The 2kph Accident 

So I was in a car accident the other day.  Obviously I’m alright, since I’m blogging about it.  Crazy stuff; all I can say about it is it was his fault for being an idiot (I’m serious, he ADMITTED it), but it was my fault too for not assuming he was an idiot in the first place.

It wasn’t too bad.  Car’s a bit roughed up in front, but nothing major, and insurance will cover it.  Just a few very noticeable scratches.  The sad thing about it?  I couldn’t have been going over 5kph.  Ever since the gas crisis, I’ve been running at really low speeds.

This is my.. 3rd?  4th? time getting in an accident, and all those times I was never going above 5kph.  A couple of times, I was just PARKED.  ANYWAY.

Oh, and an acquaintance of mine saw the whole thing.  First thing she asks me?  When am I free to go out.  Yes, I’m alright THANKS FOR ASKING!

Weekend-ing!

If you feel like stalking me this weekend, here’s a little something to help you out.

On Friday, I will be playing basketball at the old alma mater.  It’s been a while, and I really feel like showing some people up, and scoring 20.  And I’m getting fat, so..

Saturday is WordCamp day.  It’s going to be in CSB, so I’m probably going to get lost.  Still, it’ll be a relief to NOT have to be at the office for once.

Layla is such a Biatch

We couldn’t play it.  That was on our set list for the last jam, but we couldn’t play it.  I mean, I could play the guitar part OK, and Lester could hit the bass lines.  Pok was doing alright on the skins, and Ralph could actually reach the notes, but we couldn’t play it.  Layla.  What a bitch.

Well, I’m getting fat, Marc, thanks for asking.  Also, I’ve been having some pretty weird dreams lately.  I’ll tell you about them next time.  This is just a general State of the Spartan address.

I’m a little stressed, but you know what helps?  Listening to Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie.  The song speaks to me, brother.  And of course, Freddie Mercury’s really something.   David Bowie was in Zoolander, so he’s cool in my book, too.

Basketball’s been helping a lot.  I’ve been shooting baskets almost everyday, just around my backyard.  I’m actually getting really good at it.  I guess all that shooting, whether rain or shine, really hones your game.  It also doesn’t hurt that I see my brother playing in his varsity games.  There’s always a competitive vibe in me that just won’t quit.  He’s getting better.  All that training he’s getting.. wow.  Makes me wish I signed up for varsity before.

As you probably can see, I’ve sort of sold out my blog.  Well, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s  got to do, right?  So far, I’ve doubled the initial investment I made on the blog.  That’s pretty good, I think.  I’ve got this idea in my head for another Adsense experiment, but it’s tough.  There’s just too many things going on, and I can’t really focus.  Bad attitude.  I just have to keep my head down, soldier on.

Isn’t it weird how I never post videos on this blog?  It’s not because there aren’t any videos out there.. it’s because for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to post videos here in WordPress.  That’s the first thing I’m going to ask when I get to WordCamp.  Can any of y’all players help me trick out my blog with some videos and sounds (and rims, yo!)?

That’s it for now, Marc.  It was nice talking to you.

..and no, I’m not getting fat.  I’m probably hotter than most everybody you know.

I recently came across a blog that had a PR of 5, and I asked what it had that I didn’t.  The layout was nothing special.  Neither was the content.  It wasn’t exactly very SEO or very niche at all.  But this woman was making a killing with paid posts.  (Yes, I recognized them).

She was a make money online fiend.

I looked at the blog, and realized I wouldn’t link to it.  It was just like any other blog out there.  But apparently, a TON of people HAVE linked to it.  That’s why it had a PR of 5 in the first place.

So I did what any jealous blogger would do.  I technocrati’ed her ass, and I found her secret.

The woman designed free Wordpress Blog Templates.  Now this isn’t an act of goodwill.  She put in a small link to her blog at the bottom of the templates.  The templates weren’t anything special, but she got enough people to use them, effectively giving herself links.

So the moral of the story?  Learn to create Wordpress templates.  I’ll be trying to.  I think.

It used to be that nobody had any idea what Page Rank was.  Now, even my grandma knows about it.  In today’s MMO (make money online) world, PR counts for a lot.  That’s why the Google (henceforth referred to as the Big G) put into effect some changes in how they determined PR.

Now, you can’t beat the Big G.  To do so would be equivalent to suicide on the web.  The best thing you can do is to play its game, and play it well.  Here are a few things you might not know about Page Rank.

1. One way inbound links are the only relevant links.
2. Links from pages related to your website matter more than links from unrelated pages.
3. Link juice is also an important factor to consider.  If a website with 100 outbound links link to you, it’s not going to be as worth as much as a website with 10 outbound links linking to you.
4. Search engines look at webpages, not websites.  You may have different PRs for different pages in the same site.
5. Reciprocal links carry almost no weight.

So far, BlogMarc.com has a Page Rank of 2.  I’ll be trying to get it as high as possible over the next month.  Hopefully, things work out for you as well.  Good luck to us!

If you’re serious about making money by blogging, then you must be a little loopy.  It’s not your blog that makes you money.  It’s the marketing of your blog that does it for you.

I don’t have an issue with bloggers who just love to blog, and figure that they might make a few extra dollars doing it.  That’s all well and good, and a win-win situation.  But if you want to make some real money online, the way to do it is by internet marketing.  That’s where SEO comes in.

