Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

It’s about time I did another post recommending some of the latest and greatest from around this thing known as the blogosphere. I have read some great articles the past few days, and I think you will enjoy them as well.

• Latent Semantic Indexing Part I and Latent Semantic Indexing Part II
  George over at SEOHint wrote two interesting articles that introduced me to LSI. Personally I was never aware of what it was, and I found the articles quite enlightning. I should also mention that George wrote a guest article over at Bloggst called The Two Edges of Blog Monetization: Affiliate Marketing And Link Sales - Give it a look!
• The Single, Most Profound Way To Thank Your Commenters
  As I’m sure you’ll know by now, I am a true believer in removing the nofollow from blog comments. Dawud wrote a great post with his opinions on the nofollow tag, and you should read it.
• How Cost-Effective is SEO?
  Matt over at Net Business Blog has written a very detailed article on the costs of SEO, and the conclusion is not surprisingly that SEO is far cheaper than for instance PayPerClick-advertising. Are anyone really surprised?
• 26 Affiliate Marketing and Webmaster Forums to help you Make Money Online
  I’m a forum-guy, and I love to lurk and participate in forums. Maki over at DoshDosh has written an extensive list of his 26 favourite forums that will help you make money online. I expect that the next time he does the list, Bloggst will be listed!
• What Are Trackbacks and How Do I Use Them?
  Chris wrote a nice article explaining what trackbacks are and how you can use them to your favour when writing blog posts. That deserves a mention and a trackback, wouldn’t you say?

That’s it for now. If you have read any interesting articles lately that you would like to share, feel free to post a comment.

The past few months there’s been quite a bit of buzz about AGLOCO among people who are interested in making money online. I don’t really blame them, because AGLOCO promises to deliever everyone an opportunity to make money online without too much effort. All you have to do is install a cool viewbar which will log your online surfing and generate money, and of course recruit as many people as possible below you in the hierarchy, because you will get a share of their earnings as well. Of course this a pretty rough explanation, but you can find out more about AGLOCO in the links that I will refer to later in this post, as well as on their own website.

John Chow, the famous dot com mogul who recently broke into the Technorati top 100 with his blog, just announced that he has over 9000 people below him in his AGLOCO network. This should mean that once you can actually start making money from AGLOCO, John will be in a great position to make a nice buck or two, or even more! John has obviously put a lot of work into this, and it seems that he firmly believes that it will be a nice, if not easy way to make money, because no matter how famous you are online, you don’t get that many people to sign up for something without a bit of effort.

On the other side though, a recent article over at Trader’s Narrative recently received a lot of attention with its negative view towards AGLOCO. The author brings up some very interesting points about AGLOCO and its business model, many of which the team over at AGLOCO have failed to respond to.

Personally, I’m just going to say “Thanks, but no thanks” to AGLOCO. I know a pyramid scheme when I see one, and not even AGLOCO’s biggest follower can claim that it isn’t just that. A product of little or no value (seriously, a viewbar?), the potential revenue comes wholly from the peope that participate, only in this case instead of investing $x dollars, they “invest” ad views, that in turn results in money.

I have no doubts that people like John Chow will make money from AGLOCO, and I commed John for his speech on that if you want to make something of yourself and make money online, you have to go against the nay-sayers. It is completely true, but it is also true that you need to be smart, use common sense, and filter out the things that aren’t worth your time and effort. Just because John Chow believes he can make money from something, it doesn’t mean you should believe that you can make money from the same thing. If something is too good to be true, and says that you can make money without any effort at all, then everyone should have learned by now that it normally is.

I would say that if you want to succeed, you have to create your own path. Ignore the nay-sayers, but ignore the yay-sayers too. Do something that you believe in, and that you enjoy, and success will find you. To all of you who wish to pursue your luck with AGLOCO though, I wish you luck. I’m sure that with a lot of effort, you can actually earn a pretty penny from it. Just like most other things though, it won’t come for free.

Did you ever hear that expression “the times are a-changing”? It’s actually a Bob Dylan song, I think, but that’s besides the point. Because they are, a-changing, and fast too! I joined Facebook quite a while back, I think it’s almost been a year or so. Except for the fact that it looks pretty, it wasn’t of much value to me though, since hardly anyone in Norway used it, and I’m not too keen on using sites like these as a venue for getting to know new people, since I have much better ways of doing that online. As an example, I can mention that when I first signed up about 35 people of about 4000 or so from my University where signed up. When I logged in a few days back though, I had around 10 new friend requests, all from people I know!

