Here are today’s links:

• Seth Godin on Getting Stuff Done
  In this video, legendary marketer Seth Godin talks about the importance of concentrating on “shipping” a product after a certain point in development and no longer trying to tweak and improve it. Really great presentation (as usual, with Godin) and a very important message.
  –
• Optimization: Call-to-Action Buttons on shockmarketer
  This is an older post that I only just discovered today. It’s a very short report on a test run with two different buttons that yielded some very interesting results.
  –
• affbuzz
  Many of you probably already know about and avidly use affbuzz. While I’ve known about it for a long time, I’ve only just started really making use of it. It’s simply a collection of tons of different Internet marketing blogs and it works out a bit like an IM RSS-reader. You can browse through all the posts and check out the ones that interest you. If you’ve never seen it, go check it out right away! (Disclaimer: You probably won’t do anything productive for the rest of the day, once you discover affbuzz. That is not my fault.)

And that’s it. Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Be that as it may, I will still gather useful posts and resources and post them up on a Friday once I’ve found several.

Without further ado, here’s today’s collection:

• Split Testing Calculator
  This is a very simple online tool that has one purpose: To tell you whether your split-testing results are significant yet, or not. When you are split-testing and you don’t want to spend a huge amount of money to get tons of clicks, this tool can help you find the probable winner even with a relatively low number of clicks.
  –
• CommentLuv Blogs Sorted by Niche
  If you want to promote your blog by doing some blog commenting, then you’ll always welcome the CommentLuv plugin, which shows your latest blog post below your comment. Here’s a list of over 100 CommentLuv blogs, sorted by niche. Just remember to leave relevant, non-spammy comments.
  –
• Backlinks Explained on BloggerIllustrated
  Allyn Hayne of BloggerIllustrated has changed gears recently and seems to be going in a more newbie-friendly direction. The post linked above contains several, well-made videos covering pretty much all the basics you need to know about backlinks for SEO purposes. Definitely worth checking out!
  –
• Who Are You Trying to Impress? on Shoemoney
  Best post I’ve ever seen on Shoemoney. Shoe talks about why it doesn’t matter that he tends to get a lot of flak from other IM bloggers and the community in general. Do yourself a favour and give this a read.

And that’s all, folks. Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

But I haven’t given up yet, so here’s another installment of Link Love Friday:

• PPC vs. Yahoo Answers on SEOmoz
  Once again, the people over at SEOmoz manage to produce content that I just need to link to (even though they hardly need my promotion). This is a case study in which classic PPC is pitched against using Yahoo Answers for generating leads and the results are quite surprising.
  –
• Affiliate Marketing Not Dead After All by Ben Moskel
  After Google dropped a huge ban-hammer on thousands of Adwords accounts, there was something of a panic-reaction to be seen on some blogs and in forums. In the above post, Ben Moskel provides a very level-headed analysis of what probably went on behind the scenes and pretty much nips the “death of affiliate marketing” idea in the bud.
  –
• Gary Vaynerchuk Adressing Internet Marketers on Traffic Cafe
  In this video, Gary Vaynerchuck is interviewed by Dean Hunt and Ciaran Doyle. It’s a very interesting video and Gary specifically addresses Internet marketers with an important message. He also completely misrepresents Internet marketing and gets quite a lot completely wrong. You’ll be seeing more about this from me, very soon. In the meantime, make sure to watch that video.

And that’s this weeks (late) Link Love Friday. Enjoy! And if you ever have recommendations for these posts, let me know! I love to read up on interesting and fresh material concerning anything SEO, marketing, website building or general “make money” related.

Cheers,

See this weeks selection after the break.

