Apple today made iOS 4.0.2 available to the iPhone and iPod Touch. iOS 4.0.2 specifically fixes the browser and PDF-related bug that allowed the iPhone to be more easily hacked and controlled. No other new features were noted by Apple. It is recommended for the iPhone 3G, 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPod Touch 2nd and 3rd generations. Apple has already distributed several beta versions of iOS 4.1 to developers. This is not iOS 4.1. Apple also made iOS 3.2.2 available to the iPad to fix a similar problem.

from Apple

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…

Forget about PageRank.

I mean it. Take the Google toolbar off your browser and forget about Google Pagerank completely. Pagerank is really nothing more then a manipulation and marketing tool Google uses. It causes people to focus on what Google wants and keeps you focused on Google. Hence, it keeps you from thinking about other search engines.

Instead, focus on things like where a site ranks in the search engines and what kind of traffic it gets. Wanna buy links? Do it. But do it because of traffic, not because of some Google created measure. PageRank is but one of over 100 factors in search engine placement. Why do people worry about it so much?

Advertise on strong sites with good traffic and you’ll be fine. Focus on search engine placement, and Forget about PageRank completely. You’ll be more successful.

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.

The big problem I have is that it drowns out the real email and increases the chance that I’ll miss an important email from a legitimate person. Now this is something I really wish the government would step in and deal with.

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.

I can tell you this, Comcast should just get rid of its customer service department because its doing more harm then good as far as from where I sit. They dont know anything, seem to not be able to do anything and really seem as if they could care less.

Anyway – Sorry I havent been posting much. But im hoping to get back on track here real quick.

This is something I have considered very important for a long time and I believe accounts for my success, and something I am always looking to enhance. This is a top question in my mind for this blog. I am looking to establish an edge here, a point of difference. That is how you win customers, having a point of difference. Im still looking to define that here. Anyone have suggestions?

 Shoemoney just posted a video where he talks about this. Take a look:

Sub Domains To now be Considered The Same As Folders By Google?

Tedster from Webmaster World said:

News flash from Las Vegas PubCon. Matt Cutts informed us that Google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains. We didn’t get any more information than just that basic heads-up.

An interesting question is what will happen to people from BlogSpot? If this happen what will be the blogspot subdomains owners? There are thousands of people who opens blogs with blogspot and their address will be “yourname.blogspot.com” which is under a subdomain. They may now lose their rankings, although, much of their rankings really are not earned. They really leach PR off of blogspot.

But thinking positive, there are many spammers on blogspot to earn some good backlinks gaining an unfair SEO advantage by opening blogspot with no quality posts.

Personally, I like the idea. I dont use subdomains myself because I feel they are generally unecessary. But it does give an SEO advantage. For example – if you look do a Google search for "vBulletin" you see the following:

My site, vBulletin-FAQ, is only outranked by official Google websites and Wikipdia – but vBulletinSetup has 2 listings on page one because of the usage of a subdomain. It’s not 2 different sites, but Google has always treated them as such. I see many examples of this and hope this will level the playing field.

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.

The numbers are flashed briefly, and have to be recalled in numerical order. In each successive trial, the numbers are flashed for a briefer time. In this task, the performance of the humans worsened with each successive trial; the performance of this chimp remains consistent throughout. Watch the video. I know I couldnt beat the chimp. Do you think you could?

 In the video Pam talks about designing with SEO in mind even if your client hasn’t paid you for SEO.

 My personal opinion is that whenever I design a site, I have SEO in mind. If the client wants to hire me for off page SEO that would be seperate, but I do my on page SEO regardless. Watch the video and see what Pam says about website design and SEO.

You can see more of Pam at her new site – http://www.thatpamchick.com/

 – BTW Pam, I dont have a wife

In a recent poll, 58.3 per cent of you thought that when the chips are down, Google’s own brand of ethical leadership will melt under the weight of business real politics.

Not all of you are so cynical though; 16.7 per cent thought the face of business will change as more companies seek to do good, not bad. A quarter of you thought it a silly question, and fair enough too.

Im in the 58% column. I see it already happening with things such as smartpricing and the recent text link selling penalty. Google is only out for Google these Days. You dont hear too much about Google doing more to help the individual webmaster earn more money, only about things Google does to enhance it’s own revenue. Try to place an Adwords ad, and when there are no other ads watch Google, all of a sudden, tell you that your .25 a click bid isnt good enough to have your ad placed. In one breath they tell you to improve your page quality, but, that page quality is just fine if you want to pay .40 a click. I guess page quality has a price too.

