So here is an ingenious way to drive traffic to your site. Let millions of blogs find out what their “rating” is movie-style. This is exactly what a site called mingle2.com - an online dating site has done. For those that know me, I am a search engine marketing guy in my “real” life. Years ago, before SEO became the “hot” thing, a company called Atomz Search - which is now owned by analytics company WebSideStory - built a little widget that anyone could put on their website. This widget allowed the website owner to have a small internal search engine, which tens of thousands of people loved. Only, on the widget was a little link back to Atomz Search. This sky rocketed Atomz’ webpage to a Page Rank of 9 for a long time. Read the rest of this entry »

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John Battelle apologizes for the “blogstorm” that was created from the discussion around whether Federated Media was paid by Microsoft to post positive reviews of their products.

Personally, I am on the fence about how bad it is to have a paid review. The issue really gets muddied when there is no indication that the post was paid for. Its similar to paid search ads. As long as they are marked as paid, there should be no issue. Scoble does a much better job than me discussing this issue.

Sometimes, I think we all get a little self-righteous, especially about the web. Why does the Internet need to be commerce free? There is no other medium is that commerce free. Infomericals, paid product placement in movies, etc. At some point, there has to be consensus that everything has a price.

My friend Allison Hartsoe started a company a couple years back called Internet Business Skills. It seems that now that company has really grown, and she renamed it to Aspyro, offering strategic analysis and technology to help ebay sellers become more effective. I am quite excited whenever I see a friend of mine begin to realize their dream, and the hard work they put in to growing a business starts to bear fruit. So if you are a power ebay seller, and need the best to help you become the best, give Allison a call.