Shaun Low

Every Sunday evening from 8.00pm CST, #blogchat takes place on Twitter.

Hosted by the uber-smart Mack Collier, it’s a discussion by bloggers about blogging – tips, tricks, tools of the trade, best practices and more.

It’s quickly evolved into one of the must-attend chat events on Twitter, and I never fail to come away with some cool new tidbits of information every week.

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Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason. Some days they are even successful. In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues. It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.

Blog #1 - The iFrame - The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load. It seemed abnormally long. I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.
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One very important thing all bloggers must have is system set up to track visitors coming to their site. A stat tracking system is basically a must if you want your blog to succeed in the internet world. There are lots of free stat tracking systems provided on the interenet that will successfully help you analyze all of your incoming traffic. Here are some of the best free stat tracking tools.

1. Google Analytics

I think it’s safe to say Google Analyticsis one of the most popular stat tracking tools out there. Google Analytics is probably the most common and preferred stat tracking tool among bloggers. Google Analytics provides information for just about any stat you could want to track for a website. I highly recomend installing this on your site if you run a blog.

2. Sitemeter

I have never used Sitemeter but from what I have read it tracks your last 100 visitors to your site and gives an in-depth overview of how these visitors interact with your website. You can get your free version of site meter here.

3. MyBlogLog

I really like using MyBlogLog as a stat tracker for my site. It provides you with up-to-date info on how many people have visted your site. You can get a real-time info of how many visitors your site has received that day and you don’t have to wait until a certain time to check your stats (unlink Google Analytics). MyBlogLog also lets you know what your readers are clicking on, where your readers are coming from and what pages your readers are viewing. The free stat tracking system for MyBlogLog only provides minimal information about your blog but you can upgrade to the MyBlogLog pro which gives a more indepth view on your site. I wouldn’t recommend paying for MyBlogLog pro because Google Analytics is far more descriptive and best of all it’s free!

4. StatCounter

StatCounter is a free stat tracking tool which is also used by many bloggers and webmasters. StatCounter provides data about your last 500 visitors to your site and has the invisible mode option.

5. FeedBurner

The majority of bloggers already use FeedBurner on their sites for RSS Feeds, Feedburner also provides in-depth info about all visitors to your site. Here is what they offer:

What You Get
Lots. This initial release of site statistics includes:

• Visitor summary, detail and trends
• Page summary, detail and trends
• Referral and Search trends
• Inbound referral traffic breakdown, grouped by domain and broken out in detail
• Outbound click breakdown
• Visitor city cloud and live geographic visitor detail
• Percentage inbound traffic from search and the queries that drove the traffic
• Percentage of visitors that are new to your site today
• Browser and OS breakdown, with trend indicators
• Detailed historical traffic by page and by date

What stat tracking system do you guys use? If you have a better stat tracking tool that I missed please share it with the rest of us!

I found this cool test over at Daily Blog Tips which puts your blogging skills to the test. According to the description:

Becoming a professional blogger is no easy task. You will need to have a basic knowledge on several fields; including web design, SEO, online marketing and more. Do you think you have what it takes? Test your skills with these 20 questions! 

 

The test is a simple 20 question multiple choice and should only take 2-3 minutes. I got 50% on it, lol not very good. See if you can beat me, take the test here. Share your results with everyone!

A lot of bloggers, webdesigners and site owners like to trade links with each other to increase their Google Page Rank. Link exchanges and link trains have proved very beneficial for giving websites more exposure. However the “Big G” sometimes likes to update its webmaster guidelines and in a heart beat will change all of the rules just like that. Directly in the new update it says that reciprocal linking is a form of a link scheme which is now against the guidelines of Google.

Google states that:

The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links

In the new update Google basically said that buying and selling links is forbidden. What will happen to companies like Text Link Ads? Heck TLA isn’t even on the first page of the term “text link ads” when you type that in Google. Other companies like Text Link Brokers, Live Customer, and Text Link Ads will basically bring no value to websites if they don’t have an effect on your Google Page Rank.

