I'm not a huge fan of spam of any kind. With respect to blogging, spam is usually comment spam or some type of solicitation like trying to get me to blog about whatever they are selling, selling being them wanting me to blog about their latest, greatest topic or promote them in some fashion. Well, yesterday I received a rather interesting piece of spam. This spam 'technically' was an offer for me to join their services to gain organic traffic to one of my blogs. In this case, it was a simple piece of spa...
A couple of weeks ago, I read an article that started out saying that Google may penalize if you cross link between your own blogs. While this may be the case, what Google really is saying is if you have a couple of blogs and occasionally do a natural link from one to another, there isn't a problem. What they don't want is someone who has twenty blogs, consistently cross linking between them. So, in my case where I author six blogs, it would be fine for me to link to one of them if blogging about a topic...
A couple of years ago when I was active in the now defunct blog advertising networks and visiting a multitude of blogs on a daily basis, I noticed some bloggers used contests as a way to promote their blogs. I'm not sure how this method of promotion worked for them but at the time I set the notion aside. Back in March I was offered an opportunity to run a sponsored contest on one of my blogs. The sponsor supplied the giveaway and was responsible for sending the gift to the winner. All I had to do was blo...
There are three ways to promote an individual blog post on Facebook. The first is putting a link which automatically ads a thumbnail on your personal Facebook page. This is free and goes out to your friends as a Facebook comment. You can also do the same thing on Facebook pages you like but this may be perceived as spamming so I don't encourage that. The second is to put the link on your blog's Facebook page. That will go to anyone who has liked your blog's Facebook page. The third option is to use the p...
I had a Facebook account for a few years before ever actually using it. However, when we started traveling between our vacation home in Florida and here in beautiful Ontario, Canada, I quickly realized that Facebook was an ideal way to keep in touch with our family and friends especially during the travel period. There are numerous free Wi-Fi spots en route and it's free access at the airports we use. One airport I think has now gone to pay per day but if you sit in one of their bars, it is still free ac...
Yesterday, I checked my Adsense account to be greeted with the updated Terms Conditions which I agreed to. So I decided to do a bit of checking to see what else had changed. Under Adsense Program Policies I found:"Do not include deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site's search engine ranking (e.g. your site's PageRank)."I know I did not see this before! Every blogger has been displaying PageRank and Technorati rating badges for years. Not once did I ever consider having ei...
Traffic exchanges work on the principle that for every 2 sites you visit you receive one visit to your site in return. There are variations to this but in general that is how they work. If used in this manner, a webmaster or blogger can easily inflate the visits to their website or blog which is clearly against the TOS for Adsense. One reason why BlogExplosion, ExposeYourBlog, Entrecard, CMFAds and Adgitize were destined for failure is all had elements of being a traffic exchange, a couple more so than o...
I haven't had the need to update any of my Blogger templates lately. Yesterday, I realized I hadn't updated the copyright notice on a couple of my blogs which means uploading a new graphic then changing the HTML in the template from the old sig graphic to the new. It's an easy way to update the sig on all the posts in the blog with one minor update. So, I clicked on Blogger>template>html and what did I find? Previously, there was a button to click that would expand all the widgets. Now, instead of that b...
Blogging has taking a bit of a back seat this year because I have been rather busy with real life demands. My gosh, here it is the third week of April and I just realized I had not updated my copyright notices on a couple of my blogs. It really was an oversight simply because I was not blogging as much on these blogs. Adding a copyright notice isn't mandatory and some bloggers don't. The reality is, a blog is copyright protected whether it displays a copyright notice or not. A copyright notice just remin...
Blogger settings allows you to be able to set it so someone who doesn't have a Google ID to respond anonymously. For the most part this works rather well and most readers who want to comment do not abuse the privilege. Then there are the jerks (a polite way to address them) who seem to think they can say whatever they want but the lovely commentor from Blanchard, Oklahoma likely didn't realize they weren't as anonymous as they thought they were. The comment ended up in the trash right where it belonged. ...
