Promotion and discussion on forums can definitely help your traffic as well as web presence. I’ve even tried to run my own forum however it proved to be too time consuming and difficult to fight the spam bots. The benefits of forums are great and I really wanted to tap into that area.

Instead I’ve tried to be active on several forums (as well as social media) because it’s important to branch out. Talking to other bloggers and conversing can really only help you expand.

Out with the Old

BloggerForum once was a great place for link exchanges, posts about new money making opportunities and a place to share your blog. They took some downtime figuring out a new way to fight the spammers. As they have re-emerged (I had no idea they were back until today) they are missing several key categories, as well as no easy way to search new posts. I was there several minutes without success.

PayPerPost Forum was a great place for me for a while. Lately their forum hasn’t become as blogger friendly, just postie friendly. My blog promotion and social media promotion wasn’t very well received the last few times. Stumble and digg requests go unanswered and blogging news needs constant bumping to keep it alive.

In with the New

Bloggeries forum has been very impressive so far. It’s one of the few “new” forums I’ve joined. Several seemed to pop up all at once. I’ve given Bloggeries forum a shot and it’s been pretty good. I’ve gotten to know the owner pretty well as well as converse with several members. The posts have already proved to be worth it, sending about 20+ unique visitors in just two or three days.

9Mb is a webmaster forum that is owned and run by Nomar. He is previously from KingNomar.com but that has been sold. The forum is a mini-digital point. They have a tight community of users who are frequent and active. It’s good for link sales, exchanges as well as blogging questions among other things.

Have you moved on to any of the new forums yet?

Lately I have been trying to break into affiliate marketing. I’ve written about Pepperjam and Promoting and Earning Money with Affiliate Programs. In that article I mention referring yourself to affiliate offers to earn money. However, I didn’t mention incentivizable campaigns.

Incentivizable Campaigns

Basically what incentivizable campaigns are, are campaigns where you can reward people for completing your affiliate offer. These offers usually are free trial offers or a sign-up. By giving incentive for these offers, you could reward them however you want to.

How can incentivizable campaigns earn me money?

Recently I got a friend of mine (and co-author as BAYB) to join NeverblueAds. Some of you may know him as Ryan of Blogging4everyone. We talk on IM nearly every day. In about a week of being a NeverblueAds Affiliate, he’s been able to earn about 450$. I asked him a few questions about his recent success.

Ryan said that several ebooks and other internet marketers like Zac Johnson have inspired him to start affiliate marketing. Since they are making thousands of dollars on it, why not give it a shot as well.

However Ryan has taken a different approach as some of the affiliate marketers have. Over 75% of Ryan’s earnings have been through incentivizable campaigns. He has taken his offers to forums, myspace and other online contacts. In exchange for them completing his offers, he pays them a few $ for their troubles via paypal. Some of the offers can net him up to 30$! For just a couple of dollars as incentive, his profits are huge.

If he can keep up this insane rate of earning money, he could be looking at 1600$+ in earnings per month, with very little cost!

Search engines provide one of the biggest tools in the world right now. Information can be delivered to you in a matter of seconds. With so many people getting as much information as they want, the information then sometimes becomes popular. Such as internet videos. Some people have become internet celebrities due to their videos. Stars such as Will Ferrell have used videos to go viral and become even more popular.

Introducing Vid Search Live

Vidsearchlive is an internet Video Search Engine that gets videos from MySpace, MetaCafe, Veoh & Yahoo all from one location. This provides all the videos you want to get and search for all in the ease of one website. What I think will turn webmasters on to this is that you can then embed the videos onto your own website or blog.

This technique is used for other things such as searching for popular articles, pictures, etc all in one place. The is the first I’ve seen with videos.

Apparently YouTube didn’t appreciate their videos being displayed on  other sites, and have banned external script feeds. This means it will no longer work on VidSearch. I would recommend VidSearch remove them all together from their website. No reason to still have the ability to search them and get nothing.

On top of videos you can also search for music and listen to it on the website. It pulls from Esnips (which I’ve never heard of) the problem with it is it gives you the song several times. I found several titles that wouldn’t play when I searched for them.

With internet users looking to get even more information faster, I think we will see a lot of these type of sites emerge in all types of different categories.

The following article was written by Ryan from Blogging4Everyone dot Com.

Page Rank should be made a thing of the past. I am a blogger, who blogs for the pure fact that my blogs are fun for me to maintain. I NEVER feel obligated to blog on a day where I am sick, too busy, etc, as long as it doesn’t keep happening day after day.

I have had Page Rank on numerous blogs sucked away by Google. Sure, I deserved it. I admit I did PayPerPost on my blogs and I didn’t make it nofollow. However, PayPerPost slapped me back in the face with a wet noodle when they told me I had to have X page rank to take an opportunity.

