How many times you said to yourself that it’s already too late, not enough time, too difficult, too much risk involved and similar things just as excuse to not start doing something? Napoleon Hill wrote: ‘One of the main weaknesses of mankind is the average man’s familiarity with the word ‘impossible. He knows all the rules which will not work. He knows all the things which cannot be done.’

The following ad reminded about this saying. Although I don’t have any degree in Computer Science, and if I had one, I think, I would not apply for this job. Why? For several reasons:

• extremely talented
• Able to do something in one-third the time that most competent people think possible
• Relocate to Seattle area

So these would be my words that describes ‘impossible’. If I were extremely talented and very quick at what I do, I would seek a job in big companies. Start-ups would look way too risky.

I wonder who was brave enough to apply for this job. And how his life changed when he realized that he’s a millionaire?

So coming back to opportunities. Sometimes we have to take a closer look to things that surrounds us. There are so many people full with ideas. Sometimes these ideas are just crazy, but sometimes that crazy idea might turn into the next Amazon.com.

Oh, by the way, Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is the founder, president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Amazon.com. He is listed as one of the world’s wealthiest people: 2008 – $8.2 billion, no. 110

“It’s funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they assume it’s time to go out and get a job. But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In fact, if you’re reasonably intelligent, getting a job is one of the worst things you can do to support yourself. There are far better ways to make a living than selling yourself into indentured servitude.” Steve Pavlina once wrote in his blog and I couldn‘t agree more.

So what makes me think that getting a job is stupid idea?

Firstly, there’s one question that bothers me every time I go to job interview. While I’m sitting all sweating in front of HR trying to show the best I got, one simple question just keeps popping to my mind: why should I work for somebody else? Why should I try to make someone else rich or even richer?

Sure you might say, we all have bills to pay and setting up a business takes just too much time and it’s way too risky after all. Trading our time for money and being simple employee is much safer way to make money. But hey, how many millionaires you know who became such working for somebody else? They all earned their fortunes working for themselves. Furthermore they are making money 24/7 while most of us are getting paid only for working hours. So have you really never considered that it might be better to be paid even when you’re not working?

What if you got paid while you were eating, sleeping, and playing with the kids? What if you got paid whether you work or not? Don’t your plants grow even when you aren’t tending to them? Why not your bank account?

I’m not telling you to quit your job. Don’t get me wrong. All I’m saying is, that there are other ways to make money. And the best way to make money is to set up your own money making system. It might be a business, a blog, stocks or whatever you can make money from. Smart people build systems that generate income 24/7. We started a blog. Why cannot you?

To be honest with you, this blog is about making money. And we are trying to reach our dreams. And, you know, it’s not that important if we’ll make one million dollars in two years, the most important thing is – we started doing something. Most people are too afraid to start from the very beginning. But in my opinion, there is nothing to be scared of, most of us is just too lazy.

Ok, it takes some upfront time and effort to implement your own money making systems. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel — feel free to use existing systems like ad networks, affiliate programs or even Ebay. Once you get going, you won’t have to work so many hours to support yourself.

Nobody is born knowing how to start a business or generate income from investments, but, you can easily learn it. With the age of the internet came new opportunities and it would be silly not to take advantage of them. So in the end, I would like to wish best luck for all of you creating and implementing your own money making systems.

So in this post I will cover these topics:

• What is DoFollow and NoFollow?
• Why this is important?
• DoFollow search engines.
• Wordpress plugin: CommentLuv

What is DoFollow and NoFollow?

If you did some research on link building, when you’ve probably seen people mentioning “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. These are very important terms to understand when you are trying to build great links back to your site in order to increase your search engine rankings. But, to the person who is new to all this (as I was couple days ago) it may seem a bit confusing. No worries, I am going to break it down for you.

When you create a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code is:

<a href=http://themilliondollarplan.net>The Million Dollar Plan</a>

It includes the HTML tag, the URL the link will be going to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.

