Using Blogger blog for Search Engine Marketing - A Techical How-To

Blogger has changed for the better - and now you can take advantage of this free platform to get the Google+ leverage in your niche.

Warning: Extreme Geek Alert

It used to be that Wordpress.com was The Place to be for any promotion, and Blogger was a poor cousin out standing in the snow. Your wordpress sites would rank on page 1 while blogger sites showed up on page 3 or 4 if then.

What a difference time makes.

Wordpress.com was so popular, they cracked down on anything that was an affiliate link or sold anything. So they suspended sites and users in droves, rightly or wrongly, all in an effort to stop spammers from "abusing" their system. Meanwhile, the various Panda changes relegated wordpress to back pages. Apparently their content-police algorithms weren't good enough.

Now, the one difference was if you actually paid WP.com to host your site. Of course, that got you into monthly fees which also drove spammers away. Your site would rank based on quality content, but you couldn't afford more than a few blogs - which was the point.

(Slideshare.net, especially since LinkedIn bought it up, is currently going through a similar problem, and now seems to suspend you for coughing wrong. Lots of other doc-sharing sites, like DocStoc )

Blogger went the other way. Not only do they not care what you promote (except child porn, drugs, etc.) they have improved their backend.

They enabled you to put your blogger blog on a domain for nothing (you just have to provide the domain.) Or you can put it up as a CNAME, meaning it comes out as a subdomain.domain.com instead of [yourblogname].blogspot.com - which means you can now rank for your content without the penalty of being a freebie blog.

Meanwhile, blogger has also update their themes, plus there are tons of places out there which have been busy building custom themes you can install.

There are two things you might want to fix, though:

• Get your self a new favicon instead of that orange "B" (upload through the layout menu)
• Change the attribution so it's not broadcast that Blogger is hosting you (see http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2012/05/how-to-control-attribution-gadget-when.html  among many on this subject.)

It's so much better to simply use Blogger's CMS, since you don't have any worries with monthly bandwidth costs (or running out) and you are integrated directly with the Google+ universe - just add the gadgets into the sidebar.

This is so good that I actually took the next step and moved a custom-CMS-based site over to a blogger blog. But without changing my hosting, just the files on it.

It's a bit technical, but I quit programming after I passed my required classes in college - so it's not anything an average Joe or Joleen couldn't figure out.

The reason I went this route was to preserve my existing SEO rankings and have my current site link to my new blogger blog, so that it's a seemless transition (instead of working through getting redirects running right. I also have many CNAMEs and emails based on that domain, so don't want to mess with these.

The ideal is to use the template from Blogger that you like and then set up your existing CMS pages to simply route there.

1. Copy/paste your existing content over to Blogger posts. (Their pages won't SEO easily, which is one drawback.) Just keep track of the links.
2. I liked my drop-down menus, so I looked this up - the best one I found was http://xomisse.com/blog/add-drop-menu-can-styled-template-designer/ - since your menus don't change much, this makes your posts into pages for you. Code it once, and update it manually when you need to.
3. The hardest part is getting the Blogger look and feel. Save your home page (using Firefox "Save Page as..." works) and then split it up into .php pages to replace the existing pages in your CMS. (This is the technical step.) You're going to create your CSS (style sheet) and link it, as well as having php files which sit in your includes directory. Try something like OneFileCMS to show you how simple this can be. (All you are doing is slicing up what you get into the various files you need, placing these files where they are supposed to go and linking them right. Takes time, but a nice skill to learn.)
4. Then build new php pages for each of the ranking pages, which simply utilize the menu and links you have on your blogger blog.

What happens is the search engines will send someone to your site, and if they click on any other page, they are moved to your new Blogger-based site. And never return.

Yes, you have to watch your links. The whole process is an exacting one. Of course, if you moved your site by cancelling your existing hosting, then you'd be rebuilding your site completely anyway - plus you'd lose your rankings meanwhile.

This technical way of doing it enables a near-seamless transition.

Plus, you get to update your site and site links to make the new pages even better. Too often, we get into the fevered bliss of creating our new content and forget the details of SEOing every possible description and alt-tag with the keywords we want to rank for - now's your chance.

What you end up with is an updated site which now redirects viewers and search engine bots over to your blogger-hosted blog, while cutting your bandwidth and making your content part of the Google+ experience.

If you are happy with your existing CMS, then don't bother. But if you are already itching to try something new and geeky - this is a great project to jump into. (This method will also work to create static php files out of your existing CMS.)

Yes, you can expect some updates as I wrap up my first experiments.

PS. You can also take multiple blogger blogs, give them identical templates and widgets, then link them through the menu bar so they all appear to be the same site. The advantage of this is that as you CNAME all the blogs, they each will be an authority for that particular subject and cross-link into the other blogs - giving them authority. If you use the Zemanta plug-in, it's easy to make related site links to your other blogs as you go. More on this with a later post...

PS2. Ran across this one - you could move your site and domain to a OneFileCMS hosting for $4 a month and 6 domains (according to their promo) - http://www.arvixe.com/OneFileCMS_hosting

[Update: Did this with two sites: Midwest Journal Press and Worstell Farms. Both are now looking better and coming up faster than they did before. Because the page isn't being built on the fly, but is a static page. Creating another style sheet blew it up, so I simply created static header, sidebar, and footer php files. Each web page kept it's original php file-name, but was much smaller - as the stuff which never changed was stripped out into the "includes files." I haven't had a chance to check the analytics yet - but since I was "given the opportunity" to find new hosting (or pay higher than average to keep my current one) - I'll be having to compare from the new hosting.

Bottom line: both of these look better and run faster than the old ones. An improvement I should have done a year or so ago.]

What's next: Probably won't ever build an onsite CMS again. The new hosting says I've go unlimited domains I can set there (and unlimited bandwidth.) All I really need, with Blogger blogs, is the ability to create CNAMEs for them. All the analytics I'll need will be provided by Google - which will allow me to tailor these blogs to what Google says they're ranking me for. Seems like the best of both worlds.

(Still have to do the change-over at this writing, but I should be able to get into it pretty quickly and get it done, as long as I think though all the steps to begin with.)

Hope your sites go as well...

Related articles

• SEO for New Bloggers
• Start a Blog with Blogger in Draft
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• How to get a quick, useful website - cheaply.
• The Grand "Google Empire" Experiment Begins
• Day 18 - Spreading the Content Around

How to Set up a Profit-Making Affiliate Blog by Digital Recycling

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Q: You may have wondered about that old blog - do I shut it down, or use it somehow? A: Recycle - always.

(photocredit: Matt McGee)

The answer with old blogs is NEVER, EVER DELETE THEM (sorry about that shouting...) The older the blog is, the better the authority it's granted, even if it's sat inactive for awhile. Putting a little time into them now can get them earning some extra income for you from here on out - even if it takes a little more than an afternoon's investment.

Note: I'm only giving you some distilled practical theory here - this isn't a lesson in SEO. This works and I wanted to share it with you.

While there are details to this, I'm going to give you the short-hand list. We are going to use a Blogger blog, essentially because with recent changes they've made, this is able to take advantage of its being part of the Google+ family to give you better rankings.

