In commencing work over the past month or so to revitalise this blog and the AdMastery.biz group of sites in general I’ve been developing a plan.  It wasn’t totally coherent to start with but gradually came into something like an intelligible shape.

Yesterday I came across an excellent blog post by Lynn Terry describing her approach to planning the future development of her main blog.  She’s much further advanced with it all than myself, but her approach fits so well with the way my mind works that I was delighted to discover that she’d also put it into pdf format for downloading. I could print it out and scribble all over it.

I was even more delighted when I found that not only was she was giving it away free but was allowing others to give it away as well.  So here it is – completely free, with none of  my affiliate links in it, and without even asking for an email address – a gift to my readers.  Enjoy it and use it. If you’re like me you’ll find it well worth the time and thought.

Download it here: Lynn Terry’s BlogBoost2010.

This post is more or less a repeat of an email I sent out this morning to the members on my text ad site, Text.Admastery.biz. I went into its admin area half an hour ago and found eleven ads waiting to be reviewed and approved.

Of those eleven I have approved only one.

Why do people try to post ads promoting easy wealth, quick earnings, massive riches and things like that? It’s clearly stated on the entry screens on the site that such advertising will be refused and deleted without comment as this is not what the site is designed for.

My policy for some time now has been that if I spot in an advert any hint that it is easy to earn great wealth on the internet then it will be refused. Certainly there have been cases of quick success, but these are not the norm and excessive expectations should not be raised. I’m fully aware that this policy has restricted the growth of the site, but am determined to stay firm on this point.

Easy money schemes do deliver a lot of easy money, but only for the few at the top of the “food chain” who benefit at the cost of the thousands who will never even recoup their expenditure.

The effective life of a tweet on Twitter is considerably shorter than that of a blog post, which can give valuable service for months and even years.  Although it is true that a search of Twitter may find an old tweet the harsh reality is that for many, possibly most, of your followers a message will be there in front of them for a few minutes and then will pass into obscurity.  If they follow many people, and don’t look at their incoming tweets for several hours they may never see it at all.

Another reality is that the earth is round.  Not everyone is in daylight at the same time.  When I post a tweet in the middle of a UK morning my American followers will still be asleep whilst the Australians will have finished their day already and be preparing for the next night.

So without staying awake around the clock how am I going to reach them all.  This is where PostLater comes in.  I still do send out tweets on the spur of the moment as events occur and ideas hit me; but my more systematic tweeting is now managed largely by PostLater, on which I can set dates and times in advance – and not only for Twitter.

Yes, PostLater will handle full blog posts as well as micro-blogging. Some of the recent posts on this blog have been pre-written and scheduled on PostLater to appear at intervals. Of course, I could have scheduled them in WordPress, but a big advantage of doing it on PostLater is that I can easily see all my posting timetables in a single place. (This one is not being done that way as I’ll be sending it immediately; that flexibility is still there).

The links on this page are of course to an affiliate page, but in line with my normal practice I am not sending an affiliate link for something I’ve never used myself. PostLater is now an integral part of my blogs management structure. I recommend that if you’ve not already done so you check it out and see how it might fit with your blogging strategy and your ways of working.

There is no doubt that blogging can be a highly effective means of getting your message to your desired audience. But the challenge is to get your audience to your blog.

There are, of course, many ways of achieving this. Social bookmarking and networking, forum submissions, article marketing and many other approaches are powerful. However, good old fashioned SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) should never be ignored.

What does this mean? Put simply it means looking at your blog not as seen by a human eye but as a search engine’s robotic crawler will view it during its periodic visits. How can we do that?

I use a free tool called SEO for Firefox. As its name implies this is a plugin for the Firefox web browser. Its icon sits at the bottom right of my browser window and also in the Tools section of my top toolbar. It does many things, but for me the most valuable is its “SEO XRay”.

