Celebrities and Search Engines: 2006

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Finally, Something Changed To My Favor With Google Index

Finally, something has changed in my favor with the Google Index. All of a sudden, a few days ago I shot up to 542 pages being indexed in Google (up from 240). However, today it is down to 512. [Just my luck.] Tomorrow I am going to be submitting a bunch of pages to for reciprocal linking with two other websites. I'll see if this boosts it up a bit.

It seems that this site is finally back on the Google Index. Now it can be found by all of you that use the Google Search. You may ask, why am I so concerned with Google and not the other search engines? Well, it is because in my experience, Google has provided me with 4 or more times the amount of traffic than any the other search engines combined. I would be a fool to ingnore those and do what I can to be listed (and as high as possible), however, I have found it easier to get up on those indexes and to stay there. It is Google that always seems to give me the problems. Do you have the same experiences with the search engines? Leave me a comment below.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

I Hate The Google Index

In my ongoing quest to get all of the pages on the www.biographyplus.com website indexed, I have tried submitting a new sitemap. It seemed to have begun to work and I went up from the 120 or so pages indexed to a high of 287. Now I am back down to 240 pages. To top it off, this blog seems to be taken off the index as well. What is going on here? I am going to be doing a reciprocal link with two sites, which I will hopefully have up by next week. I now know that the site map just doesn't work the way it should. I have given it enough time, so now onto reciprocal linking. I'll let you know when it begins and how the indexing reacts (or does not react) to having links to the individual celebrity pages.

I am also trying to add links on my Celebrity Voice pages at http://www.freewebs.com/celebrityvoice/ (which, by the way, is indexed). The site, so far, includes the following celebrities:

Elisha Cuthbert
Paris Hilton
Katie Homes
Angelina Jolie
Lindsay Lohan
Anna Nicole Smith
Britney Spears

And just to get some links to the BiographyPlus.com site up, here are a few misc. celebrities with last names beginning with an "M":

James Madison
Madonna
Tobey Maguire
Marilyn Manson
Josie Maran
Mario
Bob Marley
Garry Marshall
James W. Marshall
George RR Martin
Karl Marx
George Mason
John Mason
Chris Masters
John Mayer
Jenny McCarthy
Jesse McCartney
Paul McCartney
Helen McCrory
Stephanie McIntosh
William McKinley
Stephanie McMahon
Kristy McNichol
Ewan McGregor
Harry Melling
Herman Melville
Eva Mendes
Maria Menounos
Arthur Miller
Marisa Miller
Romeo Miller
Sienna Miller
Andy Milonakis
Kylie Minogue
Hugh Mitchell
Kelly Monaco
Marilyn Monroe
Pat Morita
Eddie Murphy
Chad Michael Murray
My Chemical Romance

Until next time,
Ian Ripley . . .

Thursday, November 30, 2006

How Many Google Astores Do You Have?

Monday, November 27, 2006

BiographyPlus.com Update

BiographyPlus.com Deep Index Experiment

About two weeks ago I said that I was going to begin experiementing on how to raise the number of indexed pages on the www.biographyplus.com website. I did create a new index and submitted it to Google. I am now up to 277 indexed pages (up from about 110-120). It seems to be rising about 3-7 links every day. In the mean time I have also been working on expanding the site so that I now have about 1300 pages on the site (about 6 pages per person for A thru B so far). None of those new deeper pages have been indexed so far. I have not submitted the URLs for any reciprocal links yet. No, I do not know what I am waiting for. Actually, I will wait until the number of indexed pages begin to slow down or do not rais at all, this way I can try to measure if getting reciprocal links does have any affect on the site.

Top Five with Popular Terms for Christmas Music CDs

I was able to make the top five on Google for a search for "music recommendations for Christmas" and "CD recommendations for Christmas" - I know the term is a little long, but it is a very common term that hopefully people will use in their searches. Hopefully it will lead to additional revenues. How did I do it? I must have just hit on the perfect combination of keywords in the content and in the meta tags (yes, I believe that all the search engines do look at the meta tags.)

What Happened to Kate Middleton?

For about 3 days, my Kate Middleton page on www.PopStarsplus.com was in the top 5 in Google for searches on her name. Now it is not even indexed. What a crazy search engine world we live in. I also noticed that all of the other "Celebrities" I had added over the last month have also dissapeared from the index. Google taketh with one spider and taketh away with another.

Ian Ripley . . . until next time.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Google Deep Index Experiment

As you have been reading, Google hates me. Well, really, it hates my site, www.BiographyPlus.com. It does not want to spider and index my entire site. It gets the top pages, but unsystematically does not index others. I have looked at the page's html between an indexed page and a non-indexed page and I cannot find anything, I re-submitted a new site-map to Google two weeks ago and no change since it was last indexed on 11/8. I have two things I am going to do. First, I will spend an hour or so tonight submitting the page to other sites. I should have done this a long time ago. I am not interested in page ranking with this sight yet, so I did not worry about it. However, if I can get links to some of the deeper pages, then maybe it can index me via those links. Secondly, I am going to be adding some deep links onto this blog to see what happens.

Experiment Links:

Biographies Beginning with "C" -- http://www.biographyplus.com/c.htm

Fidel Castro News -- http://www.biographyplus.com/fidel_castro_news.htm

Crazy Horse -- http://www.biographyplus.com/crazy_horse.htm

Peter Abelard Biography -- http://www.biographyplus.com/peter_abelard_biography.htm

Thomas Aquinas Auction Items -- http://www.biographyplus.com/thomas_aquinas_auction_items.htm

Queen -- http://www.biographyplus.com/queen.htm

50 Cent Biography -- http://www.biographyplus.com/50_cent.htm

Actors in Harry Potter -- http://www.biographyplus.com/index_movies_h_harrypotter.htm

Biographies of Rock Musicians -- http://www.biographyplus.com/index_music_rock.htm

Okay, now we will see if this works.

Until next time . . . Ian Ripley

Thursday, November 09, 2006

A Grittier Celebrity Website Added

I have begun to create another free-web based side for celebrities called Celebrity Voice. I created it on FreeWebs. Its purpose is to be able to speak freely and candidly about the celebrities and how trashy or hot they are. If you are interested, you can check it out at: Celebrity Voice <http://www.freewebs.com/celebrityvoice/>.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

What's Up With Google Site Maps?

Google just doesn't like me. It does not matter what I do with www.BiographyPlus.com, Google just does not seem to want to Index further than the second level of the site and only a few select third level pages. There is no rhyme or reason for what pages it indexes. The reasoning is all computer generated through their algorythm, but it is a machine and not a human. My pages on BiographyPlus.com and www.PopStarsplus.com are set up the same way, but the Pop Stars site is fully indexed, although I do not know why it takes anywhere from 1 to 6 days sometimes to cache.

