Surf the Mind

Archive for the ‘Tagging’ Category

EDIT: July 5, 2006 >> Much of this information has been fleshed out in a free PDF report you can see below:

—————–
There has been a great deal of hype in Internet Marketing forums and blogs of late about tag and ping methods to increase page rank.

Tagging — or using social bookmarking and blog search sites to get high PR links to your website, can also be used to gain an edge on your competition, and even use their traffic to your advantage, when a high profile new ebook or software package comes out.

Take, for example, the new tag and ping book.

Browsing through sites like del.icio.us, Blinklist and Furl can give you a good idea of the tags that are being used by the author of the package. Technorati is showing a significant increase in the number of times per day those tags are used.

So, here’s a tip:

When big-time marketers blog about the new product, they’ll use the technorati tag “tag+and+ping” and “tagandping” and a few others. Those tags are clickable and link to Technorati’s page for each of those particular tags.

Some of the visitors to those blogs, not all but some, will click on those tags.

What will they see when they get there?

Hopefully, they’ll see something that will drive them to YOUR site for the sale.

Dissecting the Technorati Tag landing page

On the page technorati builds for any tag, there are a number of elements you will see:
1) Photos from Flickr

2) Recent blog posts tagged with that keyword or phrase

3) Who’s Blogging About sidebar with links to the profiles of blogs that have the keyword or phrase in their profile

4) Links from Furl for the same tag.

Four Preliminary Steps

1) If you don’t already have a Flickr account, get one right now and add a bunch of innocuous family photos or scenery pics (make sure they’re your pictures!!!) with public permissions. If you have never posted photos on Flickr before, your account needs to be manually approved before your pictures will start showing up on public searches for tags. You can even set up an account name that matches your blog or website, as long as you use a hyphen instead of a dot (i.e. SurfTheMind-com)
2) IF you don’t already have a blog, set one up. You can use Blogger, or WordPress.com, or best of all, you can set up a wordpress blog on your own server.

3) Set up or edit your Technorati profile. In it you’ll want to add a description (using your keywords/phrases), and a photo (it doesn’t have to be of you — in fact, you may find it a better draw to change your photo to reflect the product your currently promoting, like a tag with a dollar sign in it for Tag and Ping?), and finally all the possible keywords you are focusing on. Technorati will display your profile in the Blogs About sidebar based on these tags, so get all the ones your competitors are using in their blog posts.

4) Set up a Furl account and respond to the confirmation email. Install the toolbar, and bookmark a few news sites to get accustomed to the bookmarking tool.

Get some creative juices flowing…

1) Create an eye-catching graphic related to the subject of the ebook or software you’re promoting.

2) Create a landing page to send people to presell people that click through

3) Prepare several short blog posts about the product, offering related tips and freebies for downloads

Three Steps to Dominate the Technorati Page for Your Chosen Tags

1 )Start with the top of the Technorati page — the Flickr photos.

Post a photo or graphic, or cover image to your Flickr account, and tag it with all the tags you found the program owner and other affiliates using to tag their posts about it. In the description, use a catchy headline, and link it with your landing page url, ie

Before you buy the book, get free information on tag and ping here.

2) Next, post the first of your blog posts about the subject to your blog, tagging it with your keywords and pinging Technorati when you’re done. Your post should appear on the top of the list for that keyword shortly. Your post will attract more attention if you’ve added a good picture to your profile.

3) Furl your post and your landing page with your tags to get your post listed in the bottom section of the tag’s Technorati page.

Every few hours, add another blog post, Tag, Ping and Furl to keep your results prominent.

For even more results, sign up for as many other social bookmarking sites as you wish and bookmark your pages, your blog posts, and your bookmark lists from other bookmarking sites, ad nauseum. You can find links to LOTS of social bookmarking sites under each of the posts in this blog.

For even more results, sign up for as many other social bookmarking sites as you wish and bookmark your pages, your blog posts, and your bookmark lists from other bookmarking sites, ad nauseum. You can find links to LOTS of social bookmarking sites under each of the posts in this blog.

While this should not be your only method of traffic generation for affiliate sales, you will glean some very targeted and motivated buyers … most of whom were prepared for the sale in advance by your competitors.

Want to be alerted when more articles are posted on this topic? Subscribe below:

Since “Tagging” is turning out to be the next big hype in internet marketing (aren’t you glad I told you about it back in February?), I thought I’d share another tip with you to help you generate more traffic with tags.

Now, if you know anything about tagging, you’ll know that Technorati is king of the blog tagging world.

And if you’ve experimented with tagging, you’ll realize that on Technorati, the number of people who have bookmarked your site with a particular tag doesn’t matter. You get to tag your own post, and for as long as you’re the most recent post with that tag, you get top billing.

You’ll also know that for some really popular tags… the ones that can bring oodles of visitors… you’ll stay on top about 15 seconds at most.

