Karlonia.com

Today I received my first contact form submission, which confirmed that the system works and is sending messages to my email address. The message content is not exactly what I was looking for; instead of an article or advertising offer, I discovered that this site was reviewed and rated by a directory called Blogged.com:

Dear Karlonia.com author,

Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.2 score out of 10 in the Business category of Blogged.com. This is quite an achievement!

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.2 score.

We’ve also created Blogged.com score badges with your score prominently displayed. Simply visit your website’s summary page on Blogged.com.

Click on the “Show this rating on your blog!” link underneath the score and follow the instructions provided.

Please accept my congratulations on a blog well-done!!

Sincerely,
Amy Liu
Marketing
www.blogged.com

I suppose that this is still a good thing overall since it will count as a directory submission and backlink, although my listing is buried pretty far down and is unlikely to receive much exposure.

Unfortnately, I could not find any kind of “eclectic” or “mixed bag” category at the directory, which would probably be a better fit for this blog’s content and might also result in a higher listing. The closest thing I could find was “Miscellaneous”, but this section contained no listings at all, so it is possible that they are still rearranging their categories and trying to decide on what the final names and qualifications will be. Therefore, I might check back with them in a few days and see if it is possible to have my site recategorized. If this is successful, I can then point a few backlinks at whatever page my listing settles on and increase the value of my own link indirectly.

This article by Sarah Tenney is a review of the book Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, published by Cambridge University Press in 1985.

In this edited volume, the authors put forward a convincing case on the need to take into account the role of states in comparative politics. They note that in the decades preceding the publication of Bring the State Back In, there was a tendency among scholars to take the Neo-Marxist approach of focusing on political phenomena as the consequences of individual, group, or class behavior. Through a variety of individual case studies, the authors show that the state should not be seen as merely an arena for struggle among contending economic interests, classes, or societal groups, but as an actor in its own right. They use the country studies compiled in this book to show that states have varying levels of autonomy and abilities to influence economic developments and social cleavages. In this respect, they demonstrate that the relationship between states and other domestic and international actors should be seen as reciprocal.

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Today I finally spent some time implementing two long overdue site features, the ability to subscribe to the Karlonia.com RSS feed by email and a functional contact page that can be used for submitting articles or sending me other messages. On a somewhat related note, I also managed to have my brother design a new widget graphic for advertising this site at Entrecard or other venues that use similar banner images. The new image is located in the upper left corner of this post.

Although all of these new improvements should be helpful, the contact page feature is probably the most important. Not only do I need a way for people to contact me without having to use the public comment section, but I am also hoping that some of you would like to have your articles published here in exchange for increased name recognition and a free link back to your site. If I could receive enough submissions, this will free up some much-needed time for me to promote the site and explore monetization options, which could generate enough long term income to make things like contests or revenue sharing programs economically viable.

Meanwhile, the new banner image has allowed to me advertise more aggressively through Entrecard without having to worry as much about being rejected for “design clash” problems or because the image is “not appropriate” for some silly reason. I am still getting a few “not relevant” rejections, but these are to be expected for a site that tries to advertise everywhere, including categories that are outside of my usual range of topics. The increased advertising efforts should eventually draw in more visitors and help to push the proverbial snowball closer to the top of the hill.

Finally, those of you who prefer to subscribe to RSS feeds by email will now have this option, paving the way for a steady increase in the subscriber count. While I have not really made much of a push for RSS subscribers, this has become an important metric by which sites are being evaluated for advertising value, and as such it would seem foolish for me to ignore it. I have even managed to strategically place the RSS chicklets so that they flank the Entrecard widget on either side. This will make it very easy for card droppers to subscribe via RSS if they want to keep up with the latest posts.

Yesterday I received an email from a mysterious spammer named “PTC News”. This person is not only spamming for referrals in a hitherto unknown paid-to-click program named BuxIT.info, but is also throwing in a special bonus: an “AutoSurfer” that will automatically detect and click the paid links so that you can simply sit back and earn your pennies without having to actually do anything other than logging into your account.

