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BlogRush users may have noticed that Phase 2 is finally finished and released. The new dashboard is operational as well as the promised improved stats by John Reese. John also released a video to go with the new update located here:

http://www.blogrush.com/vphase2

On option added that wasn’t mentioned is the ability to delete a blog off of the network. On the same menu you’ll see that new categories will be coming a bit later, November 2nd for those of you with highly specific niche blogs don’t have much longer to wait.

It all seems pretty intuitive from going over it briefly.

If you’re not using BlogRush now would be a great time to try it out. Hits from the software still seem to trickle in, but given this update is less than 24 hours old we’ll have to give it a bit more time for the new changes to have some affect.

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Google appears to be trying their hand at Social Bookmarking by ending their widely known PageRank(PR) system. Here is a copy of the article below.

“Google 2.0

In a nod to Web 2.0 and in an effort to make the Google experience more user-centric, Google will end the system of assigning each web page a Page Rank based on an algorithm of links, quality and popularity. Instead, each page will have a Page Rate assigned by the readers.Page Rate will be established by the installation of an attractive voting widget on each page allowing readers to click either an up or down arrow to show approval or disapproval of the page’s content. After clicking the arrow of choice, the reader will be prompted to leave a comment about the page they just voted for. While all users are allowed to vote, only those logged into their Google account will actually have their votes counted or be allowed to comment.

Float It

Google users will also be able to go to the new “Float It” site where they may rate sites already rated by other Googlers. Once on Float It, readers are encouraged to examine pages other Floaters have submitted and vote to either “Float It” or “Sink It”, thereby helping to bring exposure to the truly deserving web pages.

Trip Over It
  Another method of finding pages to rate will be by using the new Google Toolbar With TripOverIt. The new toolbar will have a TripOverIt button integrated into it as well as a window showing the current page’s Votes and Floats. With the toolbar installed, the user may click the “TripOverIt” button and be taken to a random web page to vote on. The user need not worry about selecting categories or preferences because the toolbar will also track their surfing habits and only serve up the kind of pages they like.

While it is required that each page have the Page Rate Widget installed to qualify for a Page Rate, the site owner is not allowed to have any other voting or submission widgets on the page. Neither may the site owner ask for votes or refer to the widget in any way. The site owner also may not, under any circumstances, click their own widget. If a site owner clicks their own widget or in any way attempts to commit widget fraud, all pages owned by that owner will be removed from the Page Rate Program, will be disallowed from Organic Search Results and the Googlebot will be instructed to break all of the links on the page and screw up the CSS code on its way out. Rankings

Rankings will still be scored on a 10 point system based on a proprietary algorithm of Up Votes, Down Votes, Float Its, Sink Its, Bookmarks and the quality of comments received.

Article Follow-up here

Now, imediately I see I’m not going to be a part of this. You can’t use other widgets? Widgets like StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us? Google is late to teh Social Bookmarking arena as it is, doing a very Microsoft thing and restricting access to their systems alone willseriously hurt them in this field. Neworks and multiple powerful networks is what made these Socail Bookmarks to powerful.

Well, Google can do whatever they want I suppose. I really wonder if they’ll get anyone on their network with the rules they have here.

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I’m going to step back, or maybe to the side, or a convention article on an internet marketing site for a minute to share something I can’t believe I never gave any thought to. Something that all of us take for granted everyday, but that we have the ability to change should we all chose to. This is the realization of belief systems.

Follow me for a minute here. How is success in this industry often defined? Money.

Money is a belief system. A $5 bill is worth $5 because we all believe that is its worth. It’s actually not worth anything, it’s just a piece of paper, but we believe it’s worth five dollars. I’m sure you’ve heard in books like The Science of Getting Rich and Think and Grow Rich that when you seek to benefit everyone success will find you. As many marketers will tell you this is completely true. So how does this relate to the belief of our money system?

When we use it in this fashion we grow ourselves more spiritually than materially in an attempt to help everyone. Success is created around us in what we believe it should be. In this case it’s money. As Napoleon Hill elequently pointed out his rules can apply to anyting, not just monetary gain. As an experiment I want all readers of those books and this article to pick something that they want that is not monetary and use what those books teach to get it. It’s personally changed my life and where I am now is now where I imagined I’d be even a year ago.

I digress. The fact is is that we all want something that doesn’t exist in an imaginary world. We all want ‘money’ through the ‘internet’. Neither really exist. I know “The Secret” has came out recently touching on one of four laws, the Law of Attraction. That your desire and energy will create or attract what you want to yourself basically. It’s curious, when I see who has succeeded in this industry and who hasn’t. Those who have grasped early on that the benefit of others creates benefits for you.