God I wish a decent competitor would show up on the landscape. Google desperately needs a competitor, and so do we.

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.

I mainly use Commission Junction for affiliate programs. There are basically 2 types of affiliate programs. One is where a company pays you a commission directly for selling only their product, such as Aaron Wall and his SEO BOOK. Aaron pays you $25 for every book sold through your link. The second is a company such as Commission Junction who handles the affiliate programs for a number of companies and products.

If you look on Commission Junction (after you sign up) you see there are literally hundreds of different affiliate programs available on topics ranging from shoes to travel. Liklihood is there is at least one program that fits your website niche. Basically it works like this. Once your a registered publisher on Commission Junction, you choose an affiliate program(s) that you like. You get the code for the ad banner (or text link) from CJ and place the banner on your website. If you have an automotive forum for example, you might choose affiliate programs for car parts companies. If you have a website that attracts mostly women, maybe an affiliate program for purses and clothing would be more appropriate for you.

But, it doesnt have to end with just placing a banner ad and waiting for the money to come to you. You can be more aggressive about it. One way, and this is especially true if you have a forum, is to send an email to your members suggesting they check out the site (via your affiliate link). This can be a very handy way to push sales. I dont mind this kind of email marketing on my forums because forum users have the option to disallow admin emails f they wish (and I dont violate that wish)

You can also do some adwords advertising to draw people to your affiliate program. First, you make a page on your website that helps sell the product (and contains your affiliate link) and you place your Google Adwords ad to point to that page. You can also have the adwords ad go directly to the affiliate website. (some publishers do not allow this so check) This is an area I plan to do alot of work on in the coming months. There can sometimes be a market imbalance and I want to take advantage of that. By market imbalance I mean you will pay less for clicks on adwords then you earn off the affiliate commissions you earn from those clicks.

OK – thats the first round of basics.  More to come. Tell me, do you use any affiliate programs? Which ones?

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 have just installe Yahoo! Shortcuts on this blog and will try it out. What the hell, I get a free T-Shirt out of it, and maybe I help introduce my readers to a new widget.

As you write your blog post, Shortcuts look for Flickr photos, places, companies, products, people and much more.

If Yahoo! shortcuts finds relevant content, it will let you know. Just click the Review this post button to see what Yahoo found for you.

Ok – thats a stock image. I actually found 2 shortcuts for this post.

I’ll have to play with this for a bit and see how I like it.

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.

Its not that we do anything that great at our parties, but we have a real community of people at LVC (lincolnvscadillac.com). We do things like a secret santa and our Christmas party every year. People hang out,  get to know each other, have a few drinks and form personal friendships OFF the forum.

In my opinion, things like this are what makes a forum great. Drawing people deeper into the community. Keeping them involved and helping them make new friendships offline.

I’ll post a few photos tomorrow and you can see.

Dear Joeychgo:

The ebay.com Affiliate Team wants to notify you that we are experiencing an ongoing reporting delay of up to 48 hours, affecting both Transaction Reports and Performance Reports.  The effect of this delay may be seen in Transaction Reports in the lag time between Posting Date and Event Data of daily transactions.  In Performance Reports, the delay may be seen in incomplete data for “Today” and “Yesterday”.

A small subset of our publisher base may also be affected by a separate reporting issue, which results in a delay in the calculation of the final value fee of a number of Winning Bids/BINs.  As a result, you may temporarily notice reduced revenue commission amounts for successful transactions that posted within the first few days of the month, and again at mid-month.  Note that this issue DOES NOT affect ACRU commissions or counts. 

These issues are surfacing as a result of the surge in traffic tied to the holiday shopping season.  While reporting may be distorted during these specified time periods, please rest assured that tracking and recording of transactions remains fully functional, and publishers will be compensated correctly for all commissions at month end.  These reporting issues are expected to continue through the holiday season and possibly into early 2008, but we are working diligently towards a fix.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you in the meantime.    

Thank you for your understanding and continued support of the program.

Sincerely,

The ebay.com Affiliate Team
ebayaffiliates@cj.com

This apparantly is not only affecting general eBay affilliates but also AuctionAds affiliates as well. I find it both interesting and troubling that eBay already knows these issues will cause REDUCED revenue. Why is it that they dont make a mistake in OUR favor? Ever notice that?

