I have upgraded joeychgo.com to WP 3.0, and, as you notice, amd remodeling the site. I plan to refocus the site on forum management and internet marketing, and away from personal matters. Stay tuned…

I found them because of their recent post, Your Blog Sucks and I Got 20 Reasons To Back It Up

I would like to take each of their 20 reasons a bit further.

Your Blog Sucks When…

You have more ads, banners, and/or widgets than you have words that you have written.

This is a common problem. Too many ads for too many things with no focus. I personally wont place an ad unless I think it is beneficial to the readers. I also see this in forums alot, especially among new forum owners. I am sometimes guilty of this though myself. Sometimes, I am trying out a new ad system and have to populate it with something. (hence the Ad Stripe I posted about the other day)

Your blog’s color scheme hurts the eyes. Literally.

I have had a few say that about this blog, but really, to me, this refers to blogs where the text is light and the background is dark. I specifically did not do that here so as to make the content easy to read. That said, many people opt for something that looks "Cool"; 9 times out of 10 I find "Cool" looks terrible, especially after a few minutes.

Your last post was written 3 weeks ago.

Yes, this is a biggie. If you want people to come back frequently, then you need to post frequently.

Your blog only has one reader everyday: yourself.

HA – I fear this one myself.

Your blog does not offer RSS or email subscriptions.

These are very important things to offer (which is why I offer both). Most importantly, it reminds people about the existance of your site. This is a great lesson for forum owners as well. eMail your members from time to time. You’ll find more come by to post on your forum if you do.

You blog about making money online, but you have never made a cent.

This is a great one. There seem to be more and more experts out there every day. I see this alot with vBulletin webmaster forums. For awhile it seemed as if there was a new one popping up every week. Its the same with forums that tell you how to make money. I always tell people, I make a good living on the internet, but there is alot I dont do and want to learn about that. Part of what I hope I can do is share what I learn with the readers of my blog.

You waste hours putting random ads everywhere instead of writing content.

Yup. Even I have been guilty of this. It is an easy trap to fall into. I have since learned to better focus my time. I’m not perfect by any means, but I am improving. You too should try to focus on building content. I have ad spots I havent even bothered to fill yet. I dont even know if I plan to do so, I may just put something else in those places.

Your content is poorly written with bad grammar and spelling.

Short of normal typos, which I am certainly guilty of, I dont see this too much unless the blog is written by someone for whom english isnt their first language. That said. Try to write intelligently.

Your blog has no visuals that appeals to the readers.

I couldnt agree more. (hence why I posted the photos of my Tee Shirt Model – hee hee) This DOES NOT MEAN you should fill every post with 20 images. But post appropriate graphs and/or illustrations.

Your blog is not usable at all.

I a not sure what they meant by this one. Perhaps they mean blogs where most of the functions dont work and there is a script error message across the top all the time. You cant have much credibility with your readers if you cant even get your blog to function correctly.

Your blog does not link out to any other.

Let me expand on this. Your blog does not link out to any other OR you only link to your friends. People are too stingy with links IMO. How many people link out to bloggers such as Shoemoney or John Chow or a number of others – now go look at who they link to. DOnt be stingy. If you find a blog or website that you like and think your readers would like, share it. (kinda like I am doing in this post)

Your blog and its content is not search engine optimized.

Well, this is a good thing to do, but I wouldnt say your blog sucks if itsnt SEO’d. I gotta disagree wtih them on this one.

Your blog has no information about how to contact you (or who you even are).

I am half guilty on this one. I stil need to creat an About Joeychgo page. BUT the Contact Joeychgo page works just fine!

You do not have a statistic/analysis meter.

I have several, but I think they were reaching on this one.

You don’t network with other bloggers.

This is hard to do. But you can also see the "Your blog does not link out to any other" line above.

Your blog is not using permalinks.

I think they were reaching on this one.

Your blog has no focal point whatsoever.

Hmmm— Not sure what the mean on this one.

Your blog’s home page has no comments in any of the posts.

Uh, every post doesnt get commented on, and doesnt necessarily get commented on fast enough to be on the homepage.

You don’t do anything to promote you and your blog.

I gotta go along with this one. I am often amazed by people who think that "if they build it, readers will come". You have to promote and promote often and continously.

You put no effort into blogging.

Yup, I gotta go here too. WHy bother if your not putting any time or effort into your blog?  Stop cluttering up the internet.

Meander on over to slyvisions.com and take a look. They have alot of good content and articles.

