Naturally, everything follows a pattern. If you read about fractals, you will find that they appear on tree leaves, broccoli and so on.

As you can imagine, people’s behavior DOES follow a pattern too, and you can see this fact by analyzing a group of people… If you are a leader, you should know that usually the people you speak to tend to follow a kind of line, or at least most of them…

The thing become interesting when you find persons who stand out from the crowd! So then, by analyzing this kind of people – aka freaks – you can actually know more about what is happening in the environment and so then, improve it.

Have you seen bloggers changing their theme from time to time? may be the sidebar or the position of the links? Well, this is because they probably would be using heatmaps in order to study the behavior of the people who visit their blogs.

How a heatmap looks like?

A heatmap shows you where the visitors have been clicking on your website. With this awesome tool you can test the position of your ads, may be icon alternatives for subscribing to your blog etc etc… Use your imagination! This can be used when you need an input from your visitors, without letting them know.

One of the purposes I use heatmaps for is to analyze which landing page  “looks” – aka sells – better. Remember that your audience will probably think different than you, so don’t make any suppositions because you don’t know how they will react to certain graphic.

So as you can see, this is perfect for split tests among landing pages, which I will be talking about in future posts.

The Tool

To run heatmaps, I use the services of Crazy Egg. There should be lots of web services out there, but I like this one. So try it by yourself and tell me what do you think about it! It’s pretty easy to use, you just need to upload a script to your website and walah! – you will be catching every single click made on your website.

Input request - Are you using heatmaps? What for? Share what you know about this topic!

Hi guys,

This link love post will be brief due to I just focused in making money articles. Therefore, I collected the following 3 links for you, which contain great resources that will give you more ideas to make money with.

• How Do You Maintain Multiple and Profitable Niche Blogs by Garry Conn at GarryConn’s Blog.
• Six ways to experiment with AdSense and grow your earnings by Darren Rowse at Google Adsense Blog.
• Blog SEO Tips: Top SEO Mistakes to Avoid by Alex Cristache at Blogsessive.

These were what I could find in my feed reader, but if I missed something great related with making money and you want to share it with me and my readers, drop the link in a comment!

Hi bloggers, as you know leaving comments in other blogs can be a great way to get traffic, expand your brand and impose your authority on Internet. I like to leave relevant comments in the most of the blogs I daily visit, receiving many exposure in front of many people.

Today, I want to introduce a tool which can help you in this task. May be you have heard about Traffic Kahuna, a paid tool which you can boost your website, getting a lot of traffic and ranking better on search engines. The same team has a free tool called Comment Kahuna, which you can get targeted backlinks to your blog, without using risk techniques that can destroy your search engine rankings.

As you could see, this is a powerful tool which you can make quicker the process of commenting in other blogs. Also, by searching for blogs without no follow you can get some backlinks, useful to increase your PR.

The feed is one of the most important things in a blog, through it the people can follow you and get the lastest post of your blog without visiting it. What if you think about it, what can the bloggers get from it? I mean, what are the benefits that you can get from your own blog’s feed? First of all, you don’t subscribe to your own feed, unless you want to test a plugin to display a kind of copyright (such the RSS Footer plugin) or to check how your images are being displayed.

Really, there is not another profit you can get from your own feed, apparently. The last week I found a powerful and sweet service which can give you many useful statistics from your feed.

With AideRSS you can score, filter and track the performance of any RSS feed.This means that you can spy other bloggers’ feed if you want , so be careful. Everything is possible thanks to the PostRank™, which is a scoring system that they have developed to rank each article on relevance and reaction. It is a core part of the AideRSS engine that works to ensure that this digital assistant is helping you to tame the RSS beast and keep your news stream manageable.

Let’s go to the best part, I recorded a video tutorial but I have problems by encoding it so let’s do it with images:

Step 1. Once you are in the homepage, type the feed you want to analyze on the bar and click Analyze.

Step 2. You will be redirected to the main panel. Over there you can find the information related to the latest posts on the feed you are analyzing. You will find the best info by clicking TOP 20.

Step 3. There you will find the information related to the top 20 posts on the blog.

The information presented here can help you to determine what worked for you in the past, and with this you can have a hint of what kind of content you should write in future posts. Something particular I noticed was the title of 8 of those 20 top posts were questions, giving me the clue that people like that kind of posts, so I should analize the content and writing style and try to write something similar in a future.

Another interesting thing you can do with that info is combine it with your traffic statistics and determine you best posts ever. You can use that articles as landing pages when you are commenting in other blogs. After then, when the people visit your blog through that comment you will give them something good to read and probably you could get a subscriber.

The most interesting thing of AideRSS is that you can analyze any feed. I’m not suggesting you to copy the content or anything like that, instead, you can use that information to see what worked for other bloggers in a past, what they covered and may be that can give you many ideas to develop in a deeper way something “uncovered” by other blogger.