Ok, well, it is what it is. Those of you who are AuctionAds customers need to know about this as well, because AuctionAds is a super ebay affilliate, and as such passes these problems through to you. Don’t blame auctionAds for this, its out of their control. eBay is the problem here. In the meantime, consider this for your upcoming CJ payments, and your eBay portion might be delayed for a month, at least in part.

Ha — Merry Christmas everyone.

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!

Often I find myself working and working and working. Then I dont want to really stop working to get a full dinner. So, this is something I make that is fast, easy and cheap. Now, im not into the whole Eat Healthy thing. So if you are, dont bother reading much more.

Ok – How about some great chili mac?

It easy to make. Here is how fast and simple. You need:

• 1 box Mac n Cheese. (go ahead, cook it up)
• 1 Can chili (whatever brand you prefer – heat per directions)
• 1 Pkg Chili Flavored Raman Noodles. (cook these up too but remove water after cooking and before spice)

Now – Mix this all together in a big bowl. Serve with Bread and Butter if you wish. 

You can add more stuff if you like, such as jalepenos or even frito corn chips.

Feeds 2-4 people. Costs all of about $4. Takes about 15 mins to make. Quick and easy.

High protein and high carb. Lots of energy in this meal.

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.

This is a short video for Pam, but she talks about some good things. Sometimes you want to put out a video that is informational or educational. These kind of videos aren’t likely to spread around the net all by themselves. Well, Pam tells you a little bit about how to market just such a video.

Built out of kevlar and carbon fiber, this miniature figher jet can reach speeds upwards of 280 M.P.H. The models use small jet turbines, functionally identical to those used in actual full-sized jets to achieve remarkable speeds and flying precision.

I did some looking around and found this video of a model B-52 Bomber. Awesome 8 engine jet model requires two people to fly and control this jet. Each jet engine reportedly cost $1,500 a piece. It’s safe to say, you won’t find this model at Toys R US. God these things are cool.

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.

Let me tell you a little about what Thanksgiving means to mean. I am an American, so naturally there is a historical meaning to me as an American. But there is much more meaning for me to the holiday, and really it can be a holiday to everyone.

In my view, Thanksgiving is a day to be thankful for life, health and good fortune. Its a day for me to be thankful for having the friends and family that I have, and to remember those friends and family I have lost. I lost one of my 2 best friends a few months ago to a motorcycle accident, so my thoughts turned to him today frequently, especially since in prior years he was a fixture at my Thanksgiving dinner table.

I also thought alot about the good fortune I have ad working on the internet the last 5 years. I spent 20 years in the restaurant business prior and really became involved in the internet by accident. It has grown into a business I am very fortunate to have.

I am also thanksful for the family I have. My brother spent the day with me today – My father is out of the country (he is a snowbird)but my thoughts turned to him as well. I thought of my late mother and grandmother also today as they too were once fixtures at my thanksgiving dinner table.

What I wish for is that we as Americans could be better understood in the world. As a people, we dont really like war or feeling threatened, and we dont like having to create war or threatening others. The world of the last few years has been a pretty dangerous place, and my wish is that we could all get past that and learn to live with and respect each other a little bit more.

So I hope you all had a good thanksgiving, and I hope you had the opportunity to spend it with some people you care about and who care about you.

This might seem to be a strange piece of advice, but its true for one real simple reason. Your goals and needs for the site are sometimes different then the goals and needs of a particular or even a group of your members. They want what makes sense for them at that moment, your interests lie in the long term health and growth of the community. For example, a member tell you publically, that they want you to have less individual forum catagories. However, while that might look good at the moment, you need to think of the long term health of your community and realize that a new member might not post about a particular topic if there is no forum catagory for it.

This is something I am facing right now on Chicago Velocity. I am preparing to add and remove some forum catagories to that site soon. One of the forums I intend to add is a politics forum. I have posted on Chicago Velocity about doing this to see the kind of response I get from the membership, and some if it has been of the "dont do it" attitude.

Now, a politics forum can be heated and intense, but I have learned over time that if they are moderated correctly, they have a great ability to bring members back to your site frequently and to keep members posting about a particular topic. Even if your forum is not generally about politics, they are very helpful because your forum topic might not be a topic that commands members to return often.