A cool “stripe” appears at the very top of your blog, where you can place text ads. The ad itself is simple, easy to use, and you can have multiple ads rotating according to your needs. As WordPress Plugins goes, Stripe Ad seems to be a pretty well designed and easy to deal with plugin. There are tons of options to control the look and feel of your ads. Installation is also very simple – just download the Plugin, unzip, upload to your WordPress Plugins folder and activate. All the Plugin controls will be located in the WordPress Options section under MBP Stripe Ad.

There is alot you can control as well, such as the size and colors of the ads, how often they are displayed and more. I really like the fact you can rotate ads.

 You can get the plugin at MAXBLOGPRESS for free.

John Chow is already selling ads for $250 a month in this space. He already has 4 sold. $1000 a month in new income for a tiny piece of real estate on your blog. Not bad huh?   I need to start selling ad space here, although I would prefer to get my readership up a bit first.

MaxBlogPress has other plugins available as well such as the MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup, BlogRush Click Maximizer and the Different Posts Per Page plugins.

Take a look.

WordPress 2.3.2 has been released and includes a number of changes including one security fix, here is a list of most of the changes in detail:

• Performance improvements for post sanitization when raw content is required (#5325).
• Changes to is_admin() to ensure that it is only true for admin pages thereby protecting against exposing draft posts. (#5487).
• Suppression of database errors unless WP_DEBUG is true (#5473).
• Check for valid database connection information during install and display and error if the install fails due to database rights (#5495).
• Support for a custom database down page to be displayed on database connection errors (#5500).
• Changes to make sure we are more selective in what we make clickable, this introduces different rules for different uri types ([6450]).
• Changes to wp-mail.php to escape the error messages when displaying them to avoid a possible XSS attack (#5484).
• Changes to ensure that the post password is only exposed by the xmlrpc method metaWeblog.getRecentPosts to users with rights to edit a post (#5535).
• Changes to the information exposed the wp.getAuthors xmlrpc method to reduce the information exposed and add a capabilites check (#5534).
• Addition of extra capabilites checks to xmlrpc methods ([6504]).
• Addition of extra capabilites checks to APP server ([6508]).
• Changes to validate_file() to improve its traversal attempt detection when running on windows ([6521]).

For a complete list of all the changes you can read this section of the branches/2.3 log.

Ok – one thing I am doing for 2008 is pushing into a more aggressive approach with Affiliate marketing. Up until now, I have mainly placed Affiliate ads on my sites and used my forum newsletters to further advertise related products.

For those of you who might not know, Affiliate marketing is similar to selling something on commission. You place the ad on your site and if someone buys a product after clicking the link on your site, you get a commission. Sometimes its a percentage, sometimes its a flat fee. It just depends on the advertiser. This can be highly profitable if you have a strong site and a related product.

I have also done some minimal advertising on Google Adwords. I puchase ads on certain keywords and those ads go to whats called a Landing Page. In online marketing a landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines. Until now I have used this exclusively to advertise one product and on one keyword.

There was an ebook released recently with a target audience of people just like me (and many of you) and the book is FREE and called The Adwords Quality Guide – Free E-Book. It’s free, you might want to have a look.

My intention is to expand and become more aggressive with my online marketing. I intend to place ads on some pretty competitive, high traffic (and expensive) keywords and really try to push my overall revenue. My first goal is $5,000 a month in gross revenue from this method. The basic idea is simple. I place an ad on adwords and bring prople to a landing page where I try to sell them on a product or number of products wherby if they buy, I make a large enough commission per sale that ultimately I profit. The danger is that I pay more for advertising then I earn in commissions. The hope is that I earn more commissions then advertising costs me. With the numbers I am working with, there is a risk I could lose significantly, but it’s a gamble I am willing to take. Winners have to gamble to win. The key, is to only take calculated risks and adjust strategy quickly to minimize losses.

Identified by BitDefender as Trojan.Qhost.WU, the malware modifies the infected computer’s Hosts file, which is a local storage for domain name and IP address mappings and is consulted before domain name servers.

The modified file contains a line redirecting the host ‘page2.googlesyndication.com’. This should point to an IP of a different address. This means the infected machine’s browser read ads from the server at a replacement address rather than at Google.

"This damages both users," says BitDefender virus analyst Attila-Mihaly Balazs, "because the advertisements and the linked sites may contain malicious code – a very likely situation, given that they are promoted using malware in the first place.

