Yahoo! to discontinue LaunchCast Plus Radio

Oh no – this is not good news for me. For years I have been a subscriber to Yahoo! LaunchCast Plus Radio. As a subscriber you receive commercial free radio stations and you can even build your own station based on your favorite bands. I had not checked my Yahoo email account for a while, but now just noticed the message that came in a few days ago. On February 12 LaunchCast Plus will cease to exist. The free version will be transferred to CBS Radio, but that will include tons of advertisements.

So, I think that will mean I will have to look for a new Internet Radio service. I already looked at Sirius Internet Radio, but for $12.99 per month that is quite a difference compared to the $36/year I had to pay for LaunchCast Plus. Ok, $36/year was dirt cheap, but even if they would have raised their prices it would have still been a great deal. Too bad Yahoo! in general has no clue how to run a solid business. Their overall decline in marketshare for search and paid advertising is clearly a sign they just don’t get it.

Anyone know of any alternatives for commercial free radio that offers access to classic rock music? Please leave a comment. I would highly appreciate it.

PPC Coach PPC Training Update

It definitely pays to be a member of the PPC Coach PPC Training program. I have written about it before a couple of times. PPC Coach is a well structured approach to teach you PPC marketing skills that you can use to grow your business. The different training lessons go from easy to difficult. Good stuff and I am a paying member since August 2008.

Last week the PPC Coach opened up his “treasure chest” and started to release information about a very profitable niche. He showed us his website and listed all kinds of information that allows the PPC students to follow the campaign approach and to successfully assemble a winning campaign on its own. All I can tell is that little things like this really separate the PPC Coach from other PPC training programs or eBooks. The detail and the actual help provided is awesome. I am doing my part of the work already with research as well as finishing up another project, but I am really looking forward to hop onto this profitable train and make a few bucks.

Visit PPC-Coach for Program Details

Don’t Forget Your Past

No, I do not want to remind you of whatever bad or crazy things you have done in the past. I rather want to remind you about a little thing that eventually helps you down the road. In the past I did a lot of article marketing. Some or many of the websites I promoted this way I do not own anymore. However, the links are still out there – helping somebody else to profit from my work.

This evening I finally grabbed some time and went through those article directories that allow you to edit existing articles. So, I went through many articles that had outdated links attached to them and replaced the links with current ones. This will not help with articles that have been distributed to other websites, but it helps at least to redirect that little link juice that we get from an article directory to my newer sites that I still own. Little work – very easy to do.

So, do not forget about these things. This is fairly low hanging fruit and the payoff can be significant.

Ok, now if you want to leave a comment – tell us about your “sins” from the past. Ha ha … just kidding (or not?)

Crazy SEO Offer

I was looking for some SEO work to be done and contacted a reputable company about one of their offers. After asking some questions, this is what I got offered. Just by looking at the steps they mention below, I really had to laugh. 4 articles per month? Basic submission to Ezinearticles and a handful of other free article directories? $600 per month?

With the basic option, we now hand submit four separate articles to ten different article sites.  These sites are the basic sites, like you mentioned Ezine and such, with no specific focus. However, at each site we are careful to submit the articles into appropriate categories.

The advanced option requires more time with the ultimate goal being to have the four articles submitted to high-end industry specific article sites. If we are not able to get the articles accepted to industry specific sites (we spent up to 4 hours in this effort) we move ahead and submit them to the ten article sites used in the basic option. Once the articles are accepted and published, they are socialized on Digg, Mixx and Propeller, as well as bookmarked using several user accounts.

The basic option for article marketing is a flat rate of $600, and the advanced option is a flat rate of $950. These rates are per month, and we do still require a 3 month commitment.

Hm, let me think. Even if I overpay a content writer and pay $30 per article I would spend $120 per month. If I then either submit it myself or hire someone to submit the articles for me, this would be maybe 1 hour of time – value maybe $60/hr (I am generous here). Let’s round it up to $200.00 for the writing and submission of four articles. 3 month minimum commitment. Crazy, eh?! And this is not from some guy offering service at Digitalpoint.com or – this is supposed to be a reputable company here in the US (mentioned in many blogs, seen at conferences, etc.). Wow …

 I do not mind paying for good SEO work and I am actually really looking for some (honest/white hat) SEO work to be done and I have up to $3,000 budgeted for this, but the offer above … I would consider that a ripoff.

Vonage Update: Heading back to the shore …

Well, my last update on Vonage was more a positive one compared to my writings today. This morning I placed an order with a conventional phone carrier to move my phone service back to a normal land line. I declare the Vonage experiment failed. In my opinion Vonage offers some great features combined with cheap prices, but they are not ready for main stream no matter what you might see otherwise. Sure, I am a single customer, but overall compared to my phone service experience over the last 10 years – I did not have that many problems with my land line in 10 years than what I had to experience with Vonage in about 30 days.

Don’t get me wrong, I think VOIP is the way to go, but there are certainly thinks that need to come into place first. Reviewing the Vonage experience, I can say one thing that this company is doing wrong: Their entire troubleshooting seems to be around the customer’s ISP and broadband connection. I was clearly providing enough information to rule out my broadband connection and still we wasted lots of time “troubleshooting” the latter.

I think if Vonage (and I assume other VOIP providers) can provide more stability and reliable connections, it will be my first choice again. What broke my trust for now was broken hardware (the Vonage V Portal adapter). It not only broke, but it also broke at a time when we needed a reliable phone connection due to a relative (my wife’s grandma (94)) being very sick in another country. I had to get a phone card from the store to be able to make international calls through my cell phone. It’s easy to ignore call quality problems or issues when it is not that important and critical to make a phone call, but you come to realize how important a working phone is in case of emergency. So, as soon as my new phone company has the line in place it is time to say good-bye to Vonage for now.

Are 301 Redirects losing their Power?

Hm, I am used to read that if you permanently redirect content or domains on the Web, you should use a 301 redirect to tell the search engines that the content or domain has permanently been moved. I merged 2 websites into one and did a 301 redirect, but what I am seeing in regards to traffic numbers makes me believe that the 301 redirect is not working.

I did the same on another website. And again, I merged the 2 websites and I am seeing the same thing. I verified my 301’s and they are setup correctly. Given that my domains are in fairly competitive niches and eventually trigger a manual review by Google (main source of traffic), I am still disappointed how a correctly implemented 301 redirect is not working as anticipated. In both cases I own(ed) both domain names and I made sure I am not having duplicate content out there. So, I am not sure what is going on.

I am using the 301 redirects to consolidate some of my websites and domains to a) save money and b) to save work and c) to use combined forces of 2 websites to increase my exposure of the content.

If you are looking for an example – here you go. This blog was initially hosted on my domain “seoker.com” and I did a 1-to-1 move to this domain you are reading this article on (smartmoneymarketing.com). If you try to access anything on seoker.com you are redirected to the other website with a 301 redirect. However, traffic is 30%-50% compared to what seoker.com had before – even though I am fairly active with posting new content here.

I am getting ready to consolidate 2 more domains/websites into 1 and now I am concerned that I am losing out by doing so. So, what would you recommend? Be more patient?

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