Pyjamanating

I made a quick video because I think this new google search method may be important.

Uploading to Google Video now, and compressing for YouTube.

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but the thirty day challenge goes on forever!

EzineBlog.ORG is offering a Page Rank 5 linkback and Technorati Top 100 linkback. All you have to do is write a review like this one and link back to the promotion page.EzineBlog.ORG is completely user driven and ad-free. There stories about Entertainment, Politics, the Military and Technology. So go check out EzineBlog.ORG and browseall the interesting post and comments. And maybe get some link love also.

Saturday morning and I haven’t checked my rankings yet. That’s because I’m growing tired of the let down when progress up the charts is painfully slow or none at all.

I’m building up a nice portfolio of ‘properties’ in two niches, and getting a little bit of traffic but I still can’t say for certain whether the niches are viable or not until they hit the top ten at least. I know I’m getting some long tail traffic already, coming number one for a couple of more obscure but highly targetted phrases. In fact I’ve added an amazon link with a hope of selling one particular book that way. It wouldn’t make me the $10 but a sale is a sale.

I’m slightly tempted by the challenge within the challenge, using my third niche that I never attempted, but it’s not an attractive subject to write about so probably not.

An email from ezines contained an interesting suggestion:

Think about your current article writing & marketing strategies and ask yourself:

“Have I fallen in the trap of producing new content (most time-expensive type of content to produce) when in fact I have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of articles already not being used from prior years email newsletters, archives, old ebooks, or any content that could be easily re-purposed?”

Article Submission To Do List:

1. Spend the next 10 days reviewing your existing content since the day you started writing articles of any kind.
2. Categorize them into “can re-use” vs. “continue to ignore for now.”
3. [Recycle Your Article Electrons The Easy Way!] Setup a plan to either edit them yourself or have an editor on your team prep the content into 400-1000 word chunks.
4. Submit by the tens of articles… creating time-leverage and greater impact without producing new content.

Content that you already own that is not leveraged is like leaving traffic on the table that should be surfing your website for many years to come…

So what this says to me is that I could be looking through all of my old blog posts and other writings to see if there’s lots of good stuff that can be SEO’d and put into play right where they are.

and while I think about it there’s a video I’d like to watch again from a conference about a month ago with some guy from google giving out a lot of good information about what google likes and how to improve rankings legitimately. I received it in RSS so maybe I can find it again by searching Google reader. Well no, strangely enough Googles own feed reader doesn’t have Search. How stupid is that?

“read this before making a couscous recipe”

I took today’s training to heart and sat down to write something authentic in the form of storytelling. It was fun and I used the new “Tumbled” theme from Davinian 

Here’s my story:

http://distributedresearch.net/couscousrecipe/

I just posted this to the Forum, so I guess I’m creating some duplicate content here by quoting it again. It’s about the process of getting an ezine article approved, and subsequent editing, but goes on to arrive at an important insight into a problem with my practice as a digital publisher.

After reading all the advice in this thread I edited the bio in my article whilst it was still waiting to be reviewed, so it didn’t point to my dead tumblr any more.

Then my article was approved and I got “expert author” status.

So for my first ever ezine article submission, it took approximately 4-5 days to get approved. I was happy with that, and started promoting the article just a little bit. Then I noticed a typo, right near the beginning – oh no!  It was one of those hard to spot typos like “the the” which the brain just corrects automatically without noticing. It was in the abstract as well. So I corrected  it by editing the article and removing the superflous “the”

result: My article has gone back into review and no longer exists at the published URL 

I see a pattern emerging, about the way I use the web. I’m a wiki editor. I publish stuff and then change it all the time. I do it with blog posts too.

Write – publish – read – edit – republish

It’s the read/write web.   2.0   interactive

But now I am learning that search engines don’t like me doing this. They want me to write an article, check it carefully, publish and then LEAVE IT WELL ALONE.  I’m going to find it hard to adjust.

I’ve managed to spend the morning writing and organising new blogs without being distracted by interactions. That seems to be the right way round to do it. Get the writing done first when you’re fresh, and then go and see what’s happening with the rest of the world afterwards.

I made a video screencast today as suggested by Ed.

I don’t know why exactly, but I felt much better afterwards. Like I’d created some content without the pain of endless type type typing.

Then I got a great suggestion from Linda. Take a screenshot from the video and upload it to Flickr. All tagged and linked in. This is the way the internet works.

Now can I get the plugin to render my video here?

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Yup. That was an astronomy for beginners video for astronomy for beginners blog

I’ve done it.

I rescued the published content from my two tumblr blogs and set up new blogs on another platform. I’ve also tweaked the method I’m using after having got into a bit of a mess using a pen name.

I’m adopting a ‘real names‘ policy for everything I do, and then if I have any success with my niches I can be bulding my own brand at the same time. If they fail to prosper, they just fade into history. I’m not doing anything that I would not be proud of in the future.

The new policy also allows me to bring into play some other “georgeous and educated friends” that I know of old.

Hence ranking number six on google already for phrase search with one niche, ahead of the tumblr already! So I’ve added google analytics on both the new blogs to see if there’s going to be any traffic , and been donated a nice little piece of genuine web2.0 User Generated Content already.

The 30day challenge itself has hit a bit of a paradox, which is always a fruitful learning opportunity.

The paradox is this:

If you orchestrate lots of people together and point them to one platform via a daily instruction video, it raises the profile of the course well above the radar with risky consequences. So it’s better if the group spreads out and uses a variety of tools.

But how do you teach a large and relatively synchronous group how to use the tools if they are all different, so that diversity can be maintained and we can compare notes without drawing too much attention of the wrong sort?

Well I don’t know how it will be overcome yet, but initial thoughts are:

1) Teach the principles of how to select and evaluate a potential platform then provide a large list to choose from.

2) Organise into smaller teams and make each team specialise in a different platform.

Not an ideal social learning experience for the 30DC community, but I think we’re getting there. Well the promise from Dan that the community won;t be shut down once the 30 days is up, we are well positioned to turn into a formiddable internet marketing Community of Practice.

So that’s yet another coincidence which has made joining the challenge particularly appropriate to me, as I’m specifically interested in all of these factors:

• Web2.0
• Apple Mac
• Blogging
• WordPress Multi User
• Communities of Practice
• SEO
• Working from home earning money online

The only thing missing is Wiki. Watch that space!

Both my tumblrs have been suspended. Bum. I thought they were quite good.
Actually it’s quite exciting, a real learning process for everyone. But a pain to have to recreate the content from out of Google cache. I nipped over to ezine and changed my pending article, although apparently you can edit teh bio after it’s published anyway. I’ve set up a couple of blogs elsewhere but not sure if Google likes the domain so much.

Trying to think of all the web2.o services I’ve tried out over the past three years or so, to find a good substitute.   I was getting to like tumblr quite a lot.

Superglu? 43things?

Criteria are

*getting the keyphrase into the URL

*not having a policy which bans affilate links or any commercial use

*Tagging or seperate pages with permalinks