Teen Internet Marketer

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/41640

Now this is something I want to keep track of.

Microsoft to Expand Facebook Ad Pact

Microsoft will be providing Windows Live Search to Facebook users. Initially, this may seem like a small thing - it may just be a search bar for Windows Live - but then again, think again.

When you’re on Facebook, how many times do you use the search on their site? Honestly, I use it quite a bit - it’s much better than Myspace’s search - so it’s much easier to find your friends, applications, and groups/products/etc. However, this has another implication - finding celebrities, movies, and tech gadget fan groups via Facebook may be fun - but Windows Live Search has the potential to enhance your search by bringing up relevant results on the web - and display relevant contextual ads.

This is a big thing - and I believe that this move from Microsoft was a smart one - this creates a potential for people to centralize Facebook for their research on various things. They would be able to stay on Facebook to get all of their daily information.

If that happens, what happens to Google?

I’ve already written about how Facebook can Kill the Web.

Wordpress plugins are just that easy

Plugins are useful - and easy to install in Wordpress. I’m sure that many bloggers have several plugins installed - and I do too. I’ll give a short and concise list of what plugins I have and why they are useful.

Akismet

Definitely the staple plugin for all Wordpress bloggers - this anti-spam plugin just stops spam dead in it’s tracks. If I couldn’t live without one plugin, it would be Akismet.

Dofollow

I’ve talked about the dofollow plugin earlier - it’s a very good plugin that basically forces my agenda on my blog - I think that links should be counted by Google - as long as they’re not spam.

Hot Linked Image Cacher

This is a great plugin! I don’t like to hotlink my images, so I just hot link them, run hot-linked image cacher, and then boom! My images are now locally hosted.

Wordbook

This automatically updates my Facebook profile and feed with a thing saying “Edward has posted a new blog entry” - linking to my blog on here. This helps me get a few extra visits.

“Yet Another Related Posts Plugin”

Interesting name, right? I think that having a “related posts” section really helps increase pageviews on a blog - and I wanted a good related posts plugin. Unfortunately, the plugins that I found were either too complex, or didn’t have enough customizability. I found the perfect match with YARPP.

What plugins do you use on your blog?

From Seth Godin:

Blogging about blogging, writing about writing, documentaries about documentaries, songs about songwriting…

It’s tempting to use a medium to write about the medium.

It works for a while, but there’s a limit. Pretty quickly, you hit a natural ceiling and you won’t be able to go any further. The most obvious trap online: websites that make money by teaching you about making money by using the web.

John Chow, anyone?

Seriously though - maybe this blogging thing is getting saturated.

However, that viewpoint depends on how you use blogging. Do you use blogging as a way to organize your thoughts, or are you trying to make money online?

What do you do with your blog?

Thanks to Neil at NeilsWeb for posting this, and James Seligman for letting me know about these credits.

Facebook is offering $250 worth of free Advertising credits right now. It seems that they’re trying to encourage advertising on their network.

1. Signup for the Visa Business Network. Click “Join Network” and add the application. You do not need to fill out your profile details to get the ad credit.

2. Check the email associated with your Facebook account - you should get a $100 coupon code in your email.

Other three coupon codes for $50 each:

T5V6-1JKV-TNH9-2MRH

2JXY-WTFK-72Y0-VJ6Y

R1X5-0NH7-5FXW-5YEC

To redeem the coupon codes:

1. Login to Facebook Ad Manager

2. Click on Billing, then click on Funding Sources.

3. Click “Enter Coupon Code” and enter in the four coupon codes. You should now have $250 in your Facebook Ads account!

Enjoy!

A few years back, comment spam became a bigger and bigger problem for blogs - and Google needed to figure out a solution. Comment spam allowed spammers to unfairly game Google and get ranked for terms that they shouldn’t have ranked. Comment spam definitely started to become a problem. Enter rel=nofollow.

What is rel=nofollow?

Rel=nofollow tells search engines to STOP and do NOT follow the link. This means that the links will not affect the search ranking of the site being linked to. This should discourage spammers - as they usually spam to get higher Google rankings. To aid in Google’s effort, Wordpress put in a default setting - to make comment posts link back to the authors as “nofollow”.

However, this has a disadvantage - this means that comment authors will not get the link juice they deserve when they comment on a blog. Also, it seems that nofollow has not stopped the spam flood - anyone who runs a blog today knows that comment spam is definitely a problem worth looking out for.

Enter Akismet

Akismet, the spam detection plugin.

Ask any blogger - and Akismet will most likely be the most useful plugin that they have enabled. On Krazyness itself, Akismet has blocked 11,482 spam comments. Akismet has been very useful at eliminating comment spam - while Google’s rel=nofollow has not.

