Took some time this late evening to toss together this simple wordpress plugin to show off the most recent people to make the first comment on the 10 most recent posts. This sort of encourages the bad behavior of people spamming sites with “FIRST!”, but whatever. I think it encourages a good fun atmosphere on this site and any other site that may use it.

This thing is extremely beta. I tossed it together based on the Freepress Blog Top Commenter’s widget. So if you run into bugs, toss me a note. I could use some feedback on how well it works on various Wordpress installs. Basically, what version you are using and whether or not it works. As of right now its working for WP 2.2+. Enjoy.

Install Instructions:

1. Unzip the contents of this zip to your Plugins folder. I.E.- wp-contents/plugins/firsttocommentwidget.php
2. Activate the plugin in your wordpress admin panel.
3. Goto your Presentation -> Widgets Panel and drag the widget onto your sidebar panel and enjoy!
4. Alternatively you can call this plugin using:
   < ?php get_firsttocomment_posts(’10′); ? >
   You can replace “10″ for however many posts you want the plugin to query for comments.

Download Plugin: firsttocommentwidget.zip

This contest has been going on for a while now. This was a great contest and Mike put a lot of work into it. A big congrats goes out to the winners and the winner in my group!

A little Link Love to the Sponsors:

Thanks to the following:

Blog About Your Blog, Yimto, Google Is Not God, Semmy, Julianas Lair, Money Relations, Peter Foti, 3rd World Blogger, Contest Time, Belolats, University Kid, Mixed Market Arts, A Frog To Kiss, Lankapo, Web Blog Money, Zedomax, Flat Water, Ryan Yockey, Aims Graz, To The PC, Blog Money Wiki, VolkDefense, Scholarpreneur, Ben Spark, I Make Money On Facebook, DNXpert, EZ Money Online, Dorm Earning, Cyber Fizzle, Ez DIY Electricity, PixToo, My Blog Contest, Article Snatch, Wired Kayaker, JTPratt, 1 Man And His Blog, Slyvisions, Ideas and Money, Sean, That Single Guy, Toast & Egg & Me, Blogging 4 Cash, Andrew Benton, Controversial Marketing, Orange Inks, Blogigs, Singapore Entrepreneur, ABC, Read To Me Dad, Rhyan, SEO News, and my apologies to Gorilla Sushi for making a mistake on the URL.

…and the 12 winners are:

1. blogstarr
2. siteguides
3. jix2mail
4. azrina.aznan
5. dombrorj
6. kent56
7. red0303
8. pmonchet
9. davinian
10. red0303
11. mitch.carvalho
12. garryconn

The winners should contact Mike for some info on getting your prizes….time to find out what else Mike has going on.

I like to just go on record saying I wasn’t in any way paid to do a case study on this site. This is purely what I was shocked by and felt I wanted to share with you.

Alright so most of the US audience should be familiar with Esurance. They are a fairly new but big Automotive Insurance company. They seem to be in a huge rush to gather as many clients as possible, in fact I hear their ad every 5 minutes on one of my favorite radio stations. One thing that I find very Interesting is their total lack of SEO on their own website. Last I checked, that was a big factor to getting better placement online and even driving traffic to pages that arent just the home page.

As I like to do when I’m in between work, I stumbled onto this Esurance page. http://www.esurance.com/home/tv.asp So what did I find but the entire page loads with one massive image in the background. I felt I needed to further investigate how Esurance handles their SEO. So I took a screen cap for those of you who are too lazy to check out the link and to help further illustrate my point.

Lets start with the down to earth basics. The title of the page, “Erin Cam - Page 1″. When I last looked at web standards in general the title of the page was supposed to relate directly to the content and entice the reader into further exploring the website. Erin Cam - Page 1 doesn’t tell me anything other than some person named Erin is running a Cam? Catch my drift. Then next we take a look at the description Meta tag. Well I would look there, but there is a lack of anything to look at. So what will the search engine bots naturally look at? The on page text, which if you look at our fancy picture there is barely anything. Here is a quote of the first 30 characters on the site the way a search engine bot would see it: “Home > Erin’s World > Erin’s Cam Page 1 2 3 Privacy and Security”. This sentence in general really doesn’t grab anyone attention. In fact I wouldn’t know what to make of it if I were to see this in a search engine results page.

