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It is sort of embarrassing to admit, but for whatever reasons Google may have, they were ranking my LinkedIn.com profile #1 in google for a “Collin LaHay” search. For those of you who don’t know yet, Collin LaHay is my name.

It seemed odd that I had received a pagerank 5 and having an extreme amount of trust on my domain, that Google wouldn’t think I should rank the top result for my own name. It just goes to show that you should register your name, as well as your companies, and possibly even your competitors as users on many of the web2.0 websites because they are growing so fast and the search engines give them so much authority.

My LinkedIn profile had only 41 backlinks to it, while my blog has over 10,000, yet Google still considered it to be the most trustful result for my search.

Since it was my account, I was not too worried about it, but the thought that worried me was what if someone else registered the LinkedIn name “Collin LaHay” and was using the profile to make me look bad? Since LinkedIn.com doesn’t know who you are, you could potentially register some honest persons name and have a bunch of racist URL’s as your homepage, and Google would think that since the page was on LinkedIn.com, it should rank really high. Can you imagine what kind of annoyance this would be?

Well, thankfully my blog now ranks #1 for my name, but the lesson that YOU ALL should take out of this is to register your name on any big social media website that you can think of, even if you are not planning on using the website. You will thank me 6 months down the road before a competitor grabs your name and tries to blackmail you or make you look bad… A 30 minute fix now can save your reputation (or that of the businesses you are affiliated with) down the road.

Has anyone had any bad experiences like this one? It would be a very lame thing to do, but I know there are people out there who have tried it.

This guest blogging post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Piggy Bank Pie.

Who doesn’t like to get something for nothing? If you own a blog or website, the idea of free traffic is tremendously appealing, and many of us are willing to do whatever it takes to get a few more visitors to our websites. If it’s as easy as putting a widget on your blog, so much the better. It doesn’t take a lot of effort and you stand to gain a lot in return, or do you? I’ve tried a few of these widgets - TheGoodBlogs, BlogRush, Entrecard and others, and I’m beginning to wonder if they are really worth it.

The Good Blogs - Not So Good

One of my first experiences with traffic widgets was TheGoodBlogs. Like most other sites, you sign up, add your blog, select some tags that fit it and put a widget on your blog. The idea is that the widget shows posts related to your content, and your content in turn is shown on other blogs. One of the things that troubled me about the widget was that much of the content actually shown didn’t seem that relevant to my readers, and my stats showed that very few visitors actually came to my blog from that site. After a while, I gave up on it and removed the widget from my blog.

Blogrush? No Rush!

I was a lot more optimistic about Blogrush when it first started. Ok, the widget was ugly, but at least it had possibilities. The ten tier referral system meant that the more people you signed up, the more your blog would be seen. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The trouble is that it probably works best for those who don’t need the additional traffic. If you are an A-list blogger, you can sign up thousands of people, earning referral and traffic credits and getting your posts displayed in even more places. For the rest of us, the traffic you get is fleeting, if it comes at all. I got a trickle of traffic from Blogrush at a time when I published some of my best posts. It was time to move to the next big thing - Entrecard.

Entrecard

Entrecard held even more promise. When you sign up for Entrecard you get to customize a widget to put on your site. You earn credits for dropping your Entrecard (like an online business card) on other sites and when others drop their cards on you. You use these credits to buy 24 hours of advertising on the site of your choice. So how does it work? I have had a lot of traffic from Entrecard, but most of it is drop and run traffic, lasting 5 seconds or less. However, if I spend my ad credits wisely, and advertise on a related site, I get new visitors who stick around a while and may even subscribe to my feed.

The Verdict

So, what’s the verdict? These widgets don’t work well for me. My blog (piggybankpie.com) is in the freelance writing niche and it’s been around for a while. If you have a brand new blog, these widgets are a great way to start getting traffic. If you have blogs that cover blogging, technology, gadgets or any of the popular topics on Technorati, then you will probably get a lot from traffic widgets. They didn’t do much for me. I have removed all of those widgets from my blog and am concentrating on building a readership in other ways, through social media and networking sites. And even though I no longer have the widget, I am still spending my Entrecard credits to advertise on blogs in my niche. That’s the best way to use it, in my opinion.

Collin LaHay’s Verdict: I agree with Sharon, most of these traffic widgets are not sending me a whole lot of traffic, however I have so much extra room by having two sidebars instead of one that I am leaving them up until I find something useful to replace them with!  If you think they are there because they are bringing me tons and tons of visitors, you would be mistaken.  I will be getting rid of them in a few weeks.

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.

I have just signed up with the NeverBlue Ads Affiliate Network.

“Always keep learning, because if you ever stop there will always be someone who is better than you somewhere else in the world.”

This is one of my best quotes, because it is my motto for making money online.

I make a good deal of money online with viral marketing, search engine optimization, link building, as well as cool startup websites, however if I don’t stop and learn affiliate marketing I will be leaving money on the table.

To increase my online earnings, I am going to be experimenting with pay-per-click (like the sponsored ads you see on Google searches), and promoting other people’s products. After spending a few days looking around at the best affiliate network, I see a lot of people making huge amounts of cash with NeverBlue Ads, and thought it would be a great place to start.

Now like learning nearly any other form of internet marketing, I expected to lose a lot of money before I figured out everything. To my supprise, my 2 day test run for a few “make money from home” campaign pulled in $12 with only 37 visitors. If my blog converted as well as affiliate leads did, I would have made nearly $2000 from a single ad last month.

The thing I like most about NeverBlue Ads is that 80% of the time, you don’t even need to sell a product to make money. When I had originally thought of “affiliate marketing,” I assumed I would have to sell an expensive product to make any money. The real truth is, companies will pay you just for finding the leads (contact information, email addresses, etc) even if they don’t buy anything. Some of these companies are offering a lot for these key leads too.

For example, an automobile lead on a one page form can earn you $6. There is also an affiliate offer for free college scholarships going for $4.50 a lead, and there is even a poker affiliate that pays you nearly $2 just for getting poker players to enter an email address! If that doesn’t provide an easy enough way to make money, I don’t know what is.

I have been using Neverblue Ads for about 24 hours now, and I have earned $14. This has been all from just simple marketing, as I have not started any Adwords campaigns yet, thus putting my expenses at $0. In less than one day, I am more than halfway to making the minimum monthly payout, which is an awesome feat for a “zero experience” affiliate marketer.

I am going to be investing a lot of time and money into learning everything I can about affiliate marketing because there is a lot of potential to make ample amounts of money, and because it will give me a good introduction so that I can compete in the top affiliate challenge. (See my top affiliate challenge audition here).

While I am no affiliate marketing guru and won’t be telling you what to do, I can tell you that a LOT of people are making a TON of money with Neverblue Ads, and I made $14 profit today as an experiment. I will be continually updating my blog with my affiliate marketing ventures now. If you are interested in getting into affiliate marketing with me, I suggest you get your feet wet with Neverblue Ads.

Join Neverblue Ads today!