How to Make a Google Sitemap

Anyway, I went back to my Google Sitemap and re-created a new map. I used NeuroticWeb (http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/) to create the new map. For those of you that have not done this before, you need to Go to Google and Set up an account. Once you do that, verify your website (the instructions are on Google). Use the Sitemap generator on Google or use a free service such as NeuroticWeb above. Once you ahve the text, copy it to your notepad and save the file in UTF-8. Add it to your website as a file named sitemap.xml and then go back to Google and tell it that you are ready to be mapped. Google will then look at your site and sitemap file and tell you if it is good or not. This could be a pain and require you to continously "parse" (find and correct errors) the file. Once it accepts the file you wait. Unfortunately for me, I wait and wait and wait to no avail. Google still only indexes about 150 page out of over 800 (it leaves out most of the pages with the content). I am also working on changing the site, but if it is not indexed, what's the use?

Till next time, Ian Ripley

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

How Important Are Backlinks?

With the last two Google re-indexing in June and September, backlinks seem to play an important role in Google Page Rank and search results. For those who say that page rank means nothing - phooey. I see a definite correlation in my sites between page ranking and traffic. When one of my sites goes up in page rank, I see more traffic. If the page rank goes down, so does traffic. One think to keep in mind, however, is that this is only true for comparing a web site to itself. For instance, you may have a web site with a Google Page Rank (GPR) of 6 and I have a site with a GPR of 4, however, I appear higher in the search results. So saying "my page rank is higher than yours" means little, but saying "my page rank went up, so I will probably get more traffic" has been true with my own sites so far.

Backlinks In Celebrity Web Sites

When Google looks at backlinks, I think they look at links to each individual page. For instance in www.PopStarsPlus.com or www.BiographyPlus.com I try to get links to the individual artist or celebrity. So Lindsay Lohan pages link to other Lindsay Lohan pages, Zac Efron Pages link to other Zac Efron Pages, Michael Jordan pages link to Michael Jordan pages, etc. So when the Google spideers take a look at the home pages, they do not see most of the back links to the site, only the ones that go directly to the home page itself. Yes, the back links do help the internal celebrity pages which supposedly will help the home page it links to, but there are hundreds or thousands of backlinks that are not accounted for in the home page. Maybe Google needs to re-work its own algorithm to take this into consideration.

As a strategy, I could just have all reciprocal links go to the home page, but that would be a disservice to the individuals that want a specific celebrity. I guess I will probably keep on doing what I am doing and eventually Google will benefit websites that actually try to provide information and links to its users as opposed to sites that provide information and links that will obtain the best rankings. Hopefully I will win out in the end, but being right does not always mean success. Ultimately, when there is time, I will try to get some more "quality" backlinks, but for now, adding content and making my sites the best they can be is a priority.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Blog Spams

Spam is an annoyance.

Even on emails that I know I have not given anyone permission to place on a subsciption list of any kind recieves spam emails. People have left spam replies to this blog, I even got a spam text message to my cell-phone the other day.

To those of you that are doing it: Stop it already. Almost everyone knows what a spam email is and are hopefully not buying into your spams or phishing techniques. In a three minute period, I recieved the same exact email from three different email addresses from three different people claiming to be a daughter of a rich businessperson that was killed and they need me (although they do not know my name) to help them get money out a the bank in my country (nor do they know what country I live in). Once I decided to play along in a scam involving a dying man in a hospital who needed my help, I first gave him false information and when it came to giving him some money to help get out a larger sum which I would share, I told him that I lived in the very town that the hospital was located. I said I would be happy to visit him and give him the money then. Could you believe that he did not reply to that last email?

Unfortunately, most of the "victims" are the poor, eldery or illiterate. I seem to get a lot of phishing from crooks claiming to be ebay and paypal - I immediately send them to spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com -- I wonder if ebay or paypal really does anything with my forwarded emails?

I think that free-email sites should be monitoring their users a little better. If joe smith signs up for all of the screen names on Hotmail, AOL, etc., then does a bulk mailing from all of them, then changes all of the screen names every two weeks, then maybe something not right. I am not sure if they can track that type of usage by their users, but if not, they should.

Don't spam!

Ian Ripley

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Watch Out When Dealing Working With Celebrity Marketing & PR Firms

Working With Marketing and PR Firms Could be Good for your Site

We all want to make money from our site and drive additional traffic to it. One such was is to get "hooked-up" with marketing or PR (public relations) deparments or solo firms that are trying to promote celebrities. Most of the ones I have done have been for artists and bands, with a few television shows and movies mixed in. Most of the time, you are offered assets (e.g., graphics and MP3s) and/or contests. Sometimes you are offered the product if peform a review for them (e.g., review a new CD). If the campaign is big enough you may be offered other merchandise or money.

Beware

I have learned a lot of things over the first year or so when dealing with these companies which I would like to share. Sometimes, when you do not play it right, you may do a lot of work and get nothing out of it - which has recently happened to me. First of all, most of the people and companies I have created these types of relationships have been fantastic. I'll try to give you a list of links to their websites in another blog entry. Then there are those few that just do not work out the way you had planned. Because some of these companies deal with "artists" within the industry, things happen very fast and an album launch may be cancelled or pushed back over night.

Giveaway Contests

If you are running a giveaway contest and the companie's client (the artist) pulls out, you may not receive the items for that contest. This is something that is expected and your contact should let you know as soon as possible. Don't get too upset, this stuff happens, just make sure you take down the contest on your site and post an apology to those that have already entered. (I had to do this once, and it was no big deal.) You could also automatically add their names into another contest you are already holding. It is when your contact does not tell you that they have lost their client is when you should be mad. Yes, this did happen to me after almost a full month of running the contest. I just happened to find out because I emailed my contact a question. I was kind of mad - and have not worked with her company since.

Another quick note about giveaways -- when possible, have the PR firm send out the gifts, it is less work and less expense that way. However, if you are the one sending it out, do not begin your contest until you have the prizes in hand. This way regardless of what happens to the client, you already have the prizes to send out.

Adding Promotional Ads for Money

Most of the dealings you have with these firms are very informal. However, make sure you read whatever you write in the email and thourouhly read the emails from the company - especially when dealing with payment for placement of a banner onto your site for money. Most of the time I have had no problem. They send me the graphic (or code) and I place it on my site for the time period requested and get paid for it. There are two situations that have happened to me that I would like to mention: (1) After a number of emails back and forth between myself and a company, we began to discuss two different things. Because of that confusion, they wanted the two ads for one price, and I was quoting them twice that figure. In the end, they only took the one ad for the lower price. Just remember, if you have built up a sight with lots of visitors, you should charge the going rate for the space on the site. You can cut a deal for a little less, but do not take less than what the page real estate is really worth. (2) From what I thought was a clear concise explaination of what I was offering for a certain sum, the PR contact sent me back a message that said it was okay. I saw the okay, I saw the dollar figure, but I did not double check the estimated impressions or the run dates of the ad. It also seems that their impression counter was only getting about 10% of the impressions I was recording on two separate tracking systems. Then they informed me that while I gave them figures over a 5-6 week period, they wanted the same number of impressions in one week. Their last email was that I could try if I wanted, but if not, the promotion was over in a few days. I immediately placed the graphic on every single page of my website so that I was able to get the desired number of impressions in five days. However, when I emailed, I got no response. I emailed again to no response. A week later, another email with no response (and no payment in the mail either). If I still do not recieve anything by Friday, I will try to contact someone else within the company. I usually make the request that payment is due within 5 business days of the ad appearing live - but for some strange reason, I did not do that. I should have also re-read their response more clearly and asked a lot more questions. I now know better for next time. It is not really a mistake, just a learning experience. If I do it again, then it is a mistake.