"The webmasters are also hit because the malware takes away viewers and possible advertising revenue from their websites."

BitDefender says its software can delete the Trojan.

-also-

US online ad revenues set new high at $5.2 billion

Online advertising is continuing its inexorable march with more than 25 per cent growth recorded in the US over the last 12 months. The report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers , released this week, shows that internet advertising revenues exceeded $5.2 billion for the third quarter of 2007, representing "another historic high" for a quarter, and a $1.1 billion increase over the same period for 2006.

Now, John Chow often talks about Forex trading. Im not a trader and know nothing about forex. I never received an email about Forex before. But now, after signing up to John Chow’s rss subscription I keep getting these spammy emails about forex trading. For example:

———- ADVERTISEMENT ———-

Dear Trader,

Last week, I alerted you to the re-release of the step-by-step
Forex Profit Accelerator course that’s totally taken the Forex
trading community by storm.

Well, if you’ve checked the website lately, then you know that
only 67 copies of the course remain and the offer will be closed
for good on Tuesday, December 18th, at 11:59pm eastern time.

See the latest inventory count here:

(Link Deleted by Joeychgo)

Now the only conclusion I can draw is that John Chow is either spamming directly or is selling his mailing lists to others. Either that or its a crazy coincidence. Personally, I think it’s wrong to sell your email lists. I am a forum owner and have probably over 100,000 emails stored from my various forum members. I think of selling email lists from such things to be analogous with email spam.  Has anyone else noticed this?

Maybe i’ll have to start reading John Cow’s blog instead (notice the spelling difference) – after all, that comes up #1 for a search of John Chow. (LOL – Google Sucks)

?

?

I’m not going to tell you.

Well, not just yet. See if I posted the URL of the website, you would just ignore my little blog here and go to the 300+ plugin page. So I’m going to make you read a little bit before I give it to you.

I came across this on a post by Zhuli at the bloggeries.com forum. They are shaping up to be a pretty nice little site there.

Back to the plugins. This is just a reference site, they dont host or support the plugins, but they list them and link to them to make them easy to find. Here are just a few of the plugins they list that I found interesting:

• AjaxWP – Adds AJAX to all aspects of your WordPress site, which speeds up the load times.
• WP e-Commerce – Adds a shopping cart to your WordPress powered site.
• Digital Fingerprint – Adds a digital fingerprint to your posts so you can search the web to see if your content has been scraped.
• EasyPayPal – Allows you to accept payments for many services including subscriptions, trial periods, and more.
• PhotoZip – Allows you to upload a .zip file to create an image gallery.
• PodPress – Full featured plugin for podcasters including feed generation, iTunes preview, and download stats.
• YouTube Video Gallery – Displays thumbnails for any gallery from YouTube.
• WP-Footnotes – Allows you to add footnotes to a more detailed post.

Oh yeah, there are a bunch of free wordpress themes on this site also.

So, wanna know where to see this wonderful list? Scroll down to my blogroll on the bottom right.  

Now there is a little lesson on how to make someone read a whole post. Marketing. Remember folks, its all about marketing.

I am trying to figure out a few things. First, what is it that triggers the pagerank penalty for selling links? And second, what is a safe method of link building from here forward.

I have been looking at a number of sites trying to develop a theory regarding linking. Google has said Dont Sell Links. The first problem with this is that I have seen a number of sites that dont sell links penalized. A good example of this is vBulletin.com. vBulletin does not sell links, period. Neither does vBulletin.org. However, both took a PR hit. vBulletin.com has been a PR 7 for as long as I can remember and now is a PR 6, and vB.org has been a PR 6 and was reduced to a PR 5.

However, vBadvanced.com also was a PR 7, and managed to keep it’s pagerank level.

Why?

It’s a mystery to me.

vBulletin.com does have a scrolling bar on the left where they feature forums owned by it’s customers. You cannot buy your way into this list, they have to select you. They generally list you if they consider you to be a good customer with a solid and popular forum. But they also keep this list short. (I have 2 of my forums listed in that list, vBulletin-faq.com and lincolnvscadillac.com) They title this list "Featured Forums".

vBadvanced.com has a similar sidebar list where only a handful of forums are listed (vBulletin-faq.com is also listed from there) – This list is simply of other related sites of interest, which they label "Links of Interest".

vBulletin.org ONLY links to a few other official vBulletin sites. No other external links at all.