They say the oily wheel gets the grease, and that’s a pretty good metaphor for the issue of blogging v.s. internet marketing.  One thing that no one will argue with, is that for a blog or a site to be a successful money-maker, it has to be noticed.  While I agree that great content and a fancy layout will have your friends telling their friends about your fantastic blog, it simply cannot compare to the millions of people online that you can reach by employing SEO techniques.  The greatest blog in the world is of no value to advertisers if only 50 people read it, while a mediocre blog which generates hundreds and thousands of traffic hits is a gold mine.

This is a business.  There are two paths to take.  You can either make a small profit by putting in a few advertisements in your blog, OR you can slap some internet marketing on your advertisements.  It’s all about priorities, baby.

I’ve recently started a niche blog about healthy weight loss and I’ve been trying to figure out ways to get backlinks to it.  So I do what I usually do when I’m at a loss online.  I search other blogs for the answer.

Court’s got a really informative post on how to get backlinks.  Among the 102 ways he suggests, I’ve decided to go with using articles.  The way it works is you submit an article to an article directory like ArticleDashboard.com or GoArticles.com and they distribute for free to higher volume of readers.  In the article or in the about the author section, you can add a hyperlink to your own website.  Can you imagine 5,000 people reading your article with a single click?  Now you can.

Hopefully, you’ve worked as hard on your blog as you have on the article, which will encourage the readers who visit it from your article to become regular guests.  If that doesn’t work, at least you’ll still have driven a lot of traffic to your blog.  And hey, more traffic never hurt anyone.

So you want to make money online.  It sounds simple enough, right?  Create a blog, rehash content from other more established blogs, sign up for adsense and watch the money roll in.  Hey, that could work.. maybe.

See, making money, online or otherwise, is a business.  If you’re really serious about going through with this business, you’re going to need a business plan.  It amazes me how people start different projects and just “wing it.”  I used to do that, and TRUST ME, it’s not very profitable.

My personal idea of a business plan is pretty damn simple.  It’s production and marketing.  You produce a blog, and you market it.  That’s the WHAT.  Now the question to ask yourself is HOW are you going to do it?  What would be the most cost-efficient ways to produce and market your blog?  Will you design your layout yourself or would it be cheaper to have an expert do it (TIME IS MONEY)?  Will you create quality content people will keep coming back for, or rely on SEO, or purchase ads for traffic?  These are a few of the things to consider.

A good business plan gives you some direction and stability.  You want to know exactly what you want to do and how you’re going to do it.  Taking a few days to work out a business plan might be the most important thing you can do for your blog.

After two weeks of searching, I have finally discovered what SEO is!

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization.  That basically means you want your website to show up as EARLY as possible in the search engine results page (serp) when somebody Googles for your targeted keywords.  For example, if your blog is about golf, then you SEO your blog so that when somebody googles “golf,” your blog is listed not too far down the serps.

Complicated?  Not really!  Ideally, the higher your blog is in the SEO rankings, the more traffic you’ll be getting.  Yes, I believe in producing quality content, but nothing beats visibility for generating traffic.  More traffic equals more income, and who doesn’t want that?

For that reason alone, SEO may as well stand for Sucker Exploitation Optimization.  Webmasters and bloggers and online entrepreneurs all aim for high SEO ranking websites.  It’s just good business.  In theory, Google (if you’ll notice, I keep using Google as the default search engine because Google is the BIG G.) ranks website according to relevance and substance to their keywords.  However, greedy website and blog owners (all of them more enterprising than I) find ways to SEO their websites and blogs into top rankings in the serps, duping us unsuspecting surfers and making a pretty profit in the process.

So there.  After two weeks of tireless research, I finally know what SEO REALLY means.  And man, we have GOT to make some money off of this!

First off, what is a brand? 

According to the American Marketing Association, a brand is “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

Seth Godin in this article has his own definition, stating that brands are:

[Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation]

Combining those two definitions, let us define a brand as something that differentiates a product from all others by virtue of what is expected of it, and the emotional power of that expectation.  Sounds good, right?

I guess the question to ask now is how it is relevant to blogging.

Let’s be honest for a moment.  We’re all blogging because we want to either be heard or to make money or to do both.  Whatever the case, we need an audience.  That would be our readers, or in marketing terms, our customers.

The current blog economy is extremely competitive.  Save for the blogging giants like John Chow and Shoemoney, we’re all desperately competing for customers to bump up traffic.  With enough marketing, we WILL get our share of visitors on our blogs.  But what can we do to make these customers stay (that is, be regular readers or repeat visitors)?  We BRAND ourselves, that’s what.

Customer Loyalty is the very foundation of successful blogging.  We create that loyalty by establishing a brand that customers can trust and identify among all the other brands out there.  You want your blog to be credible and reliable, but also to be YOU.  That’s because YOU ARE THE BRAND.  There is only so much content going around to blog about.  What makes your content different is in how you present it.

If you provide customers with content that is relevant and unique on a consistent basis, they will return.  You (and your blog) as a brand will have added value to whatever content it is you are blogging about.  The customers are returning not only for the content, but for YOUR content.

So the next time you post something, think about how it’s affecting your blog as a brand.  Lay the foundation for your brand as early as possible, and watch it grow.