Chris Sandberg » Links

Favorite Links – June 27, 2007

csandb — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:16:47 +0000

A few of my favorite links from the past week or so:

John Chow is asking for FaceBook friends. Feel free to add me as a friend on FaceBook too. If you do please introduce yourself so we really can be friends.
Brian Clark shares his advice on launching a blog. Brian always has such great content, and this post is no exception. Coppyblogger is one of my favorite blogs. Keep up the great work Brian.
Neil Patel announced that Crazy Egg has launched a very cool new feature called confetti. This feature allows webmasters to see where users clicked. The cool thing about confetti is that you can sort your users interactions based on several factors such as referrers, search terms, operating systems, browsers, time before click, and window size. You can also compare two or more elements against each other.
Brian Gilley reviews the top blog review sites. A few sites I am aware of that were not on the list are Linkworth, Loudlaunch, and Creamaid.
Rae Hoffman tells us how to survive the affiliate evolution. A lot of what she suggests is very similar to what Yaro Starak writes about in his Blog Profits Blueprint.
Lee Oden shares the results of his Best Keyword Research Tool Poll. My personal favorites on the list are Keyword Discovery, the Google Keyword Tool, NicheBOT, and SEO Digger(which I just discovered due to this poll).
Andy Beard explains how to avoid being banned on Technorati.
Graywolf is offering to answer questions on the condition that you pose the question in a blog post. I have posed my own question for Graywolf here.
Aaron Wall announced he is closing Threadwatch, claims an RSS subscriber is worth 1,000 links, offers advice on tracking the growth of competing sites and outlines the evolution of a profitable site. Wow, it seems Aaron has been posting some great content to have gotten that many links from me in one post.
Seth Godin tells us how to make a million dollars. Sell expensive stuff to a few rather than trying to sell cheap stuff to the masses. It is easier to focus on a small group rather trying to market to thousands because a small group likely talks to itself and can easily spread the word about your business, and by charging more per sale you can afford to modify your offer sooner to be more effective.
Avinash Kaushik explains why bounce rate could be the sexiest web metric ever. I’ll definitely be looking at my bounce rates a lot more closely from now on.

A Few Good Posts

csandb — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:09:56 +0000

Here are a few noteworthy blog posts from the past few weeks:

Muhammad Saleem wrote a good review of the new Facebooks Platform
Utah Paul Allen Predicts that FaceBook will become the largest social network in the world
Stuntdubl SEO shares his Competitive Webmaster’s Guide to Understanding the Dynamics of Top Rankings
Andy Beard lists 32 Forms of Linking Payola and Linking Mistakes Frequently Encountered On Blogs
Michael Gray responds to Google’s addition of paid link reporting here and here
Seth Godin analyzes people’s inconsistencies and shares a shoestring opportunity
SEOmoz launched the Rank Checker
Yaro Starak shares a video he created of reviewing a blog, where he gives a lot of great advice for improving your blog
John Jonas recommends working instead of blogging
Courtney Tuttle shares his Beginner’s Guide to Top Google Rankings
Neil Patel lists Five Branding Errors That Make You Look Dumb

Enjoy!

What I Read

csandb — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:33:35 +0000

I love Google Reader’s trends feature, which allows you to see statistics about your reading habits. Here is a list of the top 20 blogs I have been reading over the past 30 days. The numbers are the total amount of posts I read and the percentage of all posts I read.

John Chow dot Com 35 33%

Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim – Internet Marketing Blog & Consultant 26 13%

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog 19 41%

SEO Book.com 19 32%

Pronet Advertising 18 32%

ProBlogger Blog Tips 17 23%

Chris Knudsen on life, business, and entrepreneurship 9 47%

The Jason Calacanis Weblog 9 20%

Shoemoney – Skills to pay the bills 9 14%

Russell Page 8 40%

Copyblogger 8 38%

Seth’s Blog 8 17%

Smooth Harold | The Blog of Blake Snow 7 37%

NewspaperGrl 7 35%

Graywolf’s SEO Blog 7 25%

Online Marketing Blog 7 18%

Macalua.com 6 43%

Tropical SEO 6 40%

SEO BlackHat: Black Hat SEO Blog 5 83%

Connor’s Conundrums 5 26%

Selections From ProBlogger’s Group Writing Project

csandb — Sat, 12 May 2007 05:09:09 +0000

I participated in ProBlogger’s group writing project a couple days ago. There were many great submissions that offer some great advice. I’m sharing some of the submissions that are relevant to this blog below:

5 Benefits Podcasting has helped my business by The Freq

Top 5 Reasons To Start A Business by Jason Drohn

Top 5 Internet Marketing Mistakes by The Internet Marketing Monitor

5 Low-Cost High-Impact Relatively Immediate Search Marketing Tactics by Sasha

The Top 5 Reasons Darren Rowse is a Marketing Genius by Kent

5 Things You Can Learn About Marketing From Pro Wrestling by Paul Nilsen

Top 5 Reasons Why Information Products is the Ultimate Business by Martin Neumann

