Entries Tagged 'Links' ↓

Favorite Links - June 27, 2007

A few of my favorite links from the past week or so:

A Few Good Posts

Here are a few noteworthy blog posts from the past few weeks:

Enjoy!

What I Read

I love Google Reader’s trends feature, which allows you to see statistics about your reading habits. Here is a list of the top 20 blogs I have been reading over the past 30 days. The numbers are the total amount of posts I read and the percentage of all posts I read.

John Chow dot Com Go to homepage 35 33%

Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim - Internet Marketing Blog & Consultant Go to homepage 26 13%

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog Go to homepage 19 41%

SEO Book.com Go to homepage 19 32%

Pronet Advertising Go to homepage 18 32%

ProBlogger Blog Tips Go to homepage 17 23%

Chris Knudsen on life, business, and entrepreneurship Go to homepage 9 47%

The Jason Calacanis Weblog Go to homepage 9 20%

Shoemoney - Skills to pay the bills Go to homepage 9 14%

Russell Page Go to homepage 8 40%

Copyblogger Go to homepage 8 38%

Seth’s Blog Go to homepage 8 17%

Smooth Harold | The Blog of Blake Snow Go to homepage 7 37%

NewspaperGrl Go to homepage 7 35%

Graywolf’s SEO Blog Go to homepage 7 25%

Online Marketing Blog Go to homepage 7 18%

Macalua.com Go to homepage 6 43%

Tropical SEO Go to homepage 6 40%

SEO BlackHat: Black Hat SEO Blog Go to homepage 5 83%

Connor’s Conundrums Go to homepage 5 26%

Selections From ProBlogger’s Group Writing Project

I participated in ProBlogger’s group writing project a couple days ago. There were many great submissions that offer some great advice. I’m sharing some of the submissions that are relevant to this blog below:

5 Benefits Podcasting has helped my business by The Freq

Top 5 Reasons To Start A Business by Jason Drohn

Top 5 Internet Marketing Mistakes by The Internet Marketing Monitor

5 Low-Cost High-Impact Relatively Immediate Search Marketing Tactics by Sasha

The Top 5 Reasons Darren Rowse is a Marketing Genius by Kent

5 Things You Can Learn About Marketing From Pro Wrestling by Paul Nilsen

Top 5 Reasons Why Information Products is the Ultimate Business by Martin Neumann

5 SEO blogs I can’t get enough of by Joost

Top 5 SEO Skills Identified As Most Important by The (SEP) Guy

Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO by Michael Jensen

Top 5 ways to connect online with the 50+ marketing demographic by The Savvy Boomer

Top 5 Business Startup Myths by John Crickett

5 Reasons Why Every Business Needs a Newsletter by Simon Payn

How To Start Your Own Business Today! No Excuses by John Anthony

The Top 5 Questions - to spark new marketing ideas by Matt McDonald

Top Five Internet Business Blogs

I am writing this post as part of Darren Rowse’s Group Writing Project. The following are my five favorite blogs related to doing business online. I would recommend them to all.

1. ProBlogger: Darren gives great advice on everything related to Pro blogging.
2. Pronet Advertising: I would say this is the best blog out there about social media from a marketers perspective. Neil and his gang have done a great job.
3. SEOmoz: Rand Fishkin and the folks at SEOmoz provide a steady flow of good advice and information related to Search Engine Optimization.
4. CopyBlogger: Brian gives great advice related to copywriting. I am constantly amazed at the quality of every post he publishes.

5. John Chow dot Com: Although his blog tends to go off topic quite frequently John offers great information on everything related to making money online.

While trying to come up with this list several other blogs came to mind which are also worth reading, so I’ve decided to list them below if you want to check them out.

SEO Book

Paul Allen (the lesser)

Newspapergrl

Macalua.com

Shoemoney

Seth Godin’s blog

Search Trends

The Carolynn Blog

and so many more…

My Google Reader Feeds

A couple months ago I noticed that I had subscribed to almost 200 feeds on bloglines. Although they were all good blogs I realized that I had been avoiding checking up on them simply because it seemed a bit daunting to login to bloglines and see that I had hundreds of unread items. As a result of my reluctance to check my bloglines account on a consistent basis I was missing a lot of good posts, so I decided that I would narrow down my choice of subscriptions to maybe only 20-30 blogs that I really felt were the most important. At the same time I decided I would also like to try out a new feed reader to see if they offered better features than bloglines.

A few weeks ago I heard from Paul Allen that Google Reader tracked your reading habits and would generate reports of what you have been reading over time. I thought this was a cool feature that may help me prioritize which blogs I should stay subscribed to and which blogs I should drop in case my list got too big again. So I left bloglines and have been using Google Reader ever since. I decided I wanted to start off from scratch and only initially subscribe to the blogs that I could think of off the top of my head. Over the last few weeks I added a few more, but have still managed to keep the list down to a size where I could reasonably read every post if I wanted to (usually I just a select a few that seem the most interesting) even if I have been gone for a few days. I wanted to share my list of the blogs I have decided to subscribe to. Don’t feel bad if your blog is not on the list, it may have been on my old bloglines list, and may show up in the future on my new Google reader list (Google reader seems to help me organize my feeds a lot better than bloglines so I may be subscribing to a lot more feeds in the future). Here is the current list:

Chad Blodgett | feed
Chris Knudsen | feed
Connor’s Conundrums | feed
Don Loper | feed
John Jonas Blog | feed
Paul Allen: Internet Entrepreneur | feed
Russell Page | feed
Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing | feed
The Carolynn Blog | feed
Macalua.com | feed
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO | feed
Pronet Advertising | feed
feed SEO Book.com
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog | feed
How to Change the World | feed
Copyblogger | feed
MarketingVOX - The Voice of Online Marketing | feed
Seth’s Blog | feed
Shoemoney - Skills to pay the bills | feed
Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim | feed
John Chow dot Com | feed
ProBlogger Blog Tips | feed

In a few weeks once I have collected more data on my reading habits I will posting a ranked list of the blogs I read the most.

Seven Digg Experts

While keeping informed and up to date about what is being written about Digg over the past several months I have come across a lot of information that really isn’t that insightful or in some cases is even just plain wrong. So to help anyone interested in learning more about Digg sort through the jungle of information out there I have created the following list of bloggers who in my eyes have proved through their writings on the subject that they really know what they are talking about. These guys have established themselves as authorities on the subject of Digg. So here is the list of the Digg experts along with a few links to what they have written about Digg. I am sure there are others experts out there but these are the ones that I have found to be the most insightful. If you know of anyone else who deserves to be on this list please list them in the comments.

Entrepreneurship Blogs and Resources

Mind Valley Labs has come up with a pretty useful list of blogs and resources for entrepreneurs. If you are an entrepreneur or are interested in learning about entrepreneurship it is worth checking out. In their comment section I added the following other blogs that are also worth checking out.

http://www.paulallen.net/
http://www.garrettsmith.info/
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/
http://brockblake.com/

Google’s Dominance

Today, in my internet marketing class at BYU, our teacher, Paul Allen, asked the class what search engine they used primarily. Amazingly 100% of the class in a class of about 50 raised their hands when Paul asked who used Google as their primary search engine. This is a biased sample, since most the students are business oriented and technically savvy, but it still amazed me that every person in the class uses Google as their primary search engine.