For those who are not sure what I mean by a scraper, it is someone who steals your content without giving you credit for your work. They typically put Adsense all over their pages, and use your RSS feed as the mechanism to get your content. I have found many “mirror” sites of my content all over the place, these sites don’t usually have a long shelf life, but they are very annoying.

I have found some interesting ways to find sites that scrape your content, and then republish it as their own.

1. Include links to your own site inside the post, thus when they republish the content you end up with a link back from their site to your content, which is funny. Watch your comments for these links and then I then usually leave a friendly comment about how if they keeps stealing my content I’ll come over and pound sand up their tuchoses, or something friendly like that. What is even funnier is sometimes they scrape Carnivals as well, so I end up with more links from these “Cloned Carnivals” as well.
2. Insert your own advertising inside of your RSS feed, most of these sites are automated, so they will then including the advertising in their feed as well, so you end up advertising your own site on their site.
3. Search for posts you have done in the past and see if there are the exact same posts elsewhere on BING or GOOGLE, that seems obvious, but you would be surprised how many of my own articles appear before their cloned post on my site! Very annoying.
4. Include header HTML comments and other tags like that, it makes your content that much easier to find. Most of my own posts have a copyright marking on the top pointing out who really owns the content. If the scraper doesn’t notice, it’s easy to find your cloned content this way as well.

Are there other ways to catch scrapers, or better still stop the parasites from stealing content? Some useful JavaScript bombs to include in code? I am open to suggestions.

All in One SEO Activated

I have had more than one of my readers suggest I use this tool, so I turned it on here, and it seemed to help this humble jumble of words get a huge spike, so I have now added it to THE Canadian Personal Finance Blog as well, to see if it can help out there as well. Thanks good readers, and keep suggesting!

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I have been trying out some new ideas, just to see if I can break out of the earning shell I seem to be in. While my readership is up, it still is not as high as I’d like, and my income level seems quite stagnant as well, so with that I have tried a few things and we shall see how it goes:

1. Using Twitter as a way to steer readers to my site. Every new post is associated with a tweet now using Wordtwit, and that seems to help send folks to my site a bit more (for some odd reason I have over 150 followers).
2. I have added a ReTweet badge on all my posts, which is from TweetMeMe, and that is interesting, but has not caused to many retweets as of yet.
3. Found SocialOomph, which allows me to set up timed Tweets, which then allows me to post a lot of my older content, and see if I can drive some traffic to some of those old Dogs as well. Haven’t seen too much reaction here either, but it is early in the game.
4. Turned commenting back on, for these older sites to see if we can start up some discussions there. Just means I have more Spam to watch for, Akismet should catch most of that.
5. Put Amazon back on the web site to see if we can figure out how to make some extra cash there. Seem to have enough traffic now that Amazon gives me some extra money every month.
6. Bought WPTouch Pro, very worthwhile, need to figure out how to drive iPod/iPhone traffic, but I really like that interface.

Finally need to find, build, or buy a new Theme for the site. It really does look dingy.

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After the fiasco that was my attempt at hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance (although that post is one of the most popular I have ever had), I ran into yet another interesting whine from one of the many posters who I included in the overly long post (this was found in Stumbleupon):

Host left out a large number of articles from a large number of excellent personal finance bloggers for no apparent reason. Not good carnival etiquette.

This is what I really have problems with in the whole Carnival world, just because you send in a post, why do you think it should be included? Especially if there are over 100 posts to choose from? Most of the larger carnivals I have seen (and stopped reading) are just so bloody long, I gave up reading them (unless they had an “editors choice” at the starting, where I read those 5 and ignored the rest). Witness this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance #202, at least it has an Editor’s choice box so I can ignore the rest of the over 100 entries.

This is why writers ridicule bloggers so much, the whole “… we should be inclusive…” mentality of, just because I wrote it someone must want to read it (this post included) is lazy, and will never make you a better writer.

I had 1 or two queries which were by normal writers who simply asked why, so that they could hone their skills, but the deluge of whining and complaining drowned out these writers. Why anyone wants to host a Carnival these days is beyond me.

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I had forgotten that I had volunteered to host the Carnival of Personal Finance, this past weekend, so when I got the e-mail from the Carnival owner I was surprised and a little panic’ed as well. 

