I want to share one of those tips with you now.

For those of you that aren’t aware, or have been hiding under a rock during the entire Web 2.0 craze, the web has taken a sharp left turn from the traditional “content is king” approach.  I’m not saying that you don’t need good content, quite the opposite actually, but the truth is that your content means exactly nill unless you have people viewing it. 

For those of you that have been here a while, you know that I’m a huge advocate of social bookmarking and other web 2.0 sites to leverage visitors and authority for free.  The thing you might not know, is that this is my number one traffic and link building method.  I use web 2.0 sites almost exclusively, and have for several months with great results.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that organic traffic isn’t better, but this not only brings you traffic quickly, it also helps with your SEO and organic traffic building methods.

The key to survival in a web 2.0 era is linking.  Linkage data determines a lot more than just your PageRank these days, and it’s not something that you can live without, and be a profitable blogger.

As Jack Humphrey tells it, and I fully agree, when linked up properly to the right sites, you can survive and thrive without any help whatsoever from Google.  The key isn’t what you’ve heard all along about a powerful network of sites, and great interlinking schemes between them, although it would definitely help if you had a large enough infastructure to pull this off.  Now, you can get by without an infastructure, or at least without paying for one.  In days past, you had to buy domains, produce content, and build links so that you could build a powerful network in which you could pass juice back and forth at will.  Now, free services like Twitter, Squidoo, and Hubpages provide infastructure, and you do nothing more than provide the links.

I’m not going to dive into this completely all in one day because it’d be a small ebook, that just looked like a blog post.  But I will direct you to the holy grail of Web 2.0 knowledge - The Authority Blackbook.  This book was so amazing when it came out that had I known how awesome it was, I would have paid several hundred dollars for the knowledge, but it was free, and still is.  It’s since been updated a few times, and the information in it is still good, and current.  If you CAN’T afford to try Social Power Linking, at least get the basic overview by trying out this fantastic book.  You can download it for free from the link above.

The key here guys isn’t always building links to your own site.  You have to set up an infastructure, and you can do it by creating lenses at Squidoo, Hubpages, or one of the million wiki sites around the web.  The key is not only building links to your site, but building links to your infastructure, and then in turn linking them to your site.  It’s much easier to obtain a high ranking for a Squidoo lense than it is for a blog.  Squidoo is already an authoritative site, and it takes much less effort to catapult your keyword rich Squidoo lense onto the first page of Google.  I did this by creating three Squidoo lenses that basically created a monopoly on the term “blog flipping“.  One of these three lenses achieved a first page ranking in less than 9 hours!  It’s dropped a few pages since then, but I haven’t really done anything on my end to assure success either.  I should have been building links to my lense, and then linking solely to SiteFlipU.com with the anchor “blog flipping”.  The key is that you want high authority links going to your infastructure, and then your infastructure sites pointing to your blog.  You can read more about how I did thid by checking out the link above.

I’m not saying that you need to stop building links to your blog, but you need to diversify.  Remember, some pages hold juice almost automatically, and it’s easier to build them up than your own site.  If you need more proof, check Google for the term “blog flipping”.  As of writing this post, I make up (directly or indirectly) 5 pages of the top 10 for this term, and there are over 35,000,000 results!  My blog is ranked #2 and #3 for the term, and if you look below, several of the other sites that are ranked for that keyword, are actually linking to my blog in the post that they are ranked for.  A good example is Missy and her site G34media.com - it talks about my Blog Flipping Forum, and posts a link to it.  So out of the 10 sites on the first page of the term “blog flipping”, I am positioned in 2 of the top 3 spots, and then 3 of the remaining 8 blogs sites on that page have links to my site within the article they are ranked for.  So even if they skp my blog and go to one of the others, they’ll still find me because those sites are linked up to mine.  Now that’s power linking!

For those of you that are new to site flipping, this seems to be one of the more popular questions.  Since I’m answering it almost daily anyway, I think it’s time to post it here for all of you to see.

Here’s the deal.  When you post an auction, you are giving up a lot of the liberties that normal salesmen have.  A salesman at your local Best Buy has an edge on you due to the fact that he gets to go face-to-face with potential buyers, feel them out, and develop rapport.  You don’t have this, so you have to improvise.  I’m not saying that selling online is HARDER than it is selling in the real world, but it’s not entirely the same.  You need to be a bit more creative, and you have to work a lot harder to show perceived value for an item that your customer can’t touch or play with.