Facebook is spreading like fire here in Norway, and I it seems that it might just take off for real. I couldn’t be happier about it! I used to participate in a similar Norwegian social network last year, but it became too much of a dating site for my taste, and in the end I just deleted my profile. But Facebook, I think it can be an extremely useful tool, especially for keeping in touch with old contacts, and that’s what I personally want from a site like this.

After using it a bit more extensively, I can say that I absolutely love Facebook. From a user perspective, it is one of the most amazing websites I have ever actively used. Everything is extremely intuitive, and the design is just amazing. I never thought that a design that at first glance appears to be a bit boring, can end up as one of my favourites of all time. The small AJAX/JavaScript tools are extremely handy, and working through the site is a dream compared to other, similar sites like MySpace, which I truly loathe for the same reasons why I love Facebook.

I’ll keep you all updated on my experiences with Facebook, but so far I have nothing negative to say about it. Oh and if you wish, feel free to check out my profile, and poke or send me a friend request.

If I was to pick the single most important method for promoting a newly started website, I would without any shed of a doubt pick link building. For anyone with some experience in the field of promoting websites, this won’t come as a surprise, but I thought a post emphasizing the importance of bulding incoming links would still be of some use, if not for anything else than just to act as a reminder of its importance.

Since I opened Bloggst, I have focused heavily on building incoming links, among other things through the Featured Blog Campaign. The main reason I value link bulding so highly, is because it is extremely helpful when it comes to increasing your organically referred traffic, which is traffic through search engines. That means that the most important benefit of incoming links to your website isn’t actually the traffic you get through the link itself (which is of course great too), but rather that it helps you rank better in search engines.

To use Bloggst as an example, I’ll show you some of the numbers. Yahoo currently registers a little over thousand incoming links to Bloggst. Technorati reports of around 150 incoming links from almost 60 different blogs. This might not sound all that overwhelming, but keep in mind that the site is just over three weeks old. Couple that with the fact that I’m already seeing a very decent amount of relevant visitors referred from the search engines, and that the search engine spiders are more or less continuously spidering the site, and it should highlight the value of incoming links. If this growth rate keep up, I expect that within as little as a couple of months, our traffic will increase significantly due to search engine rankings, especially once Google gives a bit more value to the site (they lag a bit compared to for instance Yahoo in this field).

Bloggst.com already has almost 300 pages indexed in Google, and close to 200 in Yahoo. This is as good as every page, and like I said, once the site gains a bit more recognition in the search engines, I firmly believe that the organic traffic will increase drastically.

What’s the lesson in all this? Work on building your inbound links! It will result in giving you more of the most valuable traffic there is, which is the organic traffic you receive through search engines. There are several ways of bulding links, but that’s a completely different topic for a different day.

When I posted a thread over at Bloggst asking for some feedback on my blog, the response was pretty much as expected, asking mainly for some more colour in the design. Like you’ll know, I tried switching to another theme, but I decided that I really love the fundamentals of what I already had worked out. As a result, I decided to do some work with it, and what you’re looking at now is more or less the finished product.

You should be able to tell the distinct difference. I’ve worked on the colours, and done some basic changes to the setup, although everything is still based around the old setup. Hopefully you’ll like it, as I’m quite pleased with it myself, and I’ve taken a liking to it myself - I feel it’s simple, like I want it to be, but not quite as boring as a medical journal any more Comments are of course appreciated!

This also marks a bit of a turn for my blog, as I will shift the focus a bit. From being mainly an outlet for my personal rantings and banterings every now and then when I feel like it, I will start posting more frequently, in an attempt to make it a bit more interesting for the readers, and at the same time attract more of you. This also means narrowing down the categories I write about a bit, and I will be stripping out some of the things that I don’t see myself writing about in the future. I will mainly be focusing on web trends, internet marketing and project development (productivity included). Of course, everything will still have a personal touch, and be based around my own opinions and experiences.

Hopefully I’ll be able to attract a few more readers, and still be able to enjoy my writing with this change - Time will tell!