I hope you make some use of my experiences and put them to your own use.

Until next time,

I.R.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Amazon aStore Is A Quick Way To Increase Revenues

Amazon likes to make money, and one way to make money is to get people to make them money from linking. We all know about their affiliate program where you put their banners and links on our websites. However, now they have gone a step further. They have created the aStore, which is a customizable e-commerce store that affilliates can create and modify containing virtually everything on their site. It is very simple and quick to set up a site and should have the potential of generating additional income streams. This is especially true for smaller blogs websites that do not have the resources to do so.

You can see the site I set up here for my sister site for products relating to Diabetes:

http://astore.amazon.com/popstarsplus-20

I know that this is only the first generation of aStores to come, but some of the things I would like to see in the future is the ability of placing links back to your website and the ability to further customize and choose the catagories, sub-catagories and even products for the store. In addition, I would like the ability to create more than one store. I chose to do one for Diabetes, since there is not much in the way of revenue opportunites yet, but if I had a second store, it would be tied-in with www.PopStarsPlus.com

On another note, yes, it has been a while since writing, and hopefully I will not wait as long until the next time . . . .

I.R.

Monday, July 10, 2006

I've Been Busy

First of all, sorry I have not been posting, but I have been busy with so many other things. I hope to post a little more often now (but don't h0ld me to it).

Status reports:

www.PopStarsPlus.com has been doing well, although not much of an increase in traffic last month. We think that it is because we (especially me) have not put much time into the site. We also always seem to get on the short end of the stick every time Google re-indexes, as they did last month. The previous reindex we lost a ton of traffic during the first month. This time we did not lose traffic, but we did not gain any either.

www.BiographyPlus.com seems to be fully indexed again, however, it does not recieve the same traffic as it had done when it was fist published - I guess removing all of the links on the home page worked. We still have a lot to do on PopStars, but hopefully will have time to look into this site and make it a more popular site at the end of the summer.

Celebrity News on PSP is not working very well, even though I get hundreds of thousands of visitors, no one has submitted any really good news articles - but my associates like it for press releases. [see http://www.popstarsplus.com/celebritynews.htm]

I'll try to have something os substance for you later this week.

Friday, June 09, 2006

Pages disappearing in Google Index - A Continuing Story

Okay, a few posts ago, I made mention of how Google nixed a bunch of pages from one of my sites - www.BiographyPlus.com. Well, in order to overcome this, I decided to make a few changes. The first (and only) change I have made so far is to the home page. Previously, the page was full of links to each and every of the almost 600 celebrities and historical figures I had on the site. I thought that the robots were being confused by so many links on one page [remember: Google's webmaster guidelines say that you should not have any links on your page.] At first it works, within a few days, I went fro 82 indexed pages to 112. Within a few weeks I made it up to 170 indexed pages (a little more than 25% of the pages, but almost double of what I had). It remained like this for about a week, then it began to drop again. I am once again down to 114 pages indexed. So, here's a lesson for all of you - the number of links may affect the indexing of your page for only a little while. The next fewthings I am going to do are as follows: (1) on this very blog I am going to link to some of the pages that are not linking so that maybe a stray robot may visit, (2) recreate a new site map and suhbmit it to Google (someone said that this might work, and (3) begin doing some reciprocal linking for some of the pages.

I'll start with these five individuals and see if it does any good

George Washington http://www.biographyplus.com/george_washington.htm
Michael Jordan http://www.biographyplus.com/michael_jordan.htm
Evans Blue http://www.biographyplus.com/evans_blue.htm
James Madison http://www.biographyplus.com/james_madison.htm
Mark Twain http://www.biographyplus.com/mark_twain.htm
Heidi Klum http://www.biographyplus.com/heidi_klum.htm

Until next time . . . .

I.R.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Celebrity News

A New Concept: Celebrity News by Real People

People love to read news about their favorite celebrities - so having celebrity news on your website is a good thing to have. We have been placing a lot of information about many celebrities on www.PopStarsPlus.com since we have begun. On each page, we have a feed from www.Topix.net to provide the latest up-to-date news on that particular celebrity. However, we have also decided to do something new, we have decided to add a celebrity news section with original articles about celebrities. The catch, and what makes this different from most other sites, is that we are asking the average fan out there to provide the content (kind of like a Wiki-news). The ads seeking submissions have been up for about a week so far on our site, with a number of responses. However, no real articles have come up so far. With about 150,0oo unique users each week, you think that more people would submit something - but I guess most want to get the information, not write it.

So, this blog is in a way an advertisement for submissions. The great part about the way we are doing this is that those that submit the articles can make money through Google Adsense - so they will not be writing for free. The submission guidelines can be found at http://www.popstarsplus.com/celebritynews_submissionguidelines.htm. As an added incentive, if you have any news about any celebrity or entertainment event, let us know. If you post enough articles, we will even give you your own author page.

If you want news and do not want to go through the hassle of anything like this, you can also go to Topix.net and set up a feed yourself. They have thousands of topics and all you need to do is place their code onto your site. If you have the time, you can also do your own research and write the news stories yourself every day.

News, because it is constantly changing brings people to your site and if you have good material, will continuously bring them back time and time again.

Until next time . . . .

I.R.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

International Cops Caught Hundreds of Phish

A few weeks ago I wrote about how much I despised Phishing Spams (see Phishing Down By the Pond) and how it may affect honest website owners. Well, I just wanted to give a quick cudos to the International task force that nabbed over 500 people world wide for their participation in these Phishing schemes (cheating people for over $1 billion dollars last year) with many of the arrests leading to convictions. For more information, click here.

. . . and justice for all!

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Get on the Band Wagon for Contests, Money & Increased Traffic

Promoting Bands on Your Website Can Be Beneficial to Your Website and Your Visitors

There are many benefits to promoting bands on your site such as:

Increase traffic through providing free giveaway contests
Obtaining free assets such as pictures, audio & video
Interviews with the artists
Obtaining money & merchandise for yourself

So it pays to add new artists onto your website when you are going to benefit from it.

Increase Traffic Through Giveaway Contests

One way to increase traffic on your site is to offer something to your visitors, such as contests. Many new/emerging bands or even some that are promoting a new album, are giving you free stuff to provide as contests on your websites. Some contests we have run include CDs, autographed memorabilia, Video I-Pods, MP3 Players, a personalized Valentines Day card, etc. It costs you nothing to run the contest, and your visitors may get a huge benefit if they win.

If you are constantly changing your contests each month, visitors may return each month just to see what you are giving away next. This could lead to many returning visitors each month.