Realizing we are both busy and have things to do, here we go:

1. Re-activate the Blogger blog if its been "deleted" but still there. (Note: ensure you are the real owner and no one can come back and change passwords on you. Change your Google+ security settings to point only to your contact points. Or, better, "move" the blog by changing the admins.)

2. Ensure the Google+ account for this blogger blog is very active and many people have it in their circles. (Otherwise, transfer the blog to your own active Google+ account.) Make sure your blog autoposts from your Google+ account, and uses G+ comments for the blog posts.

3. While you are working on your popularity, get the product ready. I currently prefer ebooks made from PLR or Public Domain books, but you can also use any decent affiliate product. (See "How to Master Affiliate Marketing" for some inexpensive books on this, or "How to Develop and Sell Your Own Products.")

4. Dig out Market Samurai and do your market research to find what the buying keywords are that have lower competition.

5. Create a CNAME for your blogger blog from a domain you own, so that the keyword is used as a subdomain - this is where you break it away from the blogspot domain.

6. Take your PLR ebooks which match and extract content to match the keywords - re-write them completely, but you only need about 500 words.

7. Again with Market Samurai, find videos which match the keywords, as well as ping-back links. (If you have the time it would be far preferable to create your own videos, like recording those 500 words matched to a powerpoint.)

8. Create the framework for these 5 or so pages (matching the number of decent keywords you find, and the amount of PLR you can draw from) - so you have keyword-rich links for the posts themselves.

9. Using Open/LibreOffice, create PDF's from the PLR and post these to several of the best doc-sharing sites. Ensure they each link back to one of the blog posts you just created.

10. Now, ensuring you have all-possible on-page SEO going (descriptions, etc.) - build your page so that it has:

1. Video - above the fold,
2. Text
3. Embedded PDF
4. Zemanta related links
5. Related sites from your Market Samurai research.

And you use Zemanta plug-in to help you with text links and labels, etc.

11. As your posts go live, you'll be autoposting them to Google+

12. Somewhere along the line, you've turned that PLR into at least one ebook and published these to iTunes and B&N (via Lulu), as well as Kobo and Google Plus. (See "Just Publish" for the details on these.) Create a sidebar html text box which either sells the ebook directly, or sends them to a landing page where you can get their email and they can download it for free from the thankyou page. (If you're using an affiliate product, then that's the landing page they go to.)

13. Now all you have to do is visit and post a new short post every month or so in order to keep it rising in the standings. The other thing to do is to run a Synnd campaign on those original posts, or at least the blog address, in order to improve the social signals - which will raise it's rankings as well.

- - - -

Obviously, if you would just find and take profitable areas with products - or create money-making ebooks in those areas and distribute these via the main distributors (Amazon and Smashwords don't like PLR or PD, so it's just those 5 above) - then you can duplicate this as much as you want. Every single book you create should link to it's own blog.

My own example of this is at http://goodfundraingideas.worstelldesign.com - where I've done just the above with an old (deleted) blog I found access to. The ebook is called, "How to Raise Money for Charity - A Review and Guide to Good Fundraising Ideas."

The details can be pretty-well fleshed out if you follow the links. And if I ever get caught up, this might make a nice little ebook on its own...

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Applied Online Promotion - This isn't rocket science.

An applied application of online promotion.

Since I'm moving into study of entertainment - how to promote this in order to earn money online is its own interesting research line.

The idea is to create a content-heavy line of works whicn then would lend itself to promotion. Not so odd, I planned a set of 256 short stories, each with it's own soundtrack, illustrations, and video's. This is quite different from a single release, which you'd have to separately (and expensively) build up a community awareness for, etc. Like a single film, book, or product release.

The flow of stories itself would take on the aspect of a community interest - as some of the jokes about Dickens' magazine installments for his books (...as the ship approached the harbor, someone called out from the waiting dockside throng, "What happened to Little Nell?")

Also, the extended publishing model fits this well - and it's tuned to the multi-result approach the search engines have recognized. This is where we've been heading with this 30-day study all along.

Again, the story itself is read into podcast, it's illustrated and these become a slideshow, then a video. The drawback of this is that you don't want to publish the short stories to your remote blogs, as that is just added and unnecesary content. And would defeat sales, so cut earning money.

The marketing side of this would be to create a second line of work, which would be some sort of story analysis. This could easily be distributed through a mini-net system and then bookmarked, etc. (Your promotion is typically secondary to the original work, regardless.)

Income would be utilizing the soundtrack/podcast, videos, and text as ebooks all as income/money sources.

Promotion would have that "analysis" published via main hub and remote-blog mini-net. Also, creating podcasts, graphic powerpoint, and promotional videos for each ebook - which could (and should) be widely distributed, even though the base materials are not. Even articles can be used to post spun versions of the analyses - good for backlinks.

And obviously, they'd be done in an entertaining form, with their own continuing theme to draw in people - building a community in fact.

This is obviously a great deal of content to be distributing. And a great test of what we've been developing and studying.

Needless to say, in undertaking this, I won't be doing anything else with my time - so trying to exploit my earlier work in Affiliate Marketing would take a back seat. (And is why I haven't built my own affiliate programs into any sort of regular income - too busy researching. But I told you about purpose and passion, haven't I?)

Patterns of Promotion

So the evolving pattern - as someone who has published several dozen books - is to have ebooks on handheld devices. Smashwords seems to be the best way to get these published and distributed into several versions, as well as their distributors. 

They have an affiliate program, discount coupons, and also track backlinks to your ebook. So the basics are there.

The general sequence of promotion is slightly different from the original content creation. The ebook is created, along with soundtrack, and video. And while the ebook is published for sale, the other 2 are stored away for later use. Snippets might be able to be used out of these.

Trick here is to keep the analysis up todate and publish these immediately following the ebooks. If this can be kept (or sped up to ) a weekly promotion, then the initial price point would be kept low, plus the affiliate payouts as high as possible. So these are simply loss leaders. Later stories would gradually raise their price as the series become more popular (after the first 64, hopefully.)

Main point is that by building this community, you create a demand for these books. The volume of them makes them collectibles. This is exactly what "famous authors" who have dogged out an existence by writing. Our use of this is to speed this up immensely. We will create a "body of work" in one year or less.

And we will have "left over" a set of material to extend the brand - earning additional income - after the initial product line is established. (And that is my little secret, as to what exactly - and extensively - is planned.)

The marketing is all (or mostly) online and use search engines to track and give results based on volume of fresh content. Links which run through this would all go to each of the Smashwords book pages. And the bookmarks take in all levels of this. Exhaustively. Pinging has to be done as conscientiously throughout - to alert the search engines of the new content, as well as any "fans". You have to plan your work and work your plan.

You now understand all of what I've been bringing you to (if you've studiously followed every step to this point.) As well, I have someone I can explain it all to, now - without having to explain hubs, remote-blogs, etc.). But the main point has been to scrub all this down to a finite set of rules which can be applied to the next step of online promotion I'll be doing, which brings us full circle back to the point of how to earn extra money online.

Now that it's all written up and in your able hands, I can simply devote my time to creating this monster set of works.

Good Hunting!

