Part of becoming a successful blogger is building relationships with your readers. So I thought I would take a leaf out of John Chows book and post a little about me and my trip to the to La Perouse which is overlooking Botany Bay here in Sydney.

We decided to have some lunch at the local Boat Shed Cafe Restaurant overlooking Botany Bay which is where Captain Cook discovered Australia.

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Here is the view from the Boatshed outdoor dining area. That’s my boat there right ahead… actually I’m just kidding!

That’s me on the left and my good friend Loui on the right. Behind us you can see part of Port Botany where ships come in to be unloaded.

My girlfriend Nat who is so understanding about how much time I spend on my iMac.

Don’t these dishes look so delicious!

Also at La Perouse you can see where they filmed part of Mission Impossible 2 where Tom Cruise rides the bike over the bridge during a massive explosion.

An young 29 year old Australian named John Papandriopoulos, has developed a way to revolutionize the internet by increasing bandwidth performance by at least 100 times. Did I forget to say that John is also a math guru and researcher with the University of Melbourne and came up with this whilst having a shower. Now that’s what I call brainstorming.

According to other reports John has developed an algorithm to reduce the electromagnetic interference that slows down ADSL connections.

Most ADSL services around the world are effectively limited to speeds between 1 to 20Mbps, but if Dr Papandriopoulos’s technology is successfully commercialised that speed ceiling would be closer to 100Mbps.
The Age

Now Johns new algorithm has sparked huge interest around the globe with a California based startup snapping up Johns super brain. There’s no doubt that Johns algorithm will dramatically change the internet if it is rolled out in the next couple of years.

Now where can I get a brain like that?

It’s no secret that Google hates link trades and it seems that most of the top SEO pros think Google can’t tell if a link is a bought, sold or legitimate link. This really stuffs up Googles rankings which are influenced by links and the link text pointing to the site which is why many webmasters are buying up.

Google says they don’t mind websites have sponsored links providing they include the no-follow tag so they know not to count that as a vote for the site being linked to. That’s enough of that as I’m sure you have already read thousands of other blog posts about link selling and it is becoming a rather boring subject. What I noticed today was an interesting addition to Google’s homepage. Google has added a link for StumbleUpon reviews. See image below.

I only got this link when using Firefox and was logged into my Gmail account. When you click on the link you are taken to StumbleUpon where you can sign in to your Gmail account and see which friends are already using StumbleUpon and you can even invite the rest of your friends.

It seems to me, Google is looking for ways to combat link selling by moving towards a user based review system. I’m not sure if this is going to help them combat link selling because there is always someone out there who will find a way to game the system. We humans love to break rules and we do it almost in every we do. One example is that our sports people are often found for breaking the rules with performance enhancing drugs. People love to break the rules and find an edge and regardless of what Google does, someone, somewhere will find a way to game the system.

It’s interesting to see where Google is going with this and I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for any further developments.

Sometimes I forget that there are people out there who want to start blogging but just don’t know how. What I think is a fairly simple process can be quite daunting for a less technically savvy person. Here are some things you need to know to start blogging.

The FREE Option

If you really want to get started blogging with zero cost and minimal setup, you could use a free blogging service like blogger.com or wordpress.com. Blogger is totally free and you get be up and running in only about 10 minutes, is really easy to setup and gives you a chance to try blogging to see if you like it. The downside to having a blog on a free service is that you can’t keep the domain name if you ever decide to move the blog to your own hosting so you will lose any authority and traffic that you have built if it becomes successful.

Self Hosted Blog

Now if you decide that you are willing to part with a small amount of money, you can setup your own self hosted blog on your chosen hosting provider. Firstly though you will need to choose a domain name, (a domain name is what your web site address. Ie. www.spindigg.com). You can shop around for domain name registrars and get buy a domain name from as little as $1.99 from GoDaddy.com.

Once you have registered your domain name, you will need to find a web hosting company to host your blog. I use a couple of different companies but my favourites are Media Temple and Joyent. I like either of these two hosts because I’ve been doing business with them for years but there are many other quality hosting companies that are capable of providing you great hosting that will meet your budget. Most good hosting companies have one click installers that make setting up your blog super easy. Check with their support if this is something that they can do for your before signing up.

