Day 28 - Part II - Blogs and Forums and Web 2.0 | Mike Mindel

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Day 28 - Part II - Blogs and Forums and Web 2.0

By Mike Mindel | August 29, 2007

This content is summarized from Day 28 - Part II - Blogs and Forums and Web 2.0 training for the Thirty Day Challenge, presented by Rob Somerville.

This post/video is about finding other niche content websites in your market space where you might be able to provide feedback and also incorporate a link back to your content website.

None of this is very difficult to do and in earlier videos you’ve seen how to create these comments but the main issue is finding them.

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search can be found here.

We can type in our ’speed reading’ niche keyword and see all the blogs that get returned

By clicking through to these blogs we might be able to find blogs where we can make a comment

As in earlier videos we will use our unique keyword here for the Name section of the form.

For example ’speed reading gurumaster’ has no indexed pages in Google so makes a useful unique identifier

Next we add our website and make a comment that will add value to the copy, content that is useful. Perhaps a well thought out opinion on what the person wrote.

You can go through all the blogs that are niche relevant and make posts with links back to your website which is also relevant to the subject of speed reading.

Forums

Forums are a little more challenging. Generally what I (Rob) do is search in Google for the niche phrase and add forum on the end

Hopefully Google will identify forums that are relevant to this niche. There’s a thread on this forum on the subject of ’speed reading’

so let’s click through

Sure enough there is a relevant thread. Maybe this is a forum where I can register and comment on this thread.

As I look at this, the first thing that is that none of the comments have signatures. This is usually an indication that the function has not been turned on in the forum which means they may be heavily moderating that functionality. This post has no signature for example

As I scroll down I also see a no-follow link highlighted

Further down you see that the moderator has removed a link

I would say this link has been removed because it points to a product or a sales page. So this is an example of a forum that is being properly moderated and the link exclusions are being very carefully moderated.

I would probably move on from this forum and look for forums where the signature functionality is turned on. Where the forum participants don’t have a problem with signatures or putting links in their commentary.

Other Web 2.0 Platforms

There are plenty of other web 2.0 platforms like Squidoo and HubPages that allow you to make comments or have guest book functionality enabled so you can provide feedback to the site owner.

One could always go over to Squidoo and HubPages and do a search inside that website. What I (Rob) like to do is use Google to do those searches as follows

We limit the Google search by the site e.g. Squidoo with site: squidoo.com so Google will only return pages from Squidoo. I’m searching for the specific keyword phrase “sign my guestbook”. When people have that guestbook functionality enabled in Squidoo that text is included within that module. Then I have my keyword e.g. ’speed reading’.

The reason I like to use Google to do this is that Google will return the pages in authority order. So the highest ranked as far as Google is concerned and the remainder in declining order. If we do that search inside Squidoo we would get results but not necessarily in the order of authority as Google sees it.

In the case of Squidoo here it does appear that as far as Google is concerned there aren’t any niche relevant lenses here e.g.

We could go to Watermelon on Squidoo and put in a comment with a link back to our site but this would be bad practice as there is no niche relevance here.

Time to move on and find some other platofrms with tighter niche relevance. Another platform could be HubPages. Again, notice a similar search format to Squidoo

This is much better. You can see some niche relevant hubs. Let’s click through to the first one

You can see the guestbook functionality is turned on. We can submit a comment (with our unique identifier in the name section) with a link back to our own site

The CoolIris Plugin

It will help to download and install the CoolIris plugin for Firefox.

This plugin allows you to hover over a link and Firefox pops up a window and shows you what is at the other end of the link without having to click through.

This makes browsing very fast because you can quickly put my mouse over a link, check and see what’s there.

If you do want to click through then you can then open up the page in a new tab in the browser. It also shows you which sites you have looked at already by changing the color of the link