2009 February

Do you know or suspect that others have been ‘borrowing’ some of your content, be it text, photos, or videos, to use on their sites without your permission? If you are not monetizing this content then it is probably not a big deal, but if you are, then someone else is benefitting from your work and oyu are loosing out.

I wrote a post called ”FairShare Might Help You Locate Plagiarism Partners” on Successfool.com that you can go take a look at and get a couple of resources that can track down plagiarized content.

It’s a shame how the one in the right, the content creator, must be the one to protect and police it.

John

As you know writing articles is a very powerful way to get traffic and recognition. And who doesn’t want more of both to support their online marketing business? Traffic generation is the life blood of any business. Now there is one more facet you can add to your article marketing campaigns to get a little more mileage from your articles and it utilizes the power of Twitter.

You can have a Tweet posted to Twitter automatically each time you have posted an article to an article directory. You will need to get your author feed from the article directory to use for this, most good directories should provide a specific author feed. Now you can use that feed just as they provide it or you can run that feed through FeedBurner if you want to add more features like click tracking and more.

My friend Dan Blackburn has a good description on how to do this on the Article Content King Blog.
Go there and just follow his instructions. He describes how to get the feed from the Article Content King directory, but it should be similar with any on the major article directories.

Dan will take you through getting your feed and then going to a free service called Pingvine where the feed will be set up to Twit automatically every time you post a new article. How cool is that! One more way to use Twitter!

John

PS,
If you want another good place to post your articles, gain some ad revenue from your article pages and more, you might try the unique revenue sharing Article Content King directory. I am involved in helping this directory become a marketing powerhouse for authors, the Alexa rating is growing very rapidly with all the new design features and marketing efforts. Check it out.

As I have been gradually adding more features to my blog here I noticed something that is not widely addressed. At least it never came to my attention before as I was learning about creating the 125 X 125 ads I use in the right sidebar. I have done these ads before and not thought about it either. The common way to write the code for a clickable link behind a graphic or picture closes your blog page to take the visitor to the link they just clicked on.

This is a ‘non-desirable activity’ in my book! Yes, I want them to click on the link, but keep the blog there as well. I want a new page to open for them, leaving the blog page open for them to return to. You want this too, right?  . . . say yes!

You certainly don’t need to allow people to accidentally leave your page until they are ready to. And we all know how many times we get distracted by the links we click on and don’t always go back to the original site when it has disappeared from our browser.

If you click on one of the ads on this blog you will see that it now opens a new window, leaving the blog page sitting right there waiting for you to return. I know you don’t believe me, so try it. Hehe, just for practice, really!

OK, so here is what you do about it. All you need to do is add a little bit more code to the link code you already have for the graphic. All it takes is this –

target=”_blank”

Here is an example of where you place this minor bit of code–<a href=”http://makeinternetmarketingmoney.com/pdf-power-brand” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.makeinternetmarketingmoney.com/images/pdf-pb.gif” width=”125″ height=”125″ border=”0″></a>

The thing you must pay close attention to is the quotes ( “ ) see how there is a quote at the end of pdf-power-brand” and the two within the added code, target=”_blank”

The term ‘blank’ is for a new page, you may have seen this before.

It’s interesting to note that as I wanted to figure out exactly how to do this I visited several sites so I could look at their code, and you know what? I couldn’t find one that was doing this. Everyone was letting the new page blow away their page when someone clicked on a link. Sure this may be a small thing, but if you have studied the making of a sales page, the cardinal rule is that you never, never, never – did I say, never? Never provide a link where someone can click off the page and get lost. So why is it not important here with a blog as well?

If someone just landed on your main page and got distracted, heaven forbid, by one of your ad links and got taken away from the blog – got real excited, bought something and never came back. Maybe they don’t come back to receive all the great free content you have, get top know you more, and – well you get it.

So go fix your links that can take people away from your blog and you will feel like you’ve accomplished something – it’s called ‘saving traffic’! It takes effort to get, so take a little more to save it. Help readers get the value you intend for them.

There is a nice site I found that has some great tutorials that help with doing HTML. If you are like me and don’t know it well enough to remember exactly what to do a week later, this site can come in handy. They didn’t have this exact code example there which is why I had to extrapolate a little, but it is a good site for HTML coding help. It’s a resource I will use again, I found it well laid out and easy to use.

http://csshtmltutorial.com/

John Halderman