Matt Coddington

80%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

I heard about this adorable little test from Daniel over at Daily Blog Tips (remember him from the Blogger Face-Off?) If you have a minute to kill then try it out.

It’s official, I have jumped onto the TWERQ boat. I think my formal title is Director of Public Relations or some such fancy phrase, but the long and short of it is that I’m going to be managing the TWERQ Official Blog and doing my best to market and promote this amazing search tool online.

I wrote about TWERQ RC3 on NBB a long long time ago, but I have been watching TWERQ since day 1 … well more like day 13 or 14, but still pretty damn early on. I’ve been hooked with this tool even when it was little more than “tab-based browsing”. It has come a long way since then. TWERQ is now, in my opinion, the most useful search tool on the market and is quickly adding new features.

I have no doubt that TWERQ will be making headlines before long, and I’m excited to be a part of the company while it’s still in its infant stages.

I thought it would be fun to start up a little segment here where I highlight and talk about some sites, blogs, and forums that I read the most and consider a good source of information.

First up, and justifiably so, is Deep Jive Interests, the first RSS I ever subscribed to.

If you have to throw DJI into a specific category it would probably fall into Web 2.0, although Tony talks about much more than just Web 2.0 fads. Rather than being yet another TechCrunch copycat (God knows the world can only handle one Arrington) Tony has separated himself by offering real analytical thought about the world of online applications and internet trends that is quite honestly hard to find anywhere else.

Tony is not a guru. He is, however, one of the smartest people I’ve come across in this industry, and just about everything he writes is well thought out and well argued. It’s refreshing also to read a blog written by someone with some writing (Journalism?) background and who can convey his thoughts so well and in an entertaining fashion. Unfortunately that’s a skill I lack. But I digress.

The only off-putting thing about DJI is its design, but I don’t want to hurt Tony’s feelings since he just had it redesigned. Personally I miss the robot.

Whether you’re deep into the Web 2.0 scene or just a casual bystander of all that is social bookmarking, interactive applications, and new media, you really should consider adding DJI to your feed reader or bookmarks now. Do it.

I was taking a quiz over at CNN called “Do you have what it takes to get rich?” The quiz is adorable, but is not really geared at giving you a magical answer to the question. The point of the quiz is to show you basic facts about making money in any industry. Facts that you know but probably tend to overlook in the hopes that you’ll strike it rich off of some spur of the moment amazing idea or a genius website. The truth is most people get rich through good old fashioned hard work.

Most of us have an image of entrepreneurs lodged in our heads: hyperactive, visionary, guts of steel. But those who study entrepreneurs say that’s an illusion. “Some have very boring personalities,” says Schramm. Part of the problem, says Kelly Shaver, professor of entrepreneurial studies at the College of Charleston, is that we tend to focus on superachieving outliers. (You could be one-53,000th as successful as Bill Gates and still be a millionaire.) And many books and magazine profiles about entrepreneurs look only at the ones who have already made a fortune. When asked to explain their success, Shaver says, people tend to think back and try to identify some brilliant thing they must have done - and maybe forget about the routine work, their many mistakes or their sheer luck.

That is just one of the nuggets of valuable information in this quiz. This is probably the best article I’ve ever read on CNN not only because it comes in the form of a sexy fabulous quiz but because it’s real, it’s concrete, it’s no fluff, and it actually tells you how to earn your wealth rather than sitting around waiting for it to happen.

Use your common sense. Don’t get lost in delusion. Hard work creates wealth.

A recent post on Jon’s blog (Jon from WickedFire … I don’t think he actually has a last name) is bad linkbait.

Before I get into that post, I just want to say that I hate the term “linkbait”. It’s stupid. It is a buzz word created by gurus in order to package all campaigns geared at generating natural linkbacks into a nice friendly single idea so that the idiot masses could slurp it up and execute it without ever really knowing what it is or why it is done.

The actual practice of link baiting, however, is good (if done right). For example my first big article on NBB about building niche minisites can be considered linkbait in that I wrote it with the intent of acquiring links from outside sources. What is the difference between my linkbait and Jon’s linkbait?

The difference is good linkbait is something worth reading. It delivers *something* to the end user whether it’s information or entertainment. Bad linkbait delivers crap to the user. Jon’s linkbait, for example, is never anything more than lies dressed up in the disguise of “marketing”.

You can succeed with bad linkbait - after all Jon was nothing (wait, scratch that, he was a “super affiliate” according to himself) before he created his famous CJ screenshot. Even better is that he got me to link to his article! But should you resort to bold faced lying in order to generate a couple linkbacks? If you want long-term success, and more importantly respect, then you really should focus on delivering good, quality content to the end user. Not sensationalist bullshit - ironic that Jon’s tagline is “A no BS approach to the art and business of affiliate marketing” when bullshit is all he produces.

But hey, Jon is a marketing genius, and I’m just jealous. What the hell do I know?

Read more…

Wow this blog has been down for quite a while hasn’t it? Well it’s back up now and finally off of iPowerWeb! This was the last site I had hosted with iPower, and I was just waiting for my term with them to expire before moving. My domain was also registered through iPowerWeb so there was a couple weeks of limbo when transferring that I didn’t expect which accounts for the recent downtime. I’m now testing out BlueFur so we’ll see how that goes.

So What’s Going On?

I’m going to be settling back into this blog and updating it more than I have been over the last 2-3 months. As you can see I didn’t bother uploading the old archives, and I don’t plan to.

I’m going to keep it primarily related to my own projects but will start to do opinion pieces on the internet marketing industry as a whole as well as some current events (with my unique take on them of course). I don’t plan on really promoting or commercializing this blog as I did with NBB. The few readers I have here I hope stick around and possibly spread the word about my blog, but I have no real ambition to make this anything more than a personal blog with some tidbits here and there about the internet marketing and web development industries.

As most of you are probably aware, I recently sold NBB on SitePoint. The final price was $13,000 which was about what I expected and certainly enough to make me happy with the sale.

What’s Around the Corner

With NBB gone my design business is now again my only real source of income which is fine for now. My design company has always paid the bills and been my primary job. That does not mean, however, that I don’t have some new sites around the corner.

I’m currently developing two sites in the design arena. One is with David Myers (digit) and the other is a lone venture. I hope to have both of these websites launched by the end of the summer and have them in full gear by Q4. Unfortunately both are in the infant stages so I can’t disclose anything more about them.

So I just wanted to give you guys a little heads up about what’s been going on with me and what you can expect to see from me in the near future. If you’ve taken this blog off your feedreader list please add it back as I will be updating often!