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Looks like Google got around to updating their pagerank again, and my blog’s pagerank has increased from a 4 to a 5 which is pretty cool considering the gap from getting a 4 to a 5 is a heck of a lot larger than having a pagerank of 2 and moving it up to a 3.

I knew my link building campaigns would help my pagerank, but considering my blog isn’t even 6 months old yet I didn’t expect to get a PR5 so soon.  I want to thank everyone who has been congratulating me on hitting the pagerank 5, as it is quite an accomplishment for such a new blog, however to me this is just a number. The reason I am happier is because the new pagerank update has made Google’s million-lines-of-code algorithm know that my domain is a trustful site, and has blessed about 15 more of my posts allowing them to now be on the first page for new google searches.  I have also been seeing a few number one results for very old posts of mine.

In conclusion, yeah it’s awesome that I actually hit a pagerank 5, but the real reason for me to be happy is that this will increase my search engine traffic which is the ultimate goal of the link building I have been doing. Whether you went from PR0 to PR3, or PR5 to PR4, stop wasting your time wondering why and just keep your focus on link building because at the end of the day, search engine traffic is what matters, not some number that you and only other tech-savvy webmasters know exist.  Now having my blog be a pagerank 5 will also give a lot more dofollow juice to those that read and comment on my blog frequently, so if you are looking to voice your opinion and be rewarded with powerful links, then the top commentator spots are for you, so long as that you do not keyword stuff your comments, and that your comments are actually topical to the blog posts.

As I have been writing this post, I have been multi-tasking reading my emails and my RSS reader, and I noticed that Darren Rowse of Problogger.net has already made a video emphasizing my point that you should focus on keep moving forward rather than worrying about your pagerank. You can read his post and video over at his recent video called forget about pagerank and build a better blog.

A sorta off-topic note worth mentioning is that the rapidly growing Digg.com competitor Mixx.com has increased to a pagerank 7, and every article you submit to Mixx is a dofollow backlink. So if you aren’t building links with Mixx, there is no better time than now.

As many of you have noticed, I have only had two blog posts in the last 11 days, one of which was a guest post. I wanted to make a quick blog post to let everyone know why I have slowed down my blogging schedule.

1. I have been spending a ton of time learning affiliate marketing with NeverBlue Ads.
2. I am auditioning for the Top Affiliate Challenge (Detailed post coming soon, for now, vote me a 10!).
3. One of my new startup websites is nearing completion (I will write a detailed post letting all my readers get a first hand look before the site goes public).
4. The President of Datepad, David Nichol, has unexpectedly passed away.
5. I am nearing the final month until my high school graduation.
6. I have been going to and from the hospital because my dad had hip surgery this week.
7. I made it a personal choice to only make blog posts when I have something beneficial to my readers.

In conclusion, I have decided that I want to make my posting schedule a lot less sporadic. I am going to be making a lot less posts, and instead focus on quality of quantity. Every post that I write will be in more depth, and if it is one of my unique methods to building links, I will try to write a step by step guide for all the newbie link builders that read my blog.

I am going to be changing my blog’s title for the last time, and the new focus will be Website Marketing Strategies. The reason for this is because I only make around $300-500 profit a month with my blog, and I am by no means a professional at making money with blogs. Even though I know there are thousands of people who would love to be making $500/m with my blog, I do not believe I should be a blog mentor in any way. I am a professional at creative website marketing, and I want to keep my focus on that. If you have been following my blog for some time now, you should realize that marketing a website (or blog) ties hand in hand with making money on that site, so really nothing has changed other than the title and keyword I am going to SEO for.

Content wise, since I am cutting down from my daily posting schedule I use to have, I want 90% of all posts from now on to directly or indirectly help my readers build links for search engine traffic, build traffic from other viral methods, tips to monetize better, tips for better search engine optimization, posts about my new startup companies (one is coming in a little bit), or just general posts about my entrepreneurial journey to wealth.

