Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

This is a sponsored review of Retire At 21 by Michael Dunlop that is based fully on my own opinion and is not biased in any way by my relationship with Michael.

Truth is I have a love-hate feeling with Retire At 21 (dot) com. On one side, I hate myself for the fact that I’m yet to retire at 30+ while on the brighter side, reading all those success stories gives me a sense of hope.

Hope that success (read: early retirement) can be found in places I’d not have otherwise thought it’s possible years ago - the internet.

If I could turn back the clock and back to the past, I’d have gone into blogging at the age of 15 and possibly be writing this review on one of the Caribbean beaches right now.

The Young Entrepreneur

His first taste of making money online was selling everything and anything he could get hold of on eBay and make thousands of pounds whilst his peers were struggling to make 5 pounds per week from paper rounds and odd jobs around the home.

If you think entrepreneurship isn’t in his blood, you are in for a big surprise.

At age 5 Michael was asked by his mother “what do you want to do when you grow up?”, his reply … “I want to own a shop”. Shocked by this answer, his mother replied “Like a toy shop?”, and was amazed when Michael proclaimed that in fact, he wanted a large superstore like Tesco (UK) or Walmart (America).

Despite his tender age, Michael has shown an entrepreneurial spirit that is unparalleled among his peers. He set his goal and he set it high.

So it wouldn’t come as surprise to me that he plans to retire at the age of 25 with a $10 millions in his bank based on his interview with a Brazil newspaper.

My goal is to make $10 million before I am 25…You have to aim high with your goals, it helps keep you focused and motivated.

Though it isn’t enough to own a large superstore like Tesco, it’s sinfully enough to change his lifestyle forever to the envy of his peers who will still be slogging away at Starbucks.

The Blog

Retire At 21.com is the playground of a young and successful entrepreneur, Michael Dunlop whose site showcases the best “resources aimed at younger bloggers like me”.

The idea of Retire at 21 was “originally going to be an ebook for college entrepreneur’s to earn money online but turned into a full site on how young entrepreneurs make money online“.

Despite his early success of ebay marketing and other online projects, the turning point was when he attended Yanik Silver’s Underground Seminar that taught him how to crack the code of making money online and the rest is history.

Flying class first (warning: those pictures will make you jealous!)  to the 4th session of Yanik Silvers Internet Marketing Seminar was the testament of the kind of success he has achieved thus far.

The Design

The aesthetic value of one’s blog is a matter of individual taste and preference. It’s always a case of ‘One man’s trash another man’s treasure’ but keep in mind that I’m not saying his site is a total garbage but I sincerely and honestly believe that Michael could do a much better job with his site design, taking into consideration of his proficiency in the area of web designing.

If this sounds to a bit too harsh, I couldn’t help but be more transparent in my review. A great content and awesome library of resources on entrepreneurship certainly deserve a better packaging if you ask me. With that being said and putting my two cents in, the only qualm I have is the fact that I couldn’t easily find the archive of his posts on the main page.

Put simply, site navigation could be optimized to create better overall user experience. Probably this is one area Michael might take into a consideration on his 5th makeover.

The Content

It took me a good 3 days to devour every piece of what he has written and if there is one word to describe it, it’s simply “inspirational”.

I admit I wish I could have compiled and written those success stories of young entrepreneurs myself but it’s one territory I’d wouldn’t think of crossing it. Simply for the obvious reason that he has done it better than anyone else I’ve came across thus far.

Here’s a snapshot of those inspiring and motivating stories for your weekend perusal

1. Top Young Bloggers Under 21
2. The Amazing Story Of The $10 Million Teen
3. A 7-Year-Old Political Blogger who caught the attention of Barack Obama
4. Donny Ouyang - 16 Year Old Teen Entrepreneur
5. Thilak Raj Rao - Founder of Tech-Buzz.net

If those ain’t not enough to stir your interest, how about these interviews with the cream of the crop in the blogosphere

1. Darren Rowse of Problogger
2. Pete Cashmore of Mashable.com
3. Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com
4. Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz
5. Graham Langdon of EntreCard

Last but certainly not the least, my personal favorite goes to one of the articles - Top 50 Young Entrepreneurs Under 30 that has made it Digg front page and get my two thumbs up. Indeed a well-deserved one, Michael.

Constructive Criticism

Apart from what I’ve touched earlier above, there aren’t much faults I could nitpick at the time of this writing. However if there is one thing I’m still struggling to comprehend is the fact that Michael isn’t getting as many comments on his blog that he deserves.

Is he not building enough connection or simply too busy with other priorities that have taken too much of his time? I figure which successful person has enough time for himself anyway?

Final Thought

Michael isn’t one of those average kids you see on the neighborhood using their creativity to draw the art of graffiti on the walls. Despite being young, dyslexic and dropped out of college, he’s cleverly turned those disadvantages into creating a blog that inspires other youngsters to make good use of their precious time to make money online and “conquer the world“.