Open up an individual post of your blog in Firefox, click on SEO XRay and you’ll see an analysis of some key elements of that page, including what a search engine would find as its title, its description and its keywords. Unless you’ve already done what I’m about to propose, or something similar, I will guess that whilst the title will probably show as the title of your post you’ll find the description and keywords labelled “N/a” (Not available).

Now this is just not good enough. Search engines differ as to exactly how they use this information, and the importance that they give to it, but they all want to see it there. So how can we ensure that there’s something there, relevant to each individual page on your blog? It is, of course, very easy to go into the theme editor of a WordPress blog and add description and keyword content there. That will be better than nothing but the problem is that they will come up exactly the same for every post, and that is unlikely to be what you want as you deal with many different aspects of your blog’s subject area.

Enter Platinum SEO Pack. This is a plugin for WordPress blogs that allows you to specify what you want to appear in the SEO-critical fields. I’m not going to go into detail here on how it is set up or even the full range of its functionality. Go, get it, install it on one of your blogs, and see the difference. By the way, it works on WordPress blog pages as well as posts.

(Incidentally, the links above to Platinum SEO Pack and SEO for Firefox are non-commercial. I get no financial reward if you decide to use these utilities. This post is meant solely as helpful information).

I have to confess that I have not yet done what is advocated in my title.  I ought to do so, and have been reminded about it by an excellent blog post entitled “Year in Review Article Template” by Chris Knight of EzineArticles.com.

To supplement that article I looked around on the web and found a few different examples of recent Year in Review writing.  Here are four, including a narrative report, a video review, a simple list and even a spreadsheet format. Between them they may give some ideas.

Commercial Open Source Blog: Another Year in Review

Commercial Open Source blog few days ago has completed another year of life, a good excuse to make another write-up about the past year. Over 300 posts covered many open source related to.

Wrecked Magazine – A Drifting Magazine featuring Formula D, D1GP …

Scion Racing 2009 Year in Review. The 2009 Scion Racing team video has quite a few drifting highlights from their respected stars Ken Gushi and Tanner Foust. The video is mixed with some other Scion assets but the bulk of the video …

Josh Ellingson Illustrator – Battle Damage – 2009 Year in Review

2009 Year in Review. Holy smokes, it’s almost 2010! It’s been a very interesting year, and about a million things happened. Here’s a meager rundown of all the trouble I got into this past year: My artwork went to SPACE! …

Data Breaches in 2009 – a year in review | Assassin's Blog

Announced Where the Data Breach Occurred Details of Breach Amount of Stolen Records October 28, 2009 Bank of New York Mellon Corp.

What will my own review look like? Watch this space!

Today I learned of the launch of a new ad exchange, and took a close look at it. It is so new that when I checked a few minutes ago it only had less than twenty members. I’m confident that this will change quickly.

The basic format is like a standard text ad exchange of the type popularised by Frank Salinas, and therefore similar to our own, Text.AdMastery. However there some fresh twists. There’s a section which allows surfing of sites very much like a traffic exchange, and another that behaves like a credit-based safelist. This last is similar to the existing solo ads facility but instead of requiring a substantial number of credits to send a solo to the entire membership the safelist allows the sending of smaller numbers.

I suggest you take a look at it by clicking on the banner below.

I’ve been working today to revive some of the AdMastery.biz sites.  Some of them have been sadly neglected during my recent long period of weak health, and as I worked away it dawned on me suddenly that I’d never updated the name of this blog.

This has been done today and the banner above now reads, “The AdMastery Blog“. Several of my other related advertising sites are shortly to be brought consistently under the AdMastery banner. There are other developments planned for the coming months also – including things that according to previous plans should have been launched earlier this year, if only I had not been forced to take time off.

I’m intending to add posts here several times a week and to expand the coverage to assist small-scale internet marketing businesses much more comprehensively than in the past. In summary this blog will now be designed both to support users of the AdMastery.biz advertising services, and also to provide helpful content and references for people developing their knowhow in home-based internet marketing – including email advertising, various type of ad exchange, traffic exchanges and safelists, to mention just a few of the topics to come.

