SEO For The Common Webmaster

If you have been around a while as a webmaster, I am sure that you have heard about Digital Point Forums. It is the largest known webmaster forum. It was once one of the best market places for webmasters. Is it losing its appeal?

In the past few months many changes have been made. Some are good and some are causing problems with doing any business on the forums. There have been many new moderators added and some are so young that they lack the maturity to run a forum of that size. The forum is running over with spammers and scammers and the sad part is that some of the scammers are long time members who seem to be protected by the forum leaders. Threads started about this member are closed and many people have been scammed.

The rules have been updated to include a 7 day ban for bumping threads. Of course, the general chat forum has tons of threads that have nothing to do with webmaster related topics and they can be bumped over and over. They say it is to clean up the market place but the market place is beyond repair. If you post an offer, it is quickly buried or overrun by people willing to work so cheap that a member from an Industrialized nation would starve with those rates.

The freebie section is a joke because it includes anything from free up to $5 deals. This is not free, it is a joke. Every time this is brought up, the thread is quickly closed with responds like “It ain’t going to happen” or “Only Shawn can change it.”

Shawn is the owner of the forum and he only pops in now and then and seems to have no interest in members’ concerns. That is sad to see since DP was once the greatest webmaster forum on the Internet.

The rules seem to change all the time and there can be stickies found all over the forum but not consolidated in one convenient place. We are told to report violations of the rules. However, it depends on which moderator you get rather it will be dealt with. Shannon (Smyrl on the forum) is the only moderator that can be relied on to handle issues the same all the time.

I am not trying to trash the forum because there are some great members on there. I have done a lot of business on DP since I joined in the spring of 2006. I am just expressing my concerns and the concerns of many members on the forum. I have tried to express those concerns on the forum and the threads are shut down quickly. I would love to see DP restored to a webmaster forum of high quality. It is sad to see General Chat garbage threads getting hundreds of replies while honest webmaster related topics may not get any. Is DP still a webmaster forum?

The problems have drawn me to ask the question to both myself and other members, has Digital Point Forums lost its appeal for webmasters?

The biggest dream that most webmasters have is to earn lots of money and become rich. They seek the next big trend and they look for that magic eBook that will tell them how to make millions. The truth is, there are very few d who become rich.

Looking for your dream in a $19.95 eBook is useless. I have read many and reviewed a few and most the information is so vague and does nothing but earn money for the author or seller of the eBook. Very few people who have truly became rich will take the time to sell an eBook. Rich people are not willing their secret methods for small amounts of money unless their system is no longer working well. Think about it, if you were making $5,000-$10,000 a day, why would you sell that idea to others? Most times the idea is a possibility to earn money but no proven track record. The author does not want to take the time and energy to try it out so they make their money by writing an eBook.

I once read and reviewed a eBook on a not so well known referral program. The book was well written and gave you tools to help with the program. However, the author had not made money from it and it was purely a possibility. This is common in many eBooks.

I can tell you how to make millions of dollars on any affiliate program. Basically, you have to have targeted traffic and get lots of sign-ups and sales. That sounds too simple, doesn’t it? Well it is not that simple but many of the eBooks will make it sound like that. They fail to tell you that millions of others are competing for the same sale or sign-up. They fail to tell you that you will be spending a lot of time and in many cases money for advertising just for the chance to make money.

I am not saying you can not get rich. I am not saying that you can’t pull a nice above average income from being a webmaster. What I am saying is that it takes lots of work, sometimes a lot of risk, and at all times it takes patience. The people who tell you that you can build a site and put it on auto pilot while you sit on the beach of your private island are feeding you a long of BS. You will not get rich overnight! It takes time. In many cases, it takes a lot of luck and being in the right place at the right time.

Be a website or blog owner because you enjoy it. Look for every opportunity for making money but make the best website or blog you can. There is  money to be made but you have to be willing to open your eyes and not fall for every get rich quick scheme that comes along. Follow your dreams not the dreams of others!

If you have a success story to share or some words of encouragement for other webmasters, please leave a comment for others to read.

Every few weeks I take the time to update my directory lists. It is both a good resource for my readers and a way for directory owners to advertise their directories. If you are looking for a list of directories, here is the links to the Free Directories and the Paid Directories.

If you have a directory you would like to add to either list, feel free to comment on this thread and I will be happy to add you to my lists. Please specify rather the directory is free, paid, or requires a reciprocal link.

Well it seems that another update has just been released by the creators of WordPress. Information regarding the update can be found on their blog. It seem that they are ahead of schedule and have made some new features.

I just did the upgrade for all my blogs and to be all honest, I have not found anything that just jumped out as all the new. However, the claims are that it fixed many bugs and there are some cool new features. Maybe I will see them as I need them.

For those of you who are planning to upgrade, I recommend one of two ways. The first way is the easiest but you had to have installed you blog through Fantastico which is a software installer available with many hosting accounts. All you have to do is go to the Fantastico page on your cpanel and hit upgrade and it does the whole thing for you.

If you transferred your blog or installed it yourself without the use of Fantastico, there is a easy to use plugin for WordPress that does the upgrading for you. This plugin is called WordPress Automatic Upgrade and it is easy to use and saves you the possibility of messing something up.  I use it on this blog and it has worked great for the last two updates.

Of course, you can also do it manually and the instrutions are located here. This is not hard but I prefer the easy methods I described above. Upgrades can be a pain but they did fix a lot of bugs so I highly recommend you upgrade whenever a new version comes out. Please feel free to share any new features you discovered with the update by leaving a comment here.

I know that I am not the end all to be all for SEO. I am always learning along with the rest of you. Here is your opportunity to share what you know.

If you have a great SEO strategy or wish to share some great tips for search engine optimization. Please leave a comment on this post to share with other readers.

As always, thank you for making my blog part of your life!