New Month, PageRank & Marketing Experiments!

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Nate Whitehill

New Month, PageRank & Marketing Experiments!

Well, it is now May and I am officially going on my fourth month of blogging. The past three and a half months have been great – I have managed to crank out 106 posts and there has been 847 comments, so far. I am currently averaging around 140 or so RSS subscribers per day. My goal by the end of May is to have that number around 200.

My First Contest

I will be hosting my first (2-part) contest this month – I am giving away $25 of cash as well as a blog review and 1 hour of my graphic design services to two winners. More on that in my next post.

Before I get into the details of the contest, I want to talk a little bit about the latest PageRank update and what I have planned for May.

PageRank Update Finally Here!

As most of you have now witnessed, Google finally awarded us with the long awaited PageRank update. My initial prediction of a PageRank 5 came true, and for that I am very thankful.

However happy I am with my PageRank, it appears Google’s PageRank logic is not entirely sound. A few well-known bloggers did not receive the PageRank they were expecting. For example, one well-known blogger who has been blogging almost as long as me and has just as many backlinks, only received a PR 3. On the other hand, another friend of mine who doesn’t have one-tenth the backlinks and hasn’t posted to his blog in almost 2 months received a PR 4. Go figure.

How about you guys? Are all of you happy with your new PageRank?

Top Commentators Reset

Since it is now a new month, my Top Commentators has been reset. Since my blog is now a PR 5, I expect the Top Commentators action to heat up a little more.

Don’t forget – on a blog with a higher PR, your anchor text matters THAT much more for SEO… You are free to use whatever anchor text you want as long as it is not offensive to anyone.

For more information about ranking for specific keywords, see my latest post about how to rank for specific keywords.

May is Marketing Month For My Businesses

This month, I am going to put some serious effort into marketing my web development business, infinFX, and my IT consulting firm, Scottsdale IT. I have a 3-part marketing plan I am going to execute over this month.

Part 1 – Direct Mailing: I am going to be designing and mailing out 2000 postcards to local Scottsdale businesses advertising our various services. Direct mailing is some of the cheapest and most effective marketing a business can do. I recommend it highly to anyone who owns any kind of consulting business.

Part 2 – Lead Generator & Free Website Wellness Checks: I am also going to implement a lead-generation program into the infinFX web site so it will be easy for potential clients to request a quote. We are also going to begin offering free Website Wellness Checks to local businesses who already have a web site. A great way to get the attention of potential clients is to to give something away for free. Website Wellness Checks will not only be free, but very useful, as well.

Part 3 – Free WordPress Templates: The third part of the marketing plan is to begin releasing free WordPress themes designed by yours truly. This will help add some more backlinks to my companies as well as being useful to my visitors.

I will be sure to keep you guys updated over the next month as to how these marketing methods help my businesses. In the next few days, I am going to show off the first design of the postcard I will be mailing out in the next week.

The next month will be very exciting for me and I look forward to sharing my progress with you!

By the way, don’t forget to check out my $50 Cash Giveaway Contest!
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  • http://iblog-youblog.blogspot.com I Blog – You Blog

    My best wishes are with you in this journey online. I’ve been seeing a constant rise in your RSS readers.

  • http://www.electrictoolbox.com Chris Hope

    “However happy I am with my PageRank, it appears Google’s PageRank logic is not entirely sound. A few well-known bloggers did not receive the PageRank they were expecting. For example, one well-known blogger who has been blogging almost as long as me and has just as many backlinks, only received a PR 3. On the other hand, another friend of mine who doesn’t have one-tenth the backlinks and hasn’t posted to his blog in almost 2 months received a PR 4. Go figure.”

    That’s because not all backlinks are equal. 10 backlinks from PR5 sites are a lot better than 10 backlinks from a PR4 site, for example.

    • http://www.coopreme.com coopreme internet marketing

      there is so much to pr system that we do not know.

    • http://natewhitehill.com Nate Whitehill

      Hey Chris, yeah that makes sense. What is weird is the scale – one guy has like 200 backlinks, the other 2000 and got a lower PR.