Obtaining Free Assets

Many of the record companies or marketing firms that provide these promotions want you to have the best information and assets available to make your site look good. You can wind up with an whole library of pictures to show to your visitors. In addition, they usually also include audio and video links -- sometimes exclusives or first previews just for your visitors.

Interviews With the Artists

Sometimes you may be able to interview the artists you are promoting. Occasionally, it may be live or over the phone, or many times you can send in questions and have them answer them. It is a really great addition to add to your site.

Getting Paid for Promotions with Money or Other Goodies

Depending on the promotion and the marketing company, you may be able to get paid in cash or receive other goodies such as gift cards, CDs, DVDs, merchandise, etc. The amounts you may receive may be a few dollars to a few thousand dollars, depending on the promotion and the number of unique visitors to your site. If you have put in your time and have created a site that is receiving thousands and thousands of Unique Visitors a month, all of the space on your site is worth something. The artist is getting the benefit of your visitors seeing their advertisements on your site, and you should be compensated for such. Also, if they are coming to your celebrity site, they probably fall into the demographics wanted by the marketing firm for the artist.

But sometimes, just having the contests and assets for a particular artist could lead to residual benefits. For instance, I added Teddy Geiger to my site sometime last year. I ran three separate contests over a 4-5 month period. His page has received anywhere from 3000 to 3500 page views a week. I have probably sold two dozen, plus Teddy Geiger albums via Amazon and made commissions off of that, and who knows how many of those thousands of new viewers have made me money from my other affiliates and have become return visitors each month. Yes, I know, Teddy Geiger is not a band, but I am just using him as an example to illustrate this idea.

About Promoting Artists & Celebrities Your Website

How Do You Start Promoting?

The way we began promoting artists was though solicitation of a marketing company that asked us to promote a new/emerging star. We said yes and put their celebrity on our site and worked with them in doing a giveaway contest. This worked out well and we began doing others. Other record companies and marketing firms have since contacted us and asked us to help promote their artists or entertainment events.

If you would like to solicit your services to the promoters, you need to go to them yourself. Some of the record companies & marketing firms we have dealt with include:
[ ]

If they have an artist you like, it is best to see if they have a "Street Team" - this is the quickest way to get information and obtain assets. If there is a contact person listed, send them an email tell them that you are interested in promoting their artist/celebrity and they will get back to you with any information you need to know.

Uniques are Important

The single most important figure that the promoter/marketing person wants to know is the number of "Uniques" you have each month. This means the number of non-returning individual visitors that come to your website each month. For instance, I may visit your website three times this month, and visit 3 pages each time I am there. This would mean that I would be counted as 1 unique visitor, with 3 visits and 9 hits. The promo/marketing person is only interested in that first figure. We use TrafficFacts to record our visitor data for a fee, however, if you do a search on any search engine, you can find a few free services that do the basics of what you need.

Why is this figure important to you? Simply: The more uniques you have the more a promoter/ marketing firm is willing to compensate you for your services.

Why is this figure important to them? So they can justify providing you with contest items or compensation.

Setting Up The Promotion

The way we work promotions at www.PopStarsPlus.com is as follows:

Make an agreement with the promoter/marketer
Set up a page for the artist
Populate the artist's page with the various assets
Set up a contest page
Place contest banners/info on artist page and home page
Have promoter send the winners the contest

There are a few ground rules you need to make clear first. (1) One biggy for us is that you ask them to hold onto the prizes and have them send them out at the end of the contest. Trust me, this saves you a lot of headaches or (2) Ask them to notify you ASAP if they cannot deliver the prizes. This has happened to us twice, and one time the promoter did not tell us until the last moment.

Summary

Promoting bands (or solo artists) is a good thing for your site as long as it fits into the theme of your site. If your site is about actresses only, it may not be a good fit - but you can try to find other promotions that do fit in.

To see some of the contests we are running, you can visit our home page at http://www.popstarsplus.com

To visit some of the bands we have on our site, click on any of the following links:

10 Years
Augustana
Aerosmith
Aly and AJ
B5
Beatles
Blink 182
Blue October
Bullets and Octane
Cheetah Girls
D4L
Dead Kennedys
DEVO 2.0
Evanescence
Evans Blue
Fall Out Boy
Flashlight Brown
Flyleaf
Good Charlotte
Gorillaz
Green Day
Head Automatica
Hoobastank
Hurt
Lillix
Linkin Park
Loser
My Chemical Romance
Pretty Ricky
Pussycat Dolls
Quietdrive
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Rock Kills Kid
Rolling Stones
The Veronicas
U2

Under Construction:
A Simple Plan
Backstreet Boys
Black Eyed Peas
Bon Jovi
Coldplay
Destiny's Child
Korn
Led Zeppelin
Marilyn Manson
Maroon 5
Metallica
Nirvana
Pink Floyd
Queen
Radiohead
Simple Minds
Slipknot
Sugarland
System of a Down
The Band Thrice
The Chemical Brothers
The Killers
The Who
Three 6 Mafia
Wilco

Thanks and good promoting.

Until next time . . . .

I.R.

Friday, May 19, 2006

The Importance of Link Partners

Importance of Link Partners

Introduction

Over the past few months I have learned an important lesson concerning the importance of link partners. That lesson being - you need them. Okay, that is too simple, and you have probably figured it out on your own, but let's take a look at why you need them.

The three main reasons you need to obtain link partner relationships is as follows:
1) Google looks at inbound links (those linking to your page(s)) in determining ranking for its algorithm.
2) People actually come to your site by clicking on links from your partner web sites.
3) It is good to make friends.

A Personal Note: Internal Pages Being Removed From Google Index

No one can say for sure what comprises the full algorithm (except for its developers), but through careful analysis of search results of your pages after each reindex, you might begin to observe certain patterns. For instance, Google now seems to weigh the number of highly relevant links that go to a page more heavily now than it did a year ago. We have also recently noticed that internal links of large websites that do not include inbound links from outside web pages may be either not indexed, or taken off the index. This is especially true for sites that include a lot of linking. We have noticed this on our http://GiftIdeasPlus.com site where all of the pages that were more than three levels from the home page were unindexed or never indexed at all.

What really sucked was that we noticed it about three weeks before Mother's Day and information pages, such as for Mother's Day History were not indexed, and any page I had which included links, such as links to Mother's Day Recipes or Mother's Day Teacher's Resources were taken off the index altogether.

What was worse was when last week, the www.BiographyPlus.com website lost about 80 to 85 percent of its indexed pages. A little less than 90 pages are in the index, when last week over 500 were indexed. The biography pages are only third level from the home page. I think that there are a combination of three reasons for the sudden loss. First, I have not spent any time in acquiring link partners. Google may not bother with a page unless other websites go to it. Which makes sense on its face, but how are other websites going to know about the unless they find it (usually) through search engines. [Note: Google Site Maps does not automatically mean that the pages will be included either]. The second reason for the unindexing of the pages may be due to the content. For the most part, many of the pages include the same content as the Celebrity site and it is penalizing BiographyPlus.com. Google does not like mirror sites - and may not even take into consideration that the two sites are set up differently and that BiographyPlus.com includes many other non-celebrity biographies that are not included on www.PopStarsPlus.com. The third reason is the fact that BiographyPlus.com includes many "index" pages which all are made up of links. Google does not really like pages which include "link only" content and may leave my site before fully indexing the deeper pages.