Starting this week, I want my blog to be more of a hybrid between a blog and an email tips newletter, because I want to focus on teaching everyone how to properly market their websites using different strategies. I am positive that all of you readers would prefer a single blog post every week that provides a cool trick to build traffic, rather than a bunch of off-topic posts including what I ate for dinner. No offense to John Chow and his dinner parties, but in all honesty I don’t think my readers would give a damn about what I ate for dinner, so I am going to keep my posts in quality over quantity.

Paid Reviews Update
In the coming days, I am going to be raising my paid review prices by a long shot for a number of reasons. The main one is so that there will be fewer paid posts each month, giving more traffic to the ones that do purchase reviews. I will also be throwing in a ton of bonuses for new paid reviews, and I will write a post about them after my new startup company launches and when the paid review prices increases. I am also going to be limiting the amount of monthly paid reviewers to about 1 per week.

Guest Posters Update
My blog’s goal of helping everyone learn unique Website Marketing Strategies wouldn’t be very true if I didn’t allow an underground user promote himself through his writing. I still strongly believe in guest posts because they can bring you a lot of traffic in return for expressing yourself to others, and so I thought I would offer more to any guest posters who write posts for me to put on Mixed Market Arts.

Now, not only will you get a little mention at the TOP of the post giving yourself a link and a nice heap of traffic, but for every quality guest post that I publish on my blog I will pay you a $10 tip via Paypal as an added incentive. Now you can make money, traffic, and links just by contributing to my blog.

Have a link building tip that I have not discussed?
For anyone who emails me a unique link building article or website that I have not covered already on the link building cookbook, I will give a permanent backlink on the post I write about it linking to your site, as well as a one month sitewide link on every page of my blog. That is over 150 backlinks in return for sending a 5 minute email… quite a deal if you ask me. (PS: Nothing about directories or articles, I am looking for unique web2.0 sites that people generally wouldn’t think to build links off of. Check out some posts in the link building cookbook to get a feel for what I mean).

Photo by Jurvetson

This guest post was submitted by Patrick from Piggy Bank Pie Writing Services.

You’ve probably heard of Search Engine Optimization hundreds of time. But bloggers these days are looking at more efficient ways to drive traffic instantly. The answer resides in Social Media Optimization.

There are numerous social media sites on the Internet. Some are specialized in news feeding, others in bookmarking, but the main point is, they are tools you can use to promote quality content published on your blog. Now, I cannot stress how important this last sentence is. Promoting every single post that comes out of your blog may put you in trouble. You will be seen as a spammer, and users will simply ignore you. But if used wisely, social media sites can really boost your traffic and give you high, very high visibility.

Let’s look how we can nitro boost your traffic using social media sites.

1. Install ShareThis

Let’s start with the basic. If you want to help your blog with social media sites, you need the provide a tool for readers to help them vote and promote your content. The best one I know is ShareThis. This plugin combines most of the social media submission links into one applet, and the installation is done in a snap.

2. Activate FeedBurner FeedFlare

Many of your readers will grab your posts right off your RSS feed. But when comes the time to get votes, these readers are away from your site, and therefore less likely to give their thumbs up… unless you activate FeedFlare. FeedFlare ads a footer at the bottom of each of your articles in your RSS feed. It displays the count of Stumbles, Diggs, comments, Del.icio.uses, etc. Not only subscribers get instant and dynamic information of how the post is doing on social media sites, but with a simple click they can cast their vote, helping you reach even more readers.

3. Get The Sphinn Button

If you wish to play the social media game, you need to play it right. Leaving aside the Sphinn community would be a mistake. More and more bloggers are using Sphinn to promote… what’s often buried in minutes on Digg: Internet Marketing and Blogging content. Sphinn is not BloggingZoom though, you should be careful not to submit only your own posts. Provide Sphinn fans their favorite tool and install the Sphinn submit button on your site.