Of course I should point out that the use of such auto-clicking software is considered cheating by virtually all paid-to-click programs and will result in being banned from any programs that detect it. However, this is the first time that I have ever seen anyone so brazenly advertising “cheatware” like this and even having the audacity to use it as a bait for referral collecting. Apparently the spammer has also included a video demonstration and was even nice enough to provide both Spanish and mangled English versions of the message.

Hi… // Hola… Hi, I saw your mail on a list of people who are interested in PTC, which is why you inform this magnificent PTC, and you can download a AutoSurfer makes the clicks automatically for you, and a video demonstration that teaches you how it works. ———- Hola, he visto tu mail en una lista de gente que le interesan los PTC, por eso te informo de este magnífico PTC, y puedes descargar un AutoSurfer que hace los clicks automáticamente por ti, y un video de demostración que te enseña cómo funciona. Link: http://buxit.info/register.php AutoSurfer: http://rapidshare.com/files/98261256/BuxIt.v01.zip VideoDemostration: http://rapidshare.com/files/98262412/Buxit.avi Let enjoy // Que lo disfrutes

Note that in order to avoid unwittingly rewarding the spammer or endorsing such tactics, I have removed the referral code from the text. I have not clicked through to the RapidShare URLs to examine the software or video, but I did confirm that the BuxIT.info program actually exists (as of this writing). If any of you have additional information on this Spam & Scam operation, please let us know in the comment section.

This week I will continue with some leftover queries from last week, plus a few additional keywords that were not covered in previous posts. Other queries that you would like me to address can be posted in the comment section below. If I know the answers, I will either respond in the comments or add them to the queue for next week’s list.

1. what does atm stand for bank - ATM, when referring to banks or cash, stands for Automated Teller Machine or Automatic Teller Machine, depending on which version you prefer. Note that the phrase “ATM machine” is actually redundant but has become so commonly used that I wound up targeting it as a keyword.
2. who retains rights to freelance article - The answer to this one varies according the terms under which a freelance writer’s article is sold or used. When an article is first written, it is assumed to be subject to standard copyright protection and the author retains all rights. If the article is sold to another party, however, the author may relinquish some or all of his or her rights depending upon the terms of the agreement.

   For example, for articles sold through Constant Content, there are three categories of licenses under which an article may be purchased. “Full rights” means that the author gives up all rights to the buyer once it is sold; the buyer can do whatever he/she wants with the article, including even taking credit for it.

   On the other hand, articles sold under a “Usage” license may be used by the buyer on a website or for personal projects, but the author retains all other rights. Under these terms, the author must be given credit in the form of a byline or other attribution when the article is used by the other party.

   Finally, “Unique rights” purchases work similarly to usage terms (the author must be given credit), but in this case the article is removed from the Constant-Content website so that others cannot come along later and purchase the same article. This helps webmasters avoid duplicate content issues on any articles that are purchased from the site and used for SEO purposes.

3. what are NoNofollow/Dofollow Plugins - These are extensions to the WordPress blogging platform that will automatically remove the rel=’nofollow’ attribute from links placed through the URL field of the comment section. Removing the nofollow tag allows Google to count the commentators’ links for ranking purposes in the search results. Blogs that choose to remove the default nofollow tags are known as DoFollow or NoNoFollow blogs. Karlonia.com is an example of a DoFollow blog, although I tend to remove URLs that link to obvious spammers or dubious sites.
4. how gasoline is made - Gasoline is made from crude oil, usually at a location called a refinery. For details of the actual refining process, see the linked article.
5. how do you get rid of ants in your house - It is possible to get rid of ants through a variety of methods, including some environmentally friendly ones that you may not have thought of or used yet. For more information, see my relatively popular article on How to Get Rid of Ants in Your House.
6. how to write a job rejection letter - This one seems to have become a surprisingly popular topic this past week. You can find a few clues on writing rejection letters from my other article, although many people have been requesting actual sample letters or templates. I’m planning on eventually putting something together for this and adding it as an update to the previous article as soon as I have some extra time.
7. example “deceptive advertising” ingredient - A good example of this can be found at my article on Theraflu ingredient product labeling, in which we actually examined two different varieties of Theraflu that appeared to have different labels and were different products, but which were proven to have exactly the same ingredients. Some people have considered this a case of deceptive advertising, while others have shrugged it off as “just marketing”.
8. does bleach get rid of ants - Yes, it is possible for bleach to get rid of ants depending on how you use it. Most people seem to use it as a repellent by wiping their counter tops or floors with a diluted solution of bleach and water. Meanwhile, I have read a few passages where people have put bleach into a spray bottle (again, usually diluted with water) and used it directly on the ants to eliminate them. It should be noted that bleach can remove desirable colors from clothes and carpets if it is spilled in the wrong places, however, so one should be careful about handling this particular substance.

