MBTI is the most used personality test in the world. There are some people who just LOOOVE the test, and spend quite some time studying other types as well as their own. Now, you could tap into that pool of enthusiasts by simply adding your type indicator to your about me -box or blog description. The more you know about it, you can tag your posts that are typical to your type with your type indicator as well, to pump them up in searches, blog catalogues, directories and other places.

If you haven’t taken the test or have forgotten your results, try this one: http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/mmdi/questionnaire/ It’s free to take and gives you a basic result as well as a breakdown of your closest “personality cousins”. Once you have your type, move here: http://www.personalitypage.com/html/portraits.html to read more about your type. If you’re unsure about your result, you can google for more tests, there’s plenty to choose from.

By the way; I’m an INFP.

The PR-rating, as most of you know, is relevant to how many links are pointing back at your site. It’s kind of a popular vote sort of thing. It is not entirely reliable though, as you can “vote yourself” as many times you want by creating back links – sometimes by hiring tons of people to post links on unrelated blogs on your behalf.

What I would like Google to do, is to offer an option to search without PR. I understand that in some cases PR is actually a good indicator on what quality websites we’re looking at, but on other instances… I would at least like the chance to search the web on the site’s own merits alone, take out the back link effect completely. As, there might be a site created yesterday that is far better than another site created 10 years ago which has tons of back links by the age only, but that actually offers more value to the visitor than the old site.

So, I don’t need to tell you anything about SEO, except that here’s a very helpful SEO guide that will tell you most anything you need to know about search engines.

I realised that the standard 125×125 advert will cost me more to run, because the competition is higher, but on the flip side there’s a lot more sites to advertise on, so I kept it in the game anyway. (Besides, with PW rates, who cares?) To my surprise, the smallest of ads, the button, performed best. How odd is that? The button, based on my results, brings in 1/3 more visitors compared to the square 125×125 ad, maybe because it’s so small it doesn’t look like a paid ad but something the page author recommends. (I remember reading a blog entry along these same lines saying the same about the button ad, but to the life of me I can’t find it anymore to link to it.)

As an experiment, I spent 6 dollars on Project Wonderful and 6 dollars on Facebook advertising. Even though I created a highly targeted campaign on Facebook, the cost per click is as high as $0.16 (again using a version of the same ad showing only to people who mention “Barbie” on their profile or are fans of an official Barbie collectors page). On Project Wonderful, I ran a very untargeted campaign, showing the ads where ever I could get them for 0.01 dollars, and as a result I got about double the clicks and paid on average from $0.001 to $0.02 per click depending on the size of the ad. (The cheapest being the massive rectangle ad, and the most expensive a shared position between the 125 square and the full banner.)

Of course, there might be a situation where Project Wonderful simply doesn’t work for you because your genre isn’t on the whole network. I have found only one other site running PW ads that is about Barbie, but I am lucky in a way that my topic is a fashion icon, and everyone knows her already. I can also run the ad on craft sites, and chances are there’s a Barbie collector there who sees the ad. Also, I know that people who are into crafts can be curious about Barbie, so even if they’re not collectors yet, my site might coax them into it..! I know similar things have happened when I’ve been interviewed on the telly or magazines about Barbie stuff, and someone, who hadn’t even THOUGHT about collecting before got inspired to see what it was all about and are now active members of the community. That is why you don’t always want to put in highly targeted ads to people who may already have a routine in the niche, they might have their favourite blogging tips site that they visit every day and they don’t have the need for your tips.

Then, once the clicks are in, it’s up to you to keep them coming back. Make sure they know instantly what your site is about… And don’t do it like I did with broken links on the front page!!

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It would be a lot better if there was a way to compare your site’s popularity In Your Niche, but there isn’t, at the moment anyway. That is to say that your site’s influence where it counts has little to do with your page ranks. I must give my husband’s blog as an example. He writes a blog for people who use exergaming in professional health and fitness purposes. Professional exergamers, that is. (I bet you didn’t even know there were such thing as a professional exergamer!) His blog, Exergaming Australia has a modest page rank of 2 (oh, he’s gone up!) and his Alexa ranking is around 4,600,000. Not too impressive if you just look at the numbers. However, everyone who is anyone in the field of exergaming knows who he is and what he does and his influence in the field is world wide and instant. When you google “exergaming” his blog comes up as the second result, right after Wikipedia and Nintendo Wii doesn’t even make the first page! This is because his niche is so small, that even though EVERYONE of any importance knows him, the vast majority of the web is quite unaware of what a brilliant blog he runs.