So what am I going to do about it? First, as I have been doing with PopStarsPlus.com, I am gaining additional link partners, Secondly, I am going to try to add some type of content to the top of the index pages. Maybe this will keep the spiders from going away. Thirdly, I may also redesign the home page. Google's own webmaster guidelines state that it does not like pages with more than 100 links - so maybe I should listen and cut out most of the linking on that page.

Google Algorithm and Inbound Links

As noted above, inbound links are one of the factors in Google's algorithm. However, be wary of what that means. First of all, it takes into consideration the type of link coming in. A link from a highly rated website that has relevant and related information to your site will be looked more positively than a random link from anysite.com. In addition, what type of site is it? Links from link farms are pretty much meaningless and may even have a negative influence on the results. So it is important to find sites that provide content that is related to your own. If you have a site about dogs, you might not pursue links from a site about home restoration. Another canine website would be preferable, although a general site about pets might not be out of the question.

Generating traffic from Inbound Links

If you have your link on a respected website, web surfers are more likely to trust the links provided on their site. This could provide additional traffic to your website. If you have been in this business long enough you will see that links on most link farms will not generate anything. If you have specialized content on your site and find other sites/pages with that specific content, there will probably not been many links listed -- these could lead to many additional visitors.

Making Friends on the Web

In order to create link partners, it is up to you to find them (although if your site is good, they might find you first). Once you find them, contact them. This could lead to a beautiful relationship between your two sites - even if the sites are somewhat in competition with each other. For most sites, I do not believe this to be the issue especially with celebrity websites. There are so many potential visitors out there and so much information about celebrities, that it will be a long time until there is any true competition in this area. This is why you see so many celebrity sites that link to each other.

There are many reliable websites out there. One of our favorite partners is www.TopSynergy.com. They have a really good and informative website. The site includes information about celebrities, but its main focus, as their motto reads is as a "Relationships Analyst - Home to the seekers of successful relationships." Our relationship had begun solely for the swapping of links, but at times we have delved into conversations regarding such items as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help each other to suceed.

Conclusion

So, what have we learned?
1) Inbound links from other related websites are important - not just any site will do.
2) A good inbound link could increase traffic.
3) Forming relationships with other like websites could be advantageous to both of you.
4) Do not put too many links on any one page.

I hope this helps someone out there,

Till next time . . .
Ian

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Affiliate Money

Should you make money with your website?

A stupid question? Not really. A lot of you, especially the celebrity fans, out there have created your websites because of a passion you have or the respect you have for a celebrity. You are a fan and you want the world to know it -- and to know all about your favorite celeb. So, would it be right for you also to make money from it as well?

A good website take time and money. Although you are not being a fan to create a profit, a little extra income can offset the cost of maintaining your site and your time - and may even give you enough money to purchase that concert ticket the next time your celeb is in town.

What is an affiliate relationship?

Simply speaking - an affiliate relationship is where you make money from one of your visitors going to an affiliate's site through a link from your site. If they purchase something at the affiliate's website, you get a percentage of the sale.

To illustrate how an affiliate relationship works - see below:

You make arrangements with ABYZ Co. to place a link to their website on your own site
Place the links on your site (with the coding they give you)
Wait for visitors to click on the link
A visitor clicks on the link which bring them from your website to the affiliate website
Invisible to either you or the visitor, the "click" is being tracked by a behind the scenes software. That will notify the affiliate that this visitor was referred by you.
Hopefully, the visitor will purchase something at the affiliate's website. If they do, you will receive either a percentage of the sale or a flat fee depending upon your relationship.
Wait for your check to arrive [Note: usually there is a minimum amount to be reached before payment is sent]

What are the best affiliate programs?

This is not an easy question to answer and much of it depends upon the type of website you have. We at www.PopStarsPlus.com have gone with the larger and more traditional affiliate organizations.

If you go to any of our celebrity pages, on PopStarsPlus you will see links to Amazon, Ebay, AllPosters and Contact Any Celebrity. These are solid programs, and we highly recommend all of them, but they are not the only ones out there. There are other similar affiliate programs that could easily be found on the web, and some that offer higher returns than the ones we have chosen. In addition, we have also partnered with ClickBank, Art.com and LinkShare on some of the other websites we maintain. [Be wary - some affiliate programs do not want to share sites or pages with other similar affiliate programs]

Why did we choose the ones we did? Because these programs are established and would provide our customers with good products and services. For some of our specialty sites, we have also used some much smaller programs or individual sites - but we did a lot of research first to ensure that the sites would be a good match to us and our visitors.

To give you an idea of how we use some of these affiliates, take a look at some of our sites:

Amazon, Ebay, AllPosters and Contact Any Celebrity: www.PopStarsPlus.com (go to any celebrity)
LinkShare.com: www.GiftIdeasPlus.com (go to any holiday)
ClickBank.com: www.BusinessForMyself.com (go to any theme)
Art.com: www.ArtandSell.com (go to the famous artists section) [under construction]
Some smaller independent programs: www.ChanukahGiftsPlus.com (go to any product)

For information on how to become an affiliate partner with some of these sites you can go to the "Making Money" page on PopStarsPlus.com at http://www.popstarsplus.com/makemoney.htm.

So go out there and start some affiliate partnerships and make some money to help offset the cost of your site, or to just have some extra pocket money for those rainy days.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

What Is A Link Worth?

An Introduction to Why you Should or Should Not Link

You have created a great celebrity site with all of the most up-to-date information about Diva Starr, your favorite musician. You now want to make sure that everyone else out there knows about it too. You have done everything you can to the site - but you do not know if you should spend all of your time trying to get reciprocal links from other sites. You have also heard so many things about it -- inbound links, outbound links, link farms, deep linking, reciprocal linking, this linking, that linking. Is it all really worth it?

Google and Linking

Every time Google has a new re-indexing, some websites seem to make huge leaps in terms of search placement and page ranking and others take a dive. For instance, PopStarsPlus took a good 10 to 15 percent dive in January during and after the reindex. Luckily, we have bounced back, but we tried to see what it is that made us lose search placement on Google. Not to ignore the other major search engines here, but it seems that everyone around the web is obsessed with Google search optimization, so that is what you will find the most information about. I also know the most about that and interestingly enough, Google does generate the most traffic for us than any of the other search engines. But it is because of how Google looks at the linking of websites is how many of us develop our sites -- yes, even though we think of ourselves as being independent, Google does dictate how we go about our web business. [A good place to visit is Google's own page entitled "Google Information for Webmasters" at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.]

History of How Search Engines Look at Linking

The More Links The Better

Going back a few years, the theory was: the more links you had the better. This was then modified to: the more links you have pointing to your website the better. Having links pointing to your site are called inbound links. Links from your site to another are called outbound links. In a perfect world, you would expect the better your site, the more other sites would want to link to it -- therefore, the more inbound links, the better the site.