4. Write a Diggbait

What is a Diggbait? It is a post especially written for Digg users. Writing a good Diggbait can bring so much traffic that very often, shared servers (cheap hosting deals) collide under the pressure of gigantic network load. But still, if you survive a Diggbait, you can easily add hundreds of new RSS subscribers to your blog. Your host here, Collin Lahay, previously wrote this Diggbait and received 70,979 visitors from Digg in 3 days! You can read the results of his experience in this post.

5. Help Your Blog To Survive DiggBaits

If you read digg on a regular basis, chances are you’ve been sent to a site that collapsed under pressure. If you decide to focus your energy on Digg, help yourself by installing WP-Cache or WP Super Cache. The concept of caching is very simple. Each time a visitor goes to your blog, a PHP request queries your WordPress database and retrieves the content that goes into your page (the text you wrote). This might sounds like an instant process, but thousands users reading the same page mostly at the time would badly impact your server’s performance. Instead of going through this database querying process, a caching plugin saves a copy of your pages including their content on the server’s hard disk, leaving slow database calls aside. Surviving mammoth traffic from social media sites will surely help your blog’s reputation, and Digg users will be confident they can safely submit content from your site.

6. Invest In StumbleUpon

A poll on ProBlogger asked readers what was their favorite social bookmarking site. 34% of voters said StumbleUpon. The closest followers were Del.icio.us and Digg with 21% and 18% respectively. When stumblers are going nuts for a post on your blog, you can easily expect hundreds of unique visitors in a day. Now the question is, can you stumble your own post? Yes you can, just don’t overdo it. By using SU on a daily basis, you will vote sites and participate in the community. Develop friendships and socialize with other users to build a strong profile.

7. Optimize Your Content For Social Media

It is well-known that users from social media sites have a very short attention span. What it means for you is that if you wish to promote content on these sites, you need to slightly adjust your writing. Never-ending posts where readers can get lost in paragraphs and paragraphs of text will not work. Keep in mind that not only you are writing for the web, but in this case you are writing for social media users. Let’s digg into the mind of a StumbleUpon user (that was a social media joke.) Ok, you click the Stumble! button and a site shows up. Your eyes are seeing what’s above the fold, which means, you’ll see a title and maybe the first paragraph. Now remember, the eyes are looking at the title, but the mouse pointer is still on top of the Stumble! button. Your mission, as a writer, is to provoke a mouse movement to push the pointer away from this location and prevent the user’s index finger from clicking the trigger. First thing you need is a killer title. Now if you pass this step, readers are heading for the first paragraph. Tell them what they can expect but don’t give too much information, you want them to reach the bottom of the page. Remember that social media users love bulleted and numbered lists. This makes your post easily scannable, and increases chances of being voted.

8. Play By The Rules, But…

To rap this up, I’ll conclude by sharing some explorations I’ve done recently. Blog Catalog has user groups where you can post vote requests for either Digg or StumbleUpon. When you feel like you have something valuable to share, like killer content, you may ask for social media love in order to get more visibility. Now, be VERY careful. I’m not going to say that you shouldn’t join these groups, but you need to know that reciprocal stumbling can get your blog kicked out of SU. I’ve seen users posting vote requests for each and every articles they publish. And sometimes, stuff that would never get submitted otherwise. Concentrate on writing quality content, and votes will fall from the sky. Curious? Go to Blog Catalog and join the Stumble group.

Do you optimize your content for social media sites? Any tips you wish to share? Join the conversation over to comments.

As of late, I have been finding ways to build links with Yahoo Answers clones, and I have found another one that provides dofollow anchor text backlinks. The site is called Blurtit. Since the site is basically the same as link building with Yedda, I don’t believe I need to add any step by step instructions. Answer a question, include your link, and then repeat!

For the visual learners, here is my example link.

This is part 29 of my series called the link building cookbook that aims to be the ultimate untapped link building resource on the web.