Day 29 - Wrap Up and Review

Well, here we are - the next-to-last post in this series.

Bittersweet and all that.

So we are going to summarize what has been talked about.

Summary - it's all logical

Online promotion follows a few very basic and very simple rules.

The Internet is built and continues to expand based on valuable content and speed. The increasing social use of it has only built and expanded those two principles.

In order to earn income online, in this model, you need to be able to regularly produce fresh content. So the idea is that you've been writing or commenting daily as we've been going along. (And I've set an example of how this can actually be done. Sure I started a couple of days ahead, but if you try this yourself, you'll see how much discipline it takes.)

You need to know your passion and/or purpose in order to succeed at anything. And this can be found by simply narrowing down to what keeps you fascinated, what makes you happy (brings you peace) and/or you could talk about endlessly as long as someone would listen.

Whether its a blog or a site, the point is to have a platform where you can add valuable, original content regularly. This is your base, your Hub.

Most people dread market research because they aren't following their own purpose line and don't have the needed tools. Try Market Samurai, or their free Domain Samurai as a starter.

Sales Funnels are used to provide a valuable channel of products to the lead, customer, and client. They start off small (or free) and eventually wind up at big-ticket items, preferably those which are consumable or subscription-based.

Search Engines, at their bottom line, depend on what words you describe your pages with. Google has a SEO Starter Guide (a free download) which tells you exactly what they are looking for. There are just a few (5) online SEO points to take care of, mainly.

While there are many forms of content Google now provides, it's not all that difficult to create all of them. There are 3 basic types of writing styles required for Internet marketing and promotion to the 3 basic types of Internet users.

I recommend affiliate programs when you are just starting out, as you can learn the ropes without an immediate huge investment. I also give you a list of criteria you can use to evaluate any you find that may align to your core purpose.

The biggest effort in marketing is in building a list so you can send out sequential emails with an autoresponder. This is as more people use email than surf the Internet. Email is also a personal and captive audience (as long as you keep them interested enough to not opt-out.)

Writing a web page is simple - you write like you talk. It's key that you know the 3 types of writing and post these where they will be accepted.

Social media isn't for backlinks. It's to show the authority and trust your backlinks have. Understand this and avoid the "Google Slap".

Set up your Google profile and a badge on your main site/hub. Share links to your hub on your Google+ profile. Create a Google+ page for each main product or service you offer. Plug in Google Analytics and Webmaster tools to every site and social property you create. The more you connect with Google, the easier it will be to rank well.

You can publish one essay several ways on the Internet so it can show up in several places on page 1 of Google.

A key point is using Slideshare and videos from that same content.

I don't recommend Squidoo or Hubpages, or even article directories, unless you really know how to get your time investment back in leads.

Building mini-nets from free/remote blogs and similar social properties (videos, pdf hosting, podcast hosting) and then bookmarking and pinging those bookmark profile RSS feeds it the simply and effective secret sauce which prompted this series.

It's possible to get Article Directories to work if you effectively spin the content (by hand) and use Article Demon to publish them to several hundred (or more) AD's. It will still take hours initially, but the program takes the mind-numbing repetition out of it.

You need to be using ranktracking and analytics to have definitive understanding of how effective you are - and where you still need to improve.

Network marketing is a logical extension of Affiliate marketing and providing you have a good program with lots of upline support, you can build extensive residual income from downline sales. I list several places to train in this area.

Ebay and Craigslist can be key sources of ready buyers if approached effectively.

The Natural Laws of Marketing are the same which pervade all of Life's activities on this planet. Knowing this can markedly assist your success from here on out - in any field you attempt.

I give you a list of tools and courses for use and reference. (All in addition to the numerous freebies you've received daily...)

- - - -

As I can (I'm pre-loading these and so don't have all the links), I'll come back to give you the daily links to these summary paragraphs.

Good luck with all this.

See you one last time, tomorrow.

Day 23 - How Article Directories Could Work

Article Directories are far from dead. There is a lot of linking going on.

The trick is to work out how to automate their submissions so we can give them what they want (content for their advertising) and we can then get what we want (backlinks from authoritative sites.

We've been over the fact that they all want original content. And you have to spin everything you give them in order to make it so. Posting individual content to each of hundreds of article directories (AD's) would take a month or so.

And it already takes hours to get a decently spun article. (You have to spin articles by hand - never, never, never use any sort of auto-spin program - there are none out there which work, period. Been there, tried that.)

If you recall from that last time I told you about this area, I referenced pages 254-257 of The Online Sunshine Plan.

In that section, I recommended a spreadsheet-based spinning tool called Article Re-Writer. (It's linked as a download - right-click and Save As.)

I've worked quite a bit with that program and sorted it out to some simplicities. What this had as it's best feature is that you had three (or four) alternate sentences which were chosen at random. Most article spinners simply change synonyms, which too often will make your sentence into complicated nonsense.

Google is all over synonyms, since this is what they show you when you are looking for keywords. So don't think they can't spot that with their algorithms. But the more important feature is that people won't stick around and view your page - which means Google will devalue it. Of course, you may only be looking for cheap backlinks, but let's be real. Tons of low-quality backlinks will not give you any authority and you will just be hurting your own main site rankings.

The reports I've seen say you have to be from 40% to 70% original. Which means you are re-writing the bulk of every version. Article Re-Writer makes that a lot simpler.

When you change out sentences, you can change grammar structure (active to passive or vice-versa) plus all sorts of Modern American English sentence forms like "Expressed Thought". No kidding. You think? Well, I'll be.

Article spinners can't and won't handle creating quality content at least as good as your original.

I've even found that changing whole paragraphs works. This is better, since you can change things around quite a bit. Often a paragraph consists of three sentences, which can be in at least three different positions without changing the meaning of the paragraph. So if you had A-B-C, then C-B-A, then B-A-C - you would still make the same point, but these different positions won't be duplicate content.

Best I've found is to simply write the article and then go down it, paragraph by paragraph, making two alternate paragraphs each time.

Sure, it's a lot of work. But there are a near infinite amount of varieties this way. The original author of the spreadsheet said there was something over 10,000 unique versions. And you'll run out of possible article directories before that time.

Next point to solve is the one of submitting your spun articles.

The top 10 I still recommend doing by hand. Plug your spun paragraphs into that spreadsheet and hit refresh (see instructions) to give you another version. You have to use Excel or Open Office Calc - any real spread sheet program. Google Docs (now Google Drive) doesn't do random functions.

But how to do the rest of those article directories? There is only one product I've found worth mentioning. And, to be honest, I've only scratched the surface of it (remember that I've not though article directory posting was worth my time up to now...)  It's called Article Demon.

The features are that is has long lists of article directories you can load and it will then go even register you with them, and has a place to spin articles (or you can - and should - simply plug in your own spun-by-paragraph articles as above) and it will submit your articles on a schedule, with delays - so they look more natural.

And as far as I can see, it does a very good job of being able to post articles and take the load off your time. It's also a one-time purchase (right now under a hundred bucks) and is being pretty well supported, having come out with a new version just recently which was offered as a free download for existing clients. (At the time I'm writing this, I'm waiting for the download to complete so I can check it out newly.)

