Amazon Kindle Giveaway

As you can see, I’m giving away an Amazon Kindle.

Giveaway Requirements

1) Subscribe to my YouTube Channel

2) Comment on the video

Why?

The reasons are twofold–I want to give back to the YouTube community that has once made me successful. I’ve also had a hard time attracting new users to my current channel (which was partially my fault), so the influx of subscribers will help.

Changes to tplack.com

Whenever I get a lot of time on my hands, I tend to get into the blogging spirit. It just so happens that I’ve had a lot of time on my hands recently due to winter break, so it felt appropriate to give some attention to this site. There were so many complaints about the last theme I had employed on here, so I changed it.

Today I plan to write 3-5 articles for the blog, and I will space them out over the next few weeks. I would definitely like to get into a bi-weekly content cycle if possible. The only problem with that is the sheer amount of time a well-crafted blog post takes. By that I mean, a blog post that isn’t two three paragraphs and isn’t slapped together in a matter of minutes so as to alert your readers of the news of your site.

As a teaser for what’s coming next, I would like to try giving a report on everything that happened (to me) this year, similar to the family newsletters that some people do over the holidays, except written online. What’s going to be interesting about this is that I should be able to have great precision of the dates due to Twitter.

Why & How to Reward Commenters

I love it when people leave comments on my blog. I want to know other people’s opinions, so I can either ridicule them meet new people or enjoy hearing the opinions of others. But commenters are few and far between, so it is important to be sure to reward them and encourage this rare behavior.

Commenters will further your blog’s community. If someone wrote something provocative, which is usually a good thing in blogs, their post will encourage others to react to it or leave their own feedback.

People will want to continue to do something if there is a positive reward for it. That’s just overly simplified psychology. There isn’t usually much reward for commenters other than a nice “nofollow” link. For those who are not interested by search engine optimization, “nofollow” links are tagged specifically, so they will not affect your page rank. That’s one reason people don’t have incentive to comment.

A good solution to this problem would obviously be making your links “do follow” (no special tag on them in code). I would recommend publicizing the fact that your links are “do follow”, which mine are, but I would go a step further than that.

Putting up a “Top Commenters” section in your sidebar creates a competition people to post comments and earn a link to their site on the sidebar of my site, meaning it will show up on every single page.

Some people take it a step further, which I believe is desperate behavior, and they will do a weekly giveaway for commenters for a small prize, from an iTunes gift card to a free webcam.

When people feel rewarded for their comment, and they feel that it means something, they’re more likely to comment again. When you add the element of competition, sooner than later you will find that something will be in your moderation queue.

How to Trick GoogleBot

According to Matt Cutts from Google, 2 way back links do not help with your site’s page rank. Here’s an example, Site A links to Site B and Site B links to Site A. It’s a mutual relationship, and there is no reason that these links should carry any weight with regard to your organic search traffic.

When you introduce a third site, though, things get much more complex, and it allows for your links to become quality one-way links that will affect your site’s search traffic. Take a look at this diagram.

Blog 1 does not link directly to Blog 3, but Blog 3 links directly to Blog 1. It’s quite complicated on paper, but it works quite well out in the search field. To make it work, just find two friends with sites (sites in the same niche will demonstrate better results), and decide which sites will link where. Not only is it good for building traffic, but it’s also a nice tool for meeting people.

Crowd Source

I wanted to give some insight to the idea, nicknamed “Is This Awesome” on Interstice Labs. It’s basically a tool for crowd sourcing in which the users can easily give their opinions and vote on the idea or change. While I am choosing not to give the name I am reserving for this project, I will summarize its goals and give a basic design preview:

• “Crowd Source” allows users to give their opinions on something a company has done or released. It’s like a large discussion platform.
• Users like to give their opinions, and companies value opinions of their customers.
• Users will receive points for giving their opinions, and the points may be redeemable for cash or a sponsored product.