I had the good fortune of meeting a man named Frank Segura recently.  He is the SEO man behind AffordableRanking.com and we have been discussing traffic building techniques.  I wanted to bring him to your attention because here is a company that charges the unbelievably cheap price of $20 per month (19.95, actually) for web promotion services.

Affordable Ranking CEO Frank Segura

Ordinarily, I would not mention something like this on my personal blog, but I know many of my readers have their own websites, and I think this is something that should be jumped on, by anyone looking for more traffic to their blog or site.  Frank’s team works very hard to get better Search Engine placement for each of their clients, using some of the smartest techniques, Web 2.0 sites, content creation, and the biggest piece in the puzzle, Link Building.

Okay, okay, you say big deal… Lots of companies offer services like this, right?

Not like Frank does!  Most companies will charge you $50 to $500 per month for multiple keywords.  Frank targets 3 different keyword phrases to build links to your site and only charges a fraction of what the competition charges.  And the links that you will be getting to your site are pretty cool.  They will even create one video per month, as long as you are a subcriber, and upload this promotional video to YouTube, and this will be one of your links back to your site.  For most of us, we don’t have time to create videos and upload them to YouTube, but for the measely price of $20/month, you get one made for you as part of Frank’s package.

So if you have any desire at all to get more visitors, please give this company a chance, and tell him that Chris the Webovator recommended AffordableRanking.com — you won’t be disappointed!

To follow Frank on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook, use these links:

@SEOfranks

Affordable Ranking – Facebook page

My brother Chad at the Independent Short Film blog sent me a link to the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur’s article about the 3 types of clients:

1. Paying Clients

2. No Clients

I will let you go to his blog if you want to read the descriptions on the previous two; what I liked was the part about type 3:

3. Non-Paying Clients – Funny enough these are usually the most heralded clients, yet they can destroy a business. They often come with big ticket demands, and then never pay for the services rendered. It results in a double whammy. First you incur costs to deliver goods and services, then you don’t get paid. Do you see now? No Clients cost you a lot less than a Non-Paying Client.

The key to avoiding these black holes is looking at every prospects history. Yes you can request referrals about a prospective client… I mean they are asking you for referrals after all. (End quote)

The reason I decided to talk about this article today is because in the web design / development / SEO industry, we see this all the time.  I myself have run into plenty of clients who are not willing to pay.  They want to speak over the phone for hours before even committing to hiring you, or they do hire you, and after the work is finished, try to back out on the deal.  In fact, I had a client disappear off the map completely about two weeks ago, after I sent him the code for his site, and I am still waiting for him to respond to all of the IM’s, emails, and phone calls.  Fortunately, this was on a small project and I will be better off forgetting about him than to try to rank higher than him on Google for his keywords (Riley Heating and Air, Upper Marlboro, MD) and telling people about how he was a non-paying client, dishonest, etc.  I left him a message saying, it’s fine if you cannot pay.  Just contact me so that I can send you the rest of the files, that way it’s not a COMPLETE waste of my time, at least SOMEONE will get some use out of the time I invested for you.  No answer.

So the reason I bring this up is that I like the point made here in the article:  Get references from your clients, to make sure they have not cheated other web service providers in the past.  By not wasting time on clients like this, you will be richer in the long run.  It pays to be selective.  So why do we, as service providers, not naturally ask them to reciprocate?  If we must prove ourselves before being hired, why should a client not prove himself before we take on his project?

If you agree with this line of thought then you might like my previous blog entry, from several months ago, “7 Words That Changed My Life…“

Found this while doing a search for SEO and hiphop. Pure gold, he raps about link building and getting indexed by the search engines, along with design and coding, social media, etc. Check out his channel and subscribe, he’s gonna be famous someday.