Lets take a quick look at the code of this page. Would it validate in the W3C validator? No, in fact we find 105 errors on the page itself. Without proper code usage the pages would stand less of a chance of getting correctly interpreted by the search engine bots and less of a chance of getting placed correctly in the search engine results.

Now I would look to see how the keyword usage is on this page, but in fact there is a total lack of keywords to be used. This is a huge flaw in the overall page optimization. I would assume that the page is getting ranked for the words “Erin Cam” seeing as thats the first set thats being used in the title. The results that those words would produce, would in fact be completely off compared to what Esurance would like to see.

Now that we have the problems, lets come up with some viable solutions for this setup. First and foremost, get some valid code. Takes about 10 minutes to accomplish and the code itself will be easier to read for both you and the search engines. Keywords will need to be considered, I would go with the standard “auto insurance” or something within their needs. The title and description tags should both be given some attention especially considering the on necessary keywords in their campaign.

The really tough part comes with the page itself. As it stands its one big background image with some pictures laid on top of it. My first thoughts would be to drop the description text for each video off of the background. With some creative writing this could easily increase the on page SEO and keyword density. The next would be to make those video’s interactive on the page itself (youtube embeded video’s or some home grown solution). This would not only increase the click throughs from an external site but give something interactive for the users to enjoy. As opposed to each video loading in a new window. Pop-up windows are a commonly hated problem in the world wide web. Every user dislikes dealing with them. The final piece would be to add the rel=”nofollow” tag to all of the links used on the bottom of the page. This is wasted link authority on pages that don’t need to be seen in the search engines. The only one I would possibly consider leaving is the sitemap link.

Overall this is one page of many that Esurance needs to take a much closer look at. Its obvious why they may rank for 3+ keyword phrases, just mainly due to the amount of advertising they are doing. For them to do well in a long term sense on the search engines Esurance is going to have to start paying more attention to how they code their pages and what kind of keywords they are using.

As far as everything goes, I am not an SEO, nor will I ever label myself one. I get most of my conclusions from my own trial and errors. So with that I thought I would share something I’ve been working with for a while.

Link Structure.

Maybe you have or you havent heard of it, but the concept is easy to understand. Structuring the links on for your site both internally and externally to better your linking power. I’m going to focus more on the internal.

Now I had a lot of trouble with this and I definitely had my share of faults trying to get the link structure on a few of my sites setup correctly. My sites went from decent rankings to horrible(page 2 on Google to about page 10). Even in some cases the sites were taken completely off the search engines, due to duplicate content issues. So a fair warning to anyone who messes with this stuff. Thats not to say this is hard stuff, just very temperamental.

To start, link structure doesn’t help just yourself, but in some cases it will even help out your site users by giving them a more pleasant time navigating through your site. There are a bunch of methods to setting up your links internally. I’ll focus on what worked for me, the Pyramid method. I made a real crude example of how the pyramid scheme works.

Assuming your home page is the starting point. Thats where you are directing most of your sites authority and generally  where most of your traffic is going. The basics is you take that authority and you spread it evenly around the site. So starting at my “Home Page” I use one way links directed at the “Categories” of the site. When I say one way links I mean take you are linking to the page, but that page is not linking back to you. So in the case of my “Category” page on all links going to the home page I put the “rel=’nofollow’” tag in there. Since just about every single search engine these days follows the nofollow rule, then its safe to say this works. Same goes for the “Category” links down to the “Single Post”.

When the site is setup correctly, you are evenly distributing your linking power throughout the site. Instead of just sending it all over the place. Again, this is for a simple site. The more complex the site is, the more you’re going to have to consider how its linked. Took me a couple hours of drawing it out to get it all down on some of my more complex sites.

Now the big “Magic Trick” of the linking structure is when you have your “Single Post’s” each carrying a small amount of link power, when you use them all together you can have a lot of link power. So what I have had success doing so far is putting a link on the “Single Post” pages and effectively transferring that link to the “Home page”. Giving the “Home page” a ton of authority in the site itself. You could also use those “Single Posts” to link externally to other sites in your network to give them more authority. I should also mention the “Single Post” isnt linking to anything else, except possibly similar posts or other “Single Posts”. It wont link back to the “Category”. Thats why its holding so much link power as a collective.

