Let Alltop help you promote your blog

Photo by Catherine

I found an interesting place to promote your blog. I was reading their FAQ and it said:

Q. Some of my favorite sites are not included, how do I get you to add them?
A. Please send us an email, and we’ll consider them. Please note: if your favorite sites don’t provide an RSS feed, we cannot import their stories.

So I sent them an email with three of my blogs, and the very next morning they had all three listed at moms.alltop.com, displaying my five latest stories titles, and fairly high up on their list too. I expected to have to start at the bottom.

Hungry for more blog to read? Well check out or new friends over at Alltop.com. Think of Alltop as a ‘dashboard’ that aggregates stories from all the top sites on the web and displays them on a single page.

Alltop sites bring you stories from topics that include career, small business, social media, venture capital, design, gadgets, gaming, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics and so much more!

Head over to Alltop’s main page and pick your interest.

Recent Keyword Searches: hits for key word searches, keyword hits, keyword search, average hits, how to change the title of blogger hack, blogspot backlinks, shoestring marketing, backlink builder tool, marketing shoestring, marketing add url, marketing on a shoe string

Looking for High-Dollar Keywords?

Photo by Catherine
I just found a handy little tool - Free Google Adsense Keywords & YPN Keywords Search Tool! Check it out -

Iotaweb.org offers free Google Adsense keywords and Yahoo Publisher's Network (YPN) Keywords. With the ability to search a growing database of tens of thousands of high-dollar Adsense keywords, Iotaweb allows publishers to find the keywords and key phrases that will allow them to focus their content to monetize their site most effectively.

They say the prices fluctuate constantly, but I tried putting my some of my keywords just to see how it worked.

Adsense came back at $ 21.64!
Blogger had no value.
Blogger Hacks had no value.
Earnings came back with "Earnings Conference Call" for $3.30.
Keywords had no value.
Marketing came back with a wholelist of words, such as
Direct Marketing Software - $12.17
Email Marketing - $11.40
Email Marketing Software - $10.25
Keyword Marketing - $8.15
SEO tools had no value, but SEO was $1.88.

Recent Keyword Searches: marketing add url, marketing on a shoe string, shoestring marketing, average hits of keywords, page views earnings,post rating widget blogger, backlink widget, the best today's earning in adsense, blogger hack meta description posts, # 1 on google

Page 1 on Google in 22 days!

I am sure, like me, you receive those emails about how they will help get your site to the top of page 1 on Google, for just a small fee. I have seen anywhere from $100 to $4,500 quoted!

Be first on MSN, GOOGLE, YAHOO ..
"Without being seen first on the search engines, your site can be little more than a glorified business card"
"If you're seen first on the major search engines, chances are you're the one people will call first. It's that simple."

Once, when I had pnemonia, and my website host suddenly changed my URL (this was in my pre-domain days of borntolove.com) - I broke down, and paid someone $99 to get me re-listed quickly - or so I thought...

Didn't make one bit of difference! I was so angry. So, as soon as I got better, I went back to my slow but sure method of submitting my site individually myself to the various search engines and waiting. And yes, it worked well for me, as it always did.

So I created this Marketing on a Shoestring blog on January 3/08, more to keep track of my marketing efforts and blog hacks than anything else. I did nothing, spent nothing, to promote it.

On January 4th, I received my first comment! A few days later, Blogger Templates (gave me 199 hits so far) added my link to my Blogger Hack: Three Columns, Any Browser on their site. Every day I post a new post, they update my link!

Insight Of Nothingness offered free links to 50 blogs, and I was fortunate to get 4 of my blogs added on the list.

So I decided to list the Marketing blog, along with my other blogs at BlogCatalog.com (11 hits), Zimbo.com (2 hits), Sitehoppin.com (17 hits), MyBlogLog.com (2 hits), DotDashCreate.com (18 hits) and Bumpzee.com (0 hits). Added a stats counter from Statscounter.com.

Still hadn't gotten around to listing it on any of the search engines, it was still too new. So I thought the other day, I would just check for search engine hits on my Recent Keyword Activity page of StatsCounter. And discovered I actually already had 13 Google hits!

So I click on some of the links to see where I am at, and find the following:

Date______Name____________ Query_________
Jan 6 -- blogsearch.google.com -- link:http://dzrbenson.com/blog/
- My Recent Keyword Search Increases Hits article is on page 1, 2nd listing down!

Jan 12 -- www.google.com -- hack three
-- My Marketing on a Shoestring: Blogger Hack: Three Columns, Any Browser article is on page 1, 2nd listing down, AND the coveted indented second entry Marketing on a Shoestring : Marketing on a Shoestring underneath.

Jan 15 -- blogsearch.google.com -- blogged find better blogs
- My Recent Keyword Search Increases Hits article comes up as
"Results 1 - 1 of about 1 for blogged "find better blogs"."

Jan 18 -- www.google.co.uk -- dotdashcreate.com
- My Marketing on a Shoestring: 1/6/08 - 1/13/08 article comes up on page 1, 9th listing down.

Jan 23 -- www.google.com -- marketing tip white space
- My Marketing on a Shoestring article comes up on page 1, 3rd listing down.

No, not every listing made it to page 1, but 5 out of 13 isn't bad and none were further back then page 2.