The fact that he dreams a big dream and goes to great lengths to teach aspiring young entrepreneurs the “possibility of retiring at 21″ certainly deserves my greatest respect and possibly yours as well.

In the world of retirement, 21 is the new 60 - Michael Dunlop

Well I can’t say much about you but being a grown-up myself, Retire At 21.com is one of those sites I’ll look forward to reading when my personal motivation is at it lowest.

Don’t take my words for it. Click over to Michael’s site and come back and tell me what ya think about it.

It doesn’t matter if you are already past the golden age of 21, every success first begins in mind and then in reality - regardless of your age.

Similar Posts:

• Net Strife - The Making of Internet Marketer
• The Importance of Choosing the Right Niche
• Stop! Step Back and Think! by Miss Gullible
• Blogging Topics: Making the Right Choice
• A - Z Blogging Guide for Beginners

Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

It’s time for another weekend of “Ask My Readers”. It’s been an amazing week for me on and off the blog.

Technorati Top 10K Blogs

thoushallblog.com hit the 300 subscribers count and made into the top 10K blogs amongst the millions of blogs tracked by Technorati.

It’s indeed another milestone for this blog that has only been in existence for six months. It’s ever so sweet to hit all the goals that I have set for myself and definitely make my journey into the blogosphere even more meaningful.

All these will never be possible without your continued support - my valued readers. I guess it’s appropriate now for me to say “Thank You”. I’ll make every possible effort to make your time worth while here.

I’d also like to congratulate my new online buddy, Alex from Blogsessive who made it to the top 10K at about the same time. Keep it up, buddy and let’s work toward the top 5K.

Question of the Week

I’m in the midst of working on a little project here so my question of the week would be somewhat related to it and here’s the question

If you have the privilege of donating your monthly online earnings for one month, which charity organization would it be?

I hope you do take the time to answer the above question as your suggestion means a lot to me and the project I’m undertaking right now.

Around the Blogosphere

Before I wrap the week, let me just give you a quick run down of what’s interesting across the blogosphere.

Internet Marketing Top Blogs

Gyutae Park from Winning the Web has just recently created a buzz with the launch of the Internet Marketing Top Blogs which claims to be the ultimate ranked list of the best Internet Marketing blogs in the industry and pretty much is direct competition to 45n5 Top 100.

It’s the equivalent of 45n5 Top 100 but takes into consideration many other factors such as Feedburner, Alexa, Compete, Technorati, Google PR, Yahoo links, StumbleUpon, delicious, outgoing links, and user votes to accurately rank each blog on the list.

It’s much more competitive to reach the top 100 but it’s the best of its kind if you ask me.

thoushallblog.com which is ranked at 26 at 45n5 Top 100, was debuted at 114 but as more authority blogs are added to the list, its ranking has dropped to 150 at the time this writing.

If your blog is yet to be listed, email Gyutae and tell him Yan sends you over.

Link Building with EzinePress.com

One of my online friends, Brian Hawkins has just launched EzinePress - a site dedicated to providing up to date news and resources that will help ezine publishers run and market their publications.

eZinePress.com will help boost selected publications by highlighting interesting features, spotlighting selected newsletters and linking to interesting articles.

If you have any interesting articles on your archive, why not submit them for review? Link building has never been easier with EzinePress.com

Suzanne Franco - The Next Blogging Idol?

Lastly, don’t forget to support Suzanne Franco - self-proclaimed Online Marketing Extraordinaire - in her quest to be the next blogging idol.  She is currently positioned at #11.

Even the elusive John Chow is supporting her. The least you can do is to subscribe to her RSS and help her to be the next blogging idol. Here I wish her all the best and I urge ya to do the same.

Till we meet again…and I love you all.

Happy Sunday

Similar Posts:

• Ask My Readers #1
• How I Increase My Email Subscribers by 60 in 7 Days
• I’m in the Top 100
• It’s Time for Readers’ Appreciation #2
• Posts vs Backlinks

Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

Who the %@#^ is Garry Conn?

Let’s just say there are two big ‘G’ in the world of blogging. One is Google with a double ‘o’ and the other is Garry with a double ‘r’.

Garry Conn is a down-to-earth blogger who finds joy in helping other bloggers in the business of making money online from any method imaginable.

With all due respect to those top adsense earners, no one knows explains better how to make more money from Google AdSense than Garry Conn.

While I am not the strongest and most powerful teacher in this business, the information you get from my blog comes from the heart.

The Guy Who Forgot to His AdSense Check

While most of us will rush into cashing out our AdSense check fresh from the mail box, Garry is one blogger who had the privilege of forgetting to cash out his $2000 Adsense check and live to tell his story! How’s that for an inspirational introduction!

Oh that month alone he deposited $11,ooo into his already inflated bank account.

That story alone caught my attention and I was sold. So one fine day, I asked for a Q&A chat and to my surprise despite his busy schedule of running 100+ sites, he gladly obliged. So that’s the hallmark of a true blogger if you ask me.