There is one other factor to consider. The PR of incoming links. When Google implemented this penalty many sites took a pagerank loss. Some more then others. But regardless, their PR strength was reduced and the sites they link to naturally took reductions in PR strength.

Now, lets turn to statscounter.com. This site was a PR 9 before the penalty. They sold a handful of links on their homepage. They reduced to a PR 6 when the penalty was implemented. They placed nofollow tags on their outgoing  links and almost immediately received a PR 10.

SO, this is a real puzzle. I am having a hard time figuring out this one. What concerns me most isnt the ability to sell links. It’s the ability to effectively obtain links to my sites.

More to come…   Please leave comments about your thoughts and theories.

IPOWER hosting is offering a winter special.

IPOWER Pro Plan at $4.95/month for both 1 and 2 year plans. You can lock in 2 years at under $5 a month!

Before any of you ask – nope -shes NOT naked, her hair just happens to fall that way in this video. (Although she tells me she has joked about doing Naked SEO reports) – I think that would be a great breakthrough for the SEO community 

I gotta tell you, I cant wait to meet this girl at a conference. (Shame she’s not going to SES Chicago) She really seems to be on the ball. (and cute too!)   Great news on the Pam front. She is putting together a new site for herself. She’s still building it – so I’ll tell you about it when it is ready for public consumption.

Ok – enough, onto her SEO Conference Guide for girls.

Let me explain a little. I live in a suburb of Chicago. Villa Park is a small suburb of about 22,000 people. Since I moved here and bought a home, I’ve become interested in local politics. Being that I have, well, a big mouth, I’ve become a bit known in the circle of local politicians. (in a good way, I think) A new issues has come up for our village, we are having a referendum in Feburary to enact home rule. I’m involved with trying to get this initiative passed and we are forming a citizens Committee for Villa Park Home Rule.

Naturally, the first thing on my mind was "We need a website!" So I registered a domain, Villa Park Home Rule, nd have started to build a blog on the domain. This site needs to be informational. Since the election is in just under 3 months, I dont have much time to do traditional offpage SEO, and that wont likely help much anyway. I dont know people are going to search for terms such as "Illinois Home Rule" and "Villa Park", so I’ll chase those keywords. One of the tricks is going to be to get local newspapers to link to us. If I can accomplish that we should be able to get the rankings and traffic to get the information out there. ANother method I think I will use is the Digital Point COOP Ad Network, since its free and quick. I’ll talk more about the DP COOP at a later date.

Anyway, so I have a pretty good challenge on my hands with this one. But that’s how we learn, through experience.

I had a look at your website today. Very impressive site design.

My Thoughts

Domain Name
Very easy and catchy. Good on ya… in getting a domain name that goes with your own name.

Logo
I love the logo. I would only recommend enlarging the ‘www.joeychgo.com’ slightly. Right now… I can barely read it.

Template
I had a look at your template with 3 different browsers and they all worked well. Good to see that you put so much work into making it work with cross platforms.

Photos Page
I was a bit confused when I went to your photos page. The template widen to full page and the top right navigation buttons changed. Would it be possible to keep the template and navigation consistent throughout the site?

Book Store
I also found this page a little off from the others. I think it was the ‘Popular Articles’, ‘Recent Comments’ and ‘Top Moneymakers’… that was missing… I would recommend keep some of the stuff… for visitors ease of navigation and familiarity.

Contact Form
It works!

Content
The content of your site is excellent. Good to read a site that has excellent content.

W3C Validation
I’m not to sure if it is a concern for you. But I did do a test with W3C validation and it came up with 32 errors.

Conclusion
Very impressive site… just a few things to touch up.

This review was done with 3 browsers (FireFox 2.0.0.9, Internet Explorer 6.02 & Opera 9.24) on Windows XP SP2.

The other comment I noticed was a few people felt I should post more. I can tell you, this is my intention. I am still getting used to posting frequently and staying on topic. I am really trying to refrain from posting about my personal life or politics, which is one of my favorite topics. But its taking some getting used to. My intention is to get up to about 10 posts per week on average. Aside from that, thank you all who have commented. Please feel free and encouraged  to leave comments here about how I can improve this blog.

Forums, blogs, etc all can use this same method for selling banner ads on your site. First thing you want to do is create an advertising page that explains your advertising rates and ad spot positions as well as things such as payment methods.