This post is the first installment of my English usage guide, an ongoing weekly series of articles that are designed to educate readers in the proper use of the English language and raise awareness of the need for thorough proofreading. The first few lessons will deal with groups of homonyms, words that sound alike when pronounced but are spelled differently and have different meanings when they are used in written text. Homonyms can be tricky for students and webmasters who do not manually proofread their work before submission. Unless obvious typographical errors are made, incorrect usage among these words will not be detected by standard spell checking programs.

Some of the most common errors that I see being made on published web pages involve incorrect usage of the words their, there and they’re. For the remainder of this post, I will demonstrate examples of correct and incorrect usage of these three words so that you can hopefully learn how to use them correctly and avoid mistakes in your writing.

The word their is the possessive form of the pronoun they, and is used as an adjective to modify the noun that follows it. For example:

1. Humans were forced to develop their intelligence so as not to be destroyed by their stupidity. - Matthijs van Boxsel
2. Those who believe that they have nothing to learn from barbarians have resigned themselves to their ignorance. - Karl Erfurt

There, on the other hand, is an adverb that is used to indicate a place or location, as in the commonly used phrase “over there”:

1. Tell Bush to go over there and fight for oil. - Thomas Wilson
2. Unfortunately I live in Australia, so it’s very difficult to get over there. - Chantau Daffy

The word there can also be used in a general sense to indicate the existence or nonexistence of something, as in the following humorous quotes:

1. There is no dog! - Anonymous Atheist Dyslexic
2. I stayed awake for several hours last night wondering if there was really a dog. - Dyslexic Agnostic Insomniac

Meanwhile, they’re is simply a contraction of the two words “they are”.

1. They’re not really that stupid, or misinformed, or delusional. - user HP from Scienceblogs.com
2. Do people with normal intelligence know they’re ignorant? - question asked on Yahoo Answers

The most common usage errors seem to occur when people mix up their and there. They’re is misused also, but this seems to be less common. It is relatively easy to tell whether or not you are using it correctly by simply substituting the words “they are” in the sentence. Here are some examples of incorrect usage, followed by the corrected versions.

Incorrect: Those people are genuinely happy in there ignorance. - user “franznietzsche” from Physics.com forums

Correct: Those people are genuinely happy in their ignorance.

Incorrect: I wonder if there’s a legal doctrine of “misuse of a trademark” just as their is for “misuse of a copyright”. - user Thomas from Cisco.com blog

Correct: I wonder if there’s a legal doctrine of “misuse of a trademark” just as there is for “misuse of a copyright”.




Incorrect: Does this mean msnspace will hammer out an agreement with Ubuntu over they’re logo? - Macewan, Msdn.com blog

Correct: Does this mean MSN Spaces will hammer out an agreement with Ubuntu over their logo?




Incorrect: She is actually abusing you they’re is not doubt it my mind if all this is true! - Anna, Yahoo answers user

Correct: She is actually abusing you - there is no doubt in my mind if all of this is true!




Next week, unless enough of you want me to cover a different English usage topic, I am planning on dealing with the your vs. you’re vs. yore issue, followed by its vs. it’s, and then probably sight vs. site vs. cite. We have also had one request for coverage of “could of” vs. “could have” (and similar variants), so I will fit this one in as soon as I can after dealing with the most common errors involving homonyms.

After pulling out the old scanner and fiddling around with IrfanView, I finally got some suitable pictures of the last two paid survey checks saved, along with some other images for use with later posts. The first check was from Opinion Outpost, which lately has rivaled GlobalTestMarket for being the highest paying survey company currently in my repertoire. This time I saved up $50 worth of points before cashing out.

