Yay, a few days ago I started my reviews campaign, as you read there already, you write a small review of TopTut.com and get a link on this blog, genuine, with no “nofollow”, i.e. your ranking will benefit and improve! Originally, I wanted to wait about a week or more until I make a post with links to those who reviewed this blog, however, since in 3 days I already got 2 reviews, I decided it won’t be fair to make those who reviewed us so promptly wait for long time.
So, here are the bloggers who reviewed TopTut.com so far:

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ffprod66 wrote a review on Golden Ideas

Picc wrote a review on TopTut Promotion Tips

Tom wrote a review on TopTut.com’s right place for you

Ankit wrote a review on Photoshop tutorials just got easier
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This list will be updated every few days, until the “Summer Reviewers” thread will follow. Don’t forget that the best review of the season (only 3 weeks left!) will get a sitewide link on toptut.com for 3 months, as well as a link on Lorelei Web, absolutely free!

Okay, I pretty much stole the idea from John Chow and do not anticipate his success, but lemme try and recreate it here in this blog. So, basically the deal is: You review my website, and get a link on this blog, without “no follow” attribute, i.e. this link will be perfectly fine and very beneficial for Search Engines, Technorati profile and most of all - traffic. (By the way, when you leave a comment, “no follow” is automatically added to your link so these never count towards your ranking.

EDIT: The thread with Spring Reviews has been added.

• Review Rules:

1. This has to be a real review of my site or a particular post in here, not just a link pointing to toptut.com, buried in irrelevant content. Please make it 75+ words long. Of course I am not going to stop you if you want to make it significantly longer.

2. If you do not review any post in particular, please use the following anchor text (any of your choice) to link to us: Photoshop tutorials, Promotion tips, Free WordPress themes Wordpress themes, Making money online, tutorials, Liza Kliko, Lorelei or free downloads. If you want to make any other anchor text - I will leave it to your creativity.
3. Please also include a link to this post, mentioning that I am giving away backlinks to *anyone* who reviews my blog.

4. Please note that your review does not have to be positive. Not saying I am seeking critique and getting myself a bad name, but you are in no way encouraged to write in a positive light if this is not reflect your real opinion. Be objective and write about anything you liked or disliked, if you complain about something, I will definitely look into improving.

5. Once your review is posted, please reply with a comment below, including a link to the post you made, it will be added to our list of “Spring Reviewers”. A thread for Spring Reviewers will be made separately in about a week from now, and will be updated weekly.

• Best Review Gets…

Every season, I will pick the “Review of the Season”, and the author will get a FREE sitewide link on this website, which at present worth 15$ /month + link on Lorelei Web worth 25$ / month, all this for 3 months (aka for the next season)! My pick will not depend on your PR, traffic or ranking, but on the quality of your review *only*, judging my originality and how enjoyable was it.

• TopTut.com’s current worth:

Daily traffic: 1300+ unique visitors.

Alexa: 173,373
PageRank: 4
Blog Juice: 2.8
Technorati Rank: 27,219

Alexa: 124,287
PageRank: 4
Looking forward to see your reviews!

Although some of you may think that promoting a blog is same as promoting a website, we - the bloggers, know the difference. Bloggers have more opportunities to promote, although this article will try to focus on “website” in a more general sense.
Sometime, when your website has little traffic, it is not necessarily because of bad SEO or poor promotion, sometimes it’s the small mistakes webmasters make while developing a site, which keep causing long-term damage. Here are some of the common mistakes and how to avoid them to maximize continuous traffic…

1. Keywords in URL’s. This means, the title of each page and the URL itself should contain some of the essential keywords which can potentially draw traffic from SE to your website. Blogs can easily modify the permalinks to titles, and webmasters of regular website should just give each file the appropriate name, for example “searchenginesoptimization.html” is better than “page273.html”, from Search Engines’ point of view.

2. Size (of other sites) does not matter. Don’t neglect small traffic generators; having said that, I do not advice you to buy massive links from small websites that send you a few visitors a day (although for some of you that is already a lot), but if you have an opportunity to get a link from a relatively small site with relevant theme, do not waste the opportunity. Don’t forget that any webmaster is dreaming to see his site getting recognition, and will do his best to promote it, so any link from a “small” site can potentially become a link from a “big” site, in a few months. Just have faith and hope other webmasters will do the job for you.