I prefer to sell ads on an annual basis, but you can sell them any way you like, monthly, weekly, quarterly, etc. I prefer an annual basis because its less work for me, and it gives the advertiser a more attractive price. You dont lose money on giving a more attractive price because if you sell monthly you will have some advertisers who only want a one month ad and they will balance out with the advertisers who pay full price for an annual ad. It all equals out, more or less but ends up with less work for you if you sell annually.

There are 2 basic types of banner ads. Static ads that are present every time the page is viewed and rotating ads that change between a number of advertisers every time the page is viewed. It is good to offer both kinds of ads so you have a range of pricing available for advertisers. Some advertisers sell products that are inexpensive and they must sell a large volume of product to pay for an ad. If you offer them an ad in rotation, they will have a lower cost since you can split the cost of the ad space among several advertisers for the same spot.

Determining price really is a guessing game in some respects. I look at similar sites with similar traffic and a similar topic and try to determine what a good price will be. All of this goes into my advertising information page.

So now you’ve made your advertising information page.  How do you find advertisers? There are 3 simple ways. First, look at similar sites and contact people who advertise on those sites. Contact them via email and link to your advertising information page. Dont forget to include a little about your site and why advertising on your site is a good idea for them. Remember, your selling. Be a salesman. The second way I find advertisers is to check the Google Adwords ads that come up on a Google search for your particular topic. These above 2 ways are good because these companies are already advertising on the web, so you know they are interested in advertising, you just have to sell them on your site. The third way is to ask your forum members for leads. You simply make a post asking your members to tell you the best places to get the products your site is based on. They will often tell you all you want to know. Now you email those companies as well.

Remember, be professional in your correspondence. Dont be spammy. You’ll get better results and you’ll find advertisers stick around much longer if they think they are dealing with a professional.

Caching is also getting tweaked in 2.4. So all you bloggers out there can look forward to the next release being a bit better performance wise and easier on your server load.

How about the top ten reasons for using wordpress.

10. WordPress has millions of themes.
Your blog will undoubtedly have something great and unique to bring to the table, why not have a great theme to help you get a even more unique image. Best of all, you can get a theme from a collection hosted by WordPress. Even better, don’t like any themes you have seen or you see one but want to change a few things around? With a little coding knowledge you can edit your theme seamlessly in the WordPress Administration Control Panel(WP-ADMIN).

9. WordPress also has a large database of plugins.
Plugins are another great part of WordPress that give you more control over your blog. You can have plugins that help you post podcasts on WordPress, plugins that deal with AdSense, there are even plugins to add bulletin boards to your WordPress installation! Again, WordPress makes it easy for you to find plugins you might need with their WordPress Plugin Directory.

8. WordPress news is delivered straight to your Administration Panel.
With seven years in the real world equaling one online, it is always important to stay on top of things. WordPress makes this easy by posting select top bloggers posts into your administration panel. These include plugin and theme releases for the day as well as information about upgrades of WordPress.

7.WordPress is used the world over.
Wordpress is used quite often. People from professional base ball players to soccer moms blog everyday about their lives and they can do it easily thanks to WordPress. WordPress is not just for the technologically elite either. According to Weblogtoolscollection.com, 0.8% of the internet is run by WordPress, within a few years that number could be 2-2.5%.

6. Famous bloggers use WordPress.. Everyone from John Chow to I use WordPress. Being flexible is the only way to survive today in the business world. You have to be ready to focus your blogging on a specific issue in a short amount of time if you want to be productive.

5. WordPress is easy to install.
In some cases, you can have your WordPress installation ready to go in as little as five minutes. If you have a host that uses cPanel with Fantastico, your install process is a snap, and you can be blogging in mere seconds. Also, if you ever have any problems installing WordPress Support Forums are open 24/7.

4.You don’t need your own hosting!
It is true! WordPress is availible free from WordPress.com. You can post on your blog hosted for free as much as you like, however, it is only a free host. WordPress.com also has a stringent attitude at paid posting, something that can influence your monetization strategy and your writing style.

3.WordPress is simple to maintain.
Day to Day maintenance does not exist! The only thing you have to worry about is upgrading to the newest version, which you should always do. WordPress releases are usually not for minor fixes, but for important security fixes. Therefore, if you wish to keep your blog secure, you should upgrade as soon as possible when WordPress release a new release. The upgrading process is simple and takes even less time than installing your blog!

2. WordPress lets you be yourself.
Whether you want just a single blog or you want to start a blog network you can use WordPress to do it. WordPress has had WordPress MU(WordPress Multi User) availible for FREE for a great while, so you can start your own popular blog network with nothing more than a shared hosting account,a domain name, and an idea.