So, what is a traffic-searching soul to do? (Especially if the site you want to promote is a regular content site, not a blog!?)

Well, visit Technorati for a second and look at a page for any particular tag. You can head in that direction by clicking any of the tags below this post, for example.

See the pictures on the top? They’re from Flickr. Yep, if you have a Flickr account, you can post photos AND TAG THEM.

Those photos tend to have a much longer stay on the page, and if you have a compelling shot, they have GREAT placement. The problem is, they lead to your Flickr page — not your web site.

But that’s no reason no to use them. Here are three things you can do:

• Add your URL as a copyright notice on your pictures
• Create book cover images to match your blog posts, and upload the covers to Flickr and tag them
• Use your URL as your Flickr username (you’ll have to use a hypen instead of a dot, like surfthemind-com)
• Put your URL as the very first text in the description of your photo
• Put a compelling headline as the text of your description, and use and HTML a href tag to link it to your site
• Add your URL to your Flickr profile

While Flickr tags don’t have all the advantages of a Technorati tag, there is still a great opportunity for exposure and targeted traffic (depending on your niche) if you play them right.

A little late, but better late than never, I thought I’d post an answer to this question from the comments on my post about tagging for traffic:

Could you possibly explain this tag a little bit more? I thought it was just for blogs.

Yes, tagging is most often tied to blogs these days, but you don’t need a blog to use tags, you don’t need RSS or special pinging software. All you need is a site you want to promote and your web browser (and a few bookmarklets and toolbars for that web browser).

The sites I submit my pages to are most often referred to as social bookmarking sites. They seek to organize worthwhile pages on the Web based on user submitted tags or keywords, often called folksonomy as opposed to organizing the Web with a rigid taxonomy like Yahoo!’s directory does.

The social bookmarking sites I use most frequently are:

1) Del.icio.us
2) Furl
3) BlinkList
4) De.lirio.us
5) Yahoo MyWeb

If you wish to try this for yourself, sign up for each service and drag their ‘bookmarklet’ tool to your browser’s toolbar. In the case of Yahoo!, you’ll probably want to install the toolbar.

Once you’ve got the Yahoo! toolbar and the bookmarklets for the other sites plugged into your browser like you see in the picture above, you simply go to a page on your site — if it’s a content site, find a deep link to an interesting article — then click one of the bookmarklets. For each article you submit, enter a nice range of related keywords as tags, and whenever possible a really informal description of what the page is about.

I find it most effective to post article pages, primarily because you can focus on more keywords that way. Consider a site about yoga. You could submit the index page of a yoga site with tags like “yoga, meditation, yogi, exercise, etc”, with a description like: “This is a site about yoga with lots of articles.” Which is all fine and good . But now look at some interior pages and you’ll see why tagging specific articles is better. You might have one page tagged with “yoga, exercise, back pain, pain relief” and a description like, “Study finds that practicing yoga provides better back pain relief than massage, other exercises, or even drugs!” On another page you might have tags linking yoga and breast cancer, describing how practicing yoga helps breast cancer survivors recover. Another might have tags linking yoga and christianity. All of those deep links are far more interesting, and more far-reaching than ‘This is a yoga site” could ever be.

So, once you’ve picked the first article you want to submit, furl, blink and tag it on the various services, then move on to the next page and start the process all over again.

This has never failed to get traffic to my brand new sites. And while I can’t say for certain that it helps get my sites indexed faster in search engines, it certainly doesn’t hurt. I have also found that some sites aggregate and display results for certain keywords in Del.icio.us, and if you hit the right keywords, you’ll get some one way links from those sites that also drive traffic.

I usually don’t submit all the articles in a site — just the most interesting ones (in my opinion) — since I don’t like to spend a whole lot of time on stuff like this, but I’ve found that driving a bit of traffic can give me a good indication of the revenue I can expect from the site once indexed, and it feels good to have sites that make money from day 1.

I hope that answers the question. If you need to ask more, feel free to use the comments box. Comments are on full moderation because of spam, but I let all legit comments though… plus I don’t have rel=nofollow in my tags, so you’ll get the benefit of this site’s PR5 if you include your link.

Some folks are on the ball and already emailed me asking how I could get enough money to pull in Adsense cash on the Niche Products Monthly sites before the search engines fully indexed them. One person guessed PPC, but I have to admit I don’t have the time to keep an eye on PPC traffic well enough to make it worth while… or even to make sure I don’t lose my shirt on unproductive clicks, so I don’t use PPC.

I get instant traffic by playing tag.

I use community bookmarking services like Yahoo’s My Web and del.icio.us to tag individual articles with relevant keywords. Not the front page, mind you, just individual articles. This produces a temporary surge in targeted traffic that will give you a good idea of how well your ads are placed for optimum CTR.

Do this with any new content added to your new sites in the next few weeks, and you’ll have a steady flow of traffic until the search engines pick up all the pages.

There ya go. My first full fledged tip of the new year.