Considering I still haven't spent much time (and absolutely NO money) promoting the blog, AND it's only 23 days old - I am impressed with my little blog!

Marketing Tip for 1/7/08

Finished adding my blogs to the Bumpeze site today, though I still need to go back and add widgets to a few of them. I figure I will wait till I update each blog's look. They offer to let you add a picture after you load each blog information, but there doesn't seem to be any way to connect the pictures to a blog. When you go to your dashboard, it says "screenshot not available yet".

Then I went and joined the Women Bloggers community that monawea suggested.

While I was checking on my blogs at BlogCatalog.com, I answered a few questions in the Women Bloggers discussion forum, hopefully making a few friends.

Making a typing error, when I was typing in Blogger.com, I ended up on Blogged.com (find better blogs), so I thought I would add my blogs there as well. So far, I am still waiting on a verification email, that hasn't arrived after a 2nd click. However, in the meantime, I am adding the blogs.

Better get to this one quick at Dotdashcreate.com:

Posted by ashleyford on the BlogCatalog discussion forum:
Everyone thats added their blogs on Dotdashcreate.com will get featured for Logged in users in the coming months, this will help to add to your readers and hits. Im also building a widget that will display random blogs on the homepage to help you all out with promotion.im closing the Submit your Blog form on the homepage shortly to non registered users so if you still haven't added your blog this is your last chance!

Marketing Tip for 1/6/08

Still struggling with the labels! Arrgh!

OK, today I came across a couple more sites in the BlogCatalog discussion forums, to list my blogs on.

1. Posted by keetsa : I just signed up for sitehoppin.com that brought me extra 500 visitors for the post I submitted. Check it out.

SiteHoppin' - Verb 1. - To go from one site to the next with a beer in your hand and get progressively more "happy" and enjoy interesting websites with a click of a button.

So I signed up and was able to list all of my blogs fairly easily. There doesn't seem to be any link back required. Each blog was given a Talk page

2. Posted by monawea : I started a Women Bloggers Group on Bumpzee a few months before this one. I though some of you might want to join the Bumpzee group as well. www.bumpzee.com/womenbloggers/

Welcome to BUMPzee.com ...read blogs, comment here or there, start new discussions, network with others.

So I went to start adding my blogs, which requires a fair-size widget to be placed on your blog. I am getting tired of cluttering up my blog with all these widgets, etc, but I placed it at the bottom of the blog. Seems a lot more tenedous to get my blogs listed. I only have one finished so far.

Then there was a Free Back Link post:

3. Posted by dzrbenson : I'm offering free back links from my blog, I feel like I should help the people that helped me start blogging. So if you want a free blog link dzrbenson.com/blog/?p=281 My site averages about 1000 - 1500 Unique visitors per day. So thats quite an opportunity to be noticed DzRBenson

He writes "Insight Of Nothingness "
Mental Rants and Raves - Where You Might Find Everything Or Nothing

So I figure why not? Couldn't decide which blog to offer, so I listed them all and told him to pick any of interest. Turns out his fiance is expecting a baby, so he generously gave me 4 links! Pretty generous when he was only offering 50 free links total!

Frustration, and a new report

A-r-g-h! You will have to excuse the "mess", but I have spent 3 days now trying to add labels to this blog, but Blogger keeps giving me error messages of a server problem. As soon as I get it working, I will report about how it went.

In the meantime, I came across a new report on the Mark Flavin Marketing blog that I thought might be interesting to read.

How To Make Money Blogging

Here’s a new report to show you how to get started blogging, how to get traffic to your blog & how to make money from it.
It’s written in a nice simple step by step format so if you already know the basics you can just skip along to another chapter.Click below to download it now.
How To Make Money Blogging<<--Download
Remember you are free to give away the reports to your list, subscribers, friends, family… anyone! but the content of the report cannot be changed.

Marketing Tip for 1/5/08

Found this little gadget on The Lactavist blog, and thought I would try it out.

I created a Swicki for this blog, to see how it works out. One of the advantages of starting this blog is that I can try things out here, before adding them to my blogs already earning money.

Eurekster, Inc. (http://www.eurekster.com/) is a pioneer and
leader in social search technologies. Its custom search portal and widget ("swicki") harness the knowledge, passion and behavior of online communities to improve the search experience, while creating online assets for web publishers
and infopreneurs.

Users can build and customize their search portal on any topic, and share and distribute the social search widget to grow a community of interested users. With every search, the swicki becomes more relevant and meaningful to the user community, and more valuable to the swicki builder.

Marketing Tip for 1/4/08

This morning I got a BlogCatalog broadcast from hobsdv: " We at the general marketing blog have just launched http://www.blurbblogdirectory.info Feel free to submit your blogs"

So I joined BlogBlurb Directory and added all my blogs. It was a fairly easy process, and my blogs were all approved quickly. But there doesn't seem to be any way to update or change your listing yet. Nor did they provide a proper link back.

Work for the future:
From FronTools: Social blogging networks are the best way to promote your blog for free, you just have to register.
http://www.bumpzee.com/, http://www.pijoo.com/, http://blogcave.com/, http://www.blogdune.com/, http://www.bloggingzoom.com/, http://www.bloggingbuzz/, http://www.cre8buzz.com/