Now, it’s time for you to play with this, I hope you like it!

Some days ago, I noticed someone linked one of my posts related to an affiliate program and checking the statistics, I saw that many people left my blog through the affiliate link, something good for me. Yesterday, I was checking that affiliate panel to verify how many people joined to my network, but I couldn’t find those affiliates… what happened here?

Loosing Your Referrals

Many people when you invite them to a network through your referral link, delete your referral code to give you nothing of their sales. Here is how it works:

Step 1 - Copy Link Location

Step 2 – Paste the link in the bar and select the affiliate code

Step 3 – Delete the referral code and load the page

So, if you load https://users.marketleverage.com/ you will be redirected to http://www.marketleverage.com/ . After then, the people will join to the program by “themselves” and you won’t get any commission for that.

This is a really bad problem because you are losing money, you could be earning a lot of commissions from the people who didn’t join with the referral link you gave them. And this problem is not only on affiliate programs, there is another services like Plurk which you can join with a referral link, giving some karma points to the person who invited you.

Of course, not everybody do this for bad. Sometimes the people are reading a post very quick because they need to go or something like, and when someone invite them to a network they don’t click the link, instead they memorize or take a note of the network’s name. Then when they have time, they search on google for this network to know more about it, joining to it without a referral link.

How To Solve This Problem

Some time ago, I noticed many bloggers sharing their referral codes in a different way, I thought it was a plugin or something like that… May be you have seen this before, something like theblog.com/out/marketleverage.php for example. Well, this is called Link Masking, and you can do that to protect your affiliate links.

When someone click on that link, it will be redirected to your referral link, avoiding the steps explained above. But the question is… How do I make that php file? Well honestly, it can be a html or htm file because the little code don’t use any special php function, but it’s more common to use that extension because wordpress is written in that language…

However, you need to follow the next steps to create that file:

Step 1 – Open a new text file and copy this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Your-Referral-Tittle-Here</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<script> window.location="your-referral-link-here"; </script>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=your-referral-link-here">
</head>

<p align="center">You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page doesn't load after 5 seconds, <a href="your-referral-link-here">click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

Step 2 – Save that file as thenetwork.php, i.e. marketleverage.php.

Step 3 – Use an FTP program ( I use filezilla ) to create a folder into the main directory, you can call it out, links, go or whatever you want. I called it go.

Step 4 – Upload the .php file to the created directory.

So then, you need to create a file for each referral code you want to share. This way, you will protect all your referral links and you won’t lose anything in a future.

Enjoy protecting your affiliate links!

Some time ago Yahoo! announced the launching of Yahoo! Buzz, a service which you can share stories, images or videos with million people. Now, Yahoo! Buzz is opened to the public and you can enjoy of its services, being perfect to drive traffic to a website.

If you manage a website, there are some buttons that you can add to your site to buzz your content. The people can vote up/down any article, so as you can imagine the most voted stories will be show in the home page of this service, getting exposition in front of million users.

Will Yahoo! Buzz Beat Digg?

As you see, Yahoo! Buzz is a social service like Digg, Mixx, Reddit and that kind of networks… Yahoo! has the power that any social network actually have, being this a big company with years of experience, do you think that Buzz will Kill Digg? I personally think thatt Yahoo! Buzz could be a good competitor of Digg, the categories are basically the same but there are some differences between them.

In the social aspect, at Yahoo! Buzz you cannot add comments to a story, something that reduce its points in front of Digg. You can send the stories by email to your friends or coworkers, like every network allow it.

However, I think that Yahoo! is not comming with a competition’s attitude because you can share the stories submitted on Buzz in the most popular communities: Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Propeller, Reddit and StumbleUpon. So I think they are comming with a friendly attitude, aimed to improve the web.

I think if they integrate a profile system to Buzz which you could comment, flag users and that kind of things, it would be better to them. I mean, it would be nice to have the MyBlogLog’s profile merged to this service, what do you think?

Yahoo! Buzz Plugin for WordPress

You can manually add the Buzz buttons to your site or blog. But it don’t took much time to be a plugin for wordpress, letting you to integrate the buttons to each post. Travis Johnson has created this plugin, thank you for that!

The following ones are the steps you need to follow to integrate Yahoo! Buzz to your blog:

1. Download the Yahoo! Buzz WordPress plugin.
2. Unzip the file in your computer.
3. Upload the file wpbuzz.php to the plugins directory.
4. Activate the plugin from your wordpress blog’s admin section.
5. Now go to Settings -> Buzz on Yahoo!
6. Select the look and feel of button you would like. Here the button details are given in text without graphics, so this Yahoo buttons page would be of your help.
7. That’s it, you would see the Yahoo buzz button appearing at bottom of each of your posts.

Something I think it can be improved in this plugin is to have options like the Sphinn button plugin, which you can place the button at the top, botton left/right of your posts.

What do you think about this new Yahoo! service? I would like to read your opinions!