I don’t know about you, but I’m constantly frustrated at all of the so-called “Top X Blogs” lists that use inaccurate and faulty metrics like Google PageRank, Alexa rank, and Technorati rank to determine overall rankings. Where can I find a useful resource that lists out the best blogs in the Internet marketing industry?

I’m happy to announce the launch of Winning the Web’s Internet Marketing Top Blogs, the ultimate ranked list of the best Internet marketing blogs in the industry. No more needlessly searching around to find the best Internet marketing blogs. The list uses a combination of 10 quality metrics that are weighted according to their importance and then combined to give each blog a relative score in points. IM Top Blogs uses data from Feedburner, Alexa, Compete, Technorati, Google PR, Yahoo links, StumbleUpon, delicious, outgoing links, and user votes to accurately rank each blog on the list.

The goal of IM Top Blogs is to rank every blog in the Internet marketing niche. Site categories include affiliate marketing, blogging, copywriting, Internet marketing, link building, make money online, SEO / SEM, and social media.

Be sure to check it out and contact me with any suggestions or feedback you may have. Let me know if any blogs (including your own) were left out.

Palatnik Factor currently ranked #152. What’s your rank?

MarketingCharts reports on a research study sponsored by BuzzLogic called, “Blogs Influence Consumer Purchases More than Social Networks.”

Not only is blogging a great way to keep in touch and engage your consumers, but also a great way to find new customers by adding content that may be valuable to anyone looking for a certain product or service. A website may be your selling component, but a blog can act as a catalyst to it.

Here are some key facts shown by the research which is important to understand and know:

“Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” a research study of more than 2,000 online consumers in the US, was conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester research company.

The study aimed to uncover changing behavior around blog discovery and consumption, how blogs factor into consumer purchase decisions, and the nature of blog influence on buying behavior.

For example, frequent blog readers (those who read blogs more than once per month) – constituting 20% of blog readers – say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions more than content from social networking sites, the study found.

-Blogs influence purchases: One half (50%) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.

-Blogs go beyond tech: Outside of technology-related purchases, for which 31% of readers say blogs are useful, other key categories include media and entertainment (15%); games/toys and/or sporting goods (14%); travel (12%); automotive (11%); and health (10%).

-Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56%) say blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.

Blogs’ Place in the Purchase Cycle

Blogs factor in to critical stages of the purchase process, weighing most heavily at the actual moment of a purchase decision, according to the study: Among respondents who say they have trusted blog content for purchase decisions in the past, over half (52%) say blogs played a role in the critical moment they decided to move forward with a purchase.

Blog readers’ responses regarding blogs’ influence as it relates to the following steps of the purchase process:

Decide on a product or service: 21%
Refine choices: 19%
Get support and answers: 19%
Discover products and services: 17%
Assure: 14%
Inspire a purchase: 13%
Execute a purchase: 7%
Blog Ads and Reader Trust

For frequent blog readers, ads on blogs are on par with sponsored search results, one of the most prevalent and successful forms of advertising on the web – and trust of blog advertising exceeds that around social networking site advertising.

Fully 25% of frequent readers say they trust ads on a blog they read; paid search links also account for 25% of their responses; and 19% say they trust ads on social networking sites.

The study also suggests ads on blogs spur various activities:

40% of blog readers have taken action as a result of viewing an ad on a blog; 50% of frequent blog readers say so.
Top activities include the following: read product reviews online (17%); sought out more info on a product or service (16%); visited a manufacturer or retailer website (16%).
Changing Reader Patterns: The Power of Links

Frequent blog readers use blogs as the top online navigation tool to discover other blog content, ranking higher than general web search or blog search, the study also found:

38% of frequent readers said blog links were the top tool for discovering new blog content.
34% cited web search, and 11% said blog search engines were the top tool for discovering new blog content.

For frequent readers, blog links appear to have similar impact as a trusted recommendation from a person (a response from 39% of survey participants).
One in five general blog readers (defined as consumers who have read a blog in the past 12 months) use blog links to discover new blogs.

Blog search engines received the lowest ranking from respondents: 6% of general readers say they use these tools to discover new blogs.

Blogs are not consumed in isolation, but experienced as part of a connected conversation: Nearly half (49%) of blog readers and 71% of frequent readers read more than one blog per session.

“For a portion of web users, blogs rival search as a navigation tool, which has really interesting implications for advertisers,” said Rob Crumpler, CEO of BuzzLogic. “Blogs are becoming trusted guides, steering users who are seeking very specific information to places of interest online. Being able to identify where this is taking place across the blogosphere gives us a window into user intent and a means to better target advertising to a qualified audience. This is great news for advertisers looking to maximize value in today’s environment.”