One of the best parts is that it allows you to spin the titles, tags, and even the biography. So they are truly unique across the various AD's. 

But that is the general theory of how I would consider utilizing all those article directories out there.

The advantage of spinning your content is that you can have original content which will rank on it's own. And I've said that there are programs and plugins (I've used ScribeFire with success on both Firefox and Chrome) to remote post your blogs. The tip here is to create the text with html code, so you can also include images, then generate variations with the code included - and then insert it as html instead of text. Trickier, but once you get the hang of it - and use a WYSIWYG editor like Kompozer - it's pretty simple work. Longer than Posterous, but if you intend to post to Article Directories, it's a simpler approach. I'll leave you to work out the production sequence and flow, though.

I get results without article directories, but if you've been already submitting to AD's, this would be a way to improve your work flow.

Flash Update: Just found this page from the folks at Market Samurai who are developing what they call "Article Samurai" - and I found a description of how it works (as linked.) Of course, you can see the similarity to what we've already discussed...

- - - -

Update: Recent research and practice down this line shows that really only EzineArticles is potentially worth anything. Looking up Warrior's forum showed that you don't have to spin content, but the backlinks from these sites aren't worth all that much. One author was telling me the backlinks helped to out-rank the competition, but you can do better with a mini-net distribution and social signals such as Onlywire and Synnd.

The other point brought up on that Forum was to remember why Article Dirs exist - to help people republish your content.  EzineArticles has survived the Panda/Penguin updates well and has been known to drive some traffic. It's also not bad to have additional links back to your landing pages from them.

But skipping the Article Directories entirely is OK, too. Synnd is developing their own article directory publishing - but it will need spun content, so you are back to burning time manually spinning your content to make it into quality work.

Fastest is to post on your blog to begin with and then re-publish to remote blogs as you go. Always bookmark and also do the "super-spindle" strategy Synnd recommends for really effective social signal utilization.

So forget "Article Demon" as it's not needed. And

- - - -

I've included another freebie today - an interview with Dan Swanson, who has spent his time writing articles and tells an overview of their benefits.

Day 22 - Beginning of the end, with explantations

(Secret Sauce sub-series - finis)
Explantations is a good mis-spelling. Because we are creating a plantation of social fields which bring us different SEO-enabled crops. However, our field workers are willing and self-paid, so it's a congenial and profitable enterprise for everyone.

Today, we are covering more why's and wherefore's, most of which is dealing with Bookmarks and some about Social Updates. These two are the secret fuel ingredients which give this system so much boost.

That relationship is covered in a Search Engine Land article.

Now to understand the below, I'm going to give you a link which explains bookmarking, RSS, and pinging. 

I believe I've covered before how bookmarking was a bit hit when it became popular, and Google (for a time, anyway) was following these closely as an indicator of what was trusted and so had authority. Then, of course, the spammers started gaming the scene and Google moved on. (However, not completely, as there was recently a big slap they emposed on one network and all the players in it who depended on the "in-bound links" which were being artificially created. So know that Google is watching...)

Our basic model, which deserves repeating:

• The Internet is build on content sharing.
• The search engines (Google, mainly) model their rankings based on people's use of the Internet.
• People trust useful and regularly freshened content sites - and will visit these routinely, according to their own patterns of use. 
• The way to improve your rankings is to routinely create valuable content and let people know that it exists.

Note the emphasized part of that last sentence - that is what we are talking about today.

This is what online promotion has evolved into. And you have to promote in order to tell people about your valuable product or service. The search engines and social media are simply ways to prime the pump in order to find clients.

This was covered somewhat in The Online Sunshine Plan (starts about page 212 and goes through 222). You want to utilize search engines so your new clients can find your product (and old ones can find you when they lost your address). When you have established clients, they will be coming to your site for regular services and won't be utilizing search engines to do so. This also includes search engines built into social media.

And a review of the Promotion section of that book would probably be in order - especially since you know so much by now. (Pages 242 - 309.)

Priming the pump

Here's the point which spammers don't get (as well as a lot of SEO guru's):

You don't get down from an elephant, you get down from a duck.

The search engines can send you traffic, but they won't sell your product for you. Backlinks is just one of over 200 different indicators which Google uses to rank sites. If you are trying to get just backlinks from social media, you are going to get Google-slapped. It's just too obvious. That isn't what the social media are for.

We are going to avoid social networking like Facebook. To get anything from Facebook, you have to spend hours engaging with people directly. Just like an insurance agent will join every social club in town. Gain people's trust, and get invited to their home to do your pitch. You don't close any sale at the club-house.

This is the same point of getting people to opt-in to your list. Email continues to be the #1 use of the Internet. Barely half (and dropping) of the US is using Facebook. Hardly anyone uses their email. Reason? Over 70% of the US already uses email daily - and this is growing (much to the chagrin of the government monopoly called the U.S. Mail Service.)

So you simply let people know that they can get personal emails about the valuable service and product you provide by sending it directly to their email.

The social media can be incorporated into this promotion by leaving little tips here and there, with links.

Another Campbell book - freebie alert

Here's a PDF built from a scrape I did off a site he created: http://www.jigglingtheweb.com/ And he is a good study in what to do. He tells you some incredibly valuable stuff, then says - oops, the rest of this material you have to pay for... but you can sign up here. (Just wish he had an affiliate link.)

Sidebar:

The essentials of his Goobert (Affiliate Marketing) System is found on his newsletter post. With what you now know, you can actually improve this incredibly. And when you sign up for his newsletter (I just renewed it again) you get some more freebies (still wish he had an affiliate link...)

This "web-jiggling" really lays out the basics of what we are doing here.

First make a post to your blog. Second, submit a snippet of the post to social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Propeller.

Third, bookmark your social news snippets, or article submission using three or four social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Mr. Wong, Delicious, Mixx, BizSugar, Yahoo My Web, Faves, Simpy or Google Bookmarks.

(You can get a huge list from AddThis. Just beware that many of these services come and go like the wind.)

Fourth, the last step is to ping each bookmark RSS feeds, just once, using a site like Autopinger, PingMyBlog, PingKing, Pingoat or Pingomatic. Just be careful not to overdo it, as these services will ban you for over pinging. If you ping two or three of your bookmarks, that will be enough. The search engine spiders will find the rest of the links on their own.

That's how simple it is, and what we've built up to.

1. Post fresh content to your main site/hub.
2. Post link to that conent on Google+
3. Spin that content and post to remote blogs, with PDF to slideshare.net
4. Bookmark the remote blogs
5. Ping those bookmark RSS feeds.

Test this out for yourself. This last puzzle piece fits everything together. I've only confirmed this again this week, even though this was posted sometime in 2010. Not a secret, really. But since it doesn't fall under GRQ (get rich quick), lazy spammers probably haven't figured it's worth their effort.

Bookmarking and Status Updates - automated

Now there are free ways and paid ways to go about this. I only recommend one free way and only one paid way. There are others, but these work the best for me.

Onlywire will post to bookmarks and status updates. Set up an account and you'll also need to run their little program on your computer. I've had my difficulties with them in the past, but they seem to have gotten the bugs out (helps if you set it up right to begin with - that's a confession.)