A good example is a car forum. Some members only return to your site when they have to ask a repair question. Since cars (hopefully) dont break down every day, you cant expect much activity from that member. Having a forum for topics such as politics will get members talking to one another about other things and help create and make a feeling of a "community" — This brings them back over and over again, helping you keep activity up. And active forums are more attractive for new members and advertisers.

I have also had occasions where members made a suggestion that I do something, which, while looking good on paper, I know from experience just doesnt work well. A good example of this is vBulletin’s reputation system. I never enable that on my forums because it only leads to bad feelings. Moreover, those bad feelings are not toward another member but toward the site and community in general. This is because the reputation is given anonomously, so there isnt a single person to blame. Additionally, friends tend to give other friends positive rep just because of friendship. So the reputation score really isnt a good indicator of much. As such, it has no real upside to the growth and health of the site, but easily can chase members away.

In fact, my motivation for this blog post comes from a recent email I received from a member of a forum I used to own (but sold). This member has now started his own forum and made the comment in his email that he is starting to realize all that is invilved with owning a forum community.  In his email he made the statement:

I didnt want to see some of the changes you wanted, and now that I have my own forum, god I understand where you were coming from. I apologize on behalf of the members at DSMP(the only good ones from T2G)     —    (T2G was my old site, DSMP is his new forum)

So, think things through before you do them. Don’t just do something or not do something because your members agree or disagree. Try to get them on board, but ultimately it’s your site and the decisions you make will affect the success or failure of the site in the long term. That is my advice.

Right now, I am focusing on my several forum based websites and setting income goals for each. I think all of them could be doing better financially and am looking at ways to improve their profitability. One strong thing I am looking at is the sale of direct banner advertising on each site.

Banner ads can be a powerful means of monetizing a website. This is especially true of forum communities because the userbase tends to be there frequently and the advertisers can get alot of notoriety from ads on a busy forum. They can become the "GO TO" guy for whatever they sell just because they advertise regularily on a forum. You can also encourage a vendor to become part of the community and offer expert advice while hawking their products, which is a win win situation.

I generally focus on 2 types of direct vendor advertising. The first is traditional banner ads, where the vendor purchases the banner space like a billboard. The second method I utilize is to create an enhanced usergroup for members who wish to pay an annual fee. (vBulletin makes this very easy) Then, I ask vendors to give a discount to those members in exchange for free advertising. This might not sound like alot, but imagine 100 or 200 members each paying $35 a year – and now multiply that by several forums. That free advertising you give to those members comes back to you in the form of membership fees and members who benefit from the discounts, which can considerably outperform the cost of their membership. (thus they look upon your management of the community more favorably)

I have to admit, I have been remiss in actively pursuing this type of advertising revenue in the last year. SO its one of the areas I have identified as one I could do much better with.

How about you?

Having a Google AdSense site is a great way to make money. And to create an AdSense site, all you have to do is have a Google AdSense account (which is free), a website or a blog (which is free), and some articles (which are free if you write them yourself). Once you get your site up and running, the AdSense ads will be targeted to your content.

Therefore, those looking for your content will come by, read your articles, and have a high probability of being interested in the targeted ads. Every time someone clicks an ad, you get paid! That is, as long as you have designed your site to maximize AdSense clickthroughs!

Let’s look at seven tips for creating AdSense sites that create money.

#1: Keyword Density

Before you place ads on your site, be sure your keyword density is good. You will want to be sure that the right kinds of ads are placed on your site. A free way to determine what the ads will look like on your site is to go to http://www.resultsgenerator.com/adsense/ and type in your keywords. You will then be able to see exactly what ads would show on your site.

If you don’t like what you see, then you know that you need to make changes to your keywords! You can get keyword suggestions from Results Generator from Overture or from the free trial version of Word Tracker.

#2: Focused

Not only will the ads be based on your keywords, but they will also be based on your content. You definitely want your keywords and your content to match as closely as possible.

#3: Write Often

The more information you have the better. Why? Because the more content you have, the more visitors you get. Many people suggest that you write a new article every day since no one wants to come back to your site to find the same old messages!

#4: Choose The Right Format

AdSense allows you to choose many different ad formats. Research has shown that wider ads are more successful. The top three formats are:

" 336×280 large rectangle
" 300×250 medium rectangle
" 160×600 wide skyscraper

Additionally, the 468×15 horizontal ad link under the navigation bar is also a good bet.