Sharing is Learning

The story goes like this,

I was just being unnecessarily concerned about the time Google take to index my article and rank it for my primary keywords. Prior to this, I was able to get into Google page one for my “long-tail keyword” almost immediately but it isn’t the case anymore now.

Let me just give you one example, here and here. Can you tell the difference? I wasn’t ranked for the former but got into SERP successfully for those articles that have been indexed for 14 days or more.

So in the spirit of sharing, below is the edited excerpt of our wonderful conversation in the hope that by making it public, it might probably give you some insights on what Garry Conn thinks about Google.

Garry: How old is your blog?

Yan: 6 months but this only happens quite recently..

Lesson #1
Garry did a search on the phrase from my article to see if my article was dupe content…LOL…everything here is authentically original. The lesson is Google will just ignore any dupe contents so if mine is dupe, case is closed.

G: How many posts do you do per week?

Y: 2-3 per week….probably that’s the real cause of the problem

G: So you do 2 to 3 per week? that isn’t the problem at all

Lesson #2
Your posting frequency does make a difference but 2-3 per week is still permissible.

G: Old content pulled up fine but new posts are not pulling up. Here is what I think….

G: Because your older posts pull up fine for exact phrase search but the newer ones do not I think that there is a lag, there is latency where Google has to catch up. All of your content is indexed but it hasn’t PROCESSED the information yet. Your blog at the moment is still healthy.

Lesson #3
Google is indexing billions of pages each day so patience is a virtue and time is your best friend.

Y: So it isn’t about sandbox, is it?

G: I don’t think so… because I can still get your listings to pull up, just not new stuffs and we’re talking just about a week old, anything week old and older does great, anything a week and newer does not. Sandbox would equal to your entire blog not ranking well.

G: You need to continue as you have been and NOT change anything. You have a sitemap which is great. How long have you had your sitemap?

Y: Since the beginning of the blog.

G: Excellent

Lesson #4
If you want Google to come to you, send it a sitemap. Period.

G: Do you have any errors in Google Webmaster tools?

Y:  A couple of them but I rectified them already

G: What were they?

Y: Some of them are not within my control like inbound links….but those broken links on my site I fixed them all

Lesson #5
Google hates broken links. So ask yourself when was the last time you did spring cleaning? You’ll surprised those errors are getting on the nerve of Google crawlers.

G: One thing I don’t like about your source code is the use of H1 and H2 tags. First off the web crawler is going to see your featured articles first.

Y: Oh OK?

G: So the path it will take when it visits your home page will lead to the featured articles, once it hit featured article then it will try to crawl out from there.

G: The featured articles provide a road block from Google finding your new articles below them and that is ONE issue on your home page…this isn’t too big of a deal because you have sitemap but to me it is still an issue.

Y: Oh…(astounded)

G: SECOND issue with the home page, if you look in the code you will see <h2>SEO</h2> then <h1>post title</h1>; <h1> is like the KING of heading tags and is usually the Home Link or links on the very top, actually I am going to save my breath.

I just covered this topic on SEOHosting.com of which I am a freelance writer for HostGator.com and they hire me to write on their sister company so read that post.

Lesson 6
The importance of heading tags should not be underestimated for the optimal SEO effort. If you are still clueless about it, that article is worth a read.

G: I think you can just do a few minor SEO modifications for the future health of your blog… but all in all, I don’t see that you have any problems with the blog at all.

G: Google is a database…and things get shuffled around from time to time. The worst thing you can do is make changes and make a simple problem becomes a compounding problem.

G: Are you a dofollow blog or nofollow comment blog?

Y: Dofollow for now….

G: Ouch…that doesn’t help you

Y: Should I make it nofollow, sir?

G: That is up to you…. what happens is you kill your PageRank. Link juice on a page is like a 9 volt battery that last long time if you you have a small LED light attached to it. However it will DRAIN DEAD if you use it to power something bigger like a car head light.

Y: I’m following, sir

G: So…when you DOFOLLOW comment links, you are draining your battery dead rendering your page useless in terms of having PageRank authority.

G: Internal PageRank contributes to the overall site PageRank health, DOFOLLOW is like cancer deep inside your belly.

Lesson #7
Despite all the debates, dofollow or nofollow is a matter of personal choice. This blog has been dofollow since its inception and PR hasn’t changed much since.

Like a true blue student of Garry Conn, I’ve decided to experiment with nofollow and see where it will take me to.

Getting a PR5 isn’t much of a wishful thinking, is it?

Y: Understood! Remember the first question I asked on twitter a couple of days ago, the page “the best places to get quality links” has the most dofollow outbound links but I got a PR2 instead. How’s that for a PR leak?

G: Even though that page has PR2 it is spent up so the weight that page holds for backlinks isn’t much value. So if I had my www.garryconn.com on that page, it wouldn’t really be credited as a PR2 backlink as  the PR2 power is absorbed by many other links.

Y: making sense now…

G: If you had a PR5 page and my www.garryconn.com was on that page that would be a HUGE value to my blog..