1. WORDPRESS IS FREE.
That’s right you can get one of the most versatile blogging platforms for FREE. Why on Earth would you not use something that could let you express yourself, let you earn some extra cash, and that is FREE. WordPress might have some problems with it, but the pros tremendously outweigh the cons!

From Krispy Blogging News

I know alot about alot of things, mostly related to forums. Blogs are new to me in some ways. One big way is how to promote them. in some ways I feel like a newbie, reading articles and forums looking for answers, disecting how other popular bloggers such as Shoemoney and John Chow get their traffic, and drawing on my forum experience.

I have a long way to go. There is alot I need to learn about ways to popularize my blog. Posting frequently is certainly a key component, but so is posting well. I am already making a list of articles I want to write in the hopes that people who read them will also tell others about what they have read. Thats called viral marketing. At the same time I ahve to get people to actually find and read this blog. Partly that will come from Search Engine traffic, but alot will come from me getting the word out that im writing a blog and that I have some interesting things here. I ask anyone reading this post to help me in that endeavor.

One thing caught my eye on Digital Point today. Someone posted about an article they had written regarding how to get more comments on a blog. One of the replies was:

Nice tips. I prefer getting comments since this beats coming up with new topics yourself.

Let me tell you something. If your main reason for getting comments is so you dont have to post more original content, get rid of your blog. Writing on your blog shouldn’t be a chore. If your too lazy to write original content, then just feed in some rss feeds and forget about the blog world. You might as well because if you dont enjoy posting on your blog then your just spinning your wheels. I like people’s comments because it gives me an idea of how my posting is being received. I also have the TOP COMMENTATORS plugin so you get a free link if your one of the top commentators on my blog. I do this to encourage comments.

Now, the hardest thing I have had to do was keep coming up with new and relevant content. Trouble being only that my instinct is to post about stuff in my personal life. I have had to really work to keep myself from doing that. The second question I have to ask myself is how to discuss forum related topics here. I also own a forum, vBulletin FAQ, which is one of the top vBulletin help sites around. My concern is how do I post here and not neglect that site as well. I havent worked that one out yet. but I will in time.

"Four and a half days of search, all search and nothing but search. SES is the biggest and oldest conference in this space. Seasoned search maven or hopeful newbie, you’ll find speakers who share expertise, new research, horizon’s edge views and knuckles-in-the code tactics.

I’ve attended this conference for the last 4 years, and I got to tell you, even if your a newbie to SEO you should consider attending. Even if just to attend the expo (which is free if you register now) and go to no training sessions, its a great exsperience. I’ll be there for sure, along with many other SEO heavyweights.

Thisis a great opportunity to learn alot about SEO and SEM.

"Pam" who is now filming a weekly video for Shoemoney’s Blog, talks about Search Engine Marketing and SEO events. YouTube hosted, Pam talks about all kinds of things related to the internet and of interest to webmasters, bloggers and forum owners.I have watched this for two episodes now and I am impressed.

Look at the marketing behind it. Pretty girl who is broadcasting relevant news = more readership for shoemoney. This is classic marketing and a great job Jeremy. Kudos!   Learn a lesson folks. This is how you market your website. Develop new things and discuss things people want to read about and will tell others about. Thats what website promotion is all about.

I recently had custom embroidered jackets made for a few of my websites. Forum owners especially know how hard it is to do decent custom clothing. Most suppliers want relatively large minimum orders and costly digitizing fees. Well, I found a guy who generally doesnt require minimum orders and who doesnt charge an arm and a leg to digitize a logo for embroidery.

Champs Clothing - 708-277-5067 – the owner’s name is Jim. His work is great. just clic the image and see a few pics of some of the jackets he’s made for me already. The best part is that he isnt expensive! Jackets such as the one pictured run about $55 each and he makes them for you as you need them, so you dont have to buy 24 or 48 of them at a time and then never seem to have the size you need. Give him a call and tell him Joeychgo sent you!   I think I’ll have a few things made with my new Joeychgo.com logo and we’ll have a contest or two!

Oh, and in case your wondering – he isnt a aid advertiser or anything, and I dont make a nickle if you buy anything. I try to pass on good sources that can help other website owners and this is just one of those sources I felt the need to pass on.

I read about it on almost every blog and forum I go to. Some people are near panic, seeing their pagerank drop dramatically, then drop yet again, and yet again. My thoughts on this are simple.

