[WARNING: STRONGLY SUGGEST YOU DO NOT VISIT THE URL IN THIS EXAMPLE.]  

These Twitter users have a robot set up which scans the public Twitter timeline looking for Tweets mentioning certain keywords.  

Twitter account mentions to encourage user to visit malware website

I sent a Tweet mentioning the word ‘Kindle’ and within seconds the following Tweet was sent drawing my attention to it by referring to my Twitter user id @Drivelry.  

Inspection of the user ‘neuroezrk’ shows that they are Tweeting fairly random text in a number of different languages all with urls attached to different people.  

They Follow nobody and nobody Follows them.   

Inspection of the url using the Sucuri security scanner  says the target page is infected with malware (possibly code designed to exploit unpatched versions of Internet Explorer).  

The page is also designed to sell icons – it may be the page owner is not even aware there is malware present – and my javascript knowledge is not good enough to verify Sucuri’s analysis and whether it is correct.  

However, whether or not the site is infected, the technique is definitely one which can be exploited by hackers.

I can remember people’s names, I just can’t tell whether I’ve met them or not.  My recognition techniques therefore include getting into inane conversations with them and hoping that by talking about nothing for a while something they say rings a bell.

My lack of facial recognition skills is highlighted in social situations because I happen to look slightly odd and am therefore relatively easy to remember. Not odd-so-you-want-to-sidle-away-and-put-a-hand-loosely-in-the-vicinity-of-your-imaginary-sidearm-odd,  just odd enough so that most people remember me.  All my life I’ve wanted to blend well into a crowd but it was not to be.

Hanging around with me on a more permanent basis can be even more trying.  My partner claims that going to a movie is a seriously frustrating experience.

“So is that guy in the blue shirt the same guy that was in bed with heroine earlier?”

“Ssshhh!”

“Ok, well just tell me if I’m wrong?”

“Shut up!”

Yep, a change of clothing can be a real problem. If a shirt falls in the forest, and as a movie-goer I do not observe it, is it the same person?

Thank god for the conservatism of studio producers. If they didn’t insist on bankable stars like Julia Roberts etc I would be in real trouble – all you would-be actors out there, your enemy is not moneymen bankrolling films who insist on a bankable star, your real enemy is the facial-recognition challenged (FRCs).

And as for cast-of-thousands epics: forget it! I might just be able to identify Russell Crowe in ‘Gladiator’ (let’s face it he’s fairly distinctively ugly) but anyone with a bit part in it was toast.

To simulate the FRC experience for yourself try walking into a supermarket in an ethnic neighborhood (whatever you consider ethnic) or just take a look at an online crowd scene for some ethnic group different for your own. Now imagine you feel like that pretty much all of the time.

If your current significant other doesn’t seem to like going to parties with you, but is always up for a meeting in a bar, it might not be that she’s an alcoholic, she just might be an FRC sufferer and prefer one-on-one dating to group dates.

If this is all beginning to sound depressingly familiar from your own experience you might be relieved to hear that there is evidence that facial recognition skills depend mostly on your genes and not your own memory issues. Admittedly it’ll probably turn out in a 100 years time, when we understand genetics better, that everything is genetic, launching a whole new century of speculation over free will, identity etc, but by then we’ll probably be manipulating the same genes at will anyway.

All is not lost however for FRC sufferers amongst us: we now have social media to level the playing field.

As social interactions become more and more electronic with the aid of Twitter, Facebook, online dating personals sites and TellMeAboutYourDaySoICanSellProductsToYouAndYourFriends.com, you can interact with people without even having to worry about their faces. I seem to have no trouble with the cartoonified faces cropping up these days in Twitter for example.

My helpful tip for FRC sufferers is therefore this: avoid going out socially for the next six months or so, get online, start texting like Gen Y, and find a decent home grocery delivery service. Everything will be fine.