G: If you have $1.00 USD you only have 100 penny to give to people and that page is giving more money than it has saved up.

Y: Understood! My question is even though I dollow all the outbound links, why Google rewarded that page with PR2?

G: Because Google finds the page to be valuable based of natural human behavior.

The page has had interest among people
People come and go
People come to see it… people leave
People link to it
People talk about it
Google knows
Google is not only a search engine but also an artificial intelligence, it monitors human behaviors

How does Google value things?

G: You sent me to this page http://thoushallblog.com/the-best-places-to-get-quality-backlink/ and I am logged into iGoogle. Google keeps a record of my web history as they do for thousands of people so they keep a tally on how many people access this page. Its pretty mind blowing…Google is bigger and smarter than most people realize.

Y: You have your point…..so that’s the reason why the big G gives a little PR for the page, right?

G: This page is PR2, that is pretty good for a page in a blog, you have a lot of links pointing to it, just take a look at the number of trackbacks you have.

Y: WOW, this really changes my whole perspective of what I thought I knew all along…..

Lesson #8
How Google calculates PageRank will always remain as a mystery. We can only follow certain guidelines but one thing is certain that Google records everything online. What we do, we say, we send, we link to.

All those activities pretty much affect the popularity of a page. The more popular a page is the higher is its PageRank.

The rest of the conversation is kept private to protect the secrets of Garry Conn. If you want to find out what those secrets are, it’d be a good idea to visit his site www.garryconn.com and pay attention to what he has to say on making money online.

Oh ya, if you have some pertinent questions you’d like to ask Garry, post your questions at bloggingquestion.com. Otherwise, you leave your thoughts below and tell me….

What have you learned today?

Your thoughts?

Similar Posts:

• DoFollow - What They Teach You In Kindergarden
• How Did Google Calculate Your PR?
• How To Find DoFollow Sites & Build Your Backlinks
• Linking At Its Worst - Food for Thoughts
• Google Debunk Webmasters’ Myths

Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

What is the single most important goal of a blog? Loyal readership.

It holds true that most of the successful blogs have one commonality – a large community with thousands of subscribers who follow them religiously and trust every single words the authors are saying (read: recommending).

If money is the ultimate motivation - which usually is, nothing is further away from the truth that increasing your blog subscriber will always be your top priority.

Every possible effort, ethical or unethical, is made to convince your visitors to take one single action – to subscribe.

We are made to believe that the subscriber count is one of the metric to determine how successful a blog is and how much dollars and cents it can squeeze out of it. It’s true, no question about it.

It’s the reason why we flaunt it when we have it and for the same reason we fake it when we don’t have it.

How to Increase Your Blog Subscribers in 5 Minutes

In my pursuit of a decent subscriber count, I’ve been experimenting with several methods and one of them is to produce less articles (aka more quality articles) to make time for my readers to leave comments before being pushed deep into the archive.

I’m not advocating you to do the same here as you might have probably been schooled that search engines, Google in particular, favor blogs that update daily. Whatever I do is just my own experimentation and it is not highly recommended for a new blog.

However, if there is one single method that I’ve recently implemented with much greater success is…..

Wait, just to keep you in suspense unless you have a habit of scanning my article so please read on,

How I Increase My Email Subscribers by 60 in One Week

Let me first explain what kind of effect it has on my subscriber count. Truth be told, it really comes as surprise to me that in less than one week, 60 more subscribers have happily come on board in support of this blog.

Can you believe that?

I kinda of regret for not joining the Blogging Idol 2. No, that’s a bluff. I’m yet to perfect the art of faking my subscriber count so that is the real reason why I refuse to join the game. The last Blogging Idol went to someone who was…..(perhaps I shouldn’t make any inappropriate comment here.)

There is no secret formula here. It’s just one simple trick of placing a call-to-action email subscription right after the article.

I reason first-time visitors are people who are in a hurry and dislike the inconvenience of searching for the right button to subscribe. I really need them to push the button right after they think, “Wow, this is a great post. Let me see what this guy is going to say on his next article.” Suffice to say, I need to “Strike While the Iron is Hot”

The last thing I want is them closing the tab button and say, “Maybe I’ll come back again” as in most cases, that “maybe” may always be ‘never”.

If you aren’t convinced yet, what have you got to lose spending the best of your 5 minutes to re-position your email subscription form?

Still unconvinced? Take a look at how Syed increased his subscribers to over 1800 in 10 months.

By the way, if you’ve done so, what do you think it’s the best position that has the highest subscription rate?  I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Similar Posts:

• Ask My Readers #2 - Read At Your Own Risk
• 12 Lessons in My First 12 Days as a Professional Blogger
• What You Need To Know About RSS - Beginner’s Guide
• 7 Deadly Sins of Highly Ineffective New Bloggers
• Have You Burned Your RSS Feed With Feedburner?

Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

It’s been said that monetization should be done in moderation without appearing too obtrusive to your readers.

One of the most common approaches is to insert ad banner or adsense within the post. In-line ads are perceived to have one of the highest click-through-rate (CTR).