How do you put a price tag of $12.4 million on a one-man operated blog? That’s hard to say and I dont have an answer but lets look at certain components that may have been looked at.

-Advertising: The financial sector is one of the industries that pays out the most advertising wise. Whether you are putting adsense on your website or selling banner ad space, if you have a high traffic website or blog, you’re sure to make some good money. His adsense clicks most likely pay $1.00+. His affiliate revenue must be pretty good considering the page converts well since it seems a trustworthy source averaging about 15-20 comments per post. I’m sure BankRate will use this as a platform to generate leads which we all know go for a lot of money as well (not sure how much now that the banking system has gone to crumbles)

Traffic: The traffic isn’t the greatest. According to Compete, in July it had about 350k visitors. Without a doubt it is a growing blog but you would think for a $12.4 million dollar buyout, it would have a bit more traffic even though the forecast as it continues to rank well for many desired banking keywords looks very good.

Keywords such as cd rates, best cd rates, highest cd rates, credit card offers and more are very expensive keywords to buy through paid search will this site ranks well for and so does BANKRATE. Now, they will have a lot more territory covered.

Branding: I’m sure the domain itself had a bit to do with the consideration of price. Bankaholic.com, what a great domain name. It has potential to become a lot bigger than a blog and I’m sure with more funding, may be something that BankRate will potentially brand in a near future to build out their company.

Domain Age: If you can believe it, Bankaholic.com has only been around for 2 years and 1 month as of today. In 2 years the blog was sold for $12.4 million dollars!

PageRank: The Bankaholic.com pagerank is currently 5.

Google Indexing:It has currently about a little over 500 pages indexed by Google which is not too much considering the time it has been around so since the blog has been started, new content was not put up every day.

I’ll give you an example of this. Yesterday I wrote a blog post titled, “When it is Time to Redsign Your Blog?” I was reading ProBlogger, a great blog for bloggers by bloggers about blogging. Problogger is a blog from Darren Rowse, someone whom I met at the Elite Retreat in San Francisco last April.

I hit Darren up and asked him if he could share the story with his readers or basically anything he could to to promote the post would be cool with me, I don’t expect much when I ask people for favors. Anyhow, I got an email from Darren this morning telling me he tweeted my post, shorts and simple. Sure enough, checking my analytics, I had a lot more traffic and had a good amount coming from Twitter.

Coming from an authoritative blogging source like Darren to recommend my blog post to his list of followers gives me authority as well and can increase my readership from a single tweet.

So, if you have something you want to promote such as a post, service, product, etc…Hit up your fellow industry friends and ask how you can help them, as long as they know you are there to help them as well.

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I redesigned this blog about 2 months ago and I can’t begin to tell you what great move it was. The new redesign has retained more readers, attracted advertisers and making it more popular overall. Look at successful bloggers who make good money blogging. Shoemoney.com, Johnchow.com, Problogger.com and others, if you’ve been following their blogs for a while now, you’ll notice all these bloggers have had blog redesigns in the past year or so, maybe more than once a year.

So, when is time to redesign your blog? As your blog gains popularity, you may want to start thinking about your next move and whether a blog redesign will help improve retaining daily readers and attract new advertisers. As much as us bloggers write for the passion of what we blog about and inform our readers, advertising is a part of blogging (for the most part). I have yet to see an online marketing blog without ads, and thats ok, why not? You put your time writing, why not get paid for content you create? For a little more info on when it’s a good time to put ads, check out Probloggers, “When Should I Put Advertising on My Blog?”

I have two ideas for how to choose a blog redesign. 1) Redesign your blog after a blog you read a lot yourself. As much as you probably read that blog for the content, there is something about it that keeps attracting you to it, specially if you do like that design. 2) Redeisgn your blog after a blog that brings in thousands of daily readers and probably has full-time employee’s testing ad placements, i.e. HuffingtonPost.com.

This Post is Sponsored By (Download Free Now!):

[this list has been removed due to search engine rankings for keywords that are not at all related to this blog or its content]

The list keeps on going. Do these links, once posted (which I dont), really give these sites link juice for optimization? You can get anti-spam plugins or whatever for your wordpress blog, I think its called Akismet, again, I’m very not technical with wordpress so I’ve left it as it is since the day I installed it. I’m just really curious and the outcome these people that use bots to spam the hell out of blogs achieve. NOT very good ones.

The time has come where I had to move this blog to another server (long-term plan) and as we speak, its about to migrate. How the hell do you migrate all these files, etc?

Here is what it says on the official wordpress Blog, but my suggestion, ask your new hosting company if they can do it for you or throw someone that knows how to do it a couple of bucks and save yourself the headache or risk of losing your content.