Also, look out for my new iPhone augmented reality application, ‘Who The F**k Is That?’, where you point your iPhone camera subtly at people you don’t recognise and it looks them up (when I can get it approved by Apple under their app developer Terms and Conditions some time over the next decade).

P.S. For more personal relationship therapy for those challenged in the social skills department see my upcoming article ‘Why tall people in a crowded room suffer a hearing disadvantage but they’re not really deaf or stupid.’

Now imagine that following the completion of your new office suite your property developer plasters large signs on every customer-facing entry point to your office saying  ’Building designed and built by Bodgett & Bludgett Property Developers’.

Your customers cannot avoid seeing Bodgett & Bludgett’s signs no matter which way they enter your building and if they look you up in the phone book just below your details they also see ‘Building designed and built by Bodgett & Bludgett Property Developers’.

Seems a trifle unreasonable already doesn’t it? But we aren’t finished yet.

Now imagine that as your business becomes more successful and you start drawing in more customers, a little bit of your marketing budget (‘just’ half a per cent per month or so) is continually diverted to support Bodgett & Bludgett’s own marketing efforts.

“Kee-rist,” most business owners would be saying at this point, “Bodgett & Bludgett Property Developers should be paying me!”

The analogy isn’t perfect but it’s actually what a lot of website developers do on the websites of their small business clients.

You’ve seen it yourself. At the bottom of  the page your friendly website developer places an innocuous piece of text saying something like ‘Website designed and built by Acme Developers‘.

Most web developers will place this text on every single page in your website.

But the more subtle point which the developer usually doesn’t discuss with you is that they also place a hypertext link around this text pointing back to their own website (sometimes with a stylesheet applied so that the link only shows up as a link when you hover your mouse over it).

In Google’s world a link is quite valuable – under Google’s PageRank system (all other things being equal) an outgoing link like this from your own business’s website is effectively a vote for how close to the top in the search results your web developer’s own website should rank in the search results. In particular this is also influenced by the text that forms the link, the ‘anchor text’ – which is why the web developer creates the link around the words ‘website designed and built‘ (on the basis that people searching for website developers may use one or more of these words in combination).

But the really neat bit is that as your website becomes more popular, for example as you list it in paid directories that link to it, a little bit of your PageRank is transferred to your web developer’s home page from every page in your site. The more popular your website, the more you are promoting your web developer’s site, perhaps even years after your developer last did any work for you (almost makes tied financial planners look virtuous doesn’t it).

Now that I’ve pretty much burned my bridges with all the website developers I work with here’s my suggestion about how you as a small business owner negotiate this somewhat irksome issue with your own developer.

The underlying key point is of course that you are paying the website developer to build your website to help promote your business and not vice versa (unless you want to get a suitable discount).

Your website developer will probably be surprised that you would object to their link marketing scheme - most of their other clients won’t have even noticed. 

“But we always do this,” they’ll say in a somewhat injured tone ( just like the independent financial advisers who have been selling investment advice with 50 year trailing commissions).

You can of course ask them where in the development proposal you are providing ongoing marketing services to them.

But some might regard that as confrontational (something that Drivelry.com shies away from).

Instead, remove the link (you can still leave the ‘site built by’ bit) and offer them a testimonial on their own website. You’ll say that they are “the greatest”, “the best”, “the fastest”, and “truly creatively inspired”. 

And, by the way, right underneath that testimonial on your web developer’s own website you’d like a small unobtrusive outgoing link (using keywords carefully chosen by you) to your own website.

You may feel guilty, you might  feel you’ve been pushy, but it’s all a damn sight more transparent. And best of all, given the number of other client websites your developer has already leached PageRank from (which trickles in turn to your site), you’ll be significantly better off from a web marketing point of view!

Go on. Do it!

Feeling faint hearted? Need moral support? Drop us a line to @Drivelry on Twitter (ok – if you’re a developer abuse is fine too).

