog post from May that looked interesting entitled Why Jason Yormark Is Not the SEO Expert He Thinks He Is. I, of course, had to test the gist of the article about Jason’s post, so I Googled ‘Triberr’ and added a comment, just to update everyone (as if they cared). If you’re interested, Jason’s original post on Triberr has slipped from page one to three. To make a long story short not quite so long, I eventually ended up on the official Triberr web page and started checking it out. Call me intrigued!

There are a lot of ‘systems’ out there for bloggers who want to increase their readership and traffic, build backlinks, and make money. Unfortunately most of them excel at only one thing: separating new bloggers from their existing money! And that is one thing I noticed right off the bat about Triberr – as far as I can tell, there is no entry fee or monthly subscription! It seems to be a networking structure for Twitter. In other words, if you have a blog and a Twitter account, and you network with other bloggers in a similar niche and you all retweet each other’s Tweets in some sort of systematic non-spammy fashion…..voila! That’s Triberr. To prevent a complete spam-fest, each Tribe is autonomous, complete with a Chief, rules and regulations, and you can’t get in without an invite! And you’re limited to four Tribes – one as a member, three as a Chief. There seems to be a lot of good protections in place. More reasons I’m dying to get in!

Any way, I found a couple of travel blogger types that I already follow on Twitter and have requested an invite. I’ll follow up here in the near future with a progress update…

Posted in Social Media | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Repost.Us Generates New Revenue For Content

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My Review of The Keyword Academy and Why I Quit

I have a long, sordid history trying to make money online.  I’ve tried all sorts of schemes, I’ve spent countless thousands of dollars, and so far I have precious little to show for it…except tax write-offs.  I guess the only good news is that I have discovered that I really do have an entrepreneurial mindset.  I also have a touch of A.D.D.  Those two things don’t work well together, in case you were wondering. LOL

[UPDATE: The Keyword Academy is new and improved, so I wrote a new review of it!]

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Posted in Blogging, Early Retirement, Passive Income | Tagged , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Tumblr Outage Sends Thousands Looking For Alternative Solutions

Tumblr turned blogging into something similar to Facebook and Twitter. It was easy to bounce other people’s information, pictures, videos, etc. out to your own followers. But if you thought that this free service was a good idea for setting up your main internet presence, today’s outage (now approaching 24 hours) probably has you thinking twice. But not me….I got out a few months ago, and today I’m glad I did!

To be honest, my blog has always been very personal. Lately I’ve been repurposing this domain for other goals, but for awhile I had it pointed to Tumblr. I imported all of my old blog posts dating back to 1998. I liked the way the archives displayed it all. But when I decided to move all of my content over to a normal WordPress blog I ran into a big issue, namely the fact that Tumblr has no built-in mechanism to export your blog posts! I had to search for awhile but finally found an online service that allowed me to capture all of my old content into one big xml file. I took that and imported it into my new blog and it’s been here ever since. I still have some clean-up to do with titles and slugs, but today I’m in a much better position in terms of outage prevention and backups.

Hopefully Tumblr will come back up and all of your precious gossipy content will be intact. But just as soon as you can, you might want to take some of the following steps to ensure that your hard work doesn’t disappear into some black hole…

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Going to Extremes

Link: Going to Extremes

going-to-extremes

On the flight back from South America last week, the airline was showing Yes Man, a film starring Jim Carrey. Left to my own devices, I rarely finish a movie, but I watched the first…

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Please send Becca to Antarctica!

Just register, click the verification link they send you, and vote.  Easy.

http://www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com/blogs/view/207

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