      • http://www.electrictoolbox.com Chris Hope

        Yep all very interesting. They must be some pretty poor backlinks ;) As “coopreme internet marketing” points out though there’s a lot to the PR system, and there’s a lot of factors which make different sites rank differently. If I recall correctly there’s a patent for it so it would probably be possible to look at the patent and get a better idea of how it works, but it’s probably full of mathematical mumbo jumbo that wouldn’t make a lot of sense to non phd maths people…

  • http://www.bmwdealers.org BMW Dealers

    Good to see your increase in page rank, will also mean your advertising rates can be put up :D

    • http://www.watchthisvid.com Funny Video Clips

      TextLinkAds are probably swamped with new publishers at the moment. :)

  • http://www.joshbuckley.net Josh Buckley

    It’s amazing how fast your blog has grown

    • http://www.coopreme.com coopreme internet marketing

      i kno, i love his stuff though

      • http://natewhitehill.com Nate Whitehill

        Thanks guys! :)

  • http://bitbol.blogspot.com mike – bitbol

    “Are all of you happy with your new PageRank?”
    To be honest, as much as I would like a higher rank, I don’t care that much about it. Perhaps it is because I have no intent on making money, just be heard.

    Anyhow, wordpress templates are a great way to go. I have been thinking about that, to help recycle some of my past ideas, but the only problem I have right now is that I have no place to host them. I can’t wait to see them.

    • http://natewhitehill.com Nate Whitehill

      Hey Mike, if you need affordable and reliable, let me know.

  • http://www.cyberoptik.net chicago custom web design

    I had a few of my sites go down in pr, and a new website go up to pr2 (don’t know how). I’m aiming to get my design site up to a pr 5 or 6 on the next update. If you don’t mind for one of your next posts… I have some questions about your direct mailing campaign. Where did you get the 2000 mailing addresses, and how are you mailing them (are you going to be a stamp on each one)? This is just for my curiousity, I’ve considered doing a mailing campaign however I wasn’t sure how to work it all out. Thanks.

  • http://www.crunchi.net Online Business Blog

    hey when is the next update predicted?

    • http://natewhitehill.com Nate Whitehill

      3 or so months from now.

  • http://www.thethinkingblog.com The Thinking Blog

    Hey Nate.. I got a PR5 as you predicted!

    =)

  • http://www.communityspark.com/ Community Building Blog

    I am up to a PageRank of 4 which I am happy with as I have only been blogging for 2 months. On a separate note, what kind of competition are you planning on running? I am always a critic when it comes to offering incentives for people to get involved in a community.

  • http://natewhitehill.com Nate Whitehill

    Hey Martin, it’s not so much of a competition, as it is a community building and “thanking my commentators” project. Both winners will essentially be randomly chosen.

  • http://www.mikroproje.com DotNetNuke Consulting

    Thanks for letting us commenting, these feature is really nice. I jumped to PR 4

  • http://stocktube.blogspot.com StockTube

    that’s amazing nate, considering the short period og your blogging …

    mine didn’t change a bit from the earlier PR=4 since 4 months ago … i guess backlinks are one of the most important factors to get a higher PR – forget about the tons of original postings you did … it’s not important …

    i think i asked you this before, but will you be working on projects to have wordpress themes designed for blogger platform? i would love to have one as the blogger’s template are generally sucks …

    i guess i should spend more time marketing my blog-site and building networking instead on concentrating on contents alone …

    cheers …

  • http://gostats.com Richard

    Hi Nate, if you would like to add another prize to your contest, I can offer a two year subscription to GoStats Pro (value of $180). Just email me for further info/questions.

    • http://natewhitehill.com Nate Whitehill

      Hey Richard, that sounds excellent! I am going to email you and confirm and if all is a go then I will make an announcement!

  • http://moneymaikers.blogspot.com AK

    I’m just wondering if backlinks are not as important as thought to be. One of my sites went from a PR0 to PR3 in this update with barely any backlinks. Maybe Google has a new method of determining page ranks…like tossing a coin or something.

    • http://bitbol.blogspot.com mike – bitbol

      I have no idea how they do it, but it is confusing to me too. I have a broad coverage of different topics, small number of linkbacks, but I have held a PR3 for the past six months.

      “like tossing a coin or something”
      a weighted, ten-sided coin.

  • http://www.iamkarthik.com/ Blogging Tips

    @AK

    It depends on the weight of the existing backlinks that you have too. If wordpress.org links to your blog, inspite of it being a single link will see you through a PR5 pretty soon.