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I was going to publish an earth-shattering post that would revolutionize online marketing through unconventional techniques, but I thought I would put that on hold. Instead, I’ll share with everyone that this blog is now #1 on Google (GOOG) for the keyword term Unconventional Marketing and Unconventional marketing Blog. Here is the pic.

Over the past month or two I have been floating between #2 and #3 depending on the day and weather, apparently. Now my goals are honing in on some other marketing terms as well as my name and Josh Blog. I never knew before blogging that there was another Josh Whitford in this world, but there is. And not only that, but he is an author and professor, thus holding the #1 spot for our names. In time. As far as the other terms go, I am slowly beginning to pick off the less searched for marketing terms and using those as the blog’s foundation before conquering others larger terms.

I have been developing SEO skills over the last two months as I questioned how to rank #1 for selected terms. What I have found is that ranking for keywords is pretty easy and straight forward, but depending on the terms can take a lot of time and effort to achieve. I hope to build up the skills and continue to use that to benefit this blog and those around me. If you are wondering where I learned about SEO here are the blogs you should visit. There are many more out there but these are the most legit I have found.

• Make Money Online (Vic)
• Make Money Online (Grizzly)
• How to Make Money Online for Beginners
• Learn. Rank. Dominate

As a way of celebrating, I will offer 200 Entrecredits to the first 20 people to leave a comment on this post. If you don’t have Entrecard, I will offer up a free link on my blog roll instead. I will send the credits to the email you use in posting your comments.

That’s right folks. All the secrets about blogging and the Internet are explained right here in this video, and you know what? It’s all free and here for the taking. So spend a few minutes and listen to this invaluable information. Don’t let this pass you by.

If you haven’t already you should stop by www.thatmutt.com and wish Lindsay happy birthday. She is 25 today. Also sign up to subscribe to my RSS by email and enter yourself into the contest for lots of great prizes resulting in traffic flow to your blog or website.

P.S. Tell me what you think of my signature sign-off. Otherwise you might here that phrase a lot more from me.

That is right, I am doing another contest until the end of the month. I am sure there is something for everyone. Just to clarify, all new and current RSS subscribers are eligible. If you are receiving this by RSS to your email, here is the link for the video. On a separate note, I really need to get a better microphone for these videos. I am using the stock one on the webcam and it picks up a lot of white noise. I even tried to put a noise filter over it without any success. Anyone know of any noise canceling software like the BOSE headphones?

Sitehoppin is a cross between a paid-for Wiki, like the Million Dollar Wiki, StumbleUpon and Entrecard all rolled into one. And does it deliver. I bought a couple of pages from Max, the founder of Sitehoppin.com, and I am not disappointed in the least. I got 2,916 unique page views to our two sites in the last week. Max has also offered the viewers of the Unconventional Marketing Blog a 25% discount on all purchases using the affiliate link I have provided, here.

Getting Started

First, I signed up for a login to the site and got to know the layout. Being one of the first people to join in purchasing beer shares from the site, I had the pick of any word(s), letters or numbers I wanted. I picked a small handful of numbers and relevant words for my site (1-10, MLM, Marketing, Dogs, so on). I believe that some of the alphabet is still available, otherwise double numbers and letters are easy. I think first picking up a couple of good keywords for your blog would be the best. The pricing breaks down like this.

I spent about $40 on different shares that I listed above. Spending $40 for the 3,000 page views comes out to about $.013 per page view, and every day that drops. Each Beer Share that you purchase is equal to one page. That page can then be left alone and content will be provided for it, or you can have it redirect to a page on your site. I picked about 10 different high quality articles to be linked to. After you purchase your share(s) on Sitehoppin and set up your page by linking it to whatever site you chose, that site and page will start receiving traffic to it. How does that work?

Driving traffic

Driving traffic to your site is really simple. Your page can receive two different types of traffic from Sitehoppin. The first is by people randomly landing on your page when they hit the Site Hoppin button shown in the picture. The second way is to purchase Beer Shares.

What’s the difference between randomly hopping your page and buying Beer Shares?

