Effective Internet Marketing Manchester: Nov 28, 2007

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Free MySpace Layouts - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Your head hurts.

Your eyes are burning.

You feel a little sick to your stomach.

Yep. That's right. You just spent the last two hours searching for 'free myspace layouts' and you came up with bumpkiss, nada, zilch, zip, nothing. You may even be a little astonished that such a burgeoning scene can be so bereft of a truly valuable contribution. One would think that the arena would be overrun with opportunists trying to take the internet by storm producing whole collections --not just one or two here and there-- but whole collections of quality premade MySpace layouts.

One would think.

Well after engaging in some serious clanging of swords on the front lines of the MySpace layout battlefield for the past year, let me tell you where it's at.

Free MySpace layout makers generally fall into one of three categories:

The Good
Although these are few and far between, a small (and I mean very small) group of web designers will actually put some major effort into producing a collection of attractive and truly original MySpace layouts. The backgrounds are worked up from scratch and they are customized to fit well with MySpace profiles. On top of this, great care is taken to make sure the colors selected for the fonts are properly coordinated with the background image to make the text easy to read (a big problem on MySpace).

The Bad
A much larger group of web designers (and I use this term loosely here) will scour the net and download any and every image they can lay their mouse finger on. They focus heavily on celebrity and product photos (cars, motorcycles, beer, etc) and all of them, of course, are copyright protected. So what this essentially amounts to is theft, plain and simple. These images are then used in conjunction with some boilerplate CSS code which converts them into MySpace backgrounds. In some cases, these layout makers will even use the original web address of the 'found' image in their layout codes. So in effect they are not only stealing the image itself but they are also stealing the bandwidth of the website they found the image on. All of the above takes absolutely no artistic talent whatsoever so touting the finished pieces as 'original' or 'handmade' MySpace layouts is an utter sham.

The Ugly
This group of MySpace layout makers use the same tactics as 'The Bad' but will go one step further and use any and every black hat search engine optimization (SEO) trick in the book in an attempt to 'game' their MySpace resource sites to the top of search engine results pages. And unfortunately, many of them succeed. Search engines like Google and Yahoo still have a ways to go when it comes to weeding out websites that employ unscrupulous methods like keyword stuffing and multiple site networking.

HOPE

On the bright side, search volume for the keywords 'free myspace layouts' is actually declining while searches for other related keywords is on the rise. This means that MySpace users are finally starting to realize that using the word 'free' is a waste of a good search term since 99.9% of MySpace layouts are free anway (assuming you don't count all the time you spent trying to find a good one). MySpacers are now starting to become much more descriptive with the adjectives they tack on to the keywords 'myspace layouts' in an attempt to find something that will truly adorn their profiles with an original, classy or professional look.

Hopefully this trend will continue and eventually make it a lot easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Robert Darrell is the webmaster of ironspider.ca where he provides tutorials covering all aspects of web design. He also provides a fine collection of MySpace layouts which are 100% original (no copyright violations).

You can find his collection of MySpace layouts here: http://www.ironspider.ca/adv/myspace/

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

Http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com

Effective Internet Marketing Manchester

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Free MySpace Layouts - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

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