Today is the first day of Fall 2008, Autumn is an exciting time for bloggers, the slow summer is finally over and we can all get back to business.

Fall / Autumn is my favorite time of year. I’m a halloween junky, and I also love to attend the Renaissance Festival here in ohio. I love the changing leaves, and the fresh apple cider at the local farms.

Fall has always been a time of relaxation to me. Even though my online endeavors and businesses are speeding up. There’s just something special about fall.

Fall 2008 will be the first year my wife experiences fall in Ohio. She’s from Utah, and sure they have trees, but she’s never seen the leaves change like they do here.

As fall 2008 approaches and the holiday season encroaches, now is the best time ever to build up your blog. Fall is when people come back from their vacations. Fall is also the beginning of the busy season for online professionals.

For political bloggers fall 2008 is extremely big being an election year. It’s about 6 weeks till election day. Have you made your decision yet? Will it be Mccain? Obama? Ron Paul? Other?

I of course back Obama, because I think he and Biden will do the most for our country, but a great place to get the low down from both sides of the fence is whitehouse2008.info.

Of course if you’ve been following my segments on Google trends, then you should be aware that Fall is the hot topic right now, and I highly recommend blogging about it.

Here are some related blog posts:

First Day Of Fall - 2008
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Google Trends made me crap myself…
I checked twice, and nope it ain’t chocolate pudding…

I’ve been blogging recently about google trends and the ability to make money by capitalizing on popular topics. As far as I’m aware blogging about popular topics is not yet against google’s terms…

So last week I blogged about Hurricane Hannah, and Hurricane Gustav, and a few other topics. Friday I posted my last blog post for the holiday weekend. I moved this weekend, so I’ve been pretty busy, and haven’t been online once.

Today I got online, and I noticed that on Sunday alone my website had roughly 3000 unique hits. That’s more than I’ve ever had in a single day. I posted some really good blog posts on Friday about the new vice presidential candidates(Sarah Palin and Joe Biden), and so I thought perhaps that’s where the traffic was coming from…

I was dead wrong, I checked my counterize statistics, and apparently Tropical Storm Hannah, has become Hurricane Hannah, and has become an overnight hot topic. Having been one of the first to blog about it when it first hit the trends site I have been able to get a lot of traffic to my Hurricane Hannah blog post.

How many hits?
Tropical Storm Hannah - 18035 hits since the post was written (This was a whopping 22% of my traffic since the blog began!).

Folks, since my website has had about 90,000 hits total since March, that’s huge. My Hurricane Gustav track blog post brought in around 3818 hits(or 5% of my overall totall traffic).

My link bait post on the Presidential Candidates (16 Places to get the Dish on Joe Biden and Sarah Palin) brought in 2897 (this is 4% of my overall traffic - ever)…

So my question to you is:

Do you still doubt the power of Google Trends?

My advice is get in on this action before google does something to block it, they always seem to fight it when people find good ways to bring their site traffic.

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Hurricane Gustav which I picked up from google trends, as I’ve said for the past day or so has been a great keyword, and my site’s not even about weather related topics.

Jamie Meredith from OurBlogThing, asked to see some more detailed stats and perhaps some graphs, so here’s some of my stats from Google Analytics, this is really just the first few pages… as it has the most frequent traffic stats for the past few days since I started this experiment. The image is at the very bottom of this post - just click on it to make it bigger- as you can see from the pic, I did pretty well, without really exerting a lot of effort, it’s not like I wrote a 10 page article on hurricane gustav, it might’ve been 3 paragraphs.

“hurricane gustav track” 65 hits
“gustav track” 43 hits
“vancouver earthquake” 37 hits
“tropical storm hanna” 25 hits
“tropical storm hannah” 21 hits
“hurricane hannah 2008″ 19 hits
“mackenzie phillips” 15 hits
“hannah hurricane” 14 hits
“hurricane gustav” 12 hits
“hurricane gustav latest update” 11 hits
“latest update on hurricane gustav” 11 hits
“latest gustav track” 6 hits
“latest on hurricane gustav” 6 hits
“updates on hurricane gustav” 6 hits
“hanna hurricane” 5 hits
“hurricane hannah” 5 hits
“latest update on hurricane gustav” 5 hits
“latest updates on gustav” 5 hits
“gustav latest track” 4 hits
“track hurricane gustav” 4 hits
“hurricane gustav latest” 3 hits
“hurricane gustav latest updates” 3 hits
“latest updates of gustav” 3 hits
“storm hannah” 3 hits
“vancouver earthquake august 2008″ 3 hits
“hanna hurricane 2008″ 2 hits
“hanna+hurricane” 2 hits
“latest info on hurricane gustav” 2 hits.