If you go back to sales 101, one of the most profitable things you can do as a salesman is to create urgency.  For this reason, I list most of my auctions for a period of 2-3 days.  That’s it!  Any longer and the potential buyer might see it on the first day, and then say to himself, “I’ll check back later in the week to see what the bidding is up to”.  You DO NOT want to give buyers an opportunity to watch your auctions, and make an educated guess on what it will go for.  You want to sell the site as soon as possible, and the only way to do this is to create urgency.  2-3 days doesn’t give buyers time to fall into the “I’ll check back later” trap.  It forces them to take action, and to do it right away!

Why not let them take their time?

Because you are selling online.  It’s not like you can pitch your product, drop a business card, and let them sleep on it like an offline salesman would do.  You have to create the illusion that if they don’t ACT NOW then they may be passing up an opportunity.

In case you were wondering.  Most auctions of mine on Sitepoint sell within the first 24 hours.  Why?  Because I apply offline sales tactics, in an online world.  I paint a picture that shows the value in what they are looking at, which gets them excited, and then I force them to take action.  There are many ways that online selling parallels offline selling, but in order to take advantage of these, you need to be creative, and find ways to implement them in an online world.

The true benefit of online selling is that you have the potential to reach many more customers than you would in an offline world.  Most auctions see about 2-4k visitors in just a few days.  It’s up to you to capitalize on that kind of attention.  Remember, it’s all about creating urgency.  You have to have the mindset that if you miss one buyer, there are three more behind him that would love to take his spot.

Enjoy the video, and if you noticed, I’ve added random Red Cross banners on the blog.  The Red Cross was the organization that was leading the relief efforts in New Orleans during Katrina, so they’ll most likely be on the front lines of the Gustav effort.  If you can find it in your heart to give, please do so.

PB Formerly Of The Piss Biscuit - Hurricane Gustav from bryan clark on Vimeo.

Bryan Clark’s Dream Team - Aka Chocolate Thunda

• Captain - Me
• Nick - ImWritingSports.com
• Missy - g34Media.com
• Jay - SuiteJ.com
• Neal - The artist formerly known as the affiliate post, is now at NotaBeneConsulting.com

The Flip Mafia

• Tara (Team Captian) - http://thewahmblog.com
• Joe- http://www.intermissionatwork.com
• Javier- http://gomotorscooter.com
• Vickie- Blog in progress
• Justin- http://www.doubleprizer.com

The A-Team

• 1. Ryan (Captain) - I flip for a living, no flagship blog
• 2. Justin Kander - http://www.eastcoastairsoft.com
• 3. R.J. Adams - http://linkbuildingbible.com
• 4. Paul de la Warr - http://computersystemreviews.com
• 5. Sly - http://slyvisions.com

Team JustUs

• Joe - ImWithJoe.com
• PB - The artist formerly known as ThePissBiscuit.com
• Jason - TheUniversityKid.com
• Freddie - InvestWithPassion.com
• Holly - HonestHolly.com

Elite Ninja Flipping Unit (E.N.F.U)

• Girish (Team Captain) - Habitual Flipper, no flagship blog
• Sean - http://www.smemon.com
• Forest - http://www.therandomforest.com
• Jay - http://www.datmoney.com
• Mark Cuda - http://www.monkeyblogger.com

So, get those comments in and I’ll get the teams posted.  If you haven’t made your $25 payment yet, you can do so below.  Remember, as per the rules of entry, team captains must make a blog post linking people back to the contest entry post.  You can use the keywords, “blog flipping” if you are feeling kind.  No team will be entered without their captain making this post!  I will be checking!  The reason for the post and the link is to spread the word so we might attract more competitors.  And the link is so that they get the CORRECT set of rules, and not something that could be lost in translation.  So captains, get on it.  I must have the money, and the blog post by, Saturday, August 30th at 11:59pm Central time!  You can pay by clicking the link on the bottom of this post!

Anti Up Suckas!

