Become Part of an Ebook – Free Link

Part of online business is online marketing. Ebooks are a great way to get your name out there. You can create your own ebook or become part of others as you add something substantial to their content.

Creating your own ebook is one way you can become well known as an expert in a subject.

Over at AimforAwesome.com I started an ebook about “What is the Point of Life?” Why that topic? Good question. I was increasingly aware that over the past 2-3 years that post was getting more traffic than any other on the entire site. It doesn’t get crazy amounts of traffic – there aren’t that many people searching on the topic, but there’s obviously a lot of interest in it. I don’t think my post was particularly well-written, and I think there was a lot more to talk about.

Hence the ebook, “What is the Point of Life?“.

If you want to be part of it – you can add your idea about what the point of life is by writing me at AimforAwesome@@@gmail…com and follow this post to send me your idea.

Contributors to the ebook will receive a credit with name, site (personal or business), email, phone – whatever info you want – and a free copy of the ebook, “What is the Point of Life?“.

Getting Inbound Links

Inbound links are very important for Google, and presumably every other search engine on the planet… though to be honest, I’ve focused solely on Google for about the last 4 years. If I’m well represented in Google I seem to do just fine in Yahoo, and now Bing.

I’ve been experimenting with creating articles at EzineArticles.com for the last couple of months and am possibly seeing good results already. If I can believe their stats, they’re sending me some decent clicks over to my site(s) where I’ve linked to.

Apparently Google likes the site because it’s well moderated. Junk articles don’t (usually) get through, though I’ve seen some horribly written articles the majority are decent enough quality.

What is Ezine Articles? You write articles laced with keywords about whatever topic your website or page on your website is about. You can link back to your own site twice from the “Author box” in the last paragraph. Free inbound links… for the price of writing an article. I like the idea, though at first I balked at why in the world I would write quality content for another website.

Google trusts this site to the tune of a PageRank 6. They have thousands of articles and authors – some of which ONLY write there and do very well.

If my recent gains in pagerank numbers are signs of the success of this inbound links technique, I’m all for it and will be writing another 20-50 articles there this year.

Anyone had good success with it yet?

Here’s my feed which will give you some of the articles I’ve written there. You can click one and go see the full article and how I’ve setup my links back to my own sites.

I’ll let you know more as I nail down whether or not this technique is responsible for my recent gains…

Here’s my feed:

3,993,221 Page Views in 30 Months

Over last 30 months my main 6 sites have had 3,993,221 page views.

I’ve written over 1,700 blog posts and another 2200 pages and articles on traditional websites.

Over on my YouTube account – the main account anyway, I’ve had 1,900,000+ views. At our Thai Food account – almost half a million.

We started a lot of projects over the last two years. Quite frankly I’m interested in many different areas and no one area is more interesting than any of the others. Though there are 6 main sites, I’ve started over 30 websites in the last 3 years. Now I have a good idea what is working and what isn’t working and know better where to focus.

Sometimes you have to start many projects to see – what is going to work. Other times, you’re interested in just one thing – maybe two, and you knock those out because you have the passion to focus there and really kill it.

Where will I be mainly in 2010?

I’m looking at two areas: video and ebooks. I love to do both and I’m wondering if I should go ahead and tie them together and make a run at it. Ebooks by themselves can be boring – no doubt. Dry topics are boring. Video is THE wave of the future and now – and I think tying ebooks together with video is going to be time well spent.

Why?

Apple’s itablet – if/when it materializes is probably going to be moving this direction. Apple likely doesn’t want just an ereader device. It wants a device that does it all. It wants a device that works for the magazine industry as well as ebooks and video. Some are saying it will tie it all together to bring video into the ebook. This is the space I want to be in. I want to create fun to read ebooks that are unique written and video content that my affiliates can sell for me.

The hardest piece of the puzzle for internet success is finding the traffic to look at what you’re selling. It’s ungodly difficult to create a site and either ramp it up in Google and social media sites, or just pay for traffic straight out and hope you are able to make sales.

It’s better by a factor of 100+ to just create your own content – whatever it is, and go out and find websites that have traffic and don’t know what to do with it – or, that fits your niche well and is a good match for the products and services you have to sell.

Where will you be in 2010?

Mobile Browsers and Mobile Ecommerce

If you’re still sitting on the fence regarding enabling your business website for viewing by mobile browsers like iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones this might sway you – well, it may knock you over the fence…

Ebay expects to do 400 million dollars in transactions over JUST the iPhone in 2009.

Are people using their iphones to buy? Oh yeah… in a big way.

Opera browser – the opera ‘mini’ which is a really nice mobile browser has seen great increases in use – currently they have 40 million mobile users. These users viewed 17 billion web pages with Opera mini. Not bad eh? This article talks about their growth: Opera Mini use

A very simple way to enable your website for iPhone and Android devices is, when running WordPress – add the WPTouch plugin. Here’s what the official WP page says about the plugin:

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to your iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini mobile, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm visitors without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.

What happens is that the mobile version of your site is instantly served up fresh to anyone on those mobile browsers mentioned. There is even a link on the front page to ask if the user wants to revert back to the original full non-mobile version.

Mobile is part of the immediate future. Is it the entire future? Probably not, people will still sit in front of a big screen at home or at work, but, mobile is already part of the huge share of ecommerce happening across the web. Four hundred million at eBay JUST on the iPhone? What will it be in 5 years – 200 million?

Jump in right now – both feet!

Real Time Search – A Game Changer

Microsoft’s Bing and Google just reached separate deals with Twitter for rights to index the Twitter data as it occurs… in real-time.

This is a game changer on a couple of levels.

1. People are going to tweet just to get into Google’s search engine results pages (SERP’s). It’s a game changer for companies that are looking to get into the Google and Bing search results pages. I don’t see the results in Bing yet, though some have said they are showing up for them. Google has yet to integrate Tweets into their results – but it will be interesting to see how they go about it.

Tweeting might have just become important to me again, depending on what the results show, and whether they are prominently placed. Links in Twitter will probably pick up some sort of value in Google’s eyes based on the number of times the link gets passed around – retweeted.

2. Less and less space is being used for organic search results in Google especially. Some companies are going to get pushed down, out of the sweet spot. SEO is becoming ridiculously hard to max out because there are no longer 5 or 10 slots that matter. There are just a couple.

I think small businesses – 1-10 employees are being hammered. It’s becoming more difficult to break into any online business that relies on the search engines. Companies must have budgets to hire people to do videos, images, and now tweets.

I think Google is favoring big business. Big business rules online, just as it did offline. It can’t be any other way, right?

If the Twitter results are really prominent displayed in Google results, whole businesses will develop to take advantage of this chance to get high placement in Google’s SERP’s. Heck, I might jump into that space if the getting looks good.

Will they rank the Twitter data higher than YouTube videos? Higher than image results?

Interesting to see what comes of this – the game is always changing!

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