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:

1. Increase traffic through providing free giveaway contests
2. Obtaining free assets such as pictures, audio & video
3. Interviews with the artists
4. 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:
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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:

1. Make an agreement with the promoter/marketer
2. Set up a page for the artist
3. Populate the artist's page with the various assets
4. Set up a contest page
5. Place contest banners/info on artist page and home page
6. 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.

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