Now what if you do not want to show ads on posts within certain categories? In some instances, what if you want to remove ads on all your sponsored reviews?

WordPress Hack

In my search to find the possibility to do so, I’ve just discovered a nice little hack that removes any ad from any category.

I’m not too sure if this function is going to serve any real purpose to you but in the spirit of sharing, I’m going to show you how to do it in WordPress.

<?php
if ( !in_category(15) && !in_category(23)) {
?>
Insert your ad banner or adsense code here
<?php } ?>

In the above code 15 and 23 are category IDs, replace them with the IDs of the categories you don’t want ads in.

If you are clueless, here’s how to check your category ID

I am currently using this code to remove private ad from my Review categories. Probably by doing so, I’m giving the maximum exposure to the advertisers who ordered my review.

Source: JohnTP

post scriptum

Since php and me don’t seem to go along well most of the times, I’m asking anyone here if it is possible use if/else statement within the code.

What I’m trying to do here is to show adsense on one particular category and private ad on the other.

update:

John from The Mobility Tiger - a site that talks about health and mobility issue - has shared with us a simple php hack and here’s the code for the if/else statements.

<?php if(false) { ?>

        Insert your ad banner here

    <?php } elseif(false) { ?>

         Insert your adsense code here

    <?php } else { ?>

        Insert your ad banner or adsense code here

<?php } ?>

All you need to do is to change the word ‘false’ to whatever you want to test for. In this case the category ID.

A big thanks to John for sharing.

Similar Posts:

• If You Have Adsense, Use Section Targeting
• Publicity Wheel Can Boost Your Blog’s Traffic In a BIG Way
• Google Hates Duplicate Content - The Fix
• How To Add Post Date To Your List Of Recent Posts
• It’s Christmas in August

Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

First thing first, I’d like to apologize for lack of activity here as yours truly has been deprived of internet connection for the last 5 days.

It was during this period time I realized that life was pretty boring without internet and deep inside I knew that blogging had became a part of my life no one could ever take it away from me.

OK, let’s cut the crap now. Here are some of unfinished business that I need to take care of today.

Top Commentator of the Month

It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Dennis Edell from Direct Sales Web Marketing comes out as the most active commenter here at thoushallblog.com. Until quiet recently, he is pretty much everywhere and if you have never crossed path with him, shame on you as it only proves that you have not done enough commenting. If you are still clueless, see for yourself the magic of commenting.

Though I don’t publicly shout about it, it’s a common practice that each month I’m giving away a free advertising (worth $15) to the most active reader commenter of the month. How’s that for being active? It’s the best chance to promote yourself to 300+ unique visitors each day for the next 30 days.

This is the least I could do to show my gratitude and appreciation for your continued support. In all sincerity, you are the reason why this blog exists in the first place and rest assured that your effort will never go unnoticed.

In all fairness, here are the other top 9 commentators of the month

1. Kouji - Obama Mccain American Election Haiku Poem
2. Mitch - A Point About Commenting On Blogs
3. Joel - Great Blogs That I Read
4. Freddie - 25 Blogger Motivations
5. Peter - How Blog Commenting Got Me 1200 Backlinks in 5 Days
6. Jeremy - Do What You Don’t Want To Do
7. Ben ‘the frog’ - New Google Reader Feature
8. Simon - Technorati Authority Is Manipulated Too Easily
9. Sire - The Real Dos And Don’t Of Affiliate Marketing

If you missed the boat last month, jump on board now and I might have a little surprise for you at the end of the month.

Best Answer Suggestion of the Week

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank each one of you who has made a contribution on last week Ask My Readers #1.

A couple of really good suggestions were brought to the table and among them were

1. To refrain from doing any sponsored reviews and focus more quality content – Thanks Jani for being the most critical.
2. In disagreement, JR from Internet Marketing Strategies said it wasn’t unethical to use your writing skills to make money out of it. Thanks, JR - I wish I knew your name.
   
3. Sire from WassupBlog suggested that I should have given the commenters the option to edit their comments for any typo errors. I’ve added it as per request but the typo remains..;(
   
4. While Peter from Work At Home Idea was pushing me to embark on viral linkathon so did Jeremy from Insight Writer.
5. Mitch from I’m Just Sharing suggested that I should show the entire post on my blog front page and not to worry too much about dupe contents. Food for thought.
6. Also, Tara from Affiliate Marketing Prodigy highlighted the issue of readability on my blog by changing the font color.
7. Lastly, Corey from Diligent Design thought I had a mismatch favicon that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Wouldn’t mind if you did one for me..;)

Thank you all for your honest and awesome feedback. I will make an effort to implement them progressively.

If you have something else to add, cross over to bloggingtips.com Weekly Reader Blog Critique where thoushallblog is being reviewed this week. Who knows you might win yourself $10 for being the best reviewer.

