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A contest blog. You see them everywhere. Why? Because getting content is so easy. You don’t have to find topics or even write it yourself. People will submit the content. You just have to sit back and relax. So having a contest blog is really easy.

Having a successful contest blog is not an easy thing to do. ContestBeat achieved this goal and it’s now in the TOP 10 of the contest niche.

But why contests? Are they any good? Yes they are. Case study: Domprofesor.com. Contests are great promotion methods. They increase traffic, links, rss readers and all stats in general. Before I started the contest I had 100 incoming links and 50+ RSS subscribers. After the contest I now have 250+ links and 300+ rss subscribers. So contests create awareness and build buzz. And in the long run it’s the best option.

Now you know what contests are all about, let me tell you more about ContestBeat. I chose CB because they had no fee for submitting a contest to them. Other contest sites that have CB’s coverage and viewers ask for a $10-$50 fee to post about your contest, while CB does it for free. Also what attracted me was the site’s design. Clean, crisp, big fonts, everything you need to make a site user friendly. And most of all, if you don’t know nothing about how to create a contest they have the greatest advice page, telling you all the right things and no bull.

So if you want more traffic, more buzz, more links and more subscribers, better start a contest instead of paying for any kind of advertising. And if you want to start a contest, better use ContestBeat.Com.

Popularity: 77% [?]

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CPC advertising. That’s what it’s all about. A well written ad can raise your sells while a poorly written one can empty your pockets. Furthermore, a good ad will even cost you less (about 20% less). So without further ado here are some things you should take into consideration when writing an for AdWords or a similar network:

• Keywords and Key Phrases: if your desired keyword has too many competitors or a high price there are 2 things you can do: 1) pay more to get seen or 2) be smarter than your competitors and pay less for the same results. Ok let’s be more specific and work with examples. Let’s say you want to advertise on of those $47 Money Making Programs, you can imagine that the competition is fierce. So first of all don’t use keywords, use key phrases. The reasons key phrases are more powerful than keywords is because the are more targeted. Imagine that keywords are like a shotgun that fires lots of projectiles but they spread while they travel more distance, while key phrases are like a sniper rifle - one shot, one kill, every shot hits it’s target. Back to our example, let’s say that your Money Making Program is for moms who stay at home. Using the keyword money your ad will appear whenever people search for anything containing money (bank money, spend money, how much money do I need to…, mortgages and stuff). And anyone who clicks on your ad coming from a search like this in just curious not interested. However if you use the key phrase “make money for home based moms” or something similar your ad will be highly targeted and whoever comes to your site through that ad is interested in what you are advertising.
• Keyword Typos. If you are advertising (like in the example above) for the keyword money the price will be really high. But you should take into consideration the fact that typos happen very often. But the price for the keywords moneu or monet are really low. When using typos as keyword make sure the letter that doesn’t belong there is placed near the correct letter on the keyboard.
• Negative Keywords. These are actually something good. Using phrases like “xOxOx is a scam“, “is xOxOx a scam?“, “xOxOx sucks” or “xOxOx doesn’t pay” will actually send more visitors to your site. This works because the people who search for things like this on the web are already aware of your program, they want to buy it, but they are not sure yet, they are a bit suspicious. But it costs way less than the original keyword and it will send buyers to your site.
• Ad Title. Using special characters in your ad title will make your ad special and it will get noticed faster. For example, we have the following ad titles: Make Money Online and >>Make Money Online<<. Which one will you click on??? The second one of course. You can use stuff like >><<, — –, oO Oo, it’s up to you.
• Ad Content. Make sure you use your keyword (in our case money or make money) in the ad content.
• Ad Content Again. Forget what you already know. They are all wrong. When it comes to AdWords ad, less content is more. How this works? AdWords provides you with 3 lines of text. If you can use only 1 text line (the middle one) to write your message your ad will get noticed, guaranteed. The blank space will get it noticed. Because everyone uses all the 3 lines your 1 line ad will pop into the eyes of any reader.
• Ad Placement. Again forget what you already know. You don’t want your ad to be first or second. Why not? Because you will get casual clicks, most of them coming from people who say “What’s this??? Hmmm, I’m going to click on it.” If your ad is 3rd or 4th this means that everyone who clicks on it is interested, because they are searching something and they are really SEARCHING for it even on lower spots.
• Landing Pages. Don’t start an ad campaign without a landing page (I will talk about landing pages later).