Link Farms and Relevancy

But we do not live in a perfect world, so link farms were created. These are web sites that will trade links with any site in order to get more links so that they can rise in the search engine rankings. They may link with websites that have nothing substantively in common with them. There is no relevancy between the two sites. The search engines became suspicious of these sites and began to think of ways to circumvent this. They tried to place a relevancy for each site based on its content. So, a link from a website about Angelina Jolie to another website about Angelina Jolie would be linking of relevant content to similar relevant content. Supposedly, this would give more "weight" to the link as opposed to a link from a Zsa Zsa Gabor website to the same Angelina Jolie website. So, if a Brad Pitt website has 3 links from other Brad Pitt Websites and 100 other links from other celebrity websites, it may not list as high in a search result for a Brad Pitt Website that has 10 links from other Brad Pitt websites and only 15 links from other celebrity sites. [If the search engine were only looking at linking as a factor]

Here is an example of what I think relativity is akin to: Let's say you want a guide to lead you on a mountain expedition in the Andes. One person you interview has been climbing for about 11 or 12 year, but has been to the top of Everest, K9 and a few other high peaks. The second person has been climbing for about 20 years, but most of it has been limited to the South Eastern United States, with one ascent up Mount Marcy in New York state. Here you have two different people with relevant experience -- however, if I am heading to the Andes, the guy with the Everest experience is the one I want with me.

Personally, when it comes to search engines, this is not the best factor to judge websites by. New websites have not had the chance to get sites to link to them and others just may not spend the time trying to find reciprocal links while less "relevant" sites perform this task very aggressively. As I said in a recent post, I am going to be spending more time trying to get these reciprocal links to keep up my traffic - even if I do not like it.

Inbound Only Links

The buzz about last year's Google reindex was that inbound only links are the best to have. What these are are links that come in from another relevant website but you do not have a link back to them. My comment is that if you are a site that provides resources to your visitors and the website that links to you is so "relevant" than why should you be "penalized" (I cannot confirm this) for not linking to another great resource?

Link Summary

So should you get as many links as you can? I guess it would be best if you found websites that you like or are relevant to your own content to go ahead and try to links. Do not worry about inbound or outbound only links, just that the links are "relevant" to your site. But just remember, especially those of you who have set up celebrity sites because you are big fans -- the most important thing is to have fun with your sites.

Until next time . . . .

I.R.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Celebrity Pregnancies: Jolie & Stephanie Are, Britney Denies It and TomCat Are Rumored to Be Fighting Over It

A quick way for celebrities to get into the buzz index for most search engines is to have a baby - or even to be rumored to be having a baby.

Why? Most information about the kid are going to be kept confidential - the baby might not even be brought out into the public for years after they are born. So why do we care? Well, I think that we all have a soft spot when it comes to cute little babies (yes, even the guys out there). Then, put on top of that an event that occurs to many women, be it the most successful or celebrities or Mrs. Smith from Anytown. I think it kind of creates a equalizing effect -- Britney went through the same 9 months of carrying a kid that other mothers have done since the beginning of time. [It was before my time, but does anyone out there remember when Lucy had little Ricky? The most watched TV show, ever at that time.]

When a child is going to be born into an already interesting celebrity lifestyle, then the interest becomes even greater. For instance, the relationship between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes made a media splash (especially after Tom's chair dancing episode) - and now that she is having a child with him out of wedlock, makes for an interesting story. Having a child is beautiful, but it can sometimes be stressful, even for multi-million dollar celebrities. Some tension is expected
between the soon to be mom and dad. If they seem to be arguing, it is only natural. However, unless you are the fly on the wall, do not believe all of the stories you are reading out there. She is still very young and they have both been kept behind the curtains from real life - so they may not be having an easy time of all of this. Yes, they have the money to take care of the kid, but even to ordinary people like us, how would you handle issues regarding: having a child out of wedlock, different religious backgrounds, different personalities, etc. So, let's just wish them luck and put away the rumors for a while. [Did I actually just defend TomCat?]

Britney and Kevin are another story. They have already had one kid -- why? Neither has lived a "real" life and seem very spoiled to most people. They do not have a solid relationship themselves - so why have the first kid? I hope those rumors are false about #2 -- she just may be gaining a little weight. But anyone can have a kid, it takes a lot of work to be a mom or dad. Even if the rumor is not true, just the hint that she may be pregnant again has done wonders for her Internet buzz.

I am not going to go into the whole Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt pregnancy, but here again, we have two super celebs, in a tabloid relationship, having a child together --- Buzz, Buzz, Buzz. I do not know what to think about Gwen Stefani - I think that behind the scenes, she is unlike her public persona and will probably be a great (albeit, very busy) mom.

Let's just give our congratulations to all of these soon to be moms and dads and make sure you have their pages on your website because in 9 months or less their buzz will be even higher upon the delivery of their children.

Until next time. . . .

I.R.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Keeping Up With The Blog

Okay -- I missed writing a post yesterday, but it is not easy to keep up a journal day after day. There is family, the "real job," the websites, commuting, eating, sleep and some occasional fun. Well, right now, when I have a chance, I am trying to maintain some of the entries on www.PopStarsPlus.com and www.BiographyPlus.com -- although most pages have current news feeds, the bios may go a little stale, and it is important to keep your data as up-to-date as possible. We also have over 100 celebrities in our "coming soon" category. This is way too many and we are trying to push those celebs into the regular section of the site. It also seems that googol does not like any of our pages that are in this category -- it has either taken older pages out of their index or not indexed any of the newer pages added since the previous update.

So, while I am busy updating these and the other websites I work on, I probably will be posting less over the next week or so -- but will add comments when appropriate.

Until next time . . . .

I.R.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Phishing Down By the Pond

Today, a few words about phishing and scam emails.

If you have a celebrity site, do not resort to phishing to generate a stream of visitors. I personally find it incredibly annoying. I believe in a free market economy where individuals should be able to market their wares. However, the items I would probably purchase are never part of such solicitation. I luckily do not need viagra and hopefully will not need it for many years to come -- I also do not need any other pills or medications. The spammers selling products, I can stand -- but it is those Phishing emails I dislike the most. They can really screw someone for a lot of money if they fall for it -- and unfortunately they do. I am admittedly an occasional listener to Howard Stern -- and every so often an old person would call up his studio lines about an investment they made. It seemed that the scammer gave them Stern's phone number as a contact. Some of these people lost thousands. I also cannot tell you how many contests throughout Europe I have won or how many relatives of deceased rich politicians from third world countries have received my email from a "reliable source." Can you believe that I am having multiple eBay and paypal problems on accounts that are not registered with either website!

The plan that some email carries have to charge bulk-email senders may be of some help, however, it is coming at a cost of legitimate businesses. Maybe legitimate businesses should be able to go through a screening process to have themselves removed from the bulk email charge. Another idea I have is to have all bulk non-solicited email to be "tagged" or "coded" as such and automatically placed into an unsolicited mail folder in the recipient's mailbox -- that way if you are looking for that male enhancement product, you will not be out of luck, and the seller is not denied his/her right to disseminate information. The fear is that a small site like ours, which will soon have a free newsletter, will be sending out bulk email to our subscribers - and we want to keep it free without being hit-up with these bulk fees that are not even meant for us.