The page I just linked to says you are going to have to go out and set up these accounts. But let me help you with these.

Bookmarking sites: 

Bibsonomy
Connotea
Digg
Diigo
Jumptags
Stumbleupon

Status Update sites:

Twitter
MySpace
Plaxo
Plurk
Friendfeed
Hi5
Identica

The rest aren't worth it, for one reason or another, and I won't go into them here, as I still have too much to go, plus this needs to get wrapped up.

Both bookmarking and status update sites will tell the search engines about your remote blogs, which then let them discover your main site/hub.

And the bookmarking sites above all have working RSS feeds. You are giving the ping sites (like ping-o-matic, but there are several) the RSS feed for your profile there - so you don't have to ping these more than once a week, as they'll then pick up the top few into that system.

A note on OnlyWire - if you budget this carefully, you can stay on their free plan indefinitely, which has 300 a month. However, if you go over once, you are going to have to either create a new login, or pay for their next version up (which is 10$ a month and another $3/month for the optional captcha solver.)

Drawback to Onlywire
It's only you doing this. (Priming the pump, remember?) So if you do a lot of this, it's going to look pretty spammy real quick. Another option is to also bookmark a lot of other sites, but that then uses up your Onlywire credits - or makes you do this manually. Some blogs will do posts like this. And ping.fm can do status updates to several sites like this - however, the shortener gives away the fact that you aren't doing this personally, so don't expect a lot of community support.

The solution brings up our paid version - but don't worry, they also have a free version you can also use indefinitely.

Synnd - the Syndication Revelation

Sure, that's the marketing line for it. What is does it similar to OnlyWire, but while it has a program running on your machine, it's taking that IP address along with all the other members (there's about 4700 now) and automating the process of setting bookmarks and tweets, likes across the many social media sites out there.

So you can run campaigns which will bookmark your content from all manner of international sites.  And there are numerous benefits to not being the only one to bookmark your content. Multiply this by enabling hundreds of others to do this, and you can see the advantages as Google can see that many people are interested in your site, not just one.

I could sit and talk about it for hours, but we'll let you do your own research.

• Here's 6 lessons with videos on how it works: Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine
• Here's a freebie PDF "The Syndication Revelation"
• Here's a webinar you can watch (free sign up): "Driving Traffic, Viral Exposure, Opt-ins & SEO Using Automatic Social Signals"

And did I tell you they have a free version to try out? You can only run one campaign at a time, but you'll see exactly how it works and get some immediate benefit. Try Synnd Lite.

OK - that's more than enough. This isn't a sales page for Synnd, although I could rave about it if I wanted. It's a heckuva monthly expense, so you need to be doing this professionally. The results seem slow but sure, however you'll see results for you new content if you train on how to use it (not a long training curve) and really exploit what it does.

Again, the key datum which they also have found useful is to bookmark, and then run campaigns on the incoming links to your remote blogs. You don't have to do this, but it is the secret ingredient to the secret sauce.

No extra freebies or assignments today other than the above. That's more than you get most days in this data dump, so I'm not going to add to it.

- - - -

Coming up is another week of the stuff I can now tell you, which adds to everything you've learned so far, but isn't essential to it. You will be able to further increase your income with some of these tips - provided they work for  you according to your tests.

Day 21 - Mini-nets - the beginning of the end

(Secret Sauce: next-to-last in sub-series)
These next 2 days of material both fit together side-by-each (as some Canadian slang goes). So you'll need to study them together. These two parts are much like  a race car with a nitro boost. While either will push the car forward, both together will make it really take off.

The first point is mini-nets.

I'm now giving you Michael Campbell's "Revenge of the Mini-net". This complements his "Clickin' It Rich" and "Nothing But Net". These three, added together, give you substantial data on how to earn extra income online. And while they were all given away freely on the Internet once, they have since been withdrawn to people's individual archives (like mine.)

I stumbled across these just after or around the time I finished The Online Sunshine Plan and kicked that book over to Lulu.

The overall concept was originally to build smaller sites which all inter-linked with each other and so built up authority and "link-love" between them.

This was essentially premised on the vital necessity of backlinks to improve rankings. And in the days of social media, this hasn't changed, except how you implement it.

There is an interview of Campbell with Howie Schwartz, where the latter's "Conversation Domination" was given as an example of social mini-nets.  Schwartz used several dozen social media profiles to create an interlinked set of different sites. At that time, social profiles themselves would rank. And he then linked those profiles to a landing page which would sell his Halloween costume. The problems with this are that 1) they aren't valuable content per se, and 2) the are labor intensive and had to be farmed out.

The search engines moved on after really valuable content, and it became more of a hobbyist approach for individuals. The overhead was too much to base a business on.

However I did find that other social media, namely free/remote blogs, could be employed to host regular, fresh content and could be updated easily through any program that could access them remotely.

Just recently, I did a review of this and found that while this is not all that well known, it's not a trade secret. A special report which Market Samurai put out said their interview of the "big guns" (those who serviced clients for 10's of thousands yearly) said they would outsource posting to such a network of blogs.

But in reviewing The Challenge, I found that on Module 3, they describe just such an off-page network. (A free sign-up to that Challenge will give you access to all the modules at http://challenge.co/training/) They don't spell out how to do this efficiently, however.

I initially thought this to be a trade secret. Spammers didn't need to know about this, as the would make it quit working. But you also see that I don't particularly spill the beens in this limited release. As well, there are some details you'd have to study this whole series as well as doing some hands-on work to get the same results we've been getting.

The Components

Basically, the list goes like this:

• Your main site or "hub"
• Google+
• Remote blogs
• Slideshare.net (pdf's and powerpoints)
• Videos (optional)
• Archive.org - for podcasts
• Status Update Sites
• Bookmarking Sites

Which are all in addition to your work in social networking you do as part of those communities.

The sequence:

1. Post fresh content to your hub, which is all SEO'd with linking into other pages of your main hub. 
2. Share that link with your circles (public) on Google+
3. Spin this content (edit it slightly) and post to the remote blogs.
4. Create PDF of that original content, or the edited version, and post to Slideshare.
5. (Optional: create podcast, powerpoint, and video - then post these appropriately)
6. Create status updates which alert people to the new content on the remote blogs.
7. Bookmark the remote blogs' new content.
8. Ping the RSS feeds for several of these bookmarks.

The trick is that you could spend a week or more doing this all by hand. But within this system are ways to automate this slightly and make it a one-day, if not a few hours' work.

While there are programs such as Windows Live Writer which will post to your blogs, you can also do this with Posterous.

Status Updates can be done by Posterous, but also by Ping.fm (which is changing since it was bought out) and also Hoot Suite, Twitterfeed, and some others.

Bookmarking we will cover tomorrow, as this needs a great deal more space due to their details. I'll also cover why this sequence is this way, why it works, and the basic theory behind it - although you probably already have an idea why.

But I've already given you more to work with today than you'll be able to get through in a week of hands-on application.

A side note is that once you get into Posterous auto-posting, you'll find there are ways to organize your workflow to make this far easier. But again, to tell you simply how to do this would both be boring and take the fun out of exploring.

