Do You Need A Custom Domain To Get Traffic?

When you use free services like Blogger.com you can choose to have your blog's URL be hosted as a subdomain on blogspot.com or you can choose to purchase you're own domain. That way your blog's url will look more like money howtoNOTmakemoneyonline.com instead of someblog.blogspot.com.



From what I've seen, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference in terms of traffic when you have your own domain name or you don't. It seems like more of a vanity issue. I've listed the top 30 Blogger blogs hosted using a blogspot.com subdomain below.



If you're blog starts becoming popular and you want to spend a little on it ou can get cheap domain names for under $7 a year with free WhoisGuard privacy protection for the first year at NameCheap.

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Blogger vs Wordpress

Blogging is a cheap and easy way for people who don't know how to build their own website to start making money online. All you have to be able to do is write interesting articles. Two popular free blogging platforms are Blogger and WordPress.



If you're just starting out and plan to make money blogging you should choose Blogger even though I think WordPress is a more powerful blogging platform.



It seems a little strange to not pick the best tool but I also believe in picking the right tool for the right job. As I'll explain, Blogger is better than WordPress if you're just starting out.

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How To Twitter Like A Normal Person

Twitter is a great way to communicate and meet new people with similar interests. If you run a business you can leverage Twitter to help promote your brand but it can all seem a bit overwhelming.



By now everyone knows what Twitter is but lately it seems like it's filling up with spammers and people are just plain doing things wrong. If you're just getting started, or if you're having trouble getting the results from Twitter it might be because you're not coming off like a genuine person.



I've had some fairly successful Twitter accounts (this one is new) and I've learned a bit by helping others and spent time examining how some businesses found success with Twitter. I'd like to share the key points I learned that can help you promote your company through Twitter including some Do's and Don'ts of business tweets.

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Case Study: How A Site Redesign Can Increase Traffic and Revenue

Giving your site a new look can help boost traffic and user engagement. It's also a good time to optimize the site's HTML. The importance of on-page SEO is often overlooked in favor of link building so I wanted to look at an example where it made a big difference.



Years ago I had developed a website which was a customized CMS system for a local SMB. They're in the B2B (business to business) space meaning they don't provide products and services to a large market. Their expectations for traffic weren't very high as they have a very specific focus.



They came back to me at a later point asking for some enhancements to their site and we both agreed the site's design could use a major update. It had been a few years and web trends had significantly changed.



After more than two years I took a look at the results and we're both quite happy with them.

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Is Google Panda/Penguin Only For English Speaking Searches?

As I was writing my last article patting myself on the back for my little part in making the internet a better place (since Matt Cutts and Google didn't) I was seeing something very strange.



According to Alexa, a lot of the sites I checked that were negatively impacted by Panda and Penguin had very high Alexa Regional Rankings in non English speaking countries. This raises a red flag for me that there might be something fishy happening. You know, cause these sites are written in English and all.



It made me wonder if the recent Panda and Penguin (and even earlier) changes to Google's Search Ranking algorithms might only be effecting English speaking or maybe first-world countries in general. Or maybe there was something else entirely different going on?

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How SEO and IM Became Four Letter Words

I just saw Matt Cutts response to the Scamworld video via a post on SaltyDroid.



Matt's tweet in response didn't come as a shock. Internet Marketers and SEOs seem to go hand in hand and Matt has a strong relationship with the SEO community being he's the devine messenger sent down from the top of Mount View to help those of us looking to put things online stay in Google's good graces.

Oh my: "Internet Marketer — a 21st century snake oil salesman." Painting with a broad brush here: goo.gl/MXjSC techmeme.com/120510/p38#a12…

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 10, 2012

I have respect for what Matt Cutts has been doing to combat webspam at Google but I disagree with him here. While there may have been a time that SEO and IM had a more legitimate meaning (err maybe just SEO), the titles have generally been corrupted. Maybe a little history lesson will help.

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