Great news however from PayPerPost. Ted Murphy, IZEA’s president(PPP’s parent company) has announced that Page Rank has been eliminated from their new product, Social Spark. Blogs with bigger communities and more traffic will benefit under Social Spark, according to Murphy. Ted Murphy also disclosed that they are kicking Page Rank out of the current PayPerPost system after their new product, Social Spark is live.

Alright, so maybe that is just one reason to get rid of Page Rank. Here are some more;

• Bloggers shouldn’t feel tied to a mythical number
• Bloggers shouldn’t have to be pressured to conform
• Blogging should be your choices, and your choices alone.

The list goes on and on. However, the point remains, Google has the money. Will you let them continue to tie you down with Page Rank or will you base your blog on something better. Your community, traffic and I thank you!

Things have been pretty consistent here. Posts have been good as well as our rss count. Project Wonderful, is still working out for us (advertise for only .60 cents a day right now). I hope to have a review prepared next week. In the entrecard shop we have banner space back up for sale (500 credits for a week). Also, Brians post yesterday is featured on Search Engine Journal. We’ve been busy!

If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 100 entrecard points.

Leave us a comment about anything you want. This week I’m particularly interested in interviews. Have you conducted interviews on your blog? Have you been interviewed? Do you enjoy reading them? Should we bring back interviews for Blog about your Blog?

As always tell us what articles you’d like to see here. Any questions are welcome!

Be next weeks Comment Friday sponsor for 3$! Contact us.

Traffic from search engines is the blogging gift that keeps on giving. You can find yourself receiving a steady flow of new visitors to your blog each day once you have a post ranking high in search engine results. Of course, it’s not easy to get on the first page of Google for a search term so you need to think creatively. I have an idea that can help.

Every day millions of people search for solutions to their tech support problems. This is a golden opportunity for you drive new visitors to your blog. Simply write a post detailing a computer problem you are familiar with and offer up the solution. Post it and forget about it while the Google crawler works its magic on your behalf.

Here’s a real world example from my own blog. Almost a year ago I ran into a problem with an Access database. I eventually realized the problem was with an Internet Explorer setting (of all things) so I wrote a short 100 word post about it called Access Files Located on an “Untrusted Site” and moved on with my life.

Lo and behold, over the course of a few weeks my post slowly rose in the ranks of Google searches. As of today, it’s on the first page of results for a variety of searches related to Access and “untrusted site” error messages. The post receives new and unique visitors each day from search engines. I’ve since gone on to write a number of posts containing tech support solutions that now account for about 40% of my incoming traffic.

This idea doesn’t require you to write long posts or have a lot of technical knowledge. A lot of these problems and their solutions can be found online already. Just keep these two things in mind when writing your post:

• Be smart about your post title. Use keywords you think people will use in their search results. It’s a good idea to use words or phrases from any error messages the problem contains if possible.
• Keep your description of the problem and its solution clear and concise. People want a fix for their problem and not more confusion and frustration.

Helping people solve their computer problems is a simple way to generate natural traffic to your blog. In fact, you could probably start a brand new blog offering nothing but fixes and solutions for any software package on the market today and have traffic rolling in. It just takes a little patience as the search engine spiders crawl and index your posts.

Entrecard’s best idea (besides trying to change the price system. JC is almost off the most popular list, ridiculous) is the entrecard shop. However, the first batch of sellers were really lacking. The items consisted of worthless raffles that weren’t appealing at all. They were just more attempts at gaming the system trying to get credits. Some were selling tickets at something like 110 each, with only 10 tickets allowed. The prize was 1,000 credits. I wonder where the rest goes?

However the new batch of sellers, BAYB included, has offered some great items for sale, mostly at a reasonable price. Basically, I think we’ve scored so far. With our seller status I sold 4 125×125 banners for 1 week at 400 a pop. That’s 1600 credits earned in a week. These banners will be removed in the next couple of days, because their week is up. With those credits I’ve been able to “reinvest”.

The Entrecard Shop Loot

The thing about weekly, monthly, or yearly advertising is that it will be gone at some point. With the credits earned, I’ve been able to buy several blogposts that are permanent. It has driven little traffic to the site, but the reviews have been great and are tapping in to their audience.

Among blog reviews, I’ve been able to purchase ‘critiques’ as well as timed banner advertisements that cost way less than purchasing on their entrecard.

The two, possibly best, things are the guest posts I was able to purchase. Yes, I got to buy two posts that were used for BAYB and Words of a Poet. Brian wrote about his experience with interviews as easy content and traffic. It brought up the idea of starting interviews at BAYB again. Brian is still selling his guest posts for 400 credits. I think it’s an awesome idea, his posts are good too.

The other one was a “poem about anything”. This only cost my 75 credits and I was able to use it as a post at my poetry blog. The poem is entitled Monday Off and flows pretty well with the rest of the poetry on the site. Two posts for 475 credits, maybe I will just buy the rest of my posts? Or not.

What have you been able to buy from the entrecard shop?