• how (not to) build an audience for your blog,
• how (not to) to monetize your blog, and last but not least 
• how (not to) choose your blog topics…

At times it may look like the most successful blogs are themselves about blogging and are mainly read (and monetized) by other up and coming bloggers (yep I can see the hypocrisy warning light flashing a bright orange  on the Drivelry editorial floor).

The number of blogs is growing globally at 50% a year

It is also a highly competitive world. 

When Drivelry.com started in August 2008, WordPress.com maintained a count of the number of blogs they hosted on their home page and it stood at 3.9 million (bear in mind that WordPress is only one of several free hosting platforms that include Blogger and many others).

In January 2009 (6 months later) Wordpress stopped revealing this information, perhaps because they thought it would discourage newbie bloggers, or because it was information they didn’t want to make available to their competitors.  However January’s (last published) WordPress figure of 5.2 million blogs hosted  implies a growth rate of over 2 million new blogs a year – or to put it another way that the blogging community (as represented by WordPress.com) is growing at an annual rate of 50% … 

Although not every blog is active that is still a truckload of text being generated every day to be chewed through by search engines which typically account for 60-70% of most website’s traffic. 

Links to your blog are important: so how do you acquire them?

What makes your blog more important to the mother of all search engines (Google) apart from the text you use? 

Links to your blog, which Google regards as a proxy for your blog’s  importance, aka ‘PageRank’.

It’s at this point that we come back to the conventional wisdom about links.  

Essentially it says ‘give the A-list bloggers links and comments and they will reciprocate’ (it’s kind of like the trickle-down theory of economics).  Well it could be that Drivelry frequently verges on the obnoxious but …. we haven’t seen much trickling down yet.  This might have worked as a technique in the days when people were not so ‘link-aware’  but seems not to be the case in 2009.

The community out there is generally aware that links are valuable and that even leaving comments helps generate indexable text.  And frankly most A-list bloggers have enough of both.

If you think you can get around this by leaving a link on someone else’s blog you need to be aware that nearly all blogs implement the “no follow” directive on their comment links which tells Google to ignore the link in calculating PageRank (and this is also implemented on authoritative sites like Wikipedia).

So what’s the alternative?

Link to (and comment on) blogs who appreciate links and comments!

They are likely to be smaller blogs and they need to be ‘link aware’ so that ideally they will a) notice your link to them and b) allow you to make a ‘followable’ link in your comments on their blogs (it is possible to turn off the standard ‘NoFollow’ that is generated in WordPress on links in comments).

Sounds pretty logical – so how do you find these sorts of blogs?

Well it’s actually not as hard as you might think.  Bloggers who implement ’DoFollow’ functionality on their blogs are:

1. Obviously aware by their use of ‘DoFollow’ of the value of links
2. Likely to be smaller as the very popular (higher PageRank) blogs tend to get targeted by spammers in comments – eventually causing these blogs to revert back to ‘NoFollow’
3. Often advertise the fact that they are ‘DoFollow’ so that you can find them in ‘DoFollow’ directories or Google Custom Search engine instances which only return search results from Blogs that are DoFollow

Drivelry.com is itself a DoFollow blog.

DoFollow blog search engines

For example here are a couple of search engines that find text contained in ‘DoFollow’ blogs if you want to add these to your browser toolbar as additional search providers:

http://w3ec.com/dofollow/

http://atniz.com/dofollow-search-engine/

http://www.commenthunt.com/

Health warnings about the use of DoFollow blog search engines

It is worth noting three things in relation to DoFollow search engines:

1. these search engines are not necessarily maintained by the providers out of their goodness of their hearts (in many cases they only maintain these engines so that they can use them as a data source to run search engine optimisation link generation campaigns by inserting spammy comments of their own) and,
2. due to the abuse of  ‘DoFollow’ blogs as they become more popular, sites listed in DoFollow search engines may ‘revert’ back to NoFollow so it is often worth checking whether the blog still remains ‘DoFollow’ by doing a ‘View Source’ on their comment page
3. blogs listed in DoFollow search engines typically moderate their comments to avoid becoming a target for spammers – if your comment says something like ‘Great post. Here’s a link to my blog ….’ it is typically going to be rejected by the blog owner as they are looking for you to add comment value with your link.