You may notice that traffic exchanges are mentioned there. Because the AdMastery.biz portfolio does not include a click exchange (as traffic exchanges are sometimes called) and at present it is not intended to launch one, I’ve never paid much attention to them here.  However, on recent reconsideration of their potential I’ve returned to using them considerably more myself and will therefore be referring to them periodically.  For example, you’ll find in yesterday’s post a brief note on my initial impressions of HitSilo, the new traffic exchange from Logiscape Technologies.

Also, given that this site is itself a blog, I’ll also include material on blogging and you can look forward to some changes in The AdMastery Blog itself. I’m hoping shortly to include a review of Alex Sysoef’s training programme for bloggers, “Expert Wordpress“, once I’ve been through the materials myself.

Wishing you success,

- David Murray -

After many years of ignoring them I started to use Traffic Exchanges back in early 2007. Having tried many different exchanges (I think about a hundred in all) I concluded that there were a few from which significant income could be generated – from using them to advertise other products and services, and also from recruiting new members to the exchanges themselves.

For the past year or so my mind has been on other things, not least my own web sites, but recently I’ve come back to traffic exchanges and have been surveying some of the more recently launched sites. In a previous post I referred to the new exchange launched by Tony Tezak, but today I’ve been taking a look at the latest offering from Logiscape Technologies, HitSilo.

I am impressed. It has a more complex method of operation than most hit exchanges, but having experimented with it I’m pretty well convinced that HitSilo is going to be a winner, one of the popular exchanges of the future. For greater benefit join now, upgrade and benefit from its remarkable range of advanced features.

If you have used Traffic Exchanges in your promotional work you will probably have faced the following problem.

On some exchanges you’ll have assigned credits to display one of your sites,and then waited for days or even weeks for them to be used.

On others you’ll have looked at the exchange stats after two minutes and found they’ve already gone, in a flash.

Well, I suppose I’d rather have the second problem than the first, but if I’m allocating a lot of hits to a particular promotional campaign I’d like some degree of control over how quickly they’re used up.

For some years several exchanges have allowed their users to specify a maximum number of of hits per day. I can, for example, allocate 700 credits and say they must be used over the next seven days at the rate of 100 per day.

That’s certainly an improvement, but Tony Tezak’s new exchange goes further.  He allows you to specify not only hits per day, but within the day how many per hour – and so to spread them around the clock.

Take a close look at Tezak Traffic Power and see how it might fit into your promotional portfolio.

Wishing you success,

- David Murray -

Actually it was not addressed personally to me except in the sense that it had “Dear David” generated automatically by the safelist software.  However, with its subject line, “Tyre Kickers Not Wanted” I’m sure it was addressed to people like me.

What?  Am I admitting to being a tyre kicker? Well, yes, in the sense that the author of this short diatribe meant it.  I’ve signed up for a large number of products and programmes over the years, and also have spent money on many of them.  However, I’ve also taken a close look at many programmes by means of a “free membership” and then decided that although they may suit some people they were not for me … and in a few cases that they were over-inflated garbage and little short of criminal scams.

Bluntly I’m tired of receiving emails suggesting that, because I’m discriminating about where I commit my time and money, I’m some sort of detestable “freebie-seeker”.  I once had an email from a “guru” telling me that because in spite of repeated messages from him I hadn’t bought his expensive product I must be incapable of taking in his valuable teaching.  As he was fed up of emailing me he’d decided to bother me no longer. (Those were not the precise words but they were equally strong).  After that, I certainly would not have sunk into a depression if he’d kept his promise to disconnect me – although of course he didn’t!

The reason why people (including myself) offer free products and services is to attract them to sample what is on offer, and hopefully attract them to buy much more.  There is, however, no obligation to buy more and it has to be expected that a substantial proportion and maybe a majority will not follow through.

The last thing, however, that is likely to encourage them to return for more is an insulting email. What will bring potential customers, current free members or recipients of free offers, to the next stage of a business relationship is not aggression but patient, helpful follow-up for as long as it takes.

- David Murray -