What else can we do about it. When I get emails on my aol account I automatically hit "Report Scam" - but I keep on getting the same ones over and over. Sometimes I will send out an email that says that we have detected your email as being a scam and have sent it to the proper authorities. I wish I sometimes knew who the proper authorities were (e.g., if you get an eBay or paypal scam - forward the email to spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com, some of the other big companies have similar addresses as well.

If there is someone from a government agency or police department that needs some help fighting phishing -- we at www.PopStarsPlus.com are willing to help out if it will get rid of the real spammers. Just tell us what we or our visitors need to do.

A nice day out on the lake in the middle of Spring with my fishing pole, a radio, food and drink would be very nice right about now.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Friday, March 10, 2006

Making Money With Your Celebrity Website (part 1 or 9?)

Celebrity Websites: Making Money

Because we do not live in the utopian world posed by Lennon in "Imagine," we all want to make money to move upward within the social environment around us. There are three reasons why you may read my posts - because:

You want to see what I have to say about your favorite celebs
You want to get more visitors to your site
You want to make more money from your celebrity website

Every post in this weblog relates to #s 2 and 3 either directly or indirectly. If you have any type of revenue stream already set up, then #2 will usually translate into #3. So, you should have already learned a few things over the past few posts to help you out already. So this may be the first post directly relating to generating revenues from your celebrity site, but it is really the ninth to provide you with at least some information.

The Bare Bone Basics About Generating Revenue From Your Website

1. Create a website

2. Place income streams on the site

3. Get people to come to your site

Okay, that's it. Good luck to you - go out there and make millions.

Of course I am just kidding. Each of these three items need to be explained in much, much further detail. Then, because it is not not an exact science, after what you read here and elsewhere, you need to try and try again. [You should be reading as much as you can from as many sources you can. Although you may see many different theories, you need to do what is right for you and your website or blog]

Today, I will share a few thoughts on the above items and will not go into much detail here. Other posts will be forthcoming that will help to round out the details.

Create a Website

Build it and they will come -- well, first you need to build something and worry later about getting the people to come. First, are you an absolute beginner? Then maybe you want to start out by using one of the free website programs, such as at www.Geocities.com (it is where I built my first website almost ten years ago). If a blog is more your style, try www.blogger.com (which is what you are looking at now) or www.Xanga.com. There are also other options available (which I will cover at a late date) if you perform a search for "free website" or "free blog." If you are a little more advanced, then create your own website with one of the many programs available such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage.

What kind of website should you create? -- One that you will enjoy building. The first real "ecommerce" website we built was www.GiftIdeasPlus.com, a good website, and exciting to build at first, but not really based on a lifelong passion of mine. The site is updated from time to time, but not as much as needed. The site that received the most visitors by far is our www.PopStarsPlus.com site -- which was created solely for fun without any though of real revenue potential. However, it was about celebrities and all of the stuff we liked, so it flourished and we are not bored of it. So, go ahead, build a site about a subject you like. [Start with one, then later on, begin to build other sites for other subjects you have a passion for].

Now that you have a website in place, you need to find a way to make money with it.

Place Income Streams On The Website

A website in of itself will not make money. You either need to sell items on the site (and set up an online store), set up affiliate relationships or place advertising on the site.

For those of you starting with your own sites, many of those services have tools that allow you to place some of these revenue streams on your site with very little difficulty.

Selling your own items -- To do this, you need to set up an online store. They can be started up for fairly little money from services provided by places such as www.Yahoo.com, www.GoDaddy.com and even www.eBay.com. This could be the most challenging way to earn income on the web, but if successful, the most rewarding.

Affiliate Relationships -- This is basically placing text, banners and product images on your site that link up to a third party website such as www.Amazon.com or www.Posters.com. The catch is that you have set up an agreement with these places so that if someone is directed to their website through your link and they purchase something, you get a percentage of the sale. No warehouse, no store, no customer interaction needed - just remember you are only getting a small percentage of the total sale. For some affiliate money making ideas, Click Here.

Advertising -- The most common form of advertising these days is by ad banners. You may see many of these on the websites you visit, even this one. If you look towards the top of this page, you will see a small ad from www.Google.com, these "AdSense" ads have become very popular as of late and the way you make money is from people clicking on the ad. These ads are set up so they have some type of relationship with the content of the page so your visitors are more likely to click on it. Over the past year, a number of competitors have also appeared that do the same thing. Other forms of advertising include selling space on your site to place a banner or ad. [Note: www.Blogger.com gives you an option to set this up when first creating your blog]

Get People to Come to Your Site

The first two steps are comparably easy next to this one. The site with the greatest content on a particular subject may not be found if you do not "help" people to find it. People usually "find" your site from one of three different means: word of mouth & offline advertising, links from other sites or search engines.

Word of mouth & traditional offline advertising -- Does "Do You Yahoo?" sound familiar? Did you read that on the web -- no you probably heard it on the radio or television. This was a way for the online company to get people to their site. Most people & companies do not have that type of ad revenue, but there are some things you can do, such as handing out business cards to every person you meet or handing out flyers in your local area. If your site is good, those people will tell other people, who will tell other people . . . well you get the idea.

Links on Other Websites -- Get a link to your website on other related websites. For instance, if you have a sight about reptile grooming, try to get your link placed on other reptile or reptile grooming sites. Depending on where and how the link is placed, you may actually receive some traffic from this link. Many times you will need to trade links with the site, so be prepared to place a link to their site on your own page as well.

Search Engines -- I can spend the next several days writing about this, but what it comes down to is that most of the time your site will be found through searches on the search engines. There are a great number of strategies to consider, but for this introduction, at least do the following: (1) Submit your URL (website address) to the major search engines (Google.com, MSN.com and Yahoo.com) and whatever other search engines you can find (do a search for "Add URL") (2) Try to update your website regularly (3) try to get links to your website on as many related websites as possible. These are the bare bones here -- for those with a little more knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization), you are probably laughing, but this is good for the beginner.

If you have any questions, please leave your comments below.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Respecting Privacy Rights of Celebrity Minors

Without getting into all of the technical legal stuff do celebrities have less privacy rights than non-celebs? If you were shot into the spotlight and have become a celebrity yourself, what privacy rights would you expect from the public? If you are having dinner with your spouse, is it okay if people come over to your table and ask for autographs? If you are going shopping for some clothing, is it okay if you are mobbed by crazed fans and photographers? If you throw out your garbage, should people have the right to go though it? No, I am not a celebrity, but I would be pretty pissed if I could not go out for a quck bite to eat without being hassled. But, maybe that is just the price of being famous, because being famous has its many perks as well including going to exclusive clubs that us common folk are unable to enter (or afford), living in gated houses so no-one can enter, attending social events that most people would not recieve an invitation to, etc. So, the good and the bad go hand-in-hand.