I’ve had some pretty good success with it. Its brought me up in the SERP’s a few spots just by reworking the structure. If I was a real smart person, I would consider the link structure as I was building the site. That would be the SMART thing to do, but oh well lesson learned for next time.

Give it a shot and let me know how your successes and failures go. Lets face it, not everyone will get this the first time out.

Alright, since I’ve been into giving away as much knowledge as I can about social marketing I might as well keep up with it and give away some easy tips to marketing on YouTube.com or any video site for that matter. Now you may have heard of this place. Its only one of the most visited places on the internet. Watch as I hype it up for you. Really though, a whole lot of people visit these sites, so why not gain something from it for yourself.

Right away you’ll need some software to make these movies. Depending on your OS, the simple ones are Microsoft Movie Maker for the PC and iMovie for the MAC. For my really simple videos we wont need anything fancy. If for some reason you wanted to get crazy on this you could use Adobe Premiere or a similar setup.

The same rules apply as before. Be a good socialite and participate and please don’t spam. The idea here is low budget video work. Now my first attempts at this were pretty low in traffic, but that doesnt matter. I still got something out of it and was able to improve on it.

The first and most boring part of making videos is studying the niche you are marketing to. Taking the time to do this in the beginning will work wonders for your social video marketing campaign. Find out what are the most viewed videos. Find out why people are viewing them the most. Most of the time you’ll find the video really stands out in some shape or form. Most of the time its entertaining. You can game this system, but I strongly suggest you dont. Like the thousands of videos you see of hot chicks or someone getting punched. Be honest about the video in your description and in the video itself.

Now heres an example of how I tested this out for myself. One of my niche sites dealt with a lot of pictures. Well how do you market pictures on youtube? The same way you do with a regular site. Take a stack of photos and toss them into your video, one frame for one picture. You dont have to do anything special, you could even avoid using transitions if you wanted to. Now I wanted to get fancy and put some music behind it and BAM I had a video people could enjoy. If you wanted to be adventerous you could take some time and make your own watermark on your videos with the URL to your site in it.

Well the next part is pretty easy, upload your now completed video to the various video sites out there; youtube, stage6, veoh, dailymotion, etc. Pay close attention to how you word your video descriptions. Make sure it will appeal to your market. Also be sure to accurately tag your video. Anything you can do so your video can be found.

Just uploading the video usually isnt enough to get it out there, unless its an awesome video. Heres where that magic participation in the social network pays off. Take time to write thoughtful comments on other peoples videos. People will follow those comments and see what videos you’ve got and view them. I shouldn’t have to tell you, but stumbling your videos and delicious linking to the video doesnt hurt either. Driving good traffic to these videos can easily produce some great targeted traffic for your sites.

Now how well have I done with my videos? Well in the last three I released I have had a combined view count of 10,352 views and 1035 click through the video links to my niche site. This was all done in about three days. Which I would say isn’t too bad at all. Unique videos really pay off on this site, for more than the obvious reasons. Another big benefit to just publishing the videos, usually someone will link to it or embed it on their site. Just furthering your videos reach. I’d say it took me about an hour to make the first video, thats just cause I was getting familiar with the program. After that it was only about 15 minutes per video. So 15 minutes for a bit of traffic and some easy exposure for my site. Not bad.  So get out there and give it a shot. When you’re done post some results on here. Enjoy and Good Luck!

I am pretty much all about listening to music while I work. These days I listen to just about anything I can get my hands on. What keeps me the most productive while working though is mostly instrumental music. Mostly movie score soundtracks, classical music, or trance. I also frequently listen to KCRW. Its a great Los Angeles radio station that I used to listen to a lot more when I lived in LA, but now that I’m in Seattle this is the next best alternative. You can find them on Shoutcast if you want to give them a listen.

So my question for you is what music keeps you productive while working?

Seriously this is “One Heck Of a Giveaway”! I was pinged by Mike at Bloggin-Ads.com if I wanted me to sponsor something for a contest he had coming up. I thought why not, so I am donating 3 months of ad space in a prime area on my blog. Mike was also kind enough to give all of us sponsors a little link love with this contest. If you run a blog or site about anything internet related you need to take some time and enter to win the very cool prizes offered. Apart from what I’m giving away, here are some of the other prizes being given away in my group #4.