Google is broken. What else is new.

Google breaks it’s own rule on this one. According to the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines we should "Make pages for users, not for search engines." – Yet we are told though Matt Cutts that we should use rel=nofollow tags if we are selling links. Guess what Google. Kiss my ass.

Yeah, thats right. I said it.  Kiss my ass Google.

Why do I make such a blunt statement? Simple. Many very important, relevant and prominant sites lost alot of pagerank on this update, or penalty or whatever it is. But search rankings held. Do you really think these sites are going to freely give up the income that paid links provides? Nope. Some sites charge hundreds of dollars a month for a link. And dont kid yourself. People buy links for reasons besides PR transfer. People buy links for traffic as well. I buy links from time to time and its mainly for the traffic the link might provide. And if Google next decides to penalize search result rankings, guess what? They will wreck their index and be forced to start showing less relevant and less popular sites as top in the SERPS. Hell, forbes.com and washingtonpost.com even took big hits to their PR. Wanna drop them from your search index too Google?

 Barry Schwartz of SEO Roundtable says it best:

I trust my sponsors, I value their sponsorships and I couldn’t do what I do without their financial support. Some sponsors can’t afford huge sponsorships, so they sponsor in their ways. It is what enables this site and many other sites to function and operate on a daily basis. I turn down sponsors all the time because they are simply not relevant or useful to my reader. I hand select them and for them to be on my site, means I trust them. Why nofollow someone you trust and want to thank? Is that a slap in their face? Will I have to and will they continue to sponsor? Time will tell.

In my opinion, this is a great opportunity for Yahoo to jump into the fray. Google may be all powerful, but it isnt the whole internet. I sometimes think Google forgets the strength of the webmasters in all this and the strength of it’s pagerank feature from a  marketing standpoint. While we all sweat PR updates, we are all talking about Google. Its free marketing. And there is only one reason to give a rats ass about pagerank… It is an indication of your website’s value for link sales. Thats it. Pagerank has no or a minimal affect on a website’s ranking in the search engine. To me its little more then a gold star on my spelling paper. Who cares.

Aaron Wall , the Author of SEO Book, said:

Since Google is demoting PageRank’s viability as a site’s global authority score perhaps this is a time for Yahoo to bring back WebRank, or Ask to launch something like CommunityRank. The Google-webmaster relationship is fraying. This presents an opportunity for whoever wants to take it.

Many webmasters I have talked to are pissed. I say to hell with PR. I hope Yahoo gets smart and comes out with something similar right now. I bet they can snatch the spotlight from Google. Personally, I think Google needs to be taken down a few notches. Evernotice how everything Google does is intended to penalize the very same people who provide it with a substantial portion of its profitability? Go ahead Google, start penalizing rankings next and watch your adsense revenue drop. Lets call it — SmartPricing, in reverse.

Sorry I havent posted much this month. Many things have been hapening that kept me from posting. One of my best friends passed away after a motorcycle accident earlier this month. David O’Donnell was 29. His loss was tragic to say the least. Honestly, posting on the blog wasnt my top priority. At the same time, I was remodeling the blog

As you might notice, my blog has a new and improved look and many new features. For starters, I am trying to brand Joeychgo.com into a blog many webmasters, forum administrators and bloggers can come to for information and to read my spin on things. 

I also have added the Top Commentators plugin so that those of you who leave comments can battle to be listed. The way it works is simple. The more comments you ahve, the better chance you have to get a free link from this blog without a nofollow tag. The top commentators get a link. Here is the catch, your comments expire after a period of time so you have to keep posting in order to remain on the list. (spammy comments, links or BS posts WILL be deleted and you’ll get banned, so please, make the posts decent)

Also – you can now subscribe to our blog newsletter!   Please do so! You’ll get notification when I make new posts.

I have also added a photo gallery and a book store. There are a few other things I am still working on, but the basics are together. I hope you like the blog and enjoy my posting. If yo do, please consider adding joeychgo.com to your blogroll.

So, how about some comments about the new design?

The contest is to see who can get the most new RSS subscribers in October. The winner will get bragging rights and a link on the other person’s blog. I respect both of these guys as expert marketers and already subscribe to both of their blogs.

John Chow came out swinging. While Shoemoney made a simple announcement on his blog about the contest, John Chow came out with a contest of his own to lure more new subscribers. The beautiful thing about a contest like this is that they both win as this is the type of viral marketing that will draw new readers to both of their sites. So this is as much a team effort as it is a competition between them. Thats your first lesson in marketing – anything to get your name out there.