Once you signup, you will need to change the name servers on your domain name to point to your selected hosting provider. Now domain and hosting are setup, you need to decide which blogging system you want to use. There really are lots of free open source blogging engines available and they all pretty much will do everything you need, however I think Wordpress is the best option for the new blogger because it’s very easy to setup and if you are blogging is personal you can get Wordpress setup free by submitting a request.

There are other blogging platforms but Wordpress is easy to use, has excellent community support, is widely used and has a tonne of plugins to play with that can make adding features to your blog super easy. Wordpress also makes skinning your blog easy with a number of free templates that you can download to give you blog a fresh look other than the default unless your a little lazy like me and are happy to just change the header and add a few favourite plugins. I will get around to creating my own design for spindigg eventually!

If you get stuck trying to setup your blog send me an email to spindigg[at]spindigg.com

Part of making money online requires that you learn some key skills that will make your chances of success much more likely. One of those skills is keyword research. Keyword research will help you identify which keywords and phrases are popular, which ones aren’t so competitive and which keywords are most likely to be profitable.

There is a lot to understand about keyword research and at face value it all seems pretty simple right! How hard can it be, you just need to choose some words. WRONG!

A lot can be learned from keywords that people use to search. Shorter keyword terms like ‘dogs’ tell you that the user is not really sure what they want, so their searches are very broad. If they had done their research they will generally know what they want and just want to go right to it, so they might search for ‘buy short haired german shepard in new york’ . Now there is someone who knows what they want so they are more specific and are ready to spend their money.

Jennifer Laycock wrote a great article on the user buying cycle earlier this year which outlines in more detail how users work through the buying cycle and end up purchasing a product or service. Your keyword research needs to capture the user at the moment they are ready to buy. Once they get to your site, it’s up to you to write compelling content that assures them what your are offering over delivers on their expectations.

Aaron Wall from SEOBook, has a video on how to approach keyword research including some basic tools, and the methods you might want to try to come up with keywords, phrases and keyword modifiers that will give you a killer list of keywords to promote your product or service.

Squidoo the brainchild of bestselling author Seth Godin has launched another cool FREE and what is no doubt going to be another internet marketers paradise.

The Ever project www.ever.com, allows you to do is have a great domain like the following.

Tastiest.pizza.ever.com… do you have the recipe?
Best.photographer.ever.com… is that you?
Smartest.designer.ever.com… tell me that wouldn’t make a great resume URL for a designer for hire.
Cutest.dog.ever.com… yours?
Coolest.boss.ever.com… well, if you’re the suck-up sort. www.squidoo.com

I only caught onto this yesterday and you have to be super quick to get a high traffic keyword url because most of them were already taken but I did manage to snag a few for myself to use as topical authority pages on a particular topic to target markets with good volumes of traffic and by targeting 2, 3, 4 & 5 word long tail keywords and phrases which have lower levels of competitions in the search engines.

If you haven’t grabbed your free ever.com page check it out since it’s free, easy and can bring profitable results if you add some effort to building some great content.

Sorry but actually there is no damning report on blogging for money here.  So what’s with the crazy headline!  What I’m blogging about today is creative headlines that catch peoples attention.

Blogging is about being creative, being different and making yourself unique.  If you don’t, you are just another one of millions of bloggers who are trying to find an audience that will become regular readers and that will come back often.

Everyday that blog you learn that little bit more about blogging and what it takes to be successful.  The difficult part is doing it and learning from your mistakes to make you a better blogger and providing more useful information to your blog readers.

The last few days I’ve been a little sidetracked from this blog.  I was lacking some creative juice and was struggling to find something of value to write about.  I picked up a tabloid magazine full of trashy gossip and looked at the headlines.  Here I found some great inspiration on catchy headlines that catch a readers attention and is where I got the inspiration for the blog title for this post.  I’ll be checking my blogrush dashboard over the next few days to see if it works.

Recently I met a guy who happened to be an internet marketer promoting affiliate products from and a range of affiliate opportunities. He had not been doing affiliate marketing for very long and had successfully managed to build a number of sites that put his income at over $6000 per month. Now $6000 per month doesn’t make you rich but it sure does change the playing field and opens up the door to freeing up your time from regular day job to work on your internet marketing full time.

You might be thinking so what, and how does that help me? Well what surprised me the most was this guy’s technical skills. The guy was not a designer or a developer, he didn’t have any skills other than the very basics for building a website, and has the average computer skills of anyone you might meet. He did however have a good understanding on how to drive traffic using search engines using targeted keywords. I thought how could this guy possibly be more successful than me with no technical skills?