Cheers
Yan

Similar Posts:

• Ask My Readers #2 - Read At Your Own Risk
• Readers Appreciation No.1
• Ask My Readers #1
• Net Strife - The Making of Internet Marketer
• It’s Time to Appreciate Your Readers

Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

The myths and misconceptions about Google are very much prevalent among us webmasters and in an effort to debunk some of them, Google hosted its third Online Webmaster Chat even last Wednesday where Q&A session was held between Gooooooooglers and webmasters.

Below are some of the interesting questions and answers I’ve chosen in the best of interest of you — my beloved reader. It has indeed given me a different perspective on what SEO is all about.

For more comprehensive Q&A, you can read it further from Google Webmaster Help here.

Live Q&A Session from third Webmaster Chat

How often does your search algorithm change?

We change the algorithms all the time - last year we had over 450 changes.

Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?

This is a common misconception. You don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank

Also, we generally treat all links the same - be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.

Can my site be penalized if I use rel=”nofollow” too much?

No, you run no risk of an impact on your site’s rankings if you use the attribute.

How many times a year do you update a site PageRanking?

PageRank is re-computed all the time (different PageRanks every day). But we update the toolbar PageRank 3-4 times/year.

In Webmaster Tools, you’ve recently started listing the sites that 404s are coming from. Many of our 404s are from sites that ceased to exist months (sometimes years) ago. How long does Google hold onto 404 errors?

If the crawl error sources do not exist any more, I wouldn’t worry about them — they’ll generally go away on their own over time. Having them there does not negatively impact your site’s crawling, indexing and ranking.

Duplicate content is always penalized by search engines. Then what is the reason that duplicate news content spread across many sub-domains from yahoo.com and many other popular sites does not gets penalized ?

As far as I know, none of the search engines penalize duplicate content — they just ignore the duplicates.

* An online buddy of mine, Brian made an interesting analysis on why Google says I love duplicate content PR9 for digg.com.

Does a page load time play a crucial role in Google Page Ranking? If yes how important is it?

I think the more important issue here is user experience. If your site loads fast, your users will be happy; if it loads slow, users will be less happy. Make your users happy, right?

Does having the domain name for a long period e.g. 5 or 10 years really affects SEO and give high rankings?

A site’s reputation can be a indicator to search engines, but of course, it’s not everything. Having a site for a long period of time can establish credibility with users, and as a search engine we also want to reflect this type of credibility.

Of course, newer domains can also gain users and credibility. It seems like running a good site is a bit like running a reputable business. So yes, if your domain has been credible for years it can help.

If you buy an old domain and put all your content on it in hopes of getting instant rankings, that’s not the best idea.

Does link: gives exactly the number of back links to a site?

The link: operator only shows a sampling of links to a site, so it may not show all of the links that Google knows about.

Does getting a lot of comments in a blog help in being well indexed/ranked by Google?

Having a lot of enthusiastic users commenting on your posts and doing so generating content on your site, certainly does not harm your rankings :-) Furthermore, a large fan base gives the webmaster a bit of independence from search engine traffic, which is the reason why generating original and compelling content in order to nurture a group of committed users is something I would highly recommend to any blogger :-)

Do the verification codes for Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Apps for Domain have to remain intact after the first verification or can you just remove them once it’s done?

I can only speak for Webmaster Tools, but we do recheck for those codes periodically to make sure you are still the site owner. So you’ll want to leave that code in place as long as you want to use Webmaster Tools.

If my website “A”, linking to website “B”, and “B” linking back to “A” - am I going to be penalized? Does linking strategies still work?

Participating in linking schemes to impact ranking is not advised it’s against the webmaster guidelines. The best linking strategy is to create a site with unique content or services that people want to link to. Then publicize it.

Should I be using hyphens instead of underscores in my URLs to improve a page’s rank?

For the time being, I would recommend still using hyphens instead of underscores. If you’re already using underscores and that’s working fine for you and your rankings, it’s not worth switching. But if you’re doing a new site, then I would go with hyphens.

If I have backlinks from porn sites do this affect my PR or anything else ?

Those links might be positively affecting your PageRank (PageRank does not go down from “bad” links like those from adult sites). In general, you don’t have to worry about bad links like that which point to your site which aren’t under your control.

What have you learned today?

Happy Halloween, My Friends!

Similar Posts:

• Google Hates Duplicate Content - The Fix
• Has Your Blog Been Indexed by Google Yet?
• 15 SEO Tools for Beginners
• 15 SEO Tips for Beginners
• Playing with Google in the Sandbox

Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

According to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.

In what I come to notice, the majority of beginners that jump into the blogwagon have several commonalities. In this regard, they are more likely to commit one, if not all, of the 7 deadly sins of newbies.

Blame it on the “gurus” who are selling dream that blogging success can be achieved overnight with little efforts. Nowadays, a blog can be created almost at the snap of fingers.

You and I know that blogging is fun and rewarding and it can also be pretty frustrating at times. It’s also true that there is no such thing as instant success. It takes a great deal of commitment, time and efforts to see the fruits of our labor. Convince me otherwise.