Moving WordPress to a New Server

If you are moving WordPress from one server to another, begin by backing up your data. This includes backing up your WordPress database as well as all the core files, images, plugins, and other files on your site. See WordPress Backups and Backing Up Your Database for more details.

* Note: If you are changing to a new server but same domain, all you need to do is edit wp-config.php and upload everything as it is to your new server.

If You Don’t Care If Your Old Blog Works

1. Download a copy of the main wordpress files from your OLD blog to your hard drive and edit wp-config.php to suit the new server.
2. Go back to your OLD blog and go to options and change the url (both of them) to that of your new site.
3. Again, download your database (but keep the old one just in case), upload this new database and the copy of the wordpress core files with the edited wp-config.php to your new server. Thats it!

If You Want Your Old Blog To Still Work

Caution: Make sure you have a backup of your old blog’s WordPress database before proceeding!

Part A – Activating Your New Blog

1. Download your entire WordPress installation to your hard drive. Name the folder appropriately to indicate that this is your OLD blog’s installation.
2. Go back to your OLD blog and go to options and change the url (both of them) to that of your new site.
3. Again, download your entire WordPress installation to your hard drive. Name the folder appropriately to indicate that this is your NEW blog’s installation.
4. Download your database once again (but keep the old one). Upload this database to your new server. It will be easiest if you use the same database name and you create a user with the same login credentials on your new server as on your old server.
5. If you used a different database name and/or user (see previous step), edit wp-config.php in your NEW blog’s installation folder appropriately.
6. Upload the NEW blog’s installation folder to your new site. Presto, your NEW blog should be working!

Part B – Restoring Your Old Blog

1. On the original server, delete your OLD blog’s database (remember, you should have a copy on your local computer that you made at the very beginning).
2. Upload your OLD blog’s installation folder to your original server, overwriting the files that are currently there (you may also delete the installation folder on the server and simply re-upload the OLD blog’s files).
3. Upload your OLD blog’s database from your local computer to the server. That should do it!

Another procedure for making copies of posts, comments, pages, categories and custom field (post status, data, permalinks, ping status…) easy to follow:

1. Install a new WordPress blog
2. Go on old blog Admin panel. Here, in Manage > Export select “all” in menu Restrict Author.
3. Click on Download Export File
4. In new blog go on Manage > Import, choose WordPress item.
5. In the page that will be shown, select the file just exported. Click on Upload file and Import
6. It will appear a page. In Assign Authors, assign the author to users that already exist or create new ones.
7. Click on Submit
8. At the end, click on Have fun

Note: using this method if there are some articles in new blog (like hello world, info page…), these will not be erased. Articles are only added. Using the former procedure the article in new blog will be deleted.

So, Swicki is pretty cool. You can check it out on my blog at the left (it usually shows mini video clips but now it is showing a tag cloud.) Here is why I think this could work to monetize your visitors from video. It’s something new so users will be curious to click through. It’s a video widget which you set-up keyword tags and will show related videos (pretty cool videos you may even find interesting.) It scours Google video for related videos and takes the visitor to a site with all the videos in one place.

So how do you monetize this? While setting up your Swicki page, you can customize the ads section choosing what platform of ads to show (adsense, etc) and allows you to enter your code.

The pay-per-post business model depends a lot on Google’s pagerank. Obviously, a post on a pagerank of 5 would cost a lot more than on a pagerank of 3 and so on.

Techcrunch reports, “IZEA (the new holding company for PayPerPost) CEO Ted Murphy is not surprisingly calling foul on the move, claiming that it’s part of some sort of censorship conspiracy by Google. Better still Murphy claims that it’s part of Google’s attempts to deny competition because PayPerPost is a “a very attractive alternative” to Adsense.

Murphy goes on to claim that TechCrunch should be punished because our occasional posts thanking sponsors (like this one) is nothing different to what PayPerPost bloggers do.”

Here is one thing I learned a long time ago…NEVER BASE YOUR BUSINESS -MODEL ON GOOGLE. Pay-Per-Post needs to have or should have a different pricing structure for bloggers maybe based on traffic to blog instead of pagerank…BUT here is thing. Many advertisers use bloggers as an SEO strategy.

I think we’ll see a change soon within pay-per-post and how it may change its business model regarding pagerank. If you want to advertise using a service like pay-per-post or reviewme, use it for branding and marketing purposes, not SEO, it might come back to haunt you.

What are some of the companies doing or advertising?

GreenIsUniversal -Learn More on How NBC is Building a More Sustainable World. Nov 4-11

SaveYourWorld – Each Green Wristband Saves One Acre of Rainforest for One Year

321 Transform- Helping companies go green by reducing waste & process cycle time

What are you doing for Green Week?