Additionally, I have received $10 PayPal payments recently from Lightspeed and Creations Rewards, along with two more $5 payments from Pinecone Research.

Meanwhile, check payments are beginning to arrive from my relatively recent discovery of Livewire. This company works somewhat differently from most of the others that I have had experience with so far. They do not have any kind of system for members to log into accounts or accumulate points. Instead surveys are sent by email on a first-come-first-serve basis, and if you manage to complete a survey, the incentive amount is sent to you as a separate check. After initially receiving a $4 check from them that I have since deposited, this $10 payment arrived a few days ago and gave me a chance to scan the image.

Livewire accepts a broad range of demographic profiles but is geographically limited to United States residents. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have any kind of referral or affiliate program. However, their “projects” as they call them are easy to complete, and I have not had any problems with them regarding crediting or payments. Yes, for curious searchers out there, this means that they are not a scam. Meanwhile, if you happen to live in the USA and want to sign up, you can do so at www.joinlivewire.com.

Today I received a newsletter from Dush Ramachandran, Vice President of Business Development at Clickbank, a well-known affiliate network for selling information products. The company is getting ready to launch Spanish language versions of their sales forms and order processing pages, making it possible for affiliates and product vendors (publishers) to target their marketing campaigns toward Spanish-speaking regions of the world. They are also introducing the ability for customers to purchase Clickbank products in other currencies besides the U.S. dollar. French and German language capabilities are set to be implemented shortly after the Spanish language platforms are in place.

This is good news for me and other Clickbank affiliates because it opens up the possibility of geo-targeting advertising campaigns outside of the usual “first tier” countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia) without having to worry as much about language difficulties. For things to become fully globalized, the product publishers will still need to create versions of their products and sales pages in other languages, but I expect this to happen fairly soon for most of the popular and well-converting products. Meanwhile, you can read about the details of Clickbank’s latest announcement in the newsletter below.

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Rod Baker of Share Ad Space and Million Hits Lotto fame is getting ready to take out the virtual trash, according to a new program update released yesterday. Earnings rates and advertising revenues in the traffic exchange and PTR industries have been declining over the past two years, at least in part because of too many junk paid-to-promote (PTP) types of sites infiltrating the traffic exchanges and diluting the value of credits and purchases for serious advertisers. Such sites are typically littered with banner ads, popups, and sometimes downloader Trojans or other nasties that irritate and annoy surfers to the point of boycotting the programs altogether.

The SAS owner, along with webmasters of related programs, are hoping to clean up their respective niche industries by implementing stricter requirements on what types of sites are allowed to be displayed to the viewers. Hopefully this will result in a smoother surfing experience and better conversion rates for advertisers, which will in turn increase earnings possibilities for the members.

I have had generally favorable experiences with SAS during the three years that I have been a member there. Although not always active with the surfing, I have purchased advertising credits for low rates in the past and have been gradually distributing these among various affiliate pages. The results are nothing spectacular, but I have made enough in commissions through sales of Clickbank products to offset the cost of advertising purchases and still have a small profit left over. After the proposed changes go into effect on April 1, I might start building up more credits at SAS and the newer Million Hits Lotto site so that I can increase the possibilities of making future sales. Meanwhile, here is the full text of the latest update:

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Throughout the first quarter of 2008, there has been a noticeable increase in traffic here at Karlonia.com. After the initial launch of this blog back in March 2007, traffic had been increasing very slowly until I finally reached the 100 visitor mark last December. More recently, however, the pace has really picked up. This morning I woke up to discover that I had managed to bring the traffic levels to over 500 24-hour unique visitors for the first time in the site’s history:

Although higher traffic numbers are usually encouraging, the best news about the recent totals is that none of this is low-quality “garbage traffic” such as autosurfs or bots. In fact, after manually counting up the visitors from search queries that Firestats was able to detect and display, I arrived at a total of 242. Additionally, there were another 21 visitors from the Live Search bar that Firestats did not display the full queries for, and there were also several visits in the referrer list from other search engines such as Dogpile, Excite, Alta Vista, the CNN search bar, Technorati, a German search engine called Ottosuch, and several other lesser search engines, bringing the actual organic search traffic total closer to 300. I’m also bringing in more visitors from Entrecard, blog comment links, and “clicks of curiosity” from other webmasters who discover my URL in their referrer stats.