This article is by no means the end-all and be-all of being an effective and better blogger, but hopefully it may shorten your learning curve and bring you closer to whatever your dream is.

Deadly Sin #1 - Too many ads too early

There’s nothing more amateurish than seeing the desperate display of ads block on every possible space on a blog. Adsense aside, it’s pretty common to see 8 125×125 ads on their sidebar when 7 of them are empty. Why? It’s probably because John Chow has 8. If he has 10, they will have 10 also.

You see, there is no hard and fast rules when you should monetize. It’s a matter of personal choice. However, it’s advisable not to overdo it and distract your visitors’ attention away from your content with too many ads. Suffice to say, content is one of those factors that either makes or breaks your blog in its early stage.

Deadly Sin #2 - Too passive

The best way to get yourself noticed when you are a new kid in the blog is to go out and introduce yourself to the blogosphere. I can even begin to say that how many beginners don’t do this but blog commenting is the most effective and powerful method of propelling yourself from an unknown to possibly a celebrity. A case in point is Caroline Middlebrook who is still the undisputed comment queen.

Gone are the days when people will come knocking at your door, you need to seek them out. So the next time you lament why you ain’t getting enough comments, don’t be passive, go commenting and be the next comment queen or king.

On the home front, make an effort to reply to your comments and reciprocate the same by visiting their blogs. It’s a time-tested and proven strategy to build relationship with fellow bloggers. As the saying goes, “No blogger is an island.”

Deadly Sin #3 - Wrong focus

In any marketing principle, product comes before promotion and it’s sad to see that most beginners are either unaware of this or simply be in hurry in pursuit of popularity.

Getting the visitors is the easy part (see #2), converting them to be your returning visitors (aka: subscribers) is probably the hardest part. Who would be interested in a new blog, let alone subscribe to it? It’s not the ideal first impression for first time visitors.

My point is to worry less about traffic, promotion or subscribers in the early stage of your blog. Instead you should focus on creating quality contents you and your visitors can be proud of.

Deadly Sin #4 - Ignoring basic SEO

One of the most common mistakes beginners are more likely to commit is to take for granted the importance of permalinks. It’s the easiest SEO trick yet overlooked by many. Frankly speaking, ignorance is not an exception here. If you are still at a loss, here’s 15 SEO Tips for Beginners.

Deadly Sin #5 - Not proofreading

No one is expecting you to be perfect always. Even in the best of times, we’re all make some unforced gramatical errors but that’s not the issue. The fact that you proofread before you push the ‘publish’ button does say a lot about you as a blogger.

If you can’t be bother to proofread your content which is esentially yours, would you be atentive enough to look after your’s readers? Would you be diligent enough to provide the most valuable and informative contents in the best interest of your readers?

* grammatical errors are not proofread on purpose

Deadly Sin #6 - Faking your subscriber count

Despite all the bad publicity, blogosphere is never short of fakers who proudly display his/her inflated subscribers count. I recently came across a site with a decent 950+ subscribers on its chicklet and an archive as deep as 2 months. I clicked away with smile on my face. We certainly need idiots like them to remind us of the value of honesty.

Faking your subscriber count is the lamest and dumbest marketing gimmick. Don’t fall into the trap, it’s a sure-fire way of losing your credibility fast. There’s a real good chance you’ll never get it back.

Deadly Sin #7 - Not subscribing to thoushallblog.com

It’s probably one of the biggest sins any beginners should avoid. It’s highly recommended that you subscribe now if you haven’t yet as the best of blogging tips for beginners is yet to come. Didn’t anyone tell you that before?

There you have them all - 7 deadly sins to avoid. Don’t commit those mistakes, I have warned you in much the same way God had warned Adam not to touch the forbidden fruit.

So God bless you and I love ya all.

Similar Posts:

• Ask My Readers #2 - Read At Your Own Risk
• How I Increase My Email Subscribers by 60 in 7 Days
• I Guess This Is When I Say “Thank You”
• Pimp Your Adsense To Increase Your CTR
• 16 WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95?

Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

First off, I want to thank Yan for allowing me to be a guest blogger on his website. The #1 reason I am excited about this partnership is that I believe Yan has, and will soon be recognized, as the #1 blogging resource on the web. His site is useful for new bloggers and much more advanced bloggers alike. I am excited about the future of this blog and you should be too.

In any case, here are my 12 lessons:

1. Ask Questions. No matter if you have just started blogging or have been doing it for years there is a ton to learn and asking questions is the best way to do it. But first, you always need to be able to answer this one question. “Why do I want to write a blog?” This one question alone will help you answer all future questions. Why? Because the answer will help you to know what the right questions to ask are in the first place.

2. Dive In. Again, there is so much to learn and the sooner you get started the better. One of the best resources on the web is The Blogger Face-Off at Daily Blogs Tips. If you look through all the advice these many popular bloggers give you will find that most of them wish they would have started sooner. So if you are worried about learning something just dive in and do it. Just remember to back up your database first. ;-)

3. Join the Community. No blogger is an island. We are all part of what I consider to be a fairly tight knit community. And most of us are pretty friendly and helpful to each other. If you have that concept in your head from the beginning you will be a much more successful blogger in the long run.