Despite the pitfalls above it is worth focusing your interactions on smaller DoFollow blogs rather than the A-listers.  Most of these people will value you linking to them and may reciprocate by doing the same, and will reward you for interacting with their posts in comments by enabling links you leave to count towards your blog’s PageRank.

If enough blogs do this it may help all of us find a way out of the cul-de-sac  that PageRank has led to where bloggers are sometimes unwilling to link to good information sources out there. A quick look at Google Trends for ‘DoFollow’ suggests there is hope here.

You may even want to think about making your own blog DoFollow!

Now that I know most things there are to know about blogging I thought it was important to give something back to the community.

So here are the hard-won lessons I learned about blogging that got me to where I am today, thousands of dollars of Adsense revenue every week and regular speaking opportunities (contact me for details on my new Nichesplog™  system, “‘the only program you’ll ever need to make thousands of dollars on the internet with just 5 minutes effort a day.“)

Rule 1: You must post several times a week

The success of your blog will be driven entirely by search crawlers, who read it 97.8%  more frequently than human readers (NB always provide high quality estimates to at least one decimal place).  Search crawlers have limited comprehension (less than that of your average 2 year old) so quantity beats quality every time. 

Better to post drivel than nothing at all.  Drivel is particularly good because incoming readers are more likely to click on one of the advertisements embedded in your page, rather than read your post, so drivel makes you money!

Rule 2: Write posts with titles involving the phrase  ’the 10 best…’

For example, ”The 10 best ways to lose your virginity”, or “10 shortcuts to becoming an internet millionaire”,  or “10 most popular blog topics to make money online“. 

These kind of posts are  scarce so you will be strongly differentiating yourself by doing this. 

With these kind of socially affirming titles you also appeal to the kind of people that read self-help books. These kind of people are charismatic and are bound to virally spread your message to all their friends by spruiking your posts on social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon or Digg.

Don’t worry if you can’t actually come up with 10 points. If you skip a point or two ( for example going straight from Rule 3 to Rule 5) most readers are unlikely to notice anyway.

This rule is sometimes referred to in the blogging community as the ‘Number – Adjective – Subject’ rule for obvious reasons.

Rule 3: Focus your blog on a clearly defined niche

For example, ‘Railway Travel’ is a good topic for a blog.

However ‘Railway Sleepers‘ means you’re really honing in on a  clearly defined niche. With a ‘niche dominator’ like that (unafilliated with the excellent blogging software of the same name that I have loosely based Nichesplog on) you are bound to attract most of the keyword searches that companies selling either concrete or wood railway sleepers really want to target.  Pick a market that is growing – clearly train travel is growing as environmental issues make public transport more important.

Sure, it may be a little bit difficult coming up with something that interests you about railway sleepers every week but focusing on a niche will:

a) help keep your posts short

b) you can only be accused of ignorance by other bloggers about one subject, and,

c) always remember RULE 1 (search crawlers don’t care what you write anyway).

Keep at it! Get in a routine by writing at least a  sentence  each day and just copy and paste them together every couple of days to form a post.

If you can’t think of anything to write get angry (apparently this helps).

Rule 4:  Make your blog look like something that isn’t a blog

Out there on the internet many readers do not read blogs because, unlike proper journalism, blogs are factually unreliable, prone to bias and they may be hiding computer viruses that can raid your online bank account.  Readers are aware that there is no quality control.

When you think about it even the very word ‘blog’ sounds kind of unnatural.

For this reason it is best to hide from the reader that they are looking at a blog.

For example always refer to posts as ‘articles’ and if you have control over your hosting template it is best to change things like ‘Blogroll‘ to ‘Sites I recommend‘ and ‘Categories‘ should be replaced with ‘Topics‘.