Now, as a celebrity, how much information should the general public know about you? What is off-limits and what is okay to disseminate in print and on the web? For instance, we include a lot of information about celebrities on our site, www.PopStarsPlus.com, and some of the info includes facts about their personal lives. Sometimes we have excluded information that we found out because we thought it was too personal - in fact, we still have an ongoing discussion about printing the names and birthdates of the children of the celebrities, unless the celebrity makes it into a media event themselves (e.g., Britney Spears & son Sean Preston). Speaking of Britney, is it even proper for us to be printing stories about her relationship with Mr. Federline (the poor guy's been through too much already for me to call him Mr. Spears like everyone else). In their case, the public wants to know and I think that they like the media attention, so some of the drama was played out for the media instead of keeping it to themselves.

But back to Sean Preston. Beyond what his mother does to bring him into the public eye, should the fans and the press try to obtain any more information? He is just an infant. What if he does get a little older and goes into the entertainment business, does he then become open season for the press, fans and the papparazzi? Sean's aunt, Jamie Lynn Spears has made a name for herself as a teen/pre-teen star at the ripe old age of almost 15. On our site we include a whole lot of information about her, including the fact that she has mild asthma and her favorite food is crawfish. Is all of this information necessary, are we crossing any line because she is just a kid? The answer is no. If this information is readily available to the general public on a source such as the Internet, then it is generally okay to publish. However, there are just some things that you may want to stay away from if you have a child on your celebrity site -- if they are dating someone, that is cute to mention -- if they are having pre-marital sex, don't mention it unless it is front page news and part of a huge scandal. Of course, do not have any pictures of them naked or even have links to them being naked -- that's just wrong (and illegal). Try to stay away from any personal issues they may have outside of their professional life. Finally, although it may be had to do, let's not publish any rumors about kid celebs -- only print the facts. If you see them on the street, unless you are a pre-teen, let them go their own way.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Kirby Puckett and Dana Reeve - A Superstar and the Wife of a Superman

A quick entry:

We were saddened to hear about the deaths of a sports legend Kirby Puckett and an amazing woman, Dana Reeve who both died earlier this week. Puckett is a member of the Baseball Hall of fame and a true leader, role model and sports hero while he was playing (although after he could not play any longer, he became depressed and began to tarnish his own reputation). Dana Reeves was the co-founder of the Christopher Reeves Foundation and a huge supporter of her husband's cause to cure paralysis, even after Christopher Reeve's own untimely death.

Searches for Kirby Puckett and both Reeves are hot this week - so make sure you have their pages or have them updated. If you have eBay -- Puckett memorabilia will also be hot, so have your eBay banners is very visible places - Puckett specific banners would probably work best.

Reality check -- I always have a guilty feeling when I do something to try to maximize the profits of my site after a celebrity passes away. But if I consitently have eBay, Amazon and other like banners on ALL of my pages, then I am just doing the same for this celebrity that I would have done for any other celebrity dead or alive.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Jessica Alba Not Naked in Playboy: Using Keywords

There are basically three ways that a surfer is going to come to your site (1) They already know of your site and type the URL directly, (2) they "hear" about your site from another person, website or advertisement and go to your site, or (3) they find your site on a search engine.

For my celebrity site, #3 is probably the way most surfers find it. Using Jessica Alba as an example, people might search just for her name "Jessica Alba," or add another word/term to the search, such as "Jessica Alba Fantastic Four." You, as the provider of Jessica Alba information want this person to come to your website. You might have all of the vital Jessica Alba news and info, but your site is also "family friendly" - i.e., you do not contain any of that adult content links or stuff on your site.

Last week, www.TheSmokingGun.com published papers that explained that the Jessica Alba camp was upset with Playboy for publishing a sexy photo of Jessica on the cover of their 25 Sexiest Celebrity issue (March 2006 issue). Supposedly, they only gave permission for the picture to appear inside the magazine - and not on the cover. [For more information, see Greg Levine's article on www.Forbes.com at http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/01/jessica-alba-playboy-cx_gl_0301autofacescan13.html.

This is news directly relating to Jessica Alba, and if you have an Alba page, you can provide information about this news event to your readers. This will allow you to keep your website family freindly and allow you to place some of those "dirty" words into your content such as "naked" and "Playboy." With just a litle imagination, you can also add "nude, sexy, hot" or such words that many surfers might use.

Using those words in this context is a way of attracting more users while not trying to cheat the search engines. However, remember that most of your key words should be directly related to your website. If your website is about the Sexy Jessica Alba, then have those words appear throughout the site in the textual content, in the headers, in the links and in the meta tags. Also include links to [and more importantly] from other sites with the same related words.

One test you should try at home is to enter different search terms into the major search engines and see where your site is listed for each term. You want to rank somewhere in the first two pages (the first would obviously be better). Most surfers do not go beyond two pages and only a very small fraction even would venture to the fourth or fifth page of a search result. However being listed on the third to fifth page means that you have potential to rise in the rankings in the not so distant future. What terms work best for you? If you have terms that work, you know what to add onto any new pages you ad -- if the terms you chose are not working, then either you need to find new keywords for your pages, or work a little harder on other aspects of optimizing your page. [Alot more on optimizing for search engines will appear in subjequent posts]

Just a quick note: The reason for me placing "nipple slip" in the title of my first post was to get additional visitors to the site. Hopefully once they get here they will stay -- but just like in the brick and mortar world, sex sells.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Monday, November 27, 2006

BiographyPlus.com Deep Index Experiment

Top Five with Popular Terms for Christmas Music CDs

What Happened to Kate Middleton?

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

How to Make a Google Sitemap

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

How Important Are Backlinks?

Backlinks In Celebrity Web Sites

Monday, September 25, 2006

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Working With Marketing and PR Firms Could be Good for your Site

Beware

Giveaway Contests

Adding Promotional Ads for Money

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Monday, July 10, 2006

Friday, June 09, 2006

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Promoting Bands on Your Website Can Be Beneficial to Your Website and Your Visitors

Increase Traffic Through Giveaway Contests

Obtaining Free Assets

Interviews With the Artists

Getting Paid for Promotions with Money or Other Goodies

About Promoting Artists & Celebrities Your Website

How Do You Start Promoting?

Uniques are Important

Setting Up The Promotion

Summary

Friday, May 19, 2006

Importance of Link Partners

Introduction

A Personal Note: Internal Pages Being Removed From Google Index

Google Algorithm and Inbound Links

Generating traffic from Inbound Links

Making Friends on the Web

Conclusion

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Should you make money with your website?

What is an affiliate relationship?

What are the best affiliate programs?

Thursday, March 23, 2006

An Introduction to Why you Should or Should Not Link

Google and Linking

History of How Search Engines Look at Linking

The More Links The Better

Link Farms and Relevancy

Inbound Only Links

Other Linking Tips

Link Summary

Monday, March 20, 2006

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Monday, March 13, 2006

Friday, March 10, 2006

Celebrity Websites: Making Money

The Bare Bone Basics About Generating Revenue From Your Website

Create a Website

Place Income Streams On The Website

Get People to Come to Your Site

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

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