4. Write grrrreat content! You want Tony the Tiger saying your blog is great. If you have nothing of real worth to read on your blog, why should people come? The must read article about creating great content is Yaro Starak’s article on writing a Pillar article.

5. Go Comment. Ok. So you have decided upon your reason for blogging and have started learning how it is done. You started to feel the community vibe, and you have started writing at least a few good articles. Now what? Well the reason I got so many visitors to my site in my first week is because I commented so much. I just dove into the community and started commenting on everything. A lot of people followed my links back and I had over 500 page views my first week. I attribute most of that traffic to my comments on other people’s websites.

6. Write Some More. You might not have to write everyday depending on your niche, but you should sure try when you are just starting out. It doesn’t have to be great content every single time, but it has to be good. Always strive for original content. If you got nothing for that day, highlight another article that is a great resource that you have dug up along the way. Make sure you write at least 2 or 3 paragraphs summarizing why this is a great article. For an example, check out my post entitled “Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Anywired”

7. Leverage Your Available Tools. Have you got your feedburner feed going yet? Have you setup any useful widgets? These can come after writing some great content, but I think a feedburner feed is a must have from the beginning. It should be easy to subscribe by email as well as by a reader. Also, think about your REAL needs. It is almost guaranteed that there is a tool out there you can use to accomplish what you want to do.

8. Use Your Tools Wisely. Being the gadget junkie I am, I downloaded over 30 plug-ins to try out. As I activated them my page load time became slower and slower. Don’t make the same mistake. Here is my bare essentials list of plug-ins that I use. Akismet, commentluv, Homepage Excerpts, SRG Clean Archives, Subscribe to Comments, Top Commentators, Wordpress Backup, WP Super Cache, and WP Widget Cache. To make it a nice round 10 I will give a shout out to the Dagon Design Form Mailer. Feel free to ask me about any specific plug-in in the comment section. ;-)

9. Be Accessible. Make a contact page with the Dagon Design Form Mailer. Answer your emails. Respond to every comment. It’s a community right? If you don’t participate you miss all the fun!

10. De-clutter and Simplify. My web page started to be one big mess because I kept adding things and had no sense of organization. I still feel my website is too “busy”, but I am working on that. My mantra is that simple is always better. I think Apple has some great products because of that mantra. You can too! Learn to simplify.

11. Learn Some Marketing. Once you got some grrreat content, have learned how to use all the tools, and have simplified your site to make it user friendly, you still have to promote it. I won’t pretend to know how to add “1,000 visitors in one day”, but I know you can learn it somewhere. So learn, apply it, tweak it, repeat…

12. Fall in Love All Over Again. No matter what endeavor you chose in this life, you are only going to succeed in it if you love it. The key to a great blog is to love giving your readers great value for their time. If they click on your site, you better deliver something great, otherwise you are just wasting their time. And the only way to do that is to always be in love with what you are doing.

Thanks for reading everyone! I hope you can take at least one of my lessons and go and make your blog better today. I look forward to the comments!

The author of this post is Jeremy Day. He runs a personal blog at www.insightwriter.com that focuses on improving your life and the lives of people around you. You can subscribe to his RSS feed for more update.

Similar Posts:

• 101 Great Posting Ideas For Your Blog - Part 1
• I Guess This Is When I Say “Thank You”
• Linking At Its Worst - Food for Thoughts
• It’s Time to Appreciate Your Readers
• Another Great Way To Say “Thank You”

Sponsors of The Month

1. Make Money with Motive Interactive. What's Your Motive?
2. What If You Can Have Access to 16 Awesome WordPress Premium Themes for $19.95 Per Year?

If blogging is all about sharing and learning, shall we make this a platform where we could all share and learn from one another?

All right, here’s a little experiment for the weekend. Instead of you asking me the question, I’d like to turn the table around where each weekend I’ll ask you one question and you’ll share your thought, input or suggestion with the rest of the readers here.

Ask not what the blogosphere can do for you but what together we can do for the blogosphere. - Chris Garret

Question of the Week:

If there is one change you’d like to see here on thoushallblog.com, what would it be? and why?

I’ll pick the best answer suggestion at the end of the week and showcase it on the next installment of “Ask My Reader” with the easiest backlink you could have ever got from me.

All negative comments (that pass Akismet filter) will not be moderated so you are most welcome to send me your best hate comment.

Happy weekend!

PS: I’m looking forward to what you have to say ’bout my blog as I’m planning to do a major revamp of my little playground to better serve my audience. Your suggestion is worth more than anything to me.

Similar Posts:

• Ask My Readers #2 - Read At Your Own Risk
• My Experimentation With MiniPost
• Probably Not-So-Often-Used Way To Edit Your Comment
• Another Great Way To Say “Thank You”
• Posts vs Backlinks