• Affiliate Hijacking and Other Cheats – Affiliate Beginners Guide
  This is quite an extensive roundup of things that can go wrong with affiliate links and payments. From Hijacking to bait-and-switch commissions, this article informs you how you can get cheated out of your well-earned commission and offers some pointers as to how you can protect yourself.
  –
• How Search Engines Evaluate Links – SEOmoz
  Seems like I find at least one article really worth linking to on SEOmoz every week. This one is a very well explained run-down of how link-value is determined by search engines. Read it and learn the difference between good links and bad links (and everything in between).
  –
• John Reese, Frank Kern and Tony Robbins
  These three uber-Gurus get together and have an “interview”. At least, that’s what the description says. In effect, it’s mainly Tony Robbins doing his thing. Still, it’s interesting to watch. Maybe not quite as much for information as for entertainment value, but that’s not to say there isn’t some good info in it.

And that’s it for this weeks little roundup. I hope you enjoy the links and have a wonderful weekend.

Cheers,

Here are today’s recommendations:

• Google Personalized Search on SEO 2.0
  There were two insightful posts into the recent Google upgrade, making personalized search based on the search history, a standard for all Google users. This is the case, even if you aren’t logged into a Google account. The first post is a list of ways in which personalized search affects SEO and the second one contains some ideas on how to use personalized search to your advantage.
  -
• Great Content Does Not Make for Great Rankings (by itself) – SEOmoz
  Very interesting post on SEOmoz about the sometimes unfortunate fact that “build it and they will come” rarely applies in the online world. Just having great content will not automatically lead to good rankings and this post explains why.
  -
• Mark Lyford’s Millionaire Challenge
  Mark is a guy who’s seen some ups and downs in his time. He used to make tons of money, then got in dept and even spent time in prison. On the day of his release, he embarked on a personal challenge to make a million dollars. On his blog, you can follow his progress daily. Very interesting to see someone who’s been around the block build an online business from scratch. Definitely worth checking out.

And that’s it for this week’s roundup.

Have a great weekend!

Anyway, here we go with today’s collection:

• Find Good WordPress Themes on ThemeGrade
  If you’ve ever been looking for WordPress themes, I’m sure you quickly noticed that there are more of them available than you could look at in a lifetime. Many of them look very fancy, but how can you know which themes are also good “under the hood”? Ideally, a theme should have good SEO presets (proper tagging and such), be compatible with all browsers (with the possible exception of IE6) and load quickly. ThemeGrade is a great little resource since they rate (free and paid) themes in many different aspects. Makes picking a good one that much easier.
  –
• Link Acceleration Explained – SEOmoz
  Very nice, short-and-to-the-point video explaining the concept of link acceleration (sometimes also called link velocity). A must see for everyone who does link-building for their sites.
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• Link Building Basics – Terry Godier
  In this article, titled “7 Habits of Highly Effective Link Builders”, Terry Godier explains the basics of proper link-building. Together with the link above, this should give your link-building and ranking a kick-start.
  –
• Huge Collection of Video Marketing Resources – reelSEO
  As the title suggests, this post on reelSEO contains perhaps everything you will ever need to know about video marketing. It’s a collection of links to lots and lots of resources. If you’re into video-marketing, you can’t miss this.

Right, that’s it for this week’s Link Love Friday.
I hope you enjoy the linked content and benefit from these online marketing gems.

Cheers,

The RSS feed is an essential component of every blog and the number of subscribers is often referenced as a measure of a blog’s success. The feed can also be used for blog promotion and backlink building. In this post, I list 22 RSS directories where you can quickly and easily submit your RSS without the need to register or pay a fee.

If you’ve searched for this subject before, you’ve probably encountered much larger lists of RSS directories than the one below. I found hundreds of such directories in all the lists I went through. But instead of just reproducing them all here, I weeded out all of the directories that:

• were dead (404, redirected to something else, replaced with Adsense pages,…)
• require registration
• only list feeds if you pay them
• looked too spammy/junky

After going through hundreds of directories, I was left with the 22 listed below. Some (not many) of the directories require a reciprocal link to include your blog in their listings. I figured this isn’t a very big deal and could be worth a free listing in most cases.

RSS Directories

BLOGbal

Blogoculars

BlogDigger

BlogPulse

Chordata

FeedBase

FeedBoy

FeedFury – Sometimes throws a CPA survey at you before you’re allowed to submit. The FeedShark may be a way around this.