Basically avoid anything that is a giveaway to readers that they are looking at a low quality blog post, as opposed to a high quality website.

Rule 6: Blog readers have miniscule attention spans – keep it short

Screen readers only ever read the first two sentences in a paragraph. Use lots of subheadings.  And short sentences. 

The average blog reader spends 32.4 seconds reading a post. Did you notice that there was no ‘Rule 5′? I rest my case.

All posts should be able to be expressed in 3 paragraphs – anything  longer than that is just self-indulgent.

Most readers will never waste good printer paper by actually printing from a blog.

Rule 7:  Blog rules rule over traditional publishing

Because blogs are going to sweep the old publishing empires before them there is no need to worry about grammer – or syntax; or spelling.

Traditional dead-tree based publishers also have this concept of an ‘editor’ who was not intimately involved in writing the piece, who may be able to see where you are making logical leaps that leave the reader behind, where your sense of humour deserted you, or where you just entirely omitted words. There is no need for one of these editors (or volunteers to perform the role) as editors are part of a cost base that is driving traditional publishers to the wall.  Blogs are ‘personal’ (see Rule 9) and readers are well aware there’s no quality control (see Rule 4).

Typography is just a form of Onanism for publishers. Very small fonts that don’t cater to the over-60s crowd do help you to fit more in ‘above the fold’ (an odd term that we bloggers use to describe the screen text that can be seen without scrolling down) and the over-60s are unlikely to engage with the medium anyway for all the reasons cited above.

Think about search engine optimization all the time. Before you write each post work out what keywords you wish to target and then repeat them a lot. Links to other websites fritter away your ‘Googlejuice’ (a term we bloggers use). It’s best to be self-contained (see Rule 9). Use lots of textual emphasis like italics and underlines as this is apparently also good for your Googlejuice.

Rule 8:  Create lots of buzz about your blog

Engaging with anyone else’s content can really fritter away your time. 

Instead, focus on making comments on other people’s blogs that will help get your articles noticed and really get the attention of other bloggers e.g.:

“You’re wrong. See my post at http://railwaysleepers.blogspot.com/etc.”

Use channels like Twitter and Facebook to broadcast your new posts as much as possible.  When you’re emailing each post to your address book remember Rule 4 and refer to your post as an ‘observation’, ‘explanation’, ‘article’, etc – in short anything but a ‘blog post’.

Create 50 Hotmail accounts and then use them to recommend your best articles at social bookmarking sites.

Mail prominent bloggers interesting questions that could concievably form their next blog post like “could defining your fears be more important than defining your goals?” Or  ask them about blogging – navel-gazing is a habit no self respecting blogger can resist.

PS Talking to people on Twitter can really waste your time.

Rule 9:  Personal is everything

Unlike your email, or dinner parties with your friends,  blogs are for letting it all hang out.  Pictures of your children or pets help to add that personal touch which creates a deeper relationship between you and the reader.  Pictures of your babies are a must.

It’s ok to comment about your company, your partner, and your personal habits. This helps you establish your credibility as an individual and not just a corporate stooge.

With the sheer amount of text being added to the web every day it is highly unlikely that any of  these comments are actually locatable by people close to you at your workplace, school, or other institutions you’re involved with, and people will obviously acknowledge in 10 years time that your opinion may change. Most people also lack anything approaching real search skills.

Rule 10: If you paid for something for your blog you paid too much

If you have to pay for something you’re getting ripped off. You’re already investing a lot of time, why invest money as well?

Registering and finding a domain name takes ages and then you’ve got to wait in the ‘sandpit’ until Google decides you’re not just some web spammer.

Use default designs and create your blog at one of the free blog hosting sites at Blogspot or Blogger or Wordpress.com. After all it’s the text that matters (see Rule 1). 

If it starts to go really well you can easily move your blog somewhere else.