Let’s back up for a minute. Think, if everyone all at once agreed that we didn’t want to use money anymore it would have no value. If noone wants it, it’s got no hold over anyone. Money is an abstract force that comes to you when other things are completed. Those with large bank accounts are probably rolling their eyes now at that statement at how money can’t be abstract, but if everyone but you decided they weren’t using money anymore it wouldn’t matter how much you had. They don’t want it, you’ve got nothing of value. What creates that money and makes it find its way to you is through doing things that will benefit others.

Noone wants to buy something that is worse than a previous product, they want something better. The product is trying to benefit the most people as possible. This is how it sells if you’re selling it. By making things better what you want finds you. For some this is money. Money always has a way of taking care of itself in my circumstance so I always point my desires at other things, which take some time, but do get to me.

It basically boils down to: benefit any many people as possible + work + what you desire is = success.

That’s it.

Remember, we could topple our money system tomorrow if we all chose to. No wonder so many people define success so differently. Perhaps it’s not the strongest force out there after all.

P.S.: If you liked this and benefited from this, please send it around. I’m open to good, bad, indifferent comments as long as people read it.

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John Reese announced new changes and release plans for this blogging software BlogRush. Among them is a manual review process that is already in effect to accept or reject blogs based on new criteria(yet to be released). The new interface will include more options, features, and reporting.

The master of testing will definitely give you so much information to work with it could seem overwhelming at first. There will be “per post statistics” and a “Buzz Meter” that will let you know if your post is hot or cold based on your blog headline’s click through rate.

BlogRush will also let you create Custom Reports to further define account activity by date ranges. The addition of more Categories will also be implemented to better define specific blogs into their niches.

The more interesting part of his update is his intention to try to get people to raise the widget higher on their blogs. As we know, higher visibility means higher CTR, and in an effort to keep his software as fair as possible he wants users to make their widget more visible–all without actually requiring the blogrush widget to be at the top of the blog. It will be interesting to see how this new change affects the network and current BlogRush users who keep their widget in low places on their blog. Reese said he will remove BlogRush members from the network if they don’t try to make their placement fairer to other members.

Reese also hinted of his TrafficJam.com release which will also help BlogRush members. You can read the entire article here:
http://www.income.com/blog/2007/10/08/blogrush-phase-2/

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The application of knowledge in internet marketing is what really separates one from being successful from someone who spends years struggling without making a cent. There is a wealth of free information available online for how to make money. Maybe this information being free is causing some people to become lazy in their application or usefulness of the information.

Free products and reports like Chimp Change and Russell Brunson’s IM Myth may not seem to hold as useful information in people’s mind as a product they have to buy. So while their knowledge grows and increases, they perhaps keep looking for that important piece of information that will set them financially free. Most of us have probably been through the phase where we go from program to program trying to find the one that fits us.

There have been incredibly successful products released to help people get over this learning phase to the application of what they’ve learned. Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing and the infamous Rich Jerk have created lots of new internet marketers who will soon make a name for themselves. Perhaps that’s exactly what this group of aspiring internet marketers need.

Most remember exactly what internet marketing product or document made them get into the game and stick with it as long as it takes to make it. That single product that grew in them the sudden inspriation to succeed come hell or high water. While knowledge grows the internet keeps changing, and what may have been good and useful a year ago may no longer work or be ineffective. These changes that cause changes in the results of new internet marketers, who may see their efforts happening as too slow or not at all, may be a big reason for the lack of the application of new knowledge they get.

The honest truth is that there is no instant traffic generation technique that will flood your inbox with sales, or make your rich with more money than you can imagine in a short time, or have money roll in on autopilot–UNLESS you apply everything you learn as much as you can. The knowledge you get needs to turn into work to make it happen, whether it’s experimenting with PPC or writing an article a day. If it were as easy as auto-pilot from day one eerybody would be doing this. You really do get back what you put in, and you learn as you go.

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russell brunson has put out a free report to promote a 6 hour interview he’s releasing on October 9th with Vince James called “The IM Myth”. The focal point of this report is Vince James himself, and online and offline internet marketer who made $100 million in 13 months. Yes, one hundred million dollars.

He did it by using offline methods to increase his customer base, lower refunds, and make that all important connection between the seller and you. Russell briefly bullet points some of the main themes and techniques that worked so well for Vince James. Among them are qualifying your buyers, letting them finance your offline efforts, some ways to stand out to them through your snail mail promotions, and a few others.