Now I think of myself as pretty tech savvy. I know how to write some code, I run my own server, have all the latest software to build websites and programs not to mention the huge bookshelf of technical books however this guy with his average computer skills had made enough money in affiliate marketing to not need a day job. What I realized is that I look at things more from a technical position rather than a marketers position. LESSON ONE: Learn to think like a marketer and leverage your skills to YOUR advantage.

So I asked him what it was that made his affiliate marketing projects so successful. His answer was simple…“WORDS”, it’s all in the words you use and the story you tell about the products you are promoting. He showed me some examples from his websites and it was easy to see that his writing was compelling and the words he used built emotion, made you feel something, projected an image of success for the future. It was the meticulous selection of words that compelled you to take out your credit card and make the purchase so all your problems would be solved.

Take the time and be meticulous with your writing of compelling content using words that build emotion and engage your audience. Build your knowledge of the power of words and you will build a valuable skill on your journey to riches as a super affiliate.

Yesterday I went along to the Sydney Adobe Refresh convention at Darling Harbour in the city. As I really love the latest technologies I thought it would be cool to take half a day off work at see what’s happening in the Adobe world. For the past couple of years I’ve spent most of my time in search marketing and have sort of lost touch with web design and development and boy was I going to get the biggest buzz at the convention.

People who turned up to the convention were the typical developer who wants to use the technology to build applications including myself. John Chow recently blogged about making money with Facebook apps and how developers generally don’t have any idea of how to make money with them, so I made sure I went there with a view of how to monetize and possibly bring some cutting edge technology to any of my projects including this blog.

One thing that really sparked my interest was the advertising overlays over video playback. Right now advertising is either added to the beginning or the end of a movie reel and most people including me really find that annoying. Well this new technology using Adobe AMP (Adobe Media Player) lets you push content to the Media Player using RSS technology pretty much the same way we use RSS now in RSS text readers like Google Reader but instead of adding the advertising to the start and end of the video, you can have it overlayed during the advertising playback and can be integrated so that it just pops up with nice transitions to prompt the user to interact which I think is better and not as obtrusive.

So right now this might not be practical for full implementation due to bandwidth limitations for online video advertising but as bandwidth capacity grows, our blogs may possibly become vlogs where we can record our posts and include our advertising in the video feed. The RSS feed also allow you to include custom skins for your posts and look and feel of your brand as well as statistical information on advertising performance and there is even some DRM (Digital Rights Management) built in if you need it.

There were alot of other really cool technologies at Adobe Refresh that could be used to spread your marketing message and will be easier to implement as the technology gets better and more practical. After going to the conference, I have to say I’m pretty excited about the future possibilities of internet marketing.

Boy have I been waiting to get my hands on Apple Mac OS X Leopard since I first saw it previewed at WWDC almost two years ago. I’ve waited so long that it was almost underwhelming once I installed it but didn’t take long to get excited about looking into the new features.

The new features are pretty subtle as OS X Tiger was a great OS as it was but the new features in Leopard make it that much nicer. I like the look of the doc icons which reflect off the reflective surface they sit on. This alone made me switch from hiding to dock to showing the dock.

I really like the stack icon which lets you dump files you keep dumping onto your desktop into so you keep your desktop nice and tidy. iChat with the background video effects is really cool and means you can set it up with a custom or default video background loop and don’t have to worry about the mess you might have lurking behind you whilst your talking with friends and colleagues.

There are only a few minor issues that I have noticed running Leopard. I have two iMacs, one being a 2nd generation G5 PowerPC processor which is about 3 years old and the other is a the newest iMac Intel Core2 Duo. The G5 loaded Leopard just as seamlessly as the Intel Mac however some of the features on the PowerPC G5 don’t work.

For example the background effects for iChat aren’t available on the G5. I thought I might have got the latest version of iLife with the Leopard install but this is not the case. I have a MySQL database installed on the system and found that it cannot be started from the system preference panel so I needed to start it up from the terminal window. Also on the G5 PowerPC I couldn’t get the new feature quick look to work but I haven’t really played with that much so maybe I just need to figure out why it’s not working.

Overall though, Mac OS X Leopard is a sweet operating system and if your still using Microsoft windows, now is a good time to jump ship and enjoy the switch to Apples best operating system yet.