Lots of bloggers have suffered a loss in PR from selling links that pass PR (and some that weren’t). We’ve lost one point, then had a PR 0, now we are back to 3. I still wish it was higher.

How to Request Reinclusion

To do a Google reinclusion you need to register your blog for the Google webmasters tools. Its important to have regardless. This is how I removed several old URLs (when we had a forum) that was hurting our search engine rankings.

After you register your website or blog for webmaster tools, you then must “request reconsideration.

Google Reinclusion Tips

I’ve filed for Google reinclusion three times. The second time the reinclusion gave us a PR 0. Our reinclusion request wasn’t very long and didn’t say very much. That was a huge mistake.

I have read many “success” stories of people getting their PR back and they all pretty much did the same thing. You basically need to say 3 things.

1. What you did wrong. Whether it was using payperpost or selling links, tell them what you did.

2. That you have corrected the errors. Now that you are following Google’s terms tell them how you did so. You either removed the links, posts, or added no-follow to them.

3. That you won’t do it again. A statement that you are no longer using paid to post services is a good start. Or that your advertising page clearly states you won’t pass pagerank.

Remember to give Google time to process your reinclusion. I wouldn’t recommend doing it more than once every 1-3 months.

Is getting your PR back important to you? If so which steps have you taken to get it back?

A powerful way to advertise your blog is on t-shirts and other off line advertising. I’ve looked into buying and making t-shirts for this blog, with very little luck. After calling several places the cost per shirt ended up being way too much. I have a BAYB t-shirt made on Printfection, however that costs $16 per shirt.

Vista Prints Free T-Shirt Offer

Unless you are buying in bulk, it’s hard to find a good price on custom t-shirts. Vista Print is offering a free customized t-shirt. You don’t have to purchase anything, all you have to do is design your shirt and pay for shipping.

Customize Your FREE T-Shirt

Even one shirt can help you market your blog and get off line visitors, online. I like to wear my custom shirts whenever I go to places with a lot of people, like the mall etc.

More Free Promotional Items

Not only does VistaPrint offer free t-shirts they just sent me an email with many other free and discounted offers. Whatever you can customize they seem to have it.
They have free promotional items like:

• 250 Free Business Cards
• 10 Large Magnets
• 1 Pen
• 1 Notepad
• 100 Postcards

If you decide to purchase any of these products they are at low prices, better than Cafepress and other sites I’ve seen.

If you don’t want to wear or use your promotional products, they could be a great prize for a contest for your blog. Who wouldn’t want a Blog about your Blog pen?

After entrecard adopted project wonderful many bloggers seemed to adopt the same system. We gave it a try and wrote a Project Wonderful review.

Project Wonderful in Re Review

I gave project wonderful a pretty positive review, stating that it was a great resource to use for monetizing your blog. However, don’t expect much money from it. I ended up running Project Wonderful for nearly 2 months and barely got to cash out twice ($20).

For the first week or two, our price was up to $2.20 per day. By the end we could barely get .30 to .40 cents per day. I would actually be losing money if I would take Project Wonderful over a private ad ($20 per month for a banner).

I don’t think Project Wonderful is very good for monetizing your blog. However, for advertising, it can be golden.

Advertising on Project Wonderful

If you are a bargain hunter for advertising, project wonderful may be just what you are looking for. Some websites and blogs cost as low as .01 per day (some are even free). Just by getting one click on your ad, that’s already a steal.

Two of my favorite blogs to advertise on have been Ninja Success and It’s Write Now. The cost per day is pretty low and my cost per click is only a few cents. It’s been a perfect way to use up the rest of my Project Wonderful leftover funds.

If you aren’t trying to squeeze out every dime, you can do a huge bulk order and advertise on 100’s of blogs if you want to. HomeBizBlogger has written his experience with Project Wonderful Advertising Campaigns, that could be of interested if you want to bulk advertise on Project Wonderful.

Do you reinvest the money you earn on Project Wonderful? If so which websites or blogs do you advertise on?

I’ve received several comments and criticism about not having the top comments plugin. Many bloggers like the plugin, but I like doing things my own way.

Positives for Top Comment Plugin

The top comment plugin can be essential for new blogs to establish a base and start interacting with their readers.

Installing the plugin is great incentive for bloggers to leave comments. Not only do they get a backlink, but the possibility of traffic as well.

By using the top comment plugin, comments for that blog should increase.

Negatives for Top Comment Plugin

Although you are rewarding comments, you may not get “quality” comments. I could assume we might get more comments with the plugin, but they may be even more junk comments than we already get.

Another factor is which websites you are linking to with what keywords. You want to reward your comments, but what if its a blog that is offensive or you just don’t feel good about promoting?