#5: Color Counts

You have the option to create a Google AdSense ad in any color of your choice. The best thing to do is to make your ad blend well with your site color scheme. You should make the border color and the background color the same color as your web site. You will want your text color to either be black or the color of your main content.

When creating your Google AdSense ads it is recommended to use the color scheme and style of your website so that the ads blend in well. Ads without background color and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background color.

#6: Position Counts, Too

It is well known that visitors to a website scan the site to determine if it is worth reading. You definitely want them to see and scan your AdSense ads. Therefore, the best place to put them is in the top left part of your page or directly under your headlines.

#7: Increase The Number

AdSense allows you to use up to three AdSense units on a page, two AdSense search boxes, and one unit of ad links. Using all that you can increases the chances of earning money.

Keep these seven tips in mind when creating your AdSense site and you will find that your clickthrough rates increase, thus increasing your money making potential.

About the author:
AdsenseSitesForSale.com makes it easy to generate Google Adsense Income, quickly & easily. Find all the tools and resources you need to get started fast. To receive your free Google Adsense site visit: http://www.adsensesitesforsale.com

Basically, what the blog author suggests is that you find 10 or so different forums related to your site. Then register on each of those forums. Then create a signature on each forum which is worded in a subtle fashion. Then make 5-10 posts on each forum daily. Everyone who reads your psots will be exposed to your signature message.

Now, this does work. You will get some traffic from these signature links. But really it is a form of comment spam and not something I recommend doing.

I tend to think this way. How would I feel if it was MY forum that I was doing this on. Now, if you are really contributing to the forum, and your sig link is secondary to your participation on that forum, then that is fine. But if the only reason your on that forum is to promote your site – your a spammer.

Forum owners are used to getting spammed. I have written articles on How to reduce forum spam, and for the most part these methods work, at least for the nokia phone selling kind of spammer. Dont do it. It’s a short lived method of becoming successful on the net. Your reputation as a spammer will keep you from being offered better opportunities. Keep things white hat and above board. Do things right ad you will eventually be rewarded for hard work.

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

Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Ms. Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value. Not too bad for 8 years huh? (Imagine if she gave happy endings ) I bet her ex husband is loving this.

When Google’s stock topped $700 a share last week before dropping back to $664 on Friday, outside shareholders were not the only ones smiling. According to documents filed on Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google employees and former employees are holding options they can cash in worth about $2.1 billion. In addition, current employees are sitting on stock and unvested options, or options they cannot immediately cash in, that together have a value of about $4.1 billion.

I should be returning home from Indianapolis tomorrow.

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.

DAMN.

In a little over a year, the blog’s monthly income has grown by over 6,600 percent. Here is the income breakdown.

• Private Ad Sales: $11,888.79
• Affiliate Commissions: $5,131.27
• ReviewMe: $3,000
• Text Link Ads: $2,296.74
• Kontera: $1,000
• TTZ Media: $80.58
• Subscription: $40.00
• ShoppingAds: $11.21
• Grand Total: $23,448.59

How? Makes you wonder doesnt it?

Two answers. Traffic and a very high eCPM

Blog traffic held steady at 330,339 page views from 180,291 visitors. If you take the blog’s page view and divide that by the income it will give you a site wide eCPM of $70.98. Blog expense for the month include $526.85 for Google Adwords advertising and $25 for a private ad.

Now a big part of that eCPM is the private ad sales, which are about half. But in the end the answer comes from one thing. TRAFFIC. Lots of traffic. 6,000 visitors a day each viewing about 11 pages per day. So – The question im asking myself is – how do I get to that level of traffic? This is something I am thinking about alot at this time of year as I am developing my goals and planning for 2008. Naturally, suggestions are welcome and appreciated.

"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.

Just a little more about Google Pagerank – not only have the SERPS for my sites not been affected, but all but two advertisers renewed their ads for November. So, nothing has been affected so far for me except toolbar Pagerank. At this point, I am going to continue doing things as I have been, which is following the basic Google rule – design pages for readers, not for search engines. I’m not putting nofollow tags on everything just because of Google’s PR, at least not at this point. I am in a wait and see pattern right now because I am convinced Google will have to change how this filter / penalty works.