I had written a posting already for Monday talking about Family Day in Ontario, and after taking a few minutes to think I came up with the concept of writing this week’s CPF in a Family Advice format. Thus was born:

Carnival Of Personal Finance #192: The Family Day Edition

I always valued advice from my family and from what I had heard from other folks there was always an inherent value in advice from different members of your family, so I went with that.

I looked at how many entries had been submitted for the Carnival (it is a weekly Carnival) and there was almost 100 of them, which again made me go Holy Crap (just reading all of this was going to take a while).

The Carnival itself has a set of rules for posting to the Carnival which helped trim out some of the entries up front (I’d say about 10-20%). Some posts you would tell were simply “factory” posts from sites that pump out content with very little personal input.

I started trimming and was looking for specific personal finance/family type posts which started knocking out a lot of entries, and finally I ended up with about 30 entries that I was going to use. I managed to write it in a reasonable (if rushed) format and managed to add a few pictures from the Ontario Government’s Family Day web site as well.

Backlash

Normally when I have submitted to Carnivals and not been included, I have simply gone, “Oh well…”, and moved on, but evidently that is not the “norm” when it comes to other Financial Bloggers.

One sent me a “short” note asking why I didn’t include the post, and I have been receiving “snippy” comments as well from other bloggers about my edit’ing techniques.

I didn’t want to simply publish a “here is a list of interesting posts” Carnival (I do that enough on Fridays, and frankly it is a very lazy blogging trick), I wanted it to make sense and be concise (so that someone might actually go through all the posts, not just the first few).

The Day After

Not sure what hosting this Carnival will do for my site. It didn’t really increase my traffic that much (it was a good day, but not the best day).  Hopefully I have picked up a few more readers and maybe picked up a few more incoming links, we shall see.

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SEO Bible from Amazon

SEO Bible by Jerri L. Ledford

(ISBN: 978-0-470-17500-2) As usual I have not purchased this book, I have, however, borrowed it from the Ottawa Public Library.

This is an excellent book for those who are beginners in the “Mug’s Game” of Search Engine Optimization.(SEO) It explains what the basic concepts of SEO are, and why they are important if you are trying to make money on the web.

The book starts sensibly talking about how you need a plan for how you are going to use SEO on your site (know what you want to achieve so you know whether you have succeeded or not). A good point made is that if you are going to do this, you should use Google Analytics to collect data (again, you need data to know whether you are succeeding or not).

The book then dives into different SEO techniques like the use of META tags on your site to get Search Engine Robots to find your site and be able to classify it, correctly. If you do a “View Page Source” on this page you’ll see which meta tags I have set up for this site too. The key to SEO is the use of Keywords, and the rest of the book outlines well how to get Search Engines to associate Keywords with your web site, and how to get your rank for that Keyword up the list (appearing on Page 10 on Google isn’t your goal).

Very good learning points about Keyword densities (don’t use them too little OR too much), and what techniques you should be using in a Pay Per Click (PPC) environment as well. Their explanation of PPC is useful for “newbies” as well, I learned 1 or 2 things I didn’t know as well. I skipped the section on Advertising keywords, since I was not very interested in that section (yet), but it seems quite detailed on tactics in that area as well.

Content is king, is my credo and the book outlines the importance of not simply putting out a bunch of retread information or some hack-kneed old information, you need to be interesting and fresh to attract and KEEP readers (don’t just do book reviews, as an example, unless your site is a book review site).

The books sections on Links and Robots is again very illustrative and important to understand if you want to play the SEO game. This site for example has very incoming links and whereas my financial site have hundreds of links in which helps it keep it’s popularity. How to deal with Robots is also quite important and the explanations in the book are very helpful. The author’s warnings about SEO SPAM should be heeded, unless you want to be a Black Hat SEO person (i.e. a bad guy).

Analysis of the data after you have implemented your plan is your final goal and deciding whether you have succeeded (and how you might change your plan to create more success), concludes the books content.

Rating:

I always feel that if I get three new ideas from any content it is of value, and I view this book as a useful resource and a good read. I will not be buying it, as I have already noted from it what I want to use, but I would recommend this book if you are starting out in the SEO game.