This should be quite an interesting battle, and I look forward to watching the contest develop over the next month. We should see some great marketing from these guys.

I have a new logo in the works. I am pretty happy with it and we are just making minor changes and tweaks to it. I also have a blog designer working on the new theme for this site. Both will help give this site a good solid ‘look’. What you want with a blog such as this really is differentiate yourself from the millions of other blogs out there. Your blog appearance is step one of doing that. The next thing you need to do is demonstrate some expertise in something people want to read about. That will be the next step. The first part of that step will be creating a powerful "About The Author" page. Im not sure how I want to go about that yet. I feel like its bragging, which is not something I want to do. But, I have some ideas that maybe wont look like bragging. So stay tuned.

There are several reasons for this. First, I updated my blogging software, and my theme wouldnt really work well with some of the changes. So, I have this temporary theme up. I am adding some features to the blog, and have hired a blog design professional to redesign joeychgo.com.

I have been working on the internet for almost 4 years now. My how time flies. Up until recently, I have not really had much of an overall strategy, but kinda jumped around from one project to the next. This summer I have done alot of thinking about how I could better plan the future in order to better expand and grow my online business further.

So in the coming weeks, you will see many changed. I plan to increase my posting considerably and plan to focus more on being a webmaster. I will still include my personal and political posting, but plan to speak alot more about being a webmaster, how to earn money online, search engine optimization, forum management and many other similar topics.

So, look forward to what I hope to be a pretty good transformation of Joeychgo.com.

See for your self HERE - The missle was flying north through Southern Utah. I have no clue where it was coming from, but I assume it was from a military plane and shot as practice. That region of the country has alot of US Air Force test ranges.

 

 

About a week ago, I installed a WP Plugin that allowss RSS feeds to be published on a blog. I included just a few feeds, just to test it out and see if I like the idea.

Well, I checked my comments today and found this one: Who gave you permission to use my complete content and place your advertisements next to it?

I wont reveal the author of this comment, but it was someone who’s feed I was using. I sent him an apology email and removed his feed from the list.

But it got me thinking. What is proper for using feeds? What is legal? So I did a little searching.

Jim Moore, of Harvard Law School, explains:

RSS content is also part of a worldwide web commons. When you put it out, you presume if will be read, used, aggregated, etc. If you want to create a private feed, do so. If you want to feed only headlines and summaries, like the New York Times, do that. It is entirely your choice.

But don’t get all self-righteous and attack services like TopTenSources or Pubsub or Bloglines or Squidoo or Blogbridge or Newsgator or Yahoo or Google feeds who try to make content findable and useful. If you want to participate with your content, do so. If you don’t, don’t. But don’t try to regulate innnovation and downstream processing of the commons.

That was my thinking as well. When you place a “syndicate me” box on your blog, and include the links to your feeds, aren’t you asking for people to use your feed? There are no copyright designations on the blog in question (although after looking there was on in the feed itself), no TOS regarding usage of the RSS feed, nothing to indicate I needed permission to use the feed.

For example, the NY Times has this statement on their RSS FAQ Page

We encourage the use of NYTimes.com RSS feeds for personal use in a news reader or as part of a non-commercial Web site or blog. We require proper format and attribution whenever New York Times content is posted on your Web site, and we reserve the right to require that you cease distributing NYTimes.com content. Please read the Terms and Conditions for complete instructions.

As you can see, they clearly spell out how you may or may not use their RSS feed.

As I see it, if you dont want your feed used, dont place it out there for public consumption. At least make sure you have some indication of how someone may or may not use the feed. It doesnt mean much to me as far as this blog is concerned, because I dont think I want to continue displaying other people’s feeds. But its an interesting issue and something blog publishers should consider. Most blogs dont even contain a manner in which to contact the author to ask for permission. Its a dilemma from where I sit.

This is also something of interest to the vBulletin community. With the upcoming release of vBulletin 3.6, RSS feed syndication is a feature that is in the new version. Basically, a feed will be turned into threads on your forum.

I see it as a plus because you can offer your users quicker access to related news and resources. However, I do see this exact same issue becoming a problem. fter all, it wouldnt take much to set up a vBulletin with 50 -100 feeds. No members, just RSS feeds. What are the legalities of such a situation? What about the ethics? Its an interesting problem.