It is possible to add more HTML to the code above, to let the search engine spiders know whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website. You may be thinking… “Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site?” This is a very valid concern, which I will address further down. First, I am going to show you how to modify the HTML in order to tell the search engine spiders to crawl a link or not.

• To make search engine spiders crawl a link you don’t have to do anything. Simply use the link format shown above.
• To tell search engine spiders to NOT crawl a link, you need to add following HTML code:

  rel=”nofollow”.

  So the link code then would look like this:

  <a href=”http://themilliondollarplan.net” rel=”nofollow”>The Million Dollar Plan</a>

As you can see there is no true “dofollow”, it is just NOT using the “nofollow” tag.

Why this is important?

When you are using different methods in order to build links on other websites, you need to determine if the websites you are attempting to get your site listed on use the “nofollow” tag or not. If they do, it may still be a good idea to try to get that link there, but it is generally regarded as not the best use of time since the search engines don’t follow that link and you don’t get any increase in search engine rankings from that link.

Why would I use “nofollow”?

There are many reasons you would want to use the “nofollow” tag, such as:

1) Paid Links: This is recommended by Google. If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. They don’t like that.

2) Blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic). It is up to you if you want your commentators to get link back to their site. It is personal preference.

3) When linking to major, very popular sites. If you are linking to google.com, yahoo.com, digg.com (the front page), cnn.com, or whoever else, they are already popular, so you might as well use “nofollow” since your link won’t make or break them.

DoFollow search engines

Now when we all know that DoFollow really matters if we want to increase search engine rankings, the question is: what’s the easiest way to find these blogs? Sure we could simply look into source code and search for “nofollow”, but it’s not very productive. Luckily there are search engines available which make this process very easy. So here is some search engines and DoFollow Lists I’ve found:

DoFollowDiver

D-List

DoFollow, CommentLuv, KeywordLuv Blog List

DoFollow Searcher Tool

DoFollow List

Wordpress plugins: CommentLuv

DoFollow backlink is a great reward for a valuable comment because it helps improve the search engine position. But the comment allows a reader have only one backlink and this link may have the commentator’s name or nickname as the anchor text that doesn’t mean much for search engines.

So why not to reward the comment author with an extra link with more relevant keywords in the anchor text? This is an excellent way to promote the readers’ websites and this can be done automatically with the use of a particular plug-in. And that plugin is CommentLuv. The CommentLuv is a plugin for WordPress that will visit the RSS feed of the blog address the reader provided in the URL field, attempt to find the last post the reader made and display it under the comment giving the reader a great internal backlink to his/her website.

Example:

Now many WordPress blogs are applying the CommentLuv plugin. The bloggers understand that it gives the readers an extra incentive to leave a comment, encourages people to add to the conversation by giving something back right away.

How to search for blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin

You may be wondering how to find relevant blogs with the CommentLuv plugin enabled on which to comment on. The answer is simple – use Fast Blog Finder or Google and type the search query like below replacing “your keywords” with your real keywords:

"Enable CommentLuv" +"your keywords"

By adding your keywords at the end of the search query, you will reduce the large quantity of blogs to blogs relevant to your niche. You can also use some of these search options to narrow and refine your search results.

For example, if I want to find the blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin and are relevant to the “Online marketing” keywords, simply type in:

"Enable CommentLuv" +"Online marketing"

Keep in mind that not all blogs you will find in google will be “Dofollow”. You’ll have to double check for that.

Summarizing all this, it has to be said that using “DoFollow” and CommentLuv is a great way to increase blog trafic and search engine page rank. Help others and they will help you.

2. SEO Friendly Images - Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images.
Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as
well.

3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - gives a list of the related posts based on keyword matches, limited
by a certain relatedness threshold. Like the tried and true Related
Posts plugins—just better! By using this plugin you can make your visitors stay longer on your blog and drill deeper for your content.

4. WordPress Database Backup - the name says it all, must have! We’ve already been hacked by some bad people, so we understand the need of this plugin very well.