So now, with the 3 weeks of preps, I've brought you up to what I've been dying to tell you all. Properly set up, this just works too well. But now isn't the time to give you a long list of testimonials and test cases. At this point, I'll leave you to play with this and make your own observations.

- - - -

I've given you a freebie and assignment in the text above.

Just let me know in comments or by email how you find it to be working.

Day 19 - Slideshare and Videos

(Secret Sauce sub-series 05)

Today we cover some of the more viral (as in virus) and effective alternative publishing formats.

If you wanted to review this section in The Online Sunshine Plan, it start about  page 254 and goes to around 262.

Obviously, I've found it far more useful than I described it originally. Because I started working for someone who was ranktracking as a regular part of his business. And we were able to test out these things as part of working to salvage a floundering business by investing heavily in online promotion - which was cheaper and more effective than TV, radio, or other advertising.

Now we are into re-publishing mode here. Briefly a recap:

1. Write your content, include images and links to other pages on your site. Post this.
2. Make a Powerpoint version of that - post to Slideshare.net
3. Record that article and post it to Archive.org
4. Marry these two up as a Slidecast on slideshare.net
5. And/Or turn the recording and slideshow into a video and post this to YouTube and/or any other video site of choice. (Google owns YouTube - hint). Make sure you have backlinks in the description, and the file is named with your keyword.
6. As you assemble quite a set of these, create an ebook and give it away as an opt-in incentive (and/or sell on Smashwords)
7. Assemble the video's into a DVD and use this as an incentive, or a product on it's own. (Costs you under 2 bucks to burn and mail.)
   

Slideshare.net

This has some incredible ranking. Often it will show up on page 1 of Google with several different articles. This is because they will extract all the text of their PDF and post it below the flash version of the PDF itself. Brilliant move, actually.

While you are posting your content as a PDF, they then create a new, original text version on their site. Now the PDF can still be read by Google, and your description and profile should still have links back to your main site.

They also do featured content, which gets internal views by their community (particularly if its snazzy looking).

As I said above, you create a powerpoint and post it there. But you also do a document-type PDF and post it - with all the text. (Never, ever make a PDF out of images. Use Open/Libre Office which converts your original content - copy/paste from Firefox - into a PDF with all the links intact.

If, as part of your posting, you do this with all new content, your whole site becomes accessible through Slideshare PDF's and will simply replace other sites on Google which are present for the same terms. This brings up the possibility of having 6-8 positions covered on the front page of Google. It's become more rare recently (since Panda/Penguin updates), but occasionally we still pull this off.

There was a product called "Conversation Domination" by Howie Schwartz, which used to work along this line. One Halloween, he had the bulk of the top 5 pages (50 spots) covered with his content which pushed a specific costume as an affiliate product. It's much harder to do that now days, as the search engines moved on. Some parts of it still work, but it's labor intensive.

What I learned from this, and in figuring out how to apply this to multiple clients, is in taking the parts which could be simply produced with minimal time investment, but similar results. And yes, when my boss saw my work take over half-a-dozen spots in Google's 1st page, you knew I had his attention and help in streamlining this.

Video's

Mainly, this is YouTube. Because Google owns it, and so will give you multiple opportunities to take additional rankings.

This is one point Schwartz' technique covered. Google, as I've pointed out before, will return web pages as search results, but will also return images, forums, videos, docs, news, and a few others as valuable information. All on the first page. So if you can get the same content published in multiple formats, you can rank for several different content types - and get people ultimately visiting your site.

Another valid point Schwartz found was that this was highly targeted viewers. People who followed those links were interested in this data and were more easily converted to buyers/clients. It didn't result in spikes of traffic, but did result in spikes of sales.

So the simple technique is outlined above. Text to speech, images to a powerpoint, marry the two into a video.  Post all the sub-products to their own free hosting to rank on their own for that keyword.

If you're presentable, you can always create regular content by simply videoing yourself talking. I just like the above because you get more products out of it and don't have to invest in a camera or lighting, backgrounds, etc. Most computers come with some sort of video editing program, or they can be acquired online for little to nothing.

Audacity is a very good open-source recording program. And video editors are also available, while XP and Windows 7 come with their own, as does the MAC. Linux also has many free ones.

Ensure you have a backlink in the first line of your video description. That is what always shows.

The secret to this success is to set up your production lines to generate regular video content along with everything else. Google likes regular, fresh content - and this is a no-brainer if you can organize your life to write once and publish many ways and formats.

- - - -

Assignment is to check out Slideshare and see the many wonderful and creative people who contribute to their communities. And look for documents to see what you find there.

If you already have your Google account, fill out your YouTube profile and poke around in there. Set up all the backlinks to your main site you can.

Freebie - To give you more background on this "Conversation Domination" theory, I've included an ebook from their heyday: Bending the Web. Use a substantial amount of skepticism when you read this, as the two authors are known for fantastic (unbelievable) sales pitches. While some of this material is dated, there is more of it which has become mainstream. Also, note their presentation quality.

Day 18 - Spreading the Content Around

(Secret Sauce sub-series 04)
As much as people (myself included) deride the idiosyncrasies of the free blogs, they do serve a valuable purpose - besides making money for their hosts. They allow you to republish content to different communities.

The weirdest thing, perhaps, is how useful I've found these since I published The Online Sunshine Plan. Yet nothing about them particularly shows up in that book, except as parenthetical examples.

So - no pre-reading assignment, again.

Let's get right into these...

The reason you want a lot of free blogs re-publishing your content...

This seems illogical on the outset. If Google is penalizing duplicate content and giving special tags to show who authored it first, why would you want to re-publish your content to someone else's site?

Two reasons:

• backlinks
• out-creating your competitors

We have to lay one old urban legend to rest here: duplicate content penalties.

The old-school SEO boys wrap themselves around a pole on this one. Duplicate content isn't "removed" from the rankings, it's just moved down to the "omitted results" section. I gave you at least one link where Charles Heflin shows how there really isn't any competition. And if you look up any long-tail phrase, you'll see that for exact phrases, the links Google shows usually fall apart after the 2nd page (20 rankings).

So Google is really trying to produce the best possible page results. Stuff that has the exact same content is just shuffled lower (below 750-800, as linked above.) It doesn't take them out of the standings entirely, if they still have your backlinks, then they are still contributing to your site staying on top.

Duplicate content mostly hit the free sites like blogs and article directories, which suddenly found themselves with not very many pages ranking - because they weren't policing their own content. (And so now they do, with a vengeance.) However, it doesn't mean that you can't also rank for several different sites with the same content.

How blogs do this is rather interesting. You see, they sort by date, tag, and perhaps feature new material as it's released. Tumblr.com is one which pretty routinely shows up on page 2 or 3 according to their tag pages, which sorts in a different order, so has "different content" than sites which just present them according to last first. Wordpress.com has a nice feature page, which will get a lot of new posts on their front page (handy for search engines to find new content), and if people visit it, it will stay there for awhile, as this is all a popularity contest and entertainment.