You create a new site and its content heavy,
With the right amount of pictures you believe it’s ready,
So you launch it trying to put money in da bank,
But when you search and try to find yourself, you can’t,
So you thank until your mind goes blank,
Got titles and headers but no page rank,
Sooner or later it will show if I wait,
In the meantime make sure my code validate,
And it do,
Hmm, now what I’m supposed to do,
Add meta information and alt tags too,
Still don’t get listing,
Something must be missing,
Brad and Chuck recommended doing link building,
So you start hunting down sites like a predator,
Doing back links on all your competitors,
Whoever linking to them need to link to me,
Is it free, do we swap, or do I pay a fee,
Well take it from us, before you take that step,
Some things about the site that you might want to check,
Did they use a link farm or some dirty tactics,
Could have a bad effect on your site that’s drastic,
Could’ve link baited, look at what they created,
Compare it to yours, is it even related,
Take the time, go inspect and see,
Take advantage of paid directories,
If you follow all the steps with a little bit of patience,
Get links from relevant sites that are favorites,
Update your content on the regular basis,
I’m confident you’ll make it to first page placement

This entry is from an email conversation that I was having with Kim Kolb, at the High Touch blog, Filter The Noise. I thought I would re-post it here, because it might be of some use to some of my readers. (If not, feel free to throw tomatoes at me in the comments area).

Kim says that inbound marketing relates to creating content on a niche topic, putting blogs and articles up on that topic, using organic SEO to get traffic, rather than blasting your link out with emails or tweets to people who are not interested anyways.  Sound familiar, 30 Day Challengers?  This is the same stuff we are talking about on the Team Rockstar group…  anyways, here was my response.

“Conversation marketing is basically marketing to people by building relationships with them instead of bombarding them with links and sales pitches. A lot of this relates to blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and actually becoming friends with people (although this point in itself is controversial, because many relationship marketing experts say you are NOT trying to become friends with people, you are trying to learn about them so that you can figure out what their interests and buying habits are, and then sell what they are interested in).

But with all the social sites and blogs working together synergetically to build your reputation, the goal is to be the first one people think of, so that when one of their other friends on facebook for example posts something that says, “Does anyone know a good ___________ service? Then their friends will jump in and say “Yeah my friend SO and SO does that, here is her website”.

This is the type of marketing that interests me. It is one reason the world of SEO is changing. I believe in 5 years Google won’t have a stranglehold on the markets anymore, but instead people will buy based on recommendations from their friends in the social media sphere.

Inbound linking is still a very necessary strategy. SEO, blogging, and bookmarking are all still good strategies to use to build traffic. But the two halves ideally will work together to create a cohesive, strong campaign that works well over the long term.”

Social Media Butterflies:  What is YOUR favorite site/tool?  I want to know, so leave a comment, with your vote.

Taken from http://firefoxsuck.blogspot.com/

I have been having all types of problems with Firefox 3 lately.  When I go to shut it down, sometimes it takes more than a minute to completely close out the process, so it prevents me from re-opening the browser unless I open up the Task Manager and manually kill the process.  This is annoying enough, but recently, I have noticed something even worse:

Firefox has been eating up all of my memory!  I look at the sidebar widget on my desktop and notice that memory usage has been going all the way up to 99%, and this causes all my other applications to freeze up: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Excel, Combat Arms, TweetDeck, you name it.

I found a couple of solutions that should come in handy, bearing in mind that the #30DC recommended browser this year is Firefox, not Flock.  This link describes how to minimize your memory usage, and set the disk cache size, as well as direct memory usage to be reduced upon minimizing your window. To do this you will open a new tab and type in “about:config” and follow the instructions at the above link to make your computer run better when using Firefox.

Another fix that I implemented today was getting rid of the Google Toolbar, which was only useful to me for the PageRank indicator (which is inaccurate, and redundant since my other SEO add-ons will already give me this information). To do this, you can’t just remove the Google toolbar by unselecting it under the View menu, but instead you must actually go into Tools -> Addons and disable it (then restart Firefox).

Finally, I noticed that I was no longer able to use CTRL+T to open a new tab, NEITHER was I able to open a new tab by selecting File -> New Tab.  This is extremely annoying, since I usually have between 10 and 20 tabs open at any given time.  The solution?  Disable the AVG Free toolbar (which is forced upon you each time you install/update AVG Free.  I love AVG, I have not ever had a problem with a virus since I started using it three years ago (NORTON SUCKS!) but the toolbar is unnecessary and annoying.