5. Sociable - automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites. Very good for increasing traffic.

6. Subscribe To Comments - blog readers can receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

7. Akismet - best anti-spam protection for your blog.

8. Google XML Sitemaps - this plugin can potentially help you include a higher proportion of your pages in the index and enables you to notify Google of changes, although Google makes no guarantees in this respect.

9. cforms - create a “contact me” page and let your readers contact you directly .

+10. All in One SEO Pack - very nice plugin that does all kind of good seo things for your blog automatically. Optimizes titles, generates METAtags (descriptions and keywords) for every post in your blog, avoids duplicate conent.  (updated:May 14 2008)

In order to work more efficiently and grow faster as a blog we are going to set plans for each month. At the begining of the month we set a plan, at the end of the month we post results.

Doing that will not only help us stay concentrated and effective but it will also let you use our experience for yourself. See what works best for us and use it yourself.

Ok, there is our Plan #1:

———————–

1. Create a Logo, header image and fav icon

2. Research our keywords

3. Write a description about our blog (for metatags, technorati, web-directories and etc.)

4. Submit our blog to web-directories

5. Start commenting other blogs

———————–

This plan is simple and involves things that are must-do for every blogger. At the end of the month we gonna post the results.

We are excluding Slide.com from the overview because, nevertheless it was originally formed to make photo sharing software for social networking services such as MySpace, but the company achieved its greatest success as the largest developer of third-party applications for Facebook. Kodak Gallery was one of the industry pioneers but sadly it is being beaten by its competitors.

Launch date: 2003

Status: Acquired by Fox Interactive Media (owner of MySpace) on 5/07 for $300M¹

Users: 41 millions (2007 April comScore)

Unique visitors: 19.0 million U.S and 30.0 million uniques / month worldwide (source: April 2007, comScore.)

Photobucket is a personal media hosting service . Members can choose from free or paid plans to store and share their images and videos. Their main revenue streams are through premium accounts and advertising.

Photobucket had not structured itself as a destination site, their main channel of growth was through social networking sites like MySpace.

Photobucket leads the photo sharing market with a whopping 43.5% share (~7 times more than its nearest competitor Flickr)

Launch date: February 2004

Status: Acquired by Yahoo! on 3/05 for $35M
Former game designers Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake created Flickr, an online photo sharing network, in 2004. Flickr, which began as a photo-sharing feature of their gaming project, has since then blossomed into one of the premier photo-sharing sites on the web. Yahoo! purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005.

In June of 2007, Yahoo! Photos began to close, and users are being encouraged to join Flickr. Yahoo! began including Flickr images in Yahoo! Image Search. Yahoo! Image Search was the leading source of traffic to Flickr, accounting for nearly 18% of its upstream visits. These efforts have resulted in an increase in Flickr’s US market share of 38% in 7/7/07 vs. 6/9/07. Flickr is now the #2 photography website in the US, with 6.42% of category visits for the week ending 7/7/07. Photobucket is still way ahead from Flickr with an outstanding 43.52% market share.

Some news: On April 8, 2008 Flickr Video was launched which allows pro users to upload videos with a max length of 90 seconds and max size of 150mb.Videos are displayed alongside photos on the site and can be embedded elsewhere on the net with a cleanly designed player.

1. Sitting too close to the television will hurt your eyes
False. There is no evidence that sitting close to the television will damage
your eyes. Eyes may become tired from sitting too close for long
periods, if the light in the room is too dim, or if the picture screen
is out of focus.

2. Reading in dim light can damage your eyes
False.Reading in dim light can cause eye fatigue, but it will not hurt your eyes.

3. Eating carrots will improve your vision
False. While it is true that carrots are high in Vitamin A, which is an
essential vitamin for sight, only a small amount is necessary for good
vision.

4. Eye exercises will improve your vision
False. Eye exercises will not improve your vision. This myth has made
many people wealthy. Rolling your eyes around has no effect on your vision.