Now that is almost it. Maybe I forgot something, I don’t know. But the fact is I told you in a few words what a $47 ebook would tell you in 80 pages.

Popularity: 47% [?]

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They’re not angry, I was just kidding. But they are going for your server. Let’s say you have a site. 300-500 visitors per day. Someone submits one of your posts to let’s say Digg. And in 14 hours that post gets on the front page of Digg. That’s great news. That’s what you wanted. Tons of traffic to your site. This is what you wanted. But let’s think about it for a little. 500 visitors per day means about 21 visitors per hour which means 0,3 visitors per minute. That’s not going to kill your server, even if you are using free hosting. Now let’s imagine the Digg front page situation: 10,000 visitors in 24 hours means 416 visitors per hour which means 7 visitors per minute. But you won’t get 7 visitors each minute for 24 hours. The first 40-60 minutes are going to be crucial. Being on the first page of Digg you will get some 7 visitors per second. This is bad news. This is even worse if you use a database based publishing platform (like Wordpress). Because every time a someone visits your site your wordpress will have to contact the database and display some content. And if you take into consideration the fact that most $7 hosts allow only 10 simultaneous connections to the database (only 10 users at the same time) you will realize how wrong is this. Most hosts use settings like this not to break down the server. Because if you allow more than 10 connections your server will have to process a large amount of information in a fraction of a second and it will go down.

So before you even think about getting tons of visitors in an instant, you should think about handling them in some way. If you get your post on the front page of any social site and your site doesn’t work you will hate yourself (just like I did when it first happened to me). Use stuff like WP-Cache or similar (you’ll find more about this on Google). They work. Don’t think about switching hosts. Any $7 host will give you the same thing. If you want a host that can handle 7 visitors per second you’ll have to pay about $80/month (maybe less). And if you usually get 500 visitors per day you don’t want to pay $960 year for that.

So before getting a flood of traffic you should brace yourself, using simple and effective methods.

Popularity: 41% [?]

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Or so it said… Because the result… I LOL’d my ass off.

Remember a few days ago I told you I got my hand on some of those miraculous eBooks that tell you SECRETS and stuff you would kill for (all for $49,99). I have some 75 eBooks and they are all CRAP, all of them. I read about 30 of them and I now consider myself as stupid as I was before. Not only there was nothing new in those eBooks, but some of them contained literally no information at all. It was just crap. I also got on of those TRAFFIC eBOOKS about how to get more traffic to your website. And now I am writing about it because yesterday I saw and ad for that particular eBook that said:

“No visitors on your website??? Get tons of traffic today!”

I won’t give names but what you are going to read next will be as funny as hell. The first thing you must know is that this eBook costs $97 or $47 (depends who is selling it - because there are some resell/rebranding rights). The eBooks in very short - I don’t like looong thing to read, I like step-by-step stuff, easy to read, clear and concise, that tell you exactly what to do. So I was thinking I finally found something here. But I WAS WRONG. I WAS SOOOO WRONG. Here is basically what the Ebook was all about:

1. Download some CRAZY BROWSER and then join some TRAFFIC EXCANGE/AUTOSURF sites (that’s just smart, I didn’t see that coming). Then you read more about how to use the autosurf sites and the browser you just downloaded. And of course all the links to the traffic exchange sites and to the browser download are all affiliate links (hidden of course).
2. The next thing the program tells us we need is a huge subscriber list. To do that we
   are going to need an autoresponder (that the eBook provides of course, with an affiliate link of course). Now the next phrase made me lol just like a lolcat: “Not sure what to promote to your huge subscriber list? Here are some great programs…” After that there are some links to some other $49,99 crappy eBooks, affiliate links of course.
3. Step 3 consists in signing up to some free hosting services (affil links here too). After signing to that free hosting service you’ll need to create an AMAZING TRAFFIC FORMULA PAGE (???WTF???) - all details are inside.
4. And finally a SECRET that will send targeted visitors to your site immediately - and you are so lucky because this is an INVITATION ONLY and you have an invitation. After sending the invitation code you get the link where you can download the TRAFFIC SECRET: THE TRAFFIC TOOLBAR aka SPYWARE.
5. Finally there are of course some other bonuses: more $49,99 affiliate programs that you can(not) make money from.

