General stuff about me…there won’t be much in here…
Sorry for the delay…
Sorry for the delay in the posting of the “Great Websites, Limited Funds” series. It will still be coming, I promise. For now, I’ll be spending time with my wife and 4 day old baby!
Here name is Aubrey Ann and she is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen!
Contest: How Would You Spend $100 – Win $150
It’s contest time!
Let’s imagine for a moment that you aren’t a millionaire and you only had $100 to spend on SEM (search engine marketing).
What would you do? How would you spend that $100?
All you have to do is send me an email with the best way to spend $100 marketing your website. The website could be new or old, but you can’t spend over $100 exactly on your marketing.
You could have articles written, buy PPC ads, buy a site review, whatever. Make sure you give me some details because I might be using your idea in a future post.
If you are the winner, you will get your choice of spending $150 on this site. $150 will get you the following:
Complete Site Review (1 review)
Contextual links (2 links in either one or two posts, your choice)
Sponsored Posts (3 total sponsored posts)
So all you have to do is send me an email with your best marketing idea under $100!
If you win I’ll contact you to get some info on claiming your winnings.
How to Be Successful
I was just tagged by Eve and thought I would respond about how I define success and how I approach that goal.
I realize that my view of success isn’t the same as most of you reading this, but maybe it will put it into perspective a little better once you read my post.
For me, success isn’t about money, cars, fame, etc. For me, success comes when I am 60 years old and look back on my life and see the joy that I had, and that I passed on to my children. To see them growing and knowing the full diety of Christ and recognizing his authority in their life as a good thing. That is how I define success.
In order for me to achieve that goal I look at a few different things.
1. Money
As you know, money make the world go ’round. Without it, I have to keep working 40/hrs a week. So in terms of money, my goal is 1 million dollars. With $1 mil. I can “retire” and spend more time at home with my family doing what I love to do instead of what I am required to do.
2. Focus
I tend to really get focused on one thing and when that happens everything else falls by the wayside. I am trying to stay focused on what is really important to me, my relationship with Jesus Christ and my family, even while I am doing everything I can to earn money online.
3. Motivation
I have never been easily motivated. All during school my teachers said, “He doesn’t apply himself,” which is unfortunately very true. In that light I have been trying to stay as motivated as possible without getting over extended. Taking on too many projects is on of my downfalls because as I take on a new project, my motivation to complete the previous projects drops to nothin’.
4. Perspective
For me, keeping the above three items in perspective is what makes me successful, and in turn defines success for me. Putting God first, my family second, and everything else third. That is true success.
What you’ll find with true success is that it brings true joy and happiness. If your “success” makes you want more and more, then you haven’t yet found real and lasting success.
I’ll be tagging Andrew to follow up with his views of success and how he defines and achieves success.
Google Needs Snitches! No Pay, No Vacation Time, Nobody will like you!
Deat Matt Cutts and Google,
I used to love you. I would tell my friends about the “car Google bought”, the mortgage “Adsense was paying for”, and so on. Now you are trying to destroy what you helped create.
In an outright foolish blog post Matt Cutts said, “I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms.”
In other words, “We need data in order to be able to stop people buying links from anyone but us. Please screw other webmasters by being an un-paid rat, we’d appreciate it.”
Google, if you want my advice, stop fighting against webmasters, because if it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t have anything to offer searchers.
Webmasters don’t put content on the internet anymore because they want to. They write and spend money building sites so they can make money.
We don’t need a puppet giving us little tid bits of not actually useful help in “ranking better“.
But now you want us to stop making money by selling text links for page rank? Matt Cutts said, “Ash, there’s absolutely no problem with selling links for traffic (as opposed to PageRank).” How can I, as a webmaster, know what the intention of other webmasters is going to be? How can you, as a search engine, punish me for selling related text links? After all, I must approve links that are put on my pages. So even if they are paid, they are deemed relevant by me. It’s my site, and my content, leave it alone.
Oh, and on another note Cutts also said, “For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt.” Why should I punish people who are buying relevant links on my site by nofollowing them? After all, didn’t you just say there is “absolutely no problem” with selling links for traffic?
They want a link, I think their site is worthy, they offer to give me money, it’s a win-win-win. It’s a win for me, I get paid. It’s a win for them, they get a relevant link. It’s a win for you, you find another relelvant site.
However, punishing paid links is a lose-lose-draw. I lose because people are scared to buy links. Advertisers lose because I won’t go to the trouble of giving them a link without getting paid. You won’t find the relevant site as easy, even though you’ll find it eventually.
I know with as many minor SERP updates, you can easily filter out 99% of spam. You aren’t going to catch that other 1% of spammers this way.
If you are going to alienate me and tell me that what I’m doing, and will continue to do, is against your rules, does that make me a “black hat”? And since you are saying that I’m on the wrong side of the line, what stops me from going all the way over and joining SEOBlackHat (No nofollow)?
If you still think this “Calling All Snitches” post is a good idea, keep it up. You’ve just lost a follower and forced someone to the dark side.
Never again yours,
Brandon Hopkins
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