5.You can wear your eyes out by using them too much
False. You cannot wear your eyes out by using them. Cutting down on
reading or close work, will not help or harm your eyesight.

1. YouTube

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the leader in online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.

• Google bought YouTube for $1.65B even though it was not yet earning a profit.

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2. Google Videos

This video sharing network features an unlimited time frame to upload the videos, which sometimes creates problems since full movies may be uploaded, which causes thorny copyright problems . However, Google also continues to improve this by monitoring the content of the videos. There are also videos for sale in the website for a minimal fee, and some videos can be downloaded for free with specific software that can only be provided by Google.

3. MetaCafe

Metacafe is similar to other top video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but with several key differences. Core differentiators include duplication elimination, Adult content filtering, an 80,000 community member reviewer panel, VideoRank™, and Producer Rewards™. Its VideoRank™ system gauges viewer reactions to videos in order to feature those that prove most popular to its viewers. Additionally, Metacafe pays video creators for original work that has exceeded a certain threshold of both total views and VideoRank score through its Producer Rewards™ Program.

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4. DailyMotion

Dailymotion is a social video site based out of Paris that offers a mix of both amateur and professional content. They are differentiating their site by offering a mix of professional content, contextual advertising, and paying top content producers (companies or individuals) through their MotionMaker program. Dailymotion offers a healthy mix of individual videos, channels and groups that can be viewed by popularity, most recent, most views and most rated.

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5. Veoh

Veoh is a Web site that’s headed for your TV. It’s also the name for a suite of applications for collecting, publishing, and watching a vast selection of HD-quality video programming. Veoh is a diverse, virtual community of indie publishers coming together with their new audiences. And it’s also a few offices in Southern California full of entertainment industry insiders, outsiders, and technologists.

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[via CrunchBase]

(screenshot taken on April 20, 2008)

Ok I know that it is number 10, but it is in the first page, and this is awesome! As you noticed it’s Lithuanian website, but the same rules for making google rankings apply even in Eastern Europe.

So how did I make it from the measly 6-7th page to the top? The answer is SEO (search engine optimization) of course. Ok let’s split everything to a 3 step instruction.

1. Getting links from other websites. It is #1 thing every webmaster should do. Links from other sites are the main ranking boosters. I submitted my website url to as many internet categories as possible. To small and big websites about videography, to free advertisement pages. Since i have guitar message board I put it on my signature. I even put a small and unnoticeable link in this blog right bottom corner. It doesn’t matter if people ever click on these links, because google consider a website more valuable when it has greater amount of links to it.

2. Research your major keywords and optimize your content. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and do a research. Often it is very hard to compete with others using one word keywords such as “money” “blog”, so instead of doing that find phrases. What I did is I found two phrases which I believe are most searchable and suitable for my content, it’s “filmavimo paslaugos” (”video shooting services” in English) and “vestuviu filmavimas” (”wedding shooting” in Engl.). Then I optimized an article about our services by adding main keyword in the first and last paragraphs as you see in the picture. The second paragraph has less important keywords. Moreover I optimized url address, naming it “main_keyword.html”, and I got an instant better rankings by doing so. I didn’t add my second keyword “vestuviu filmavimas” in the main article because my video business is oriented towards making commercials so wedding videography can really put off my potential customers. I put this keyword phrase in a deeper place of my website.

3. Monitoring your ranking status. I believe there are 2 must have things:
a) google webmaster tools - there you will see what keywords brings most of the traffic and how you rank in google search with certain keywords.
b) google analytics - for very in depth statistics.

Using these tools you will be able to track what helps you increase traffic and rankings, who links to you, the amount of unique visitors and many more things. Pay attention which keywords bring you the biggest traffic because it may appear that they are absolutely different from what you thought at first and maybe you should work stronger on those new keywords.

This is my personal experience I hope it will help you. What is yours?

P.S. my second keyword phrase “vestuviu filmavimas” ranks only in the second google page. It is what I’m working on right now, not bad, because it was on the 6-7 page 2 months ago.