On the other hand, I run a Barbie community site, as you know, with a page rank of 4 and Alexa ranking of about 476,000, which is pretty impressive for any site, BUT, I make no money (or very little) and the English speaking world is pretty much unaware that my site exists. Put “Barbie” on Google and you won’t see my site anywhere near the top of the results, I quit searching after page 6. And that is because there are a gazillion Barbie sites out there, collectors, articles written about the doll and so forth and so forth, and not even refining the search to “Barbie community” help me much. Yes, I am bad at SEO, but my husband there is even worse.

I checked a few Barbie-sites that I know of and who are very well known amongst collectors, to see how they rank. I kicked their butt so bad, I couldn’t find an unofficial Barbie-site (non-Mattel) that would have had better rankings than I have, not even my biggest direct competitor. How much good does the rankings do for me? Not much, other than I get to pat myself in the back for beating the other sites in the numbers game, but that’s it.

So what to do? Make sure you introduce yourself to all the right people and get the word out. Do the best you can do to produce high quality content and people who do find your site may spread the word where it counts. Focusing on your page ranks is not going to bring your fame and fortune they are there just to report to you how much you’ve improved, not where you should be.

Does that make sense to you?

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I started writing a newsletter for my community site theBdoll.com at the beginning this year. First I thought I would just write a normal email and be done with it, but a silly thing happened – I run a bilingual site, so I would need to write in two languages and the other would have to scroll down to read the email in their language. That is when I decided to make two pdf’s, one in each language. And while I was doing the pdf, I thought why not put a couple more pages into it, and ended up writing a full blown e-newsletter, as in a little magazine. My members LOVED IT. They went absolutely ballistic over it, and I was blown away by the reactions. I got email from people who hadn’t visited the site for a while saying what a great idea that was and a lot of people raised their hands saying they’d like to help me with the newsletter in the future.

The whole project has brought the community closer together and as close knit as we were, the newsletter has made us even closer – I feel.

In each of the issues I introduce two of my members. Hopefully that will make all of us look more approachable as well as interesting to the non-returners – there is a lot of different types to go around, and I’m sure eventually everyone will find someone they’ll relate to and feel safe with if they’re more quiet type. In addition to that, the newsletter, or ezine rather, contains news, the latest hot stuff and a humorous gossip column of or members dolls – we’re Barbie collectors.

Of course, not all sites have topics that allow quite that elaborate ezines, and on the other hand, your topic might be even more open to ideas, I know that each issue I’ve made has brought in another idea. Have a look at our newsletter to get ideas for yours! http://www.thebdoll.com

Nowadays, everything is “optimized” for Google. When I use it as a search engine, I no longer receive the most relevant pages, but the results of the best SEO-experts out there. It’s like the Olympics where the players use the best drugs that test can’t reveal yet. It SUCKS. It’s UNFAIR to everyone.

Google has again changed the rules on how they index pages, and what do they do? They announce to everyone that this and that no longer apply! Good heavens, Google! You have a big mouth and you need to learn when to shut up! Just tell people you have completely renewed your algorythms, and you are not going to reveal what they are. Sure they can still try to make their searches rank high, but you’ll have the advantage of being ahead of the game and serve relevant searches.

You will probably get webmasters turn away from Google and optimize for Bing instead, but the thing that made Google popular back in the day wasn’t webmasters, but people who found what they were actually looking for without some second class writer with first class SEO knowledge thought we should be looking for. I for one will be doing my searches elsewhere until you learn to shut the fuck up.

It was a good run while it lasted Google, but now I’m going back to Altavista. Who uses Altavista anymore?! I hear you ask. Exactly. When I did a few searches with keywords I often use and run websites for, my sites ranked as I would expect them to on Altavista, where as Google didn’t even blink. I know these sites are of high quality, but they are not obsessively search engine optimized and as such, Google didn’t take much of a notice of them. Altavista on the other hand ranked them fairly, where they were supposed to be as the last entry of the first page they were, and where they were supposed to be on the top, they were. I normally do SOME SEO, put in keywords and page descriptions – when I think I should – and put in links to my sites where I think it would be helpful for people but I’m not spending hours on end on link building and trying to improve my Google and Alexa rankings. So there you have it. Who would have thought.