• License for PopUp Loser (Semmy)
• 200EC (Aims Graz)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Contest Time)
• 100 One Buck Wiki pages (Zedomax)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (To The PC)

To get some entries in this contest is a real easy task. Subscribe to Bloggin-Ads.com via email, make a post about the contest on your blog, comment on one of the contest sponsors blogs, and a whole lot more options. So head on over to his blog and check out the official rules!

Link: The “One Heck Of A Giveaway” Contest

So lets talk about some ways to market your affiliate program/ebook/website. The new buzz word in the internet marketing world is Social Marketing!! Its just as it sounds and a fairly simple idea. You make a website or have a program you want to sell and all you do is market it along all the social networks. IE: youtube, myspace, facebook etc etc. We used to call this spamming sites back when I first started doing it. Now a days its pretty much becoming the normal thing to do. Its also becoming the easiest free method for gaining traffic to your sites. In some cases easier than getting ranked on the search engines. My goal over the next few weeks is to dump off a few simple techniques to gain traffic from these social giants for your various projects.

I already talked about gaining traffic on StumbleUpon. The key with StumbleUpon, and the same goes for every other social network, is participating in the network. No one wants to Stumble, or Digg, or give a rating to people who arent involved. I am not saying, go out and be a spammer and annoy the hell out of people. The basic idea is make some friends, add value to their social networks and participate.

So lets talk about one that you probably havent used before, Scribd.com. If you havent been there before, this site is all about ebooks, articles and anything in the written form. There are some photos, but those arent getting the most attention. One method I have employed with Scribd is uploading quick articles about affiliate offers that are going on right now. The first thing you want to pay attention for with Scribd is originality. Do not go and copy other peoples stuff. This is just going to give you some bad reputation on their site and no traffic going your way. Scribd is all about original articles that generally help people in some shape or form. Again, its all about adding value to the site. You want to create enough buzz for people to want to comment on it, link to it, and build traffic to it. Now the beauty of Scribd is you can add HTML to your articles. This means you can embed your links into the articles and easily use their social network traffic to push some sales/traffic your way.

So now that we have some tactics under our belt for using the site. How do we build the traffic on the article? The very first method is to…you guessed it participate in the site. Go comment on other articles, join groups, make a group, and get some friends. Because no one knows anything about people who keep to themselves. One example for you, lets say you comment on one other persons article, not only will the author see it and probably check out what you have written but so will all the other people who see that persons article. Again I really want to emphasize the fact that you should be writing real responses that add value to other peoples articles and not writing things like, “HEY CHECK OUT MY COOL ARTICLE!”. All that does is waste your time, other peoples time, and ruins your reputation. Another method is Stumble your own articles. Again thats just an easy way to cross the traffic sources over from StumbleUpon and Scribd. There are plenty of other ways to drive the traffic to your Scribd articles. I could write pages and pages of them. Now I’m not guaranteeing any crazy amount of traffic. Always take your time, and test test test. Then test some more. Track your results, review them, and go back at it again. Enjoy the tips and Good Luck with your Social Marketing!

Shoemoney recently posted a plugin he had one of his friends put together. Its basically a plugin that puts your sites url on your RSS Feed. Which is supposed to stop scrapers from stealing your content and not giving you any credit or link love. This way your URL is automatically in every feed post and if some other site scrapes your content you’re getting some link love back.

I decided to toss it on some of my more popular sites and with in the first day I was getting some free backlinks. Generally the more popular the site is, the more its getting scraped by other sites. This could be modded to work for any setup I’m sure, not just wordpress. If you have some PHP knowledge(doesnt take much) you could implement this for your sites RSS Feeds. What have you got to lose? Take a few minutes and toss it on your wordpress blog.

Plugin Link: RSS Footer

Google has been extremely busy launching lots of new ad features. Recently I posted about the Adsense team testing another ad type with little scroll buttons(Link: Adsense Scroll Ads). I personally didnt think that was such an effective ad type. Mainly due to the fact that there are tiny buttons that normally people wouldnt click on.

This ad however is a much better step for the Adsense team. Its basically like the auctionads or minimall look. Easy to navigate small checkout ads. These ads seem much more inviting and simple. I’d be curious to see how well they convert in the long haul for these shop owners. I might have to test them out myself.