Another point is that these freebie blogs all have different templates and have different content showing up. (We'll go into this later about how you can help this with sidebar widgets) So it's mostly, but not exactly, the same content. If there isn't much content around with these keywords, then your re-published content has a good chance of showing up.

Now, yes, if they all had completely different (or at least 40-70% different content) then they'd all rank for the keywords. However, it's a different scene when you are spinning several versions of that material with all that time invested. (We will go over spinning content toward the end of this 30-day program, however. In theory it could be useful - and would help out article directories.)

What we've seen by utilizing these freebie/remote blogs and tracking their ranks from week to week, is that the free blogs will show up and maybe even outrank your main site for a few days or weeks, then slowly drop down the rankings, while your main site (which they link to) starts to increase it's rank. Even though they were posted the same day, within minutes of each other (and I'll tell you how to do this on a later day.)

The top remote blogs

We'll refer to them as remote blogs from here on out, as they have your content in remote locations. ("Free" describes a lot of things these days...except perhaps beer, meals, and money.) If you visit http://knowem.com and do a search, you'll find the top blogs on their main page of social sites. They are listed below.

Blogger.com
This was bought by Google a long time ago. And this year has been getting overdue updates which allow it to rank better. Main point of use is that they don't care if you heavily push affiliate sites and you can have dozens (one lady has hundreds, per report) of different blogs to separate out your content.

Wordpress.com
Finicky about anything that sells anything - unless you have a paid hosting with them. So you can get banned and never figure out why. This ranges from dropping your site to dropping your login. I've even experienced accidentally violating their rules and having my login dropped, but leaving my blogs up - orphaned. So two things you have to do with them: 1) only link to an innocuous "review" page and not to direct affiliate links, 2) have multiple administrators for every page - you can sign up several times with different emails to make additional accounts. You're also allowed almost unlimited number of extra blogs, but once you give it up, neither you nor anyone else can get it again. Wordpress.com blogs tend to show up and sink like July rockets, settling down at the lower pages of rankings.

Tumblr.com
Quite a popular blog site. And while they have a few "bad words" which they ban almost automatically (like "work from home" and "make money online"), otherwise they pretty much leave you alone. Also lets you have numerous extra blogs. Noted as above for ranking well according to its tag pages.

Posterous.com
Almost a newbie on the scene. It was first known for allowing you to post by email. (Now all of the above, and most others, allow you do do this.) However, it's becoming more popular as a blogging platform on its own and the guess is that mainly because it allows you to post to other blogs and social platforms with a copy of your post - which will link back to that posterous blog for any default. So yes, it's giving itself all the backlinks it can find.

There are a few others like Livejournal and Xanga which we won't cover here. Mainly because you can't auto-post to them, which is a hint of what we'll cover later. Sad, really, because they have active communities. Xanga did this in response to spammers, which IMHO was a shot in their own foot. LJ does it by neglect - it's supposed so, but is wonky that way.

Other remote blogs of interest

Anything that can be remote-posted to is useful. However, if it's hosted on someone else's dime, then you can get quite a community built up.

I've already covered how you can build Wordpress blogs on your own site. But that can give you server issues, which (twice-burnt) I don't recommend as a platform. Other free blogs can be set up. And you can also set them up as subdomains, so practically you can build up as many as you have space and bandwidth for. Main problem: they are on the same IP address, so they can appear to be spam-blogs (or splogs). And is why the free/remote blogs are nice - you can have other IP's backlinking to your main site.

There uses to be several free blog hosting sites. (And you can look up free hosting and set up blogs there, but most require a lot of attention in order to retain the free status. Leave one alone for awhile and your account gets cancelled. Content means traffic means ad sales - no content means canceled account.) However, most weren't able to keep sufficient profit to survive, so they've mostly gone by the buy. Wordpress-based free blogs were the rage once...

Blog.com
One of the survivors. Wordpress based and ranks well overall. You do have to turn on remote posting, however.

Blogetery.com
Another Wordpress survivor. Went through some wierd hosting problems a couple years ago - some terrorist-related individuals were hosting with them, and their host shut all their blogs down. But they're back and other than being a bit slow at times, it's a great little community of bloggers.

Typepad.com
They are finicky about getting set up and only allow you one free blog per login/email address. And make it hard to find how to set up a free blog (I've lost that page more than once.) Otherwise, a nice little remote blog. They are their own scene and have built up a nice non-WP platform as a standard.

Again, there might be a handful of others which would fit in this. I've literally spent days searching for WP-based blogs and "free blog hosting", but keep dropping back to these few above. There are still some around, but mostly they have closed off free sign-ups, or are based in a foreign language (non-English), which gives you problems.

Tricks and Details on setting remote blogs up

Generally, these just run as a few:

• Fill out your profile so it looks like a real person. Photo, some interests and definitely your main site as a backlink.
• Unless you like a lot of email (another reason to get a[n additional] gmail account), ensure that you simply have to approve every comment. Most of these long tail blogs, in my experience, only attract fools trying to backlink to their site with comments. It's not that you can't do this, or that it doesn't work. But it's labor intensive and most of these guys are rank amateurs - they don't really contribute to any ongoing conversation.
• On some (blog.com, blogetery.com) make sure that you can remote post to them.
• Put your main site RSS feed in the sidebar to get more backlinks. When you update your main site, it will auto-update (and auto-backlink) on the remote blogs.
• A news feed sidebar with your keyword as a search term is a nice touch. Gives another hint of authority.
• Vary the theme and put a different one up than given. Takes a few minutes, but you generally wan them all to look different.
• Follow some other blogs, especially if you have others of your own on that platform.

Some (tumblr, typepad) don't have customizable sidebars. Their loss. And they might have changed things since I wrote this or last visited their site to set one up.

Isn't this a bit, well, callous?

Well, no. The reasoning goes like this: You are one of a handful who are providing new and fresh content for the Internet. Posting to remote blogs is simply a way of reaching more people with that content. These sites are mostly (-ahem-) content pimps. They (especially Wordpress.com) don't want you to earn income from your content, they just want you to post your content to their site so they can.

So you help them, and they help you.

If you keep your sales/landing pages, review pages, and infotainment pages separate (infotainment goes on the remote blogs, review pages go on your site, and sales pages are either separate pages on your own, or hosted by that affiliate product you are pushing) - then you and the remote blogs can have an amicable, cross-beneficial publishing arrangement.

There's also the point that this doesn't mean you quit contributing to your communities that you've found, just because one of them exists on one of these platforms. You keep contributing - but no one said you couldn't also have an additional blog or two to host your additional content, did they? Especially if the profile is different from your personal one... (Someone recently told me that they'd seen I hadn't been blogging much - but they don't know all the "alternate identities" I use in order to get my research done... Rest assured, I'm as over-prolific as usual - "don't try this at home", and "use only under adult supervision") ;)

- - - -

OK, another couple of freebies. But I'm not apologizing for these guys' lack of taste or professionalism. They will give you some additional pointers we haven't gone over. But it's up to you to test them. Some are dated, some never worked. But the common sense ones you should be able to spot right off.

Blogger's Guide to Profits
Building a Blog Empire for Profit

And your assignment is to check out these free platforms above and see what you find there.

Day 17 - The Google Gorilla in the Room...