“Hurricane Gustav” = 118 Hits total

“Hurricane Hannah” = 96 hits total

“Vancouver Earthquake” = 40 hits

“mackenzie phillips” = 15 hits

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Image via Wikipedia
The past few days I’ve been experimenting with google trends.

Google trends are hot topics of the moment. I wrote one tiny post using the keyword phrase Hurricane Gustav track, and have gotten about 500 hits in two days.

Not too shabby, I can always use more traffic, and I have impression based advertisers who pay me for each view of my website, which is nice.

I was quite amazed at this technique myself, as I never expected it to be this valuable.

The more amazing thing is the fact that I was also able to round up about 35 new subscribers overnight. I didn’t think the traffic would be that sticky but apparently I’ve got myself some new readers.

I’m definitely going to be using google trends more and more to bring in more quality traffic, and keep you posted on the outcome.

One note- Hurricane gustav is still bringing in a lot of traffic, my advice would be to write a blog post about Hurricane Gustav track, and see how much traffic you get from it.

On a side note -I do feel bad for those in the path of Hurricane Gustav, and making money off a hurricane isn’t that great, but they’re used to hurricanes and if I went through something like Hurricane Katrina, there’s no way I’d move back to the gulf coast region. My thoughts and prayers are definitely with the people down there.

Lets hope Hurricane Gustav proves to be a let down as far as hurricanes go..
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How you can capitalize on google trends…
hurricane gustav track, get the latest updates on hurricane gustav

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Image via CrunchBase, source unknown
Using google trends to increase traffic…

Using google trends is pretty easy and straight forward, it’s also a great way to find new niches for new blogs and topic web sites.

First thing you want to do is go to google trends.
Next you’re gonna want to click on ‘More Hot Trends’ on the bottom right. This will give you a huge list of 100 hot trends.
Next you’re going to want to choose which trends to blog about, I think it may be best to only pick no more than 5, 2-3 per day should be good enough.
You can click on each trend to bring up a side by side google and google blog search on the topic, you can go to the blogs and just rephrase what they say, don’t copy and it’s best if you use more than one source.
When writing your post make sure you use the exact trend phrase that they give on the trends page. This is the keyword that you will want to get ranked for. You want to use it in your title, in a heading(h2 or h1) and at lease 4-5 times in the body of your blog post.
Be sure to link out to other blogs on the same topic, as you will get pingbacks and that will increase your rank.
A good tool I use to help me when blogging is called Zemanta and it makes it easy as pie to include related articles, and images.
On posts that you make on google trends that aren’t related to your blog, be sure to put up a disclaimer explaining what your blog really is about and giving people a method to subscribe easily - this is a good way to build future traffic to your blog, I’m sure many who visit will share some of the same interests that you do and will be interested in hearing more about them…
Don’t over do things, don’t do this everday, and don’t make it the only thing you do…This is a nice way to bring in some fresh traffic and increase your money however it’s not a great way to run a successful blog - use it sparingly and just as a tool in your arsenal, for example I’m planning on doing it one day per week, starting next week. I will keep posting updates on my successes and failures using this tip.

Follow these easy tips and I’m sure you’ll be successful using Google Trends to bring in more traffic.
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Google Trends update:
Yesterday I mentioned delving into google trends as a way to bring new traffic.

Yesterday I wrote a post about Mackenzie Phillips, Del  Martin Dieing, and Hurricane Gustav track. Each of these topics were at that point in the top 5 google trends.

I know I planned to write 25 posts on google trends topics, however I had some errands to run offline and was unable to get back on - don’t worry I’ll be doing a lot more of these.

I found out that it’s a very wise thing to do, in fact I’m thinking about instituting a trendy wednesday. Every wednesday I’ll focus my efforts on google trends topics.

The results have been astounding - I got 131 hits to one blog post on hurricane gustav. All these hits were either from google search or google blog search, which definitely proves that the point is valid, perhaps if I’d worked on a longer post with more mentions of hurricane gustav I would’ve ranked even higher.

At any case this does prove something pretty remarkable, and that I’m going to be delving a lot deeper into, over the coming weeks.

Stay tuned for further updates on google trends.
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I just read of a study on getting traffic from google trends, and thought I need to get in on some of this action, so here’s what I’m going to do in my first experiment. I’m going to write 1 blog post each on the top 25 topics of the day.

Tomorrow I will check back and let you know what I’ve received in teh way of traffic. These won’t be extremely deep posts, just small ones with the intent to build keyword density.

Wish