Project Wonderful has been hanging on for a while, even though the few pennies I earn doesn’t really ad up, but it has a good ad campaigning system so everything that I earn I’ll pretty much put back in.

The network I’m now going for is Adgitize. The reason for this is that the network, that seems to be in early days and quite amateurish in look still, is run by a guy who seems very dedicated to his thing and who is making eager effort to make his network flourish. The sad thing is that since the network is lacking in looks, I think it is hard to take seriously. It attracts second grade… Or shall we even say third grade blogs as publishers, often beginners and those who will add any gadget out there on their blog just because they learned the art of “copy paste”. Not only that, they are the ones who will add 3×3 -ad code to their site. In my opinion it shouldn’t even be offered. 3 ad boxes is more than enough and often that is too much on the same network (lowers the price paid for each ad box as there’s more room).

Anyway, Adgitize is good for small and medium sized blogs because you can earn in multiple ways on their system. It’s not only how many ads you show, or how many is clicked, it also has to do with you clicking on others adds, how many ads you show (this shouldn’t be rewarded imho), it even rewards you for posting content onto your own blog! There are a lot of things this network could do to improve, but it has such a flying start that I wish more serious bloggers who have more self control on advertising and understanding of quality would get into it as well.

Photo of a child on man’s avatar. Probably the last time any woman told him he was cute.

Photo of a child on woman’s avatar. A stay at home mother who has nothing else to talk about but her kids. (Probably uses a screen name such as “MomOf2″.)

Just the eye. Seeks a deep contact with people while trying to remain anonymous and appear soulful. Kind of works but is quite unoriginal and thus utterly forgettable.

Popular cartoon character – A male who is trying the “boyish charm” angle although it has never worked for anyone. We’ve seen enough of Vinnie the Pooh and friends already! Original cartoon characters by the man/woman behind the avatar, are encouraged though!

Disproportioned photo - An avatar of a casual Internet user who hasn’t yet found the delights of Photoshopping. (Has uploaded a photo straight from the camera, without shaping it into a square first.) Unprofessional.

Logo – impersonal. Is here to sell me something.

The vast majority of people prefer the picture of a person in an avatar over a logo or other graphic. People want to speak to people. If your avatar is listed amongst several others (like recent visitors list), the likelihood that you’ll get a click is higher if it’s your face in there. But, sometimes you need to put that logo up there. Another thing is, that if you’re using your photo, it gets boring after a while, and intolerable to you when you get a better photo of yourself. But the problem arises, that people get confused if you change your avatar. They won’t remember who you are for a while, until you say something really characteristic to yourself. I believe I found a solution to both of these problems. You are not likely to change your logo too often, right? So why not use that together with your photograph?

Here are some of my recent avatars:

See what I mean? There are elements in the avatar that stay constant while I get bored with the rest of it – me. :p This of course requires some Photoshop skills, but nothing too complicated. This also gives you the option of using different theme in the photos while still tying them to yourself. The one I’m holding my dog is used on social sites for field spaniel owners. The one I hold a pen in, is designed for my writer’s profile.

Lastly, it’s a good idea to upload your avatar to Gravatar, which is a centralized avatar storage, that will allow you to link a photo to your email address. This way when you comment on a blog (all that have Gravatar enabled) will fetch your photo that matches the email address you used. Sweet.

In the stumbling world, the word goes, that it takes over your life almost. “One more stumble” can keep you up late at nights and drag you out of bed early to do a couple more before going to work. Okay, addiction should not be used as a recommendation, but it just tells you how cool it is. And people who don’t have addictive nature, will handle it fine, don’t worry.

StumbleUpon brought back my belief in the Internet some months ago when I started using it. I was quite bored and thought that nothing happened around the Internet anymore. I installed Stumbe, and realised there was a lot of cool things going on!

For bloggers and site owners I would like to say though, that take Stumble as it is. Don’t tell people not to give you thumbs down for your post, because that’ll be a sure fire way to make them do so. Also don’t tell them to stuble you, as they most certainly won’t if you tell them to. Just add the “stumble this” button and leave it at that – not that you need to, any site can be added to Stumble, but it makes it a tad more easier at times, and also remind your readers who stumble to stumble… Not that they would need to be reminded most of the time…

Just one more thing. Do you know what is the first thing I do when I get homy on a new computer? (I have had to change computers a lot lately, long story.) I install the SU toolbar. I feel naked without it. Get yours!