FeedShark – Multi-Pinger

GoldenFeed

IceRocket

JordoMedia

LeighRSS

MillionRSS

NewsMob

Plazoo

ReadaBlog

RSS-Network

RSSmicro – Has an interesting feature in that it calculates a “FeedRank” to reflect the quality and popularity of your feed (my FeedRank is, alas, crap).

RSSmotron

Weblogalot

Yahoo RSS Directory – I included this since I figure many readers probably already have a Yahoo account. If not, then this technically breaches the “doesn’t require registration” feature.

Buttons and Stuff

Some of the directories offer buttons that you can place in your posts to let readers visit your directory page and/or vote on the post. Some of them are just fancy backlinks, however.

Here are the buttons and backlinks from all the above directories:

Weblogs Directory

Blog and ping

Evaluation

I don’t actually know whether submissions to RSS directories is a good strategy. You do get exposure for your blog, potentially new readers and backlinks. That’s all good, without a question. What I’m not sure about is whether it’s worth the time. I’ll let you know if i see a significant benefit from this. Until then, I would say go ahead and submit your RSS if you have a spare 40 minutes or so.

All the best,

See this weeks selection after the break.

• More on the Duplicate Content Myth – Jonathan Leger
  I recently posted my own thoughts about duplicate content. The linked article by Jonathan Leger actually has two parts (part 1, part 2), of which I especially enjoyed the second one. The posts are already a bit over one year old, but they are still relevant as ever and definitely worth a read.
  –
• Description of a CPA Scam – Harlan Kilstein
  A while back, I posted an article about the difference between a scam and a crappy product and stated how I often see the term “scam” being misused. The video linked above is an example of a real scam. It’s really disgusting that people do such a thing and the video is well worth watching.
  –
• Dennis Yu – Shoemoney
  Speaking of scammers, this is an in-depth post by Jeremy Shoemaker about the, by now notorious, Dennis Yu, a guy who managed to piss off a lot of high-profile Internet marketers in a very short time. It’s interesting and sometimes baffling to read his story. There’s more in this follow-up post.
  –
• 3 Symptoms of a Marketer Who’s Destined to Fail – Chris Rempel
  Finally, here is an incredibly good post about where most IM’ers that fail to make money go wrong. I’ve seen many a post with this type of “Top Mistakes to Avoid” theme, but this one just left me speechless. It’s really well written and contains priceless information. Go read it now!

And that concludes today’s roundup.

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

See this weeks selection after the break.

• Pat’s First Annual Income Report – Smart Passive Income Blog
  Pat has been documenting his online marketing career on the Smart Passive Income Blog for just over a year now. He has been incredibly proficient in finding and leveraging sources of income and his blog is a real goldmine of good information. He posts monthly income reports and just recently, he posted his first ever annual report. Some very good summaries and insights await so go ahead and give it a look, if you haven’t already!
• Grizzly Brears’ Take on SEO – How To Make Money Online For Beginners
  Griz has an interesting, relatively simple and probably accurate stance on SEO. This article is a good summary of said stance. He also takes on some of the misassumptions being spread about social media marketing. And in case you caught the “controversy” caused by Powazek’s recent rant about SEO being all lies and scams (to which SEObook and many other SEO blogs posted rebuttals very quickly), Griz also adds his two cents to this little discussion.
  All in all, I really liked this post for offering quite a wide overview over what’s currently going on in the SEO “scene”.
• How I Ranked For 66’000 Visitors Worth of Keywords – ViperChill
  While it has a very spectacular title, this post is actually a “keyword research basics” kind of post. Glen from ViperChill explains how he drove a ton of organic traffic to his personal development blog, PluginID. Great resource if you’re new to keyword research, as he explains everything you need to know to do it and it’s all with free methods.
  Reminds me that I should do an RQR Basics post on keyword research.

And that’s it for today’s roundup.

Have a great weekend!