Beer Share pages on Sitehoppin will receive 30% of the total traffic. This means your page and the others like it that have been purchased will receive about 1/3 of the traffic on Sitehoppin. That might not seem like a lot, but there are 95,000 pages submitted to Sitehoppin (at the time of writing). Currently, 80 Beer Shares have been bought from Sitehoppin. These 80 pages are getting 1/3 of the traffic from the whole site. Every time I log in to the site I see at least 40 registered users logged in and about 2,000 non-registered. With an Alexa rank of 17K, I know Sitehoppin is getting the traffic it boasts. I have had 3,000 page views to our sites from Sitehoppin in the last week. I don’t think there is another place that you can by a few $1 pages (Beer Shares) and get that kind of return. The fact that the traffic keeps coming in and I have invested nothing more also means that it is consistent. It is easy to see that as more people start Sitehoppin, good steady traffic will be generated.

Other benefits

•    You can site hop on your iPod Touch or iPhone.
•    You can submit each article you create, like StumbleUpon without the backlash.
•    Watch the creator of the site with all of his funny video posts.
•    Sell Beer Shares for real money, Buy Low, Sell High.
•    Set Sitehoppin on “slideshow mode,” in order to surf the web in fixed intervals. It is real easy and fun
•    Drop Entrecards while gaining traffic for your own site with “Tag Hoppin.”
•    Gain free traffic from your own “Beer Widget.”

Results

I have gotten far more traffic from Sitehoppin when compared to Entrecard. The bounce rate between the two sites is comparable. The major advantage Sitehoppin has over Entrecard is the amount of time invested. I probably spend 1/4 the time on Sitehoppin for the same number of visitors. The Ability to Tag Hop on Sitehoppin allows you to collect Entrecredits and gain extra traffic by collecting beer credits (very cool, two birds one stone). Hurry, while it lasts, because this site is giving away a lot of traffic to be kept hidden.

As all bloggers know, having a good Technorati ranking is key for establishing your credibility. But when you are starting out as a blogger, what is the easiest way to increase your rank?

Your Technorati authority is the number of blogs that have linked to your site within the last six months. For more information about Technorati and Technorati ranking, go here. Your number one goal is to increase this number of links pointing to your blog. Unfortunately, if one site links to your blog more than once, only one is counted. So the key question to ask yourself is how to get your link on as many different blogs as possible in the shortest amount of time. The answer: Contests.

People love winning things for very little effort. In the last month, I can count about 6 contests I would deem legitimate and worth more than $2,000. Some of you may have heard about the Sense to Save contest or the Winning the Web contest. Contests like these are a great way to drive traffic to your blog and are a lot of fun to talk about. The downsides are the effort involved in executing them and not everyone is willing to put forth the time and energy to properly run one.

To increase your Technorati authority by using contests, find upcoming contests through forums, Google Alerts, search engines or word of mouth (right now Ty over as Tysblog.com is collecting contributors). When you find a contest you can participate in, try offering something to be donated for the prize. The idea is to offer the contest either a service or products. For example, I found a contest and donated Entrecard credits to it. Entrecredits are cheap and work great for this. Because of my donation, my link was visible under the list of contest prizes, which everyone involved saw. In most cases, the hosting blog is willing to take on most prizes in order to sweeten the pot and make more buzz for his or her site.

The best part about donating to Internet contests is the publicity they can offer you. This is because one way to be chosen as a contest winner is to promote it and give some “link love” back to the hosting site. If you have donated to this contest, this will help drive a little traffic to your site, boost your Technorati authority and establish your presence in the blogging community.

I donated to one contest and gained over 14 backlinks to my blog from it. The cost of those 14 backlinks was the 1,000 Entrecredits I originally donated to the contest prize. Everyone would agree that 1,000 Entrecard credits go for about $4-5 dollars or about an hour of time. That is a great trade-off for gaining links. Imagine if you hunted down 5-10 different contests and donated just Entrecard credits. That could be enough to double your Technorati rank in most cases. Plus, all those contests you decide to donate to will enjoy the boost in prizes to give away. This is a classic win-win situation.

This is a screen shot of my Technorati authority. In one month, www.joshwhitford.com went from 0-54 authority.

The truth is, you will probably never run out of contests that are worth donating a prize to, along with gaining some traffic and Technorati authority for your blog. The number one way to grow your site and market yourself is to participate in the blogging community. Growing your network and community is the foundation to your blog. Trust, traffic and authority aren’t given to a blog, they are earned. Your mission is to establish yourself in your niche community.