Do Follow

That’s why I’ve taken this time to enable the do follow plugin on Wordpress. This means that whenever any one of you comments on Krazyness - you will get free link juice from Krazyness to award yourself for your efforts.

I don’t think I’ll recieve much more spam (other than what Akismet already blocks) - and I’ll probably see more comments on this blog from now on. I would strongly encourage other blogs to follow suit - and disable nofollow.

For anyone who ever really looked at the Facebook application development platform, it can be tremendously scary - there are so many possibilities with the Facebook platform. Right now, most Facebook applications are limited to “What type of Underwear are you?” and the various “Pet” applications on profiles. However, the Facebook platform is extremely versatile and - if enough developers take advantage of it - could spawn applications which will replace the rest of the World Wide Web as we know it.

How would Facebook aid in the congregation of the web? Here are some examples:

Doing Research on Facebook

In the past few years, online research is conducted in fewer and fewer ways:

1. Search Wikipedia - Wikipedia is a giant repository for human knowledge - there’s no need to search Google for small websites about Egypt if it’s all on Wikipedia
2. Search Google for Forum/Blog posts about the subject (useful for when you’re looking for howto guides, articles, or Q/A)

How would it work on Facebook?

What if you could search Wikipedia right within Facebook? Open up your application “Wikipedia” - and then search for articles. If you do article editing - no problem - your article edits would appear in your feed. Why go to Wikipedia.org if you can see what articles your friends have edited via the Wikipedia Facebook Application?

Blogging on Facebook

This is a no-brainier - many people are already importing blog entries into Facebook Notes. Myself? I’m using a handy plugin called Wordbook to link Facebook with my blog instead of directly importing them. Nonetheless, once more people go onto Facebook - why bother writing on your blog? Just blog directly on Facebook with the blogs application. How would people get RSS updates to your blog? Instead of RSS, people would most likely “Feed subscribe” - meaning that your new blog posts would go on their Facebook Feed.

News on Facebook

Online news has been growing at a tremendous pace - around 76% of 18-35 year old people prefer online news sources. How would Facebook fill that gap? In the same way as blogs - people could “install” a news app from New York Times, Google, or CNN, and read current news from their feed. The news widgets could even target news to the reader. If the reader is a 18 year old male who lists a lot of sports in his Facebook “Interests” - the news application could choose to post more sports articles into the feed. On the other hand, if the reader is a 40 year old middle-age woman, the news application could still effectively display articles to the woman’s interest.

Email on Facebook

Even though E-mail is not part of the World Wide Web (which only covers websites) - if Facebook gains dominance, it’s messaging system could effectively replace email. Why?

Many people receive spam on a daily basis - however, on Facebook, it would be much harder to get spammed. Why? Facebook only allows you to communicate with your “friends” - only people whom you want to hear from. Facebook mail isn’t cluttered by spam like email technologies. Users looking to escape the savage nature of e-mail would start using Facebook mail instead to message their friends - rendering e-mail obsolete.

In a sense, some of this is already happening - albiet on a smaller scale. Although Facebook will probably never replace the entire Internet, it’s scary seeing how much of it *could* replace the web - and what will probably happen to the Internet in some form or other within the next 20 years. A global login system, social actions, and everything - all from one site.

My bad - I’m sorry. Anyways, I’m back from mountain biking - it was great! I’ll get some pictures up sometime soon. However, I have an awesome announcement:

I just received my Teen Business Forum tees!

I’ll be sending one to Shoemoney’s free shirt friday - and selling the rest for $5 apiece - a 50% subsidization of the tees.

Teen Business Forum Thread Link

As a FYI to all you blog readers, I’ll be gone for the next week downhill biking in Port Angeles with part of my school (for “Focus Week” - a week where we do school-sponsored trips and activities).

As such, I may or may not be online - depending on if I can find wifi in Port Angeles. Don’t fret, though - I have scheduled posts to appear over the next few days - continuing my SMX organic SEO series of posts.

Funnily, I decided to take a look at the Fluidride website - they will be hosting our bike trip - and was surprised to see that they run Wordpress. I wonder how much Contagious Media Services was paid for that website?

I just went to the Meetup202 Seattle meeting yesterday - it was pretty good. I met up with Steven Troung, Wes Mahler, and a few other guys from the Seattle area to talk about Affiliate Marketing. It was definitely a great meeting! If you are in the Seattle area, feel free to join us next month - newbies are definitely welcome. We hung out for a while - from 2:30ish to 9:00 or so.

At the meeting, we talked about affiliate marketing with paid search marketing. Steven and Wesley run Tracking202 - a service that tracks your keywords for affiliate marketing campaigns. I’ll definitely be running that to track my affiliate campaigns when I start out.

This meeting opened the door for me to get into affiliate marketing - I now know some experienced affiliate marketers and will definitely be trying that out during the summer.

Oh, and I also got a Twitter.