A Good Time is Blog Time

Link exchanging certainly can be a bit of a nightmare, I found this Link Exchange Scams explained site when someone tried to scam me with a fake PR. I couldn’t understand how someone was showing a PR6 when they were not even Google indexed. Hence my search and my arrival on this site. Clearly I am into SEO but had not stumbled across this scam before.

Basically what happens is that you get invited to link to a site in return for a link back to your site from a very high PR site. Looks great PR is showing to be genuine and you may be tempted to skip the usual checks. But as the site I found explains, the page rank has been hijacked from another source, and there are various means for doing this.

Bottom line is the scammer gets a good link back to them from a site with genuine page rank and you get a link back from a fake site that is likely to have its page rank disappear overnight, and is not Google indexed anyway. So anyone looking for that page in Google will not find it, and effectively the link is completely worthless.

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There are many ways to use Google search to find information, but a dedicated blogger needs to know which ones are likely to help him get the information he needs.

For basic tips and tricks using Google the Google’s tips and tricks pdf is as good a place to start as anywhere. But I was a bit surprised to find how little it actually tells you, OK it shows you how to find exact phrases, how to screen out unwanted results using a – symbol and a few other helpful modifiers. But if you are blogging and looking for ways to suss out the competition and find long tailed keywords that are highly audience targeted, then it doesn’t really help. So if you want some Google search tips and tricks that might help, then read on.

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The format of this site has changed, but all the categories are still there and visible after you have done an initial keyword search. Look for the option to change from broad to exact down the left hand side and to add average cost per click open the columns menu using the button at the top right of the table.

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Google Buzz is the big story after its launch last week. If you choose to use it, then it links in automatically to other services such as Picasa, Google Reader, Twitter and Flickr. Lots of nice features and of course another option to place links back to your websites or blogs of interest. Although to be honest there are already plenty of options for doing that via the share icon below; which as I write is not currently offering Google Buzz. Pretty sure it won’t be long before it does though.

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In my last post we discussed various ways of  working from home and touched on the subject of direct sales. This is where you offer a product for sale yourself rather than through an affiliate relationship where in fact you are marketing a 3rd party product sale.

In order to be able to sell directly you will nearly always need a means of accepting online card payments if you are going to operate effectively. The vast majority of people who purchase online like to make online payments, it is a part of the whole convenience package that they are being offered. If having offered a product online, you then advise your customer that they need to make an offline payment you might find in a lot of cases that they will not proceed with the purchase. People really are getting used to online banking, look at Chase Bank Online, Citibank Online, big banks with lots of customers that have become used to operating their finances online, even when it comes to their salary.

I have to qualify that statement however by saying this is the case for the vast majority of products, but not all, and at the end of the day you will need to rationalise what is the best method of payment i.e. an offline payment option, offline combined with online,  or a combination of online payment options. To maximise your chances of making a sale it is a good idea to have at least 2 ways people can make a payment.

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