• Social Bookmarking - Every post on your blog should be submitted to at the VERY least StumbleUpon, and Digg.  If you aren’t submitting these sites, you’re losing valuable chances to gain traffic, backlinks, RSS subscribers, and possibly even costing yourself money when you go to sell.
• Blog Commenting - Whether you are doing it the old fashioned way, or you are building your links a bit quicker using Bookmarking Demon, you should have some links by now.  If you have less than 300 or so, you might want to reconsider selling.  You’ll be lucky to get a couple hundred dollars.  I try not to sell until I reach the 500-1,000 link plateau, but I’ve seen people have success with 300-500 links.
• Content - Remember, our target before the sell date is 30 posts.  We want 30 posts, and at least one pillar article per week.  Hopefully you are there, if not you can always backdate the posts like crazy.  But make sure to get that UNIQUE content going.  If you’ve been using PLR, it’s time to re-write your content.  If someone spots duplicate content, your blog isn’t going to go for nearly as much.
• Rss Readers - What are you guys doing about Rss readers?  I know they are hard to get, but did anyone come up with anything creative?
• Final Tweaks - I generally don’t go all out on my theme tweaks until I’m about ready to sell it.  Just like selling a house or a car, you want your blog to look it’s very best when it goes up for auction.  To do this, make sure you have a professional header, clean design, and you aren’t showing too many ads per page.

So we’ve got about 10 days left… what should we be doing?

I know most of you have been working pretty hard on these blogs, but it’s time to work even harder.  The last week before these things go up for auction needs to be the most productive, and show the most results.  Trends are important when selling a blog, so you want to make sure that all of your statistics are trending upward.  You do this by giving it one last strong push the last week or ten days before the sale.  A blog with an Alexa ranking that’s going up, is much better than one that has over-performed in the past, and is on it’s way down.

SUGGESTION - It’s completely up to you guys, and I know you’ve been working hard… but I don’t want to see you short-changed.  There should be a PR update coming any day now (we’re over the usual 3 month mark), and you might consider holding on to your blog until the update happens. This will make it a bit more valuable to an investor.  I know you’ll be missing out on some pretty cool prizes, but the update might be worth it.  It’s really up to you guys…  just a suggestion so that nobody feels duped when we get the PR update.

Ask Them

If you don’t have the “subscribe remind” or a similar plugin installed, you are missing out on some potential subscribers.  This puts a small blurb of text on the bottom of every post asking people  to subscribe to your feed, and it generally has about a 1-2% success rate.  Not much, but it’s worth having.

Contests

I realize that if you hold a contest it could push your blog past the deadline for selling them, and thus cost you some points in the contest.  But more RSS subscribers might make you more cash, and then it would make it worth it.  I’d recommend a quick contest… something you can do in a week, maybe two and make it a term of entry that they have to subscribe to your feed.

Giveaway

You might forego the contest completely and just do a giveaway.  This might be your best option.  I saw my buddy Ryan do this with a brand new site, and he ended up with over 200 Rss subscribers in less than 60 days.  And what was he giving away?  A wordpress hoodie.  Yeah…

Respond to Comments

When responding to comments, you can almost always find a way to slip in a statement like “are you subscribed to my feed” or “Thanks for the compliment.  I recommend signing up for the feed so you don’t miss any more great information”.  Stuff like this is cheesy, but effective.

Category Exclude

There are several Wordpress plugins that allow you to exclude categories from your blog.  Why would you want to exclude these?  So that you can use them for RSS-only posts of course!  Make sure and hype up that you are getting ready put out a post that offers a great deal of information, hype it for about 2 days… then release it.  Your Rss subscribers will get the post, the regular blog readers… not so much.  Want to kick it up a notch?  Post an excerpt on your blog.  Two sentences followed by some periods might peek their interest.

Even with all of these ideas, it’s pretty tough to generate a ton of RSS subscribers in 30 days.  I usually end up with somewhere between 30-50.  So what do I do?  I don’t mention it anywhere in the ad for the site, unless someone asks… and surprisingly, they usually don’t.  Just focus on the good parts of the site, and leave out the not so good… just as if you were selling anything else.  Always focus on the features and benefits.  For example. if you were selling cars, and a couple came in to look at a new SUV would your opening line be “Hey this thing sucks gas bad.  It gets like 8 miles per gallon.”  or “This is a great looking truck with a wonderful ride.  It’d be great for hauling a boat back and forth to the lake.”   I think you know the answer…