These link exchange companies might not go out of business just because of this Google update. They will still be effective in driving traffic to other sites but when it comes to increasing page rank nobody will be interested in these companies anymore. How will webmasters get around this new update? Any ideas from you guys? Click here for full details on the Webmaster Help Center update.

Lee LeFever is a community consultant, communicator and keeper of ideas. His passion lies in public speaking and often times he speaks in conferences, moderate panels, and conduct workshops. Thanks to Lee and Common Craft we have a nicely organized video that explains the power of social bookmarking and how it works to make web sites and web pages easier to remember, organize, and most importantly for bloggers is the ability to share these websites with other people of similar interests. The video is heavily focused on Del.icio.us but will also work for other sites such as Magnolia and Furl. It’s only a 3 minute video and it is definitely worth watching.

AllAdvantage was a site that not only paid you to surf the web, but also paid you to refer other people to surf, and then pays you again if the people you refer start referring other people as well, this keeps going all the way down to 4 levels. I know it sounds confusing but lets continue, AllAdvantage 2.0 came out with a new company called Agloco. this stands for A Global Community. Apparently AllAdvantage failed because the timing of the companies launch was bad, not the concept they presented to the public. Nobody knows forsure what actually happened but there is nothing wrong with going for a round two. Note: I am not trying to promote Agloco with this post.

Agloco provides a downloadable toolbar which is put at the bottom of the browser. AllAdvantage used to pay the users a flat fee er hour, this time they switched it up a bit. Agloco will give you a share of the income that the viewbar earns. Users can be paid via cash or in stocks. This prevents Agloco paying out more than what they make.

The viewbar provides privacy protection, spyware protection, phishing protection, member IM, voice communications, RSS feeds and more.  Agloco apparently is a 100% member owned company and the more members you refer the more shares you own. 10% of the company profits go to the company managment and the rest going towards the shareholders. When you sign up for Agloco you are given a user ID and you then use this ID # to refer other people.

Personally I don’t think Agloco will succeed and the only people that will make any real money from this will be the people with the most referrals. I wont be promoting Agloco in any way (even though I have a button at the top of the page with my referral ID on the link). This post was more of a rambling than anything and I forcast that Agloco will fail just like AllAdvantage 2.0. Unless you are already one of the top referrers for Agloco don’t assume you will be making any kind of income from these guys.

What do you think will happen with Agloco? Succeed or fail?

Today I went to check out my Technorati page and to my surprise I was ranked number one! Not only was I ranked number one but Shaunlow.com was in the top 100. Happy to know my blog has become one of the best in the world I wanted to go see what other blogs were ranked. Turns out every single blog I visited in Technorati was ranked # 1 . I thought I caught a lucky break.

Go check your technorati rank and enjoy being ranked #1 while it lasts because I’m sure they will have this glitch fixed anytime soon.

If you have a MySpace and looking to make a bit of extra cash Chitika Owna is something you might what to look into. Chitika is a well established company who is known for providing interactive product advertising. Chikita has come up with a new service called Chitika Owna which allows MySpace users to feature Chitika products on their page to earn some extra revenue.

Chitika has 5 skins designed to be integrated for MySpace pages. Customize the look, enter your Chitika ID (this allows you to collect any money you make), copy and paste the code and you are ready to go!

Chitika made a demo myspace page which shows you how to effectivly display your different skins and shows how to maximize products effectivly to make the most of your MySpace. Check it out here.

Anyone else every play Halo 1 or Halo 2? Haha I love those 2 games and what’s even better is that someone took the whole “gaming experience” to the next level and brought a deadly vehicle from those games to life! Really scary huh. I don’t know how many people I killed in that game using the Halo Warthog and all of a sudden that killing machine has been brought to life. Who knows how much this killing machine cost to make in real life but I think it’s really cool because I was always a big Halo fan.

I found this cool picture over at Brown Baron. Bungie has the full story here.