Good read!

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I got approached by the folks over at Wikinvest a while ago to add them to Canadian Personal Finance Opinions and I wasn’t sure it was a good fit, but I decided to go ahead with the system anyhow, and boy am I glad I did. The amount of new traffic and also new links has given me 20% growth in my readership and it continues to grow. I have also been able to integrate their embedded graphics stuff to show off financial numbers as well, so it is very useful to me, and I would highly recommend using them if you are a Financial site.

I have been having a great deal of problems with Dreamhost this week , my server crashed twice and put my site(s) off line for over 6 hours during peek times for me. I have complained to Dreamhost, but I think I will be more formal when (and if) I decide to re-subscribed with them for the new year.

I have also been fiddling with my side advertising blocks to see if I can generate any kind of income from them, because right now, I have made Zero from them, and am starting to think that this is just a “fool’s game” when it comes to this kind of advertising.

Finally Kontera really upset me when I saw that their links are appearing on this site, however, they are not giving me any credit for it I have sent them a fairly nasty note asking what the problem is, since I have copied their code into this site’s template, and since the links are showing up the problem is most likely at their end (and they are not counting). Stay tuned, those links may disappear soon as well (since I am making pretty much nothing from them as well).

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This site has had a busy week with a tremendous day of over 300 hits on Sunday for no apparent reason, which is interesting, if not confusing. If I am to believe the statistics I have seen this is an interesting trend, but more likely than not an attack from a “scraper” or something like that. 

On the advertising front, Bidvertising will be bidding a fond adieu from my sites, as it has earned me next to nothing even with large page impression numbers, and as I have learned, no point in flogging a dead horse when it comes to advertising, move on to the next idea. I am adding more Market Leverage sponsors in my rotators to see if there is interest from my readers, but we shall see (on this site).

As for the Canadian Personal Finance web site, I feel a complete refurbish of that site coming soon as well, given the only thing that is paying for that site is Adsense.

This site continues to not be listed normally in Google as well, I must figure out what is going on there as well. More interesting articles from my past coming too, as I clean out my archives.

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How To Build Traffic

I have learned about the Digg Effect from John Chow and his initial success posting about pop up urinals in Vancouver (I am not making that story up), however in the Ottawa Financial Community there is one member who if he mentions you on his site, the traffic increase is amazing, and that is the Canadian Capitalist.

I’d like to dub this traffic increase, “The Capitalist Effect“. I discussed this with Michael James on Money and he has noticed the exact same thing as well. The red circle reflects the day he mentioned my “So I should Divorce my Wife” post, in his This and That #102 .

Canadian Capitalist Effect

The same thing happened to this site, when I added a Comment to John Chow’s monthly gloating about how much money he makes about the paltry sum that I make, so Traffic comes from being known by the “Big Boys”, and sometimes even the “Intermediate Guys” too!

As a courtesy, here are ALL the member of the National Capital Financial Bloggers Association:

N.C.F.B.A.

• Canadian Capitalist
• Canadian Money Blog Reviews
• Dividends Matter
• Investment Jungle
• Larry McDonald’s Investment Ideas
• Michael James on Money
• Not Getting Rich Quick

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Back to trying to build traffic to both of the sites by submitting articles to Carnivals to see if we can build up readership and pass through rates here and at Canadian Financial Opinions. Mentioned at Business On Line and on Canadian Capitalist’s This and That #100 posts and both of those should help send more traffic through the finance site as well.

This site’s development continues as well, with experiments being done with community work and publishing posts in Facebook and such. My guess is my Facebook community is not large enough to add much extra traffic, but it’s a place to think about getting more traffic from.

Still no crawl of the site by any of the major search engines Yahoo, Google and MSN even though the site was added to their indexes, but this might take time as well.  My comment on John Chow drove a fair amount of traffic to this site, but still no search engine traffic at all.

Will post traffic pattern graphs later today or tomorrow. Have a great weekend all.

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In an attempt to infuse a little more life into this sad blog I have joined BlogRush to see whether it helps drive as many readers to me as they claim. Will this work? We shall see.

I will watch my stats to verify any claims, I am willing to try new things if need be.

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