As a benefit to my readers, I will use the rest of this post to summarize and describe what I have been doing to bring in the traffic and provide some tips for newer bloggers to accelerate the traffic building process:

1. Smart SEO: After the first few months, I realized that it would be difficult to rank for any highly competitive keywords unless I could get backlinks from some major authority sites. But for a site like mine, this is very difficult because I just don’t have the popularity or insider connections to pull off such a feat. However, I discovered that I could often rank well for lots of other keywords that were less competitive but still received significant search traffic.

   I put together a strategy whereby I would do SEO research and optimize my pages for targeted keywords before publishing them, with the goal of bringing in at least 5-10 visitors per day for each page. By doing this, I reckoned, the multiplying effect of having many content-rich pages would add up over time. By the numbers, 5 visitors per day times 200 pages yields 1000 daily visitors, which will hopefully be enough to pass critical mass and allow unsolicited natural linking to occur, thus allowing my SEO operation to run somewhat on autopilot.

   This strategy worked to some extent at first, although I still had problems with pages dropping into Google’s supplemental and omitted results, while others seemed to pop in and out of the SERPs intermittently even when I received good rankings. The big breakthrough came about two months ago when I began aiming inbound links at specific pages that I expected to rank well instead of simply getting more links to the site’s home page like most people do.

   Most of these inbound links have come from blog commenting. After publishing a new keyword-targeted page, I would seek out other blogs (preference was given to DoFollow, but I did not use these exclusively) that had pages with content and keywords similar to my own. Then I read through the other blog’s article, left a non-spammy comment, and repeated the process with a few other blogs until I had at least 5-10 good links pointed at the page. In most cases, I did not attempt to put keywords into the name field of the other blogs; the only exceptions were instances where it was clear that the site owner was openly allowing this practice.

   Within a few days of gaining the backlinks, search traffic to the target pages increased, but better yet, this traffic has remained and become more reliable because the pages have attained a certain “stickiness” and are not dropping in and out of the results anymore. Another beneficial side effect of this strategy has been an increase in crawling frequency to non-targeted pages, which has caused older pages that I had completely forgotten about to gain a foothold in the SERPs and bring in traffic for all sorts of interesting “long tail” queries.

   The main disadvantage to this method is that it requires a fair amount of time to find relevant sites, write comments with substantial content, and set the links for each page, especially since I have over 300 pages and am publishing a new one every day. However, I am hoping that once the traffic to the site reaches a certain critical mass, other sites will begin linking to my pages naturally without me having to expend so much effort to acquire the needed links.

2. Entrecard: Participation in the Entrecard system has provided a nice boon to Alexa rankings and has complemented the search traffic nicely by drawing in visitors from the webmaster community along with members of the general public who are arriving at this site through the search engines. In order to increase Entrecard traffic, I have used multiple tactics including reliably reciprocating drops, purchasing low-cost (in terms of credits) advertising at lots of different sites, and dropping on popular or active sites. I will also occasionally drop on “newbie” blogs in order to get some fresh faces in front of my site and increase the chances of gaining more repeat visitors in the future.

   I try to use up my maximum allocation of 300 card drops per day whenever possible, which allows me to rack up more credits and purchase more advertising on other people’s widgets or through the shop feature. Amazingly, as of this writing, I have managed to climb into 5th place out of 197 blogs (based on advertising price) in the Internet marketing category. There are still a few more things I can do here, such as actively participating in Entrecard’s forum or getting an article published on their blog, but I am only one person and there are only 24 hours in a day.

3. Scratchback widget advertising: I am beginning to pick up a significant amount of traffic coming from the various sites where I have purchased text link ads through the Scratchback widgets, and these ads may be having a small favorable effect on SEO as well. Scratchback is a system where you can make a small donation (tip) to another site owner by clicking on an open link in the appropriate widget. These donations are small cash amounts, usually in the $1-5 range, although they can be as high as $25 depending on the preferences of the site owner.