While not showing screenshots or other common proff media in “The IM Myth” Russell also bullet points what Vince James’ techniques and a personal consultation have done for his business. It’s an incredible change from appearing your online business is stagment at a certain income threshold.

The real driving force of this report is the 6 hour interview he conducted with vince james that he is releasing later. After seeing him briefly lay out techniques along with great pictures of actual envelopes and packages it’s hard to doubt Vince knows what he’s doing. Russell even gives you the actual companies he uses in his offline marketing at the end of the report.

It was a short and vey interesting read. Plus it’s FREE and everyone likes free stuff.

You can download the report here if you haven’t read it yet.

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You see it written on sales letters, in some mailing lists, and even in forum signatures. It’s a very common way to end a document in internet marketing. The saying is only three words: To Your Success. You see it on sales pages for new product releases to places like Traffic Swarm. In fact, the phrase seems to live on Traffic Exchanges.

In researching this phrase I found it located on a lot of non-internet marketing related sites. This could just be because the sales letters are not indexed in the search engines, but if they are they didn’t appear high enough in the search results.

This phrase seems to be everywhere in the internet marketing community. Why do we use it? In my opinion, it seems to be a good, non-committing, non-gender specific closing statement. It reads to everyone the same. At the same time I think it’s a bit detached to the reader. Rather than the above deduction of being non-committing it can read back as the visitor being just another customer.

To be fair, I haven’t tested this on sales pages yet, but would be interested to see the results(if any) that this phrase has against other closing statements. It seems that this may have been something one maketer did and gradually caught on as others thought it was a good idea or addition to what they were already doing.

Perhaps, by now, I’m simply numb or jaded to the sales pitches and marketing techniques I seem to be around all the time. I can’t say whether or not those three little words impact your sales numbers, but it will be tested when I come out a new product. Before then I’m curious if another marketer has done this test to see if it really makes a difference. Visitors have very short attention spans and those words are always at the bottom of the page, so how do we know they read them before making a buying decision?

If anyone is currently testing sales pages I’d be interested in their results regarding this. Well, it looks like this is coming to an end.

To your success,

Robert Kreuk

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Natural traffic is one of the sought after forms of traffic in internet marketing. It costs time and effort to get listed, but once you’re listed in a good position you no longer have to pay for that traffic. The goal is to be on the front page listed in one of the top three spots, or the first one, depending on how people click the listings to find out what they want.

There’s many articles, ebooks, and probably even seminars devoted to getting your site(s) indexed faster and faster. I suppose this will be another one of those articles, but with how Google seems to change it’s mind every day on what it indexes, all were surely relevant at some point in time.

Beginning marketers sometimes watch and wait as long as two weeks, or longer, for their sites to get indexed. These marketers may benefit most from this article while those who get their site indexed in a few days to 24 hours or less may not learn anything.

Since we’re looking at Google we’ve got to look at what their search engine spiders think is important and relevant. This means using Google’s own systems, mainly PageRank (PR). High PR pages that link back you are the biggest step to making this happen. We need these links to be one-way as well, since Google weighs more for a site linked one direction than one with a reciprocal link.

Does it matter what kind of high PR pages link back to you?

In my experience no, but I’m sure someone will chime in with a comment of how that’s wrong. The pages don’t seem to matter because the search engine spiders visit these high PR pages many times a day to index new material. When the bot sees your site linked on one of these pages it believes your site is important and relevant on the page it found it on, so goes one layer deeper(your link) and indexes it.

So where do you get these high PR links?

In the age of Web 2.0 they’re everywhere. There’s particular power in social bookmarking websites. They always seem to have a high PR (PR4 or PR5, sometimes higher) and by simply bookmarking your site on many of them you’ll give your site many quality and high PR backlinks. StumbleUpon seems to be most powerful of these sites, and anyone who has used the service before knows there are very few bad pages in their bookmarks.

Another route is Social News sites. These are sites like Digg, Netscape, and Newsvine. You can also get the bots to come with Pinging servies. Ping-o-matic and Pingoat are popular pingers.

A final note is that the bots seem to like unique content more than recycled content. It’s simple enough to test once you get the hang of getting indexed. The theory of duplicate content seems to have some weight in my experience with indexing, but the backlinks seem to work the same way to the bots on unique or recycled content.

The only secret here is to use any and all means available to you to get your site indexed in Google.

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