Well this week has certainly been an interesting week, I was mentioned on many search engines forums and got a ton of back links.

The funny thing is that it wasn’t based on real good content, it was based on a capturing a few screenshots. The article practically wrote itself and it was only one or two paragraphs.

The screenshots actually became link bait and it was not something I was trying for. The initial traffic was off the hook in almost a week into it it still off the hook. All because I was up watching an infomercial.

After I made my post my buddy David from Australia says you should do a video on it. At first I didn’t think it was worthwhile but then I thought about it further and it became a good idea. After I did my little screen sharing video I added it to the post and I added to YouTube of course. I’m not exactly sure how many views the video has, I don’t really care.

The video was made actually as proof of what I was seeing on the Google search results. I had a few people, not many ask if I was doctoring up the pictures. Considering I suck at Photoshop I would even know how to do that if I tried I thought I would just make a video. Kind of proving the naysayers wrong.

It was very strange seeing stuff that I find on Webmaster world and people leaving comments on it. All it was was somebody in the right place at the right time. I don’t know why Google chose my IP address for this test but I don’t care.

It has been about a week, and I’m still seeing the search results with the advertisers clicks in Google. Most of the time I have been spending this week is capturing screenshots for other people. It has been quite fun, to see what niches my friends really care about their pay per click earnings in.

If you want to read the whole story head over to my main website where you will see all about Google showing click amounts in the search results.

I received a lot of questions about my twitter “Tip of the Day” on using PLR articles. First let me explain about PLR articles, they are articles that you either get for free for joining a PLR membership site or worse from sites where you pay a monthly fee or an article based fee.

When I first started making websites I stumbled upon a site where I would get 500 articles just for joining. Not a big deal and with these articles I could get my site up and running faster. Once I started putting up these articles I found my site getting more traffic. After the first two months I upgraded to the fee based service where for $9.99 I could get 5000 articles a month.

The problem is they were the same articles that everyone else was getting for free and placing them on their sites. When Google got smart to this all my sites got dropped. I went from making a nice buck to almost zero. Costly lesson indeed, the only people that make money off PLR sites are the people that are getting newbies like me to pay for their service.

90% of the 5000 articles were not based in my niche so they were worthless, I still have these articles but I don’t use them as site content. I will use them if I get writers block just for subject ideas, or for email subjects. Putting any article on your site that you get from a free or fee based plr membership is totaly worthless and waste your time.

Thanks for all the people on Twitter who asked me about PLR articles. If you are not following me on Twitter you can add yourself and get my “tip of the day” when I remember to give one. http://www.twitter.com/nyfalcon

Last week I started to make a website right in front of everyone on my forum. I am posting exactly what I am doing step by step and it is scary. I am amazed at how much I take for granted when I make a site. Sometimes I am leaving out steps without even thinking. I don’t know of any so-called Guru and I use that term loosely that has built a site and shows what they do.

You can follow the description on the forum.  http://www.nyfalcon.com/forum/general_discussion/just_registered_two_domains-t152.0.html

Affiliate Summit Pictures

Here are the pictures from affiliate summit. I am only in 3 or 4 which means I did a better job of hiding or I was off doing private meetings. It probably was a combination of both.

As you can see from the pictures there are plenty of affiliate managers that will show you all about their programs. I am still sorting through business cards and choosing which ones to work with.

A couple of affiliate managers have sent me a few products to try and see if I like them before I even join their program. One current program that I am already working with sent me something nice too, along with a personal note. This is the reason to go to Affiliate Summit to build relationships.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/affsum/sets/72157604143561153/ 

Shawn Collins has posted a ton of pictures in his Flicker account that were taken at Affiliate Summit. For those that could not make it here is a small reason on why you should make the next one.

It is not often that I am going to recommend a tool or anything that will not help you in your quest to build quality sites but I can’t help it here. One reason is the price and the other is because it actually works better than advertised if you spend 10 minutes learning the program.

Since I am all about building quality sites for the long term for making money online and the owner of this program is the same I have no doubts that this tool will help you. I am a big fan of Jason Potash and his program “Content Composer” which I use everyday but this new tool just blew me away. It is called Comment Kahuna and like I said it is free.

All you have to do is go here http://commentkahuna.com/ and watch the video and you can see what this thing does. You sign up for the email to get the unlock code and you install this in minutes. What the program does is find quality backlinks for your search term with their pagerank. You place a quality comment on these blogs and you will have people viewing your site from url where it list your name in the comment field. You have to watch the video as Jason explains the power of this free tool in detail.

I downloaded this tool only two days ago and tested it on one of my new blogs and after the two days the new blog was not only found by the search engines it also made me a few dollars already with contextual ads.

You need to have a direction for your pages and a “call to action”. You need to direct the end user where you want them to go. People need a nudge sometimes when they are sitting there with their credit card in hand as they are browsing the internet.

I have just discovered a site that explains it better than I ever could.

http://www.smsmallbiz.com/technology/What_to_Do_With_Online_Customers.html

For years I have been harping on ways to get traffic to your site. I hate to use spammy methods but there is one that works better than any other method especially if you are just starting a website.

I use elance and other places to hire writers but I also use Craiglist. My buddies over at Portalfeeder have made a little video using the exact methods that I use. You can see it on the forum. How to Get Traffic video.

I have used this to hire about 15 writers so far and as you get better at it you will make better ads.

What a great source of information they have there for people that want to make money online. Brad Callen is a smart cookie and he knows how to get traffic to your website without going into black hat methods.

I suggest that you sign up and get a few ebooks on SEO from the good folks over there. If you have an ebook or a product that you want to sell this is also the place for you.

Free IQ

I get asked a lot of times about how I make my web pages that they get such good rankings. I never make a page just for the sake of the search engines, I make all my current pages for users. (Yes I was guilty of making pages for search engines only at one time.)

Making pages for a search engine to read is so dead now that it doesn’t make sense to waste your time doing it. Trust me I have a ton of pages out there that are duplicate content that it’s not funny. Guess what it also hurts your earnings to have these pages up, but thats for another post. See how I handle making my web pages so they work