And that was it. The conclusion we can draw is:

YOU PAY $47 FOR LEARNING THAT:

• You can get traffic by using traffic exchange/autosurf sites (DOH). Awesome dude, I didn’t know that !!! LOL.
• This is not a scam, is says traffic and it gives you traffic. However traffic is nothing, you need readers. If you wanna make money from this you will need clicks on your site, and traffic alone won’t get you clicks. Only visitors will get you clicks.
• Getting some free affiliate links for $47 is a deal that rocks. Awesome dude. LOL again.
• Getting spyware for $47 is also a great deal. Spyware is way more expensive than that. ROFL.
• You know where the huge number of crappy eBooks come from: the same place, because they are all the same.

So my final advice… Don’t buy crap, use your common sense. No one is going to sell you $1000 worth of product for only $47. NO ONE.

Popularity: 36% [?]

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A while ago i was writing a post about Blogrush and Entrecard. This was a few days after i discovered EC. It worked nice (so i thought). However, in time, my opinion has changed.

ENTRECARD IS THE SAME CRAP FREE ADVERTISING CAN OFFER.

But what else should you expect from free stuff. For people who don’t know what Blogrush is I will tell you immediately. Blogrush is a program that will send readers to your site (or so says it’s admin) for free. The only thing you have to do is place a widget on your site that displays links from other sites. This is something like link exchange without the backlinks. At first glance this could work, but it doesn’t. You place the thingy on your site and wait. And wait, and wait. Your latest post is displayed 5000 times but still no one click on it. So it’s goodbye free traffic. The reason why this system doesn’t work is because your posts get displayed but no one sees them. This is because everyone can (and will) place the widget on a almost invisible position. Nobody wants to use their good space (used for advertising) for some crazy widget. This was the almost invisible position, because you can use the absolutely invisible position. You can place the widget in an iFrame and set the iFrame’s dimension to 0×0 pixels. The Blogrush spider will find the html on your site but no one will see it. Great. So in my opinion Blogrush is doomed. It will fail.

As for Entrecard… It also sucks. When i found EC I was excited it worked. It sent visitors to my site. And that’s just about it (you should keep in mind the fact that autosurf programs also give you free visits). The thing is EC sent visitors to my site, but not readers. 95% of the visits EC sent me just bounced off after dropping their card. Dropping what card I hear you ask? Entrecard’s system is based on a liason between webmasters. Webmasters get in touch with each other by dropping their card (something like a business card). This way you get credits to your account and you can display your ad on other sites in the network. Besides getting credits from dropping your card, you can also get credits from people (webmasters) who drop their cards on your site. Anyway, most of the people over there get their credits by dropping their cards on other sites. And this is more and more like autosurf.

So to continue my story… I a couple of weeks I had the amount of credits needed to display my ad on a popular site like Problogger or JohnChow. Getting on a site like this means huuuge exposure. But the problem is big sites never have free ad space. You’ll have to wait 12-14 days. Patience is a virtue and I have it. So i have waited 14 days for a free spot on Problogger. The wait time was 1 hour. I was getting anxious. My site was going to be on Problogger. Great. But the only problem I had was that the waiting time remained at 1 hour for the whole day (23 hours to be precise). And after that all the ad spots were again full for 14 days. So I guess there’s something going on in here. I think you must know the right people to get featured on a famous site.

So the conclusion is that Entrecard is nothing but an autosurf program that gets you visitors not readers, and only if you people in high places you can use it at full capacity.

So the final conclusion is: all the free advertising methods tested by me so far (Blogrush, Entrecard, Adgridwork) don’t work any better than any autosurf system.

Popularity: 37% [?]

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