5 SEO blogs I canâ€™t get enough of by Joost

Top 5 SEO Skills Identified As Most Important by The (SEP) Guy

Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO by Michael Jensen

Top 5 ways to connect online with the 50+ marketing demographic by The Savvy Boomer

Top 5 Business Startup Myths by John Crickett

5 Reasons Why Every Business Needs a Newsletter by Simon Payn

How To Start Your Own Business Today! No Excuses by John Anthony

The Top 5 Questions – to spark new marketing ideas by Matt McDonald

Top Five Internet Business Blogs

csandb — Wed, 09 May 2007 11:38:31 +0000

I am writing this post as part of Darren Rowse’s Group Writing Project. The following are my five favorite blogs related to doing business online. I would recommend them to all.

1. ProBlogger: Darren gives great advice on everything related to Pro blogging.
2. Pronet Advertising: I would say this is the best blog out there about social media from a marketers perspective. Neil and his gang have done a great job.
3. SEOmoz: Rand Fishkin and the folks at SEOmoz provide a steady flow of good advice and information related to Search Engine Optimization.
4. CopyBlogger: Brian gives great advice related to copywriting. I am constantly amazed at the quality of every post he publishes.

5. John Chow dot Com: Although his blog tends to go off topic quite frequently John offers great information on everything related to making money online.

While trying to come up with this list several other blogs came to mind which are also worth reading, so I’ve decided to list them below if you want to check them out.

SEO Book

Paul Allen (the lesser)

and so many more…

My Google Reader Feeds

csandb — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 08:11:42 +0000

A couple months ago I noticed that I had subscribed to almost 200 feeds on bloglines. Although they were all good blogs I realized that I had been avoiding checking up on them simply because it seemed a bit daunting to login to bloglines and see that I had hundreds of unread items. As a result of my reluctance to check my bloglines account on a consistent basis I was missing a lot of good posts, so I decided that I would narrow down my choice of subscriptions to maybe only 20-30 blogs that I really felt were the most important. At the same time I decided I would also like to try out a new feed reader to see if they offered better features than bloglines.

A few weeks ago I heard from Paul Allen that Google Reader tracked your reading habits and would generate reports of what you have been reading over time. I thought this was a cool feature that may help me prioritize which blogs I should stay subscribed to and which blogs I should drop in case my list got too big again. So I left bloglines and have been using Google Reader ever since. I decided I wanted to start off from scratch and only initially subscribe to the blogs that I could think of off the top of my head. Over the last few weeks I added a few more, but have still managed to keep the list down to a size where I could reasonably read every post if I wanted to (usually I just a select a few that seem the most interesting) even if I have been gone for a few days. I wanted to share my list of the blogs I have decided to subscribe to. Don’t feel bad if your blog is not on the list, it may have been on my old bloglines list, and may show up in the future on my new Google reader list (Google reader seems to help me organize my feeds a lot better than bloglines so I may be subscribing to a lot more feeds in the future). Here is the current list:

In a few weeks once I have collected more data on my reading habits I will posting a ranked list of the blogs I read the most.

Seven Digg Experts

csandb — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 08:35:46 +0000

While keeping informed and up to date about what is being written about Digg over the past several months I have come across a lot of information that really isn’t that insightful or in some cases is even just plain wrong. So to help anyone interested in learning more about Digg sort through the jungle of information out there I have created the following list of bloggers who in my eyes have proved through their writings on the subject that they really know what they are talking about. These guys have established themselves as authorities on the subject of Digg. So here is the list of the Digg experts along with a few links to what they have written about Digg. I am sure there are others experts out there but these are the ones that I have found to be the most insightful. If you know of anyone else who deserves to be on this list please list them in the comments.

Entrepreneurship Blogs and Resources

csandb — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 16:20:05 +0000

Mind Valley Labs has come up with a pretty useful list of blogs and resources for entrepreneurs. If you are an entrepreneur or are interested in learning about entrepreneurship it is worth checking out. In their comment section I added the following other blogs that are also worth checking out.

http://www.paulallen.net/
http://www.garrettsmith.info/
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/
http://brockblake.com/

Google’s Dominance

csandb — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 23:24:00 +0000

Today, in my internet marketing class at BYU, our teacher, Paul Allen, asked the class what search engine they used primarily. Amazingly 100% of the class in a class of about 50 raised their hands when Paul asked who used Google as their primary search engine. This is a biased sample, since most the students are business oriented and technically savvy, but it still amazed me that every person in the class uses Google as their primary search engine.