(Secret Sauce - third installment)

We can't continue here without discussing the 900lb. Gorilla in the room - Google.

This particular scene only unfolded for me last month, but is so basic to our SEO efforts that I had to tell you (been "busting to" in fact).

Google has been working on entering the social arena for years. They tried Buzz and Wave and now Google+ - which seems to be a hit (finally). Of course, it's overshadowed by Facebook, for now.

The reason I can say that is that point I've mentioned about Facebook before: it's a walled garden. Unfortunately, that works against it. While I could tell you all the statistics which show it reaches a saturation point in any country and then starts slowly declining, they offset that with it's entry into new countries. And point to ad revenue (which doesn't get new clients for those businesses, so is a ponzi scheme waiting to implode.)

Google+ is simply built on how people share content. So it's a natural fit to Google and users.

But the real deal is that it's now integrated into all Google does - and shortly will even have their analytics built into their Google+ pages. And how you integrate with Google affects what searches you personally get and also who gets your links. So this will help your community to keep track of your content - nice, yes?

There are 2 parts to this:

1. Everything you connect into Google will help your site rank better.
2. Google will teach you how to make better content - so your pages rank better.

Now, the outset is that you need to set up a Google Account, which is fairly simple -  go to https://accounts.google.com and fill out their form. Now a point here is that you don't try to set up several accounts here. It's not like twitter. They cross-check stuff. So one should do you and keep it the same. From all the work I've done with them, that's my short version. Pick one and stick to it.

Google's purpose

Arguably, they have mostly been interested in how people store and retrieve information. Their business plan has been to sell advertising, which has worked. Especially with the tools they offer to "auction" their ads. So they very nearly always sell as the highest rate possible, but that's another story we don't have time to get into.

The great part of Google is that they have been so successful at search, that they have long controlled the greatest part of the market for searches. So if they say they want "such-and-so" every one asks - "how high?" (mixed metaphor).

For better or worse, they have started to become ubiquitous on other platforms as well. Their Chrome browser is now starting to unseat Microsoft's IE as top dog. And this is another way they are working to understand people's usage of the Internet, so they can give better results in their search.

Factually, their biggest problem now is their success, as they have been losing trust - essentially due to the huge amount of data they can access about people. Again, this is an issue that there are solutions for which we don't need to get into.

Our use of this is to leverage their ability to have their fingers in all pies in order to get them to notice our content more easily. The second point it that their feedback on what we do can improve our own rankings. So we use their expansiveness to our advantage.

Analytics

Google Analytics is simple to find. http://www.google.com/analytics/
You sign in with your gmail account (Google Account) and then enter all the various properties that you have. For each one (unless you group them together) you'll get a number which you can drop into other social properties where they ask for such.

A lot of these social sites are supporting Google analytics, which is a good thing. It makes it easier to implement (no cutting and pasting code into your page headers) and this also tells them that your site is available and connects to you.

While we'll go over this later, this is a key point - that you take control of ownership for your content. The better you make this content and the more sites you have out there, it's important that Google knows where it started. By plugging in analytics, you then will enable Google to directly track your site/blog/content and so tell you all sorts of things about how it's working and what you can to to improve it.

Now a caveat - Google Analytics simply isn't as good as your own server. But if you are using free hosting, it's the next best thing (and far better than nothing.) So if you have a Google account, then take the next step of generating a number for it and plugging it in.

Webmaster Tools

Their use of this is fascinating, since they can tell you what people are using to search your site. Again, your own server is better for this in terms of accuracy, but this is what Google thinks your site looks like and so can give you a leg up on what content you should produce next in order to back up what Google is sending your way.

A rule of warning here - it's not the Gospel truth of what are the best keywords you should be using. Remember our lessons on Market Samurai. Not all keywords are valuable. You want to chase those which have commerciality - people click through on ads which others pay good money for. But you can scrape these keywords and run them through Market Samurai (or for free - through Domain Samurai) to find out what is working best for you.

They also tell you here what broken links you have and how you can improve your site for the search engines. Mainly that when they search a site and find broken links, they come back less often. So fixing these ensure they will search your site quickly (like minutes).

Recently (this year sometime) they plugged Webmaster Tools into Analytics which improved both of them. So when you go into Analytics (you'll have to turn on this interconnection, but it's simple) then you can see what keywords are being searched for and what pages people are accessing.

Again, this is included with your Google Account. And some, like Wordpress.com, only take Webmaster Tools. Odd, but at least you'll be able to see the keywords they visit your free Wordpress blog from it's dashboard - which is also handy.

Google+profiles

While this has been a long, slow start and with several mis-steps, now it looks like they have their feet under them.

Google+ profiles are your personal page on Google. And ties all your work on their various platforms together. And it's the best of the profiles out there, since they have learned from Facebook's and other's mistakes. Just review that freebie I gave you yesterday about setting up your social profiles and you'll get the bulk of it. (Pictures, links back to your site, the whole thing.) But they do privacy better (as much as you can on the web...)

I'm not one who cares all that much for burning my time keeping track of other people's posts. (Even Google has this on automatic.) But Google has released this along with some of their other updates, and is probably the first to use a tag (rel=author) which says that the content on that page was created there first. By doing this, they can see where someone else simply copied the content and pasted it onto their site.

So they can then give the best value to the original content. People who copy your stuff (and leave the links intact) will then be sending you authority for being the author. So they boost your site up for those keywords.

The way Google helps you with this is by enabling you to put a badge on your site which lets people "plus-1" your page. But also marks your site as the original.

Google+ pages

I'm continually surprised that there isn't a land-rush for these.

The same thing you do for yourself, you can do for any product. Like affiliate products and such. If you support or recommend a product and have put up pages about that product or service, then create a Google+ page for this and then share the link here for your content (a lot like Facebook or Twitter). But in this case, the links don't disappear, since Google is hosting it on their servers.

Now, if you have a site for that product, then create a badge from that Google page and plop that code down in the sidebar. Voila - you are now the authority for that content as well.

So if you have several sites, you create Google+ pages, share the links, and plop the badge on those different sites. Don't forget to put your link on that page to your site - it goes right under the logo you use. (Nothing like a backlink from Google to make your day, eh?)

Both on their pages and your profile, you can link all your other sites in. Of course, this makes your blogger blog have more seniority, doesn't it? Not bad for free.

- - - -

There's really too much to discuss here. I've touched on the basics we are going to use later in our "secret sauce" sub-series.

The freebie today is called the Google Plus Marketing Landscape - a collection of data from someone who is an online geek from beyond. While you can get it from his site, I've left all his links in and encourage you to visit it just to get a feel of what he knows. (His style of content isn't what I cherish, so I opted out after awhile...)

Your daily assignment is to create a Google Account if you don't have one and play around with their profiles and pages. If you want, you can start linking in your content so others can find it on Google.

Now I don't go into these "circles" things. But I'll leave you to search for them, as there is quite a bit of discussion on them. Hint: pages can't "circle" people. But you can find "shared circles" of just brands and pages to use for your pages to increase their authority. (It's just branding after all...) Active brands will include you're brand in their circles, particularly if you've shared some good content on your G+ page.