3. Size (of your site) matters. Yes, it’s good to have a big… website. You can brag, you can gain world’s domination… OK, serious now: the bigger is your website, the more potential it has. One hundred articles will naturally cover a wider variety of keywords and miscellaneous keywords “joints”, rather than one article. Also, it can potentially interest more visitors from different countries and cultures, as again - your guest is likely to find something interesting for himself after browsing one hundred topics, which may not happen if you only have a few measly articles.

Read More from "Give your website’s traffic Nine Lives"

Most of you probably know of about this very well-known tool - Blog Juice Calculator. It calculates how important is your blog compared to others on the internet, based on your Technorati Ranking (i.e. hos many blogs listed in Technorati link to you), Alexa and number of backlinks from Bloglines.

When this blog was launched it probably was 0.0, but I do not know as I did not check. In the beginning of March, I checked and our “Blog juice” was 0.2. Rather depressive if you see how much most of other web journals have… anyway, I started to work on promotion, mainly it came thanks to the freely offers WordPress themes - Lorelei Bliss 2.0 and DarkLight.

After 3 weeks the ranking climbed up to 1.5 1.8, 2.3  2.6 (updated on April 9th May 2nd), which is our todays number and the aim by the end of April to reach 2.3. Is it possible? We will see in 4 weeks! Current rank (will update this bi-weekly):

EDIT: Reached 2.3 on April 9th, so now the goal could be cheekily raised higher for the end of the month… How about 2.5?

EDIT May 2nd: Yet another goal is achieved, I was hopping for 2,5 by the end of the month and achieved 2.6. Well, it’s ok, I know.. I am the best

What can be better than to make money when you sleep? For example Adsense - check your balance before sleep, make up in the morning and see how nicely the number grew up while you were snoring, just like a classical bamboo tree. There are only 2 categories of people who can make money while sleeping - webmasters with monetized websites, or big company / factories owners that go to sleep while the workers continue their job and the “machine” keeps rolling. However, while opening a factory is definitely not something you can do with minimum effort, expenses and time - opening a site is THE solution.

What do you actually need? A good domain name for a start, as having your own name guarantees you will never lose traffic + it looks a lot more respectable. You can start off with a free host and a decent free web layout if you cannot make your own and get the business going. Of course it’s time consuming, it will eat up many hours, but believe me it’s worth it. After all, how hard is this job? Sitting in your socks at your desk, drinking coffee and writing some content for your blog readers of website visitors? Hard manual labor? I don’t think so.

Choosing marketing strategy.

This is the most important and most essential step - choosing HOW will you monetize your website. If you choose the wrong strategy - no harm, unless we count in the loss of time, disappointment and low / lack income for longer then expected. Before you start getting creative - face one fact: online marketing has been prospering for years now, many blooming years and all the possible and impossible ways to make money online has been invented by now. There is a very slim chance that you will manage to come up with some ground breaking strategy, which will change the world’s perception on Marketing. So, don’t re-invent the wheel, a good and smoothly rolling wheel has already been invented, tested and successfully produced before you, all you need is to take the model and apply to your site. After all, there are not all that many ways to make money online, however the countless are the sources.

Wasting time and working out everything by yourself, testing it all on your skin, is yet another good way to throw the time away and lose precious energy. Go to some big forums, ask for help, or ask friends - how do they make money? What affiliate program pays and which did never paid them? What ads bring good revenue and which are useless? You really don’t need to go by the trial and error path. Find a successful website that is similar to yours in both niche and layout. See how other successful website owners implemented Adsense, AdBrite and other other income streams on their websites. See also, WHAT do they actually use? For example blogs rarely use Adbrite, because I can say from personal experience that it does not pay out to keep a huge square for ads that might never be purchased while contextual ads like AdSense will generate a massive income depending on your keywords.

All or nothing?

Many people tend to think that since they have already employed one type of ads, what they earn from it reflects their website’s potential revenue. No, it does not. You can combine as many income streams as you wish, see what works best for your site’s layout, niche and traffic. I personally never tried Amazon and eBay affiliate programs, neither Chikita eMini, because all my websites are freebies oriented, and it’s a lot easier to make a freebies seeker to click on an advert, rather than make him buy a laptop for only 700$. Study your traffic, perhaps if most of your traffic comes from a particular country you might want to take advantage of it? Whatever you decide, my point is - do not rely on one income opportunity solemnly. If one did not work for you, it does not mean your site is crap and it’s time to shut it down. Try as many options as you can.