   In exchange for the tip, you are allowed to place a text link ad for your site and even choose the anchor text. The main limitations are that you only get 20 characters of text and the links are nofollow (in order to avoid being penalized by Google for paid links). However, not all search engines recognize nofollow and it still provides a good avenue for traffic, especially if you can find a relevant site for your text link placement.

4. Social directory and community sites: The BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog widgets on many sites have provided an opportunity for me to gain much exposure by simply visiting other sites that are members of these particular networks. When the other site owners see my little avatar appear on their widgets, many of them will click through to my profile page and eventually my blog, resulting in a steady influx of new visitors.

   Meanwhile, I have had many people add me to their friends lists at BlogCatalog and leave messages on my profile pages, giving me the opportunity to visit other sites and leave appropriate comments. Although I haven’t been nearly as active with these types of sites as I have with Entrecard, the traffic is ongoing, and my brand name (Karlonia) is steadily being distributed onto an increasing number of other people’s profiles and lists.

5. Blog commenting: Although I have tended to regard blog commenting as a relatively convenient SEO tool, the original purpose of this medium was to allow the commenter to give feedback to the blog owner and join in a community style discussion similar to a forum or bulletin board service. Even though I have now established my own site and become semi-addicted to SEO, I have not completely forgotten about the original spirit of commenting. I have occasionally left rather lengthy and informative comments on other people’s blogs whenever I found a post that really interested me or saw an opportunity for me to contribute some of my ever-growing store of knowledge to the readers.

   Because there is the ability to place links back to my site in the URL field, a well-placed and useful comment can be a decent source of traffic from curious visitors to the other site. Over time, if one can leave enough quality comments on lots of other sites, the accumulated hits can add up to a significant and diverse traffic flow.

6. StumbleUpon: I am relatively new user of this particular venue, but I have received some nice bursts of traffic from it occasionally. A few of the other Entrecard members have Stumbled this site and a small sampling of its pages; however, I have yet to explore the full potential of this system. From my experience, it works very much like a manual traffic exchange with no timer on it. By clicking the “Stumble” button on the toolbar, you can keep surfing through a nearly infinite number of web pages and can even control which ones you see to some extent by choosing preferred category tags. Actually doing the stumbling can eat up a lot of time that could be used for other tasks, but it is still a good way to gain exposure to new websites that would otherwise remain undiscovered.
   
   
   
   

   Well, that about wraps it up for the major traffic sources that I have tapped into thus far. Of course, there are still more promotional avenues out there that I have not gotten to yet, such as PPC (pay per click), email lists, various offline advertising methods, and the relatively new Project Wonderful. Meanwhile, if you have any other useful traffic building tips to share, feel free to use the comment section to describe your discoveries.

Earlier today I received an email from my mother alerting me to an article posted by Dennis O’Reilly at CNET News.com. The article describes a handy little freeware program called Auslogics Disk Defrag that is supposed to be able to defragment your hard drive faster than the standard Windows utility can. After downloading the software and trying it out myself, I can confirm that it does work very efficiently and managed to finish the defrag process on my main drive in about four minutes.

Although the exact value of disk defragmentation is debatable, most experienced computer users recommend it as a routine maintenance operation to keep your computer running smoothly and prevent severe slowdowns. The process organizes your files more neatly on the disk and maximizes use of your free space to store additional files. It also reduces the wear and tear on the mechanical parts of the drive because they do not have to spend as much time accessing program files if they are in one location on the disk as opposed to being scattered all over the place.

Before you actually begin the defrag process, it is a good idea to go to Control Panel >> Add/Remove Programs (or Programs and Features if using Vista) and remove any applications that you are no longer using. You can also do a disk cleanup to remove any temporary Internet files and empty the Recycle Bin. This will free up more space on your drive and prevent fragmentation later after these files are eventually removed. For example, I had a few old PC games left on my drive that I was not playing anymore, so I was able to free up a few gigabytes of space before I even started defragmenting.

When this is done, you can install the Auslogics utility and open up the initial screen. It has a nice little pie chart that shows you the actual size of your disk, how much of it is occupied by various files, and how much free space you have left:


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