While searching for the top comment website, I found Andy Beard’s article, Multiple Reasons Why I Loathe the Top Commenter Plugin. He sums up his negatives for this plugin, he’s always worth a quick read.

Alternatives for Top Comments

When people ask why we don’t have it, or that we should, I just point them to Comment Friday. This not only gives me the choice of who I link to, but how I do it. I can choose if I want it to be from a quality comment, interesting, sad, funny, or just because I want to.

Another alternatives to a top comment is doing a round-up of top commenters. Pure Blogging used to use this method, but looking through a few pages they don’t seem to do it anymore.

Some blogs run contests for their top commenters of the month. Zac Johnson was (is?) doing this for a while. I won 2-3 times, however I only received one prize :(. Bloggers reward their top commenters with prizes like cash, advertising or other similar prizes.

This article is written by Rhys Wynne – a six year blogger who also runs his own Webmaster Tips Newsletter at My Brand New Brand, Subscribe Today for free extras!

S.E.O.

Three letters that everybody is going crazy over on the internet. Do this, don’t do this, and people will come streaming in from search engines willing to throw cash and ladies at you.

Sorry, I don’t agree with it.

With blogs, whilst SEO is important, in the majority of niches you should really focus on your readers rather than search engine positions. Guys like John Chow rank nowhere in search engines. So how can he make $30,000 a month?

Simple, by writing for readers (or – in his terms – getting other people to write for his readers).

Here are some things I’ve noticed which you could be doing wrong. Well, they’re not wrong, but I find them offputting as it reads to me like you are putting search engine’s first.

Overly SEO’d titles
Titles shouldn’t be 3 or 4 lines explaining exactly what you are doing in the article. Titles should be brief, clever and eye catching. Whilst Titles are crucial for SEO purposes, a long title may not only appear offputting for readers, but also get you penalised in search engines.

Furthermore, if your page has more than 1 h1 tag on it, there’s a chance that the second one will be ignored. H2-H6 tags are there for a reason.*

Confusing Internal Backlink Structure
Everybody’s seen those blogs with random words linked for Search Engine Optimisation benefit. People will follow them, and Google will follow them. People will be confused, and google will give you a slight benefit. Sure, link to your own stuff, but it should either be a lead in (such as “I wrote about Search Engine Optimization here”), or even a simple “Click Here”. Just don’t confuse your readers.

Getting Rubbish Rank Instead of Real Readers From Forums
This is a lesson that I learnt recently whilst promoting Retro Garden. To aid promotion, I joined a bunch of video game and retro game forums to participate in discussions there. Immediately I put my forum signature as a keyword rich link. I didn’t see any benefit. I changed to an image based signature and – whilst losing on search engine traffic, I got more clickthroughs and readers.

Not all forums allow this, but if you see other people use images in footers, why not you use one too, especially if you contribute?

So it sounds like I don’t do any SEO on my blogs. You couldn’t be further from the truth, I do SEO on my blogs, but I’m not SEO for the sake of my readers.

You got any S.E.No-No’s to share with the group?

New month, new contests for your blog. Only the simplest ones for you all. Let’s start…

iPod Touch from Datepad

Your chance to win the new iPod Touch ($400): you only have to write a post about the new dating site Datepad (150 words minimum) including a link to the contest post. Each person can submit only two entries. The contest is open worldwide.
Ends on April 20th

Free Software from Ask the Admin

Win a free copy of Roxio Toast 9 Titanium (a CD/DVD burning suite from ROXIO) plus a Silver iPod Nano from Ask The Admin, a great site that offers free tech support. To enter complete these tasks: subscribe to his RSS feeds via mail, leave a comment on the contest post and write a post about this contest. Contact him telling what you have done.

Cash from Top Site Of The Day

Top Site Of The Day, an interesting site that offers a wide collection of the best sites online (you can also submit your own for FREE!), is having a contest with three cash prizes: $75.00 – $50.00 – $25.00
To enter gain your tickets by writing a review of the site, a post about the competition or by adding it to your blogroll.
Ends on April 28th.

And don’t forget to visit About Blog Contests, your daily source for the latest, simplest and greatest blog contests around the net!

I haven’t done a popular post total since the beginning of the year when I did our best posts for 2007. Here are a few posts that were popular in March.

Stumbleupon Now Using Captcha – This post was very popular on stumbleupon especially, getting about 2,000 uniques and tons of stumbles. Do you hate captcha as much as me?

23 Things I’ve Learned Blogging – One of my longest post, it took me a few days to put together. Look for a follow-up post on this (definitely not as long).

No Longer Promoting NeverblueAds – I am definitely happy with the supportive response I’ve received from this post. Still no response from Neverblueads. Oh well, this post ranks on page 1 in google for NeverblueAds.

6 Rules for Social Media – The basic rules for social media websites. Great ‘guide’ for users new to social media.

What were your best posts for March?