A good way to build authority and search engine rankings for your site is through article directories. They usually don’t generate a lot of traffic, but they do provide quality one-way links back to your site, and there’s always the possibility of the articles becoming popular and generating direct traffic. The two biggest directories are www.goarticles.com and www.ezinearticles.com. These are the best in terms of quality and what they allow, but there are hundreds of others to choose from. If you’re interested, you can check out this list of about 2200. Read the rest of this entry »

And I’m back… who knows how long I’ll be back for, but for now I’m back. I know the irony was killing you, of my leaving after writing a post about bloggers leaving. In case you were wondering, I kind of did that on purpose. At least you would have something to laugh about while I was away. I used to spend several hours a day working on this blog, commenting, researching, advertising, and writing. Unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury of time anymore. So for the most part, I am going to be spending my time simply writing and researching, and let my readers do the advertising, assuming I write good enough posts. So with that knowledge, anytime you feel like an article has been helpful for you, or you’ve learned something worth sharing, a “retweet,” or “stumble” would be greatly appreciated. Remember, this blog will only grow as far as you take it, I will be spending my time writing, so Thank You for your support!

There were several people who sent me emails about buying advertising, I apologize for not getting back to you, I hadn’t checked the email until recently. All advertising positions are available again, and if you were one of the ones who emailed me before, please email me again if you’re still interested, otherwise I will assume you changed your mind which I totally understand. I will start off trying to post weekly, and see where it goes from there. All prices and information should be on the “advertise” page.

Also, I am always eager for guest posts, if you’ve read some of my posts on that, you can see there are many benefits. I’m retained some traffic this whole time, and have about 150 subscribers, so you will certainly get your articles read. Also, it’s a chance for me to develop a relationship with you, so that I can help you out when you need it as well. Drop me an email using my “Ask Jonathan” page if you’re interested. The size of your blog doesn’t matter to me, this is just about free advertising for you.

Also, I want to start helping you guys, “my readers” as much as I can, so I’ve changed my contact page to an “Ask Jonathan” page. Starting today I am offering free blog coaching, to everyone! I don’t know everything, but on issues concerning SEO, social media, social networking, and traffic generation, my opinion may be of some help to you. So feel free to drop me an email, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, with as informative an answer as I can give.

My main goal in bringing back mastersofseo this time, is to make it more about Your benefit, and less about my profit. I’ve already learned my profit will be minimal no matter what I do. But I have knowledge that according to the comments is beneficial for people, so it’d be a shame to waste it. With that said, I want to write blog posts about what’s important and relevant to you. I want to cover the issues you’re struggling with, so please, if you want me to cover a topic, send me an email and I’ll try to write a post on it. If I can get enough emails, then I hope to make a weekly post, with the information You specifically want to hear.

Thank you everybody who is reading this for sticking around, God willing the best is yet to come.

Since I can’t resist coming up with these terms, hopefully this will be the beginning of a “blogvival,” with alots of blogs coming back from the dead.

My question is, are you a Problogger/Doshdosh reader, or a Johnchow/Shoemoney reader?

Now most likely you are subscribed to all four of them, but though everybody groups John Chow and Problogger together because of their success, they are Very different bloggers. They both have very different styles and their content is also very different. In my opinion at least, doshdosh and shoemoney are simply the second-generation problogger and Johnchow, so I will only be talking about Problogger and Johnchow

Problogger is more of a content-based writer. He writes helpful tips, and lots of list on how to blog, how to get traffic, and how to make money blogging… I find his posts very down to earth, and easy to understand. Not always very useful, because it’s often things you’ve already heard elsewhere, but he still writes good posts. Just look at the title of his blog, “Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging.” At least the way it sounds, is that it’s all about You.

John Chow on the other hand is more of a rant-based writer. And what I mean by that is, he writes whatever the heck he feels like writing at the moment. And you know what? He’s amazing at it. That type of blogging is really hard to do because it’s hit or miss, because his posts are so random, you could just as easily upset your readers as make them enjoy it. So in that sense, props to John Chow. Also, when he’s in the mood, he writes very informative “how to…” posts. These posts though few, are very helpful and definitely as insightful as Problogger if not better. However, if you just read John Chow’s blog title, you will see a drastic difference in his goals, as opposed to Problogger’s. “I make money online by telling people how much money I make.”

It’s all about him and his success.

The interesting thing is, Problogger could be very likely as stuck up as John Chow “sounds.” Now I’m not saying either necessarily is… I’m just saying that John Chow sounds like he is. But this just shows what a difference how you advertise your blog, will effect it’s stats.

Let’s look at the stats of these two sites momentarily. These are the stats as of Nov 2^nd 2008,

Google Page Rank

Problogger 6

John Chow 3

Alexa

Problogger 44,000

John Chow 27,000

Technorati

Problogger 32 (yes you read that right, it’s not a typo)

John Chow he’s not in the top 100 so he’s somewhere below 1,146

Siteanalytics.compete.com (A much more accurate traffic checker)

Problogger 358K for this last month

John Chow 164K for this last month

So now you probably read that and went is this guy stupid or something, John Chow is slaughtering him in Alexa ranking. Well No I’m not stupid lol, everybody knows Alexa is very skewed, check out this post by Otooo if you don’t believe me. And further more, look at this alexa graph of the last six months for both of them. They are practically even except for that massive peak by Problogger.

So the point of all this is to get you to question your advertising strategy. When you write your posts, or are commenting on blogs, or are emailing your readers, who is the focus? Are you making it about you? Or about your readers?

This last stat I think clearly shows the difference between the two sites, their RSS subscribers. RSS subscribers are like votes, they show how good and popular a blog really is.

RSS subscribers

John Chow 38,150

Problogger 66,584

Problogger almost doubles him. The morale of this story is, Make your blog about your readers! Not about you!

If you liked this post please subscribe to my RSS feed by clicking this link, so that you can receive more posts on how to blog.

After seeing several other successful blog competition sites, i’ve created one of  my own. Here is the link, it looks like it could be very successful. There will be blog cups every month with the winner getting a prize.

I highly encourage all of you to check it out, prizes include links, banner ads on both this and that site, entrecard credits, and much more. For the first competition I am offering 500 credits if 20 sites join. If over 50 sites join then the prize will be 1000 entrecard credits. And if it’s more then that, well then we’ll see the prize will probably be higher.

All you have to do is comment and drop your link. And most likely your site will be added. So go to it now, just drop your link in a comment and make sure that after joining you vote for your site, because otherwise you won’t win anything, so check it out now.