I will give you an example. For the past 1,5 years I was “faithful” to Adsense and did not even try anything else. Of course not forgetting that up until recently competitive ads were not allowed together with Google (they still prohibited for YPN), but still and all I was very narrow minded. A couple of weeks ago I was introduced to Text Links Ads and ReviewMe. Both sites are run by the same owner, and I got 4 links sold at TLA within 2 weeks and one very nice review offer from RM last week so I can only but hope this will double itself text month. Text Links Ads has just covered my annual hosting fee for this blog in mere 2 weeks of absolutely passive participation (once you install the script you really need not worry about anything anymore) and if I’d not have tried, I could miss this opportunity.

Most important is to be open minded yet cautious to new offers, ideas and revenue streams. Experiment with design, ads position and colours, and see what works best for you.

A several weeks ago I started to look for miscellaneous alternatives to the most commonly spread ads network - Adsense. I asked in forums and read up on blogs of those who I trust and value and realized that there is a damn easy way to make money from small, almost tiny text links. This program is especially good if you have a several websites with different niches.

You have probably heard of it before - I am talking about Text Link Ads, which is a great way to Monetize Your Site

Advantages:

1. Compatible with Google Adsense and can be used together on same page.
2. Extremely elegant looking links, these are “just” text links, u decide on a color and font size, no “sponsored by” add-ons or huge ads space required to be occupied.
3. Payment can be done by both PayPal and cheques.
4. You can make money even off your blog’s feeds / RSS.
5. You may get between 5$ to 300$ per link a month, and sell up to 10 links on a website. (the price depends on factors such as Alexa rank, Page Rank, Traffic, volume, and NICHE.)

It’s not another spam / scam site, you can read a lot of positive feedback on TLA (Text Links Ads)

on DigitalPoint Forums. Another advantage is that just like me, you will be earning 25$ for each person you referred to Text Link Ads. In order to qualify for an affiliate payment, a referred

publisher must install the advertising script on their site for seven days. At this time the referral will appear in the affiliate’s account.

> SIGN UP HERE <

End of the week, everybody are relaxing, planning something nice for the weekend. Everyone except those who work by the computer, like us. So, while it’s not too busy, I decided to spare some time and dive into the realm of SEO, again.

Came across Jim Westergren’s website, that analyzes what ‘smart‘ link building is, and even offers to do it for you. We all (or at least most of us) know that back links from high quality content sites are more “valued” by SE, but not many of us know where exactly is the line between “high quality page” and “low quality page”, in Search Engines’ terms. Smart Link Building explains it to you in great details and therefore has 2 advantages: it’s both a good guide for those who don’t even know what ‘anchor text’ is, and – offers top class service for sites owners who seek to dramatically improve their ranking. His service is unique, because it guarantees you will get backlinks (elegantly wrapped in an article), of an absolutely different level — not only links from various server IP’s and good PageRanks, but also links that come from superior value pages… I will not extend further, if you want to read more, just go to his link building website and see for yourself. You will also see examples of his work, which will most definitely impress you at first sight.

Even if you cannot afford to avail of his extraordinary link building campaign, I’d strongly recommend to read that page and educate yourself. Doubtlessly worth your time.

Go to any webmasters forum, enter the SEO section and see how devotedly people are working on Search Engine Optimization. Making the site bot-friendly (XHTML, CSS, WAI-AAA), amount of indexed pages seems to have an unjustified extra weight and this whole meta tags and keywords density fuss sometimes crosses the line. Is it really that important? It is, if most your traffic comes from Google and other SE, but if it isn’t? You need thousands of pages that has been aggressively promoted for years in order to be ranked high enough.

The thing is, if your website deals with something unique, something that has little (if at all) results in Google, you will show up upon every search anyway, however, if your site deals with popular keywords (which are normally the high paying ones), such as “SEO” (110,000,000 results in Google) or “Digital Cameras” (97,300,000 results in Google) or better off - “Free Software” (1,090,000,000 results in Google. Only), where are you exactly in this list?
Just imagine making one more site about free software… Do you really believe you will make it to the top 10 results? Or even top 50? Ever?? The competition is absolutely inhuman, the money invested in back links and promotion are immeasurable and no matter how perfectly your website will be optimized for SEO - you won’t get more than a few hundreds of visitors from SE’s. It’s a fact that most “average” websites (I mean we are excluding MS, Apple, CNet, Download.com, and some others of that rank) do not benefit from more than 20% - 30% of traffic from SE. Most websites have even less. A lot less.
So, does SEO worth dedicating hours to?