Now, I have something else for everyone. Many website owners, especially forum administrators, would like personalized clothing to sell to their members. I found a company that can do hats, polo shirts, jackets and other items for a reasonable price and doesnt require a minimum number of pieces for an order. You can order just 1 jacket if you like. I have had a few jackets made up for a few of my sites and you can see photos of the Jackets in the Joeychgo Photo Gallery – For more information on how to get stuff for your website call Jim at Champs Clothing – 708-277-5067, Let him know Joeychgo sent you.

Shoemoney won the Battle of the Bloggers with 7,170 new RSS readers for his blog. I found it interesting to see how both he and John Chow handled the end of the contest. John Chow, on his announcement that he lost had this to say:

Did Shoemoney Cheat?

I’ve been bombarded with tons of IM pages asking if Shoemoney cheated or game FeedBurner. He managed to gain more readers in one day than he did the entire month. I will leave it up to you to decide if there was any underhandedness going on. I will only say that Shoe is a lot more evil than I gave him credit for.

Shoemoney in the meantime, had a much more humble approach. In his post he said:

So who won? IMHO we both win. It was great publicity for both of us and we both gained thousands of RSS subscribers. Officially I won the contest, but I think the REAL winner will be revealed over the course of the next few months when all the people who only subscribing for the contest entries.

I think you can tell a little something about a person based on how he handles a win or a loss. Congrats Jeremy.

So, how about a little bit more about pagerank.

Everyone seems to be running around trying to figure out what to do about the major pagerank decreases many sites have seen.

There is an interesting post on BlogStorm

If you lost PR this week ask yourself these questions:

• How many links did you have from blogrolls?
• How many directories linked to you?
• How many links did you have from sites that sold links?
• How many links did you have from sites that got links from sites that sold links?
• How many links did you have from sites that got their links from sites that got links from directories?

People are looking at their site for the answers but if you understand how PR is calculated its clear that the issue probably extends far deeper than your site and even the sites that directly link to you.

If the sites right at the bottom of the chain such as directories and low quality blogs all start to lose PR it affects every single site on the web

This is right on the money in my opinion. Whenever Google Pagerank is changed, it affects ALL websites. The reason for this is that PR doesnt exist in a vaccum. All sites affect all other sites. Even sites you havent even heard of affect your site. They link to someone, who links to someone, who links to someone who links to you. If that first website’s PR drops, all the others do as well. This drop might be unnoticable to you in and of itself, but when a large number of sites are affected, the process snowballs and affects everyone.

This is a big part of why you see tremendous drops in PR. Some sites that were a PR 7 for years, went from a PR7 to a PR3.

I suspect the results were not what Google really intended. I say this because if this was Google’s attempt to stop link sales, why wouldnt they publicize it more? Why wouldnt Google say – "Hey –  if you want your pagerank back, remove all paid links and submit a renclusion request." Why is Google not telling us what to do?   Simple – because it isnt over yet. They are still making changes to the PR algo.

Truth is – I believe at this point ONLY toolbar pagerank was affected. The real PR of websites, was not. This is why there are no significant ranking changes.

But, as I said in my previous post. Who cares. Google made yet another mess. Big Deal. My only wish is that another search engine would step in and give Google some real competition. Right now, Google operates without real competition, which is bad for the internet.

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.

Two Mexicans are standing on opposite sides of the road, each holding signs.  One keeps having cars stop and gets money, the other isn’t getting a single person to stop.  Finally the one with poor luck says, hey, what are you doing to get all those cars to stop.  My sign says how I am homeless and have no food.  The other Mexican says, you are doing it all wrong, read my sign:

"I just need $10 more to get back to Mexico"

There is a great marketing moral to this joke. To sell successfully, you have to put your sales pitch in a way that makes what the buyer wants.

We all sell. Maybe your selling your forum to new members, or selling a product on your website. Or selling your point of view in a political debate at the coffee shop. Whatever the case, your selling. To successfully sell, you need to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes and figure out what he needs or wants so you can tell him how your product or service fits that need or want.

Something I have had to explain to many people, is that just because you think your site looks good, doesnt mean others will. A perfect example is loud obnoxious colors in your website design. Bold greens, hot pink, etc. It might look cool, but its annoying to most people. They wont ever see what your site is really about. You have to sell your site to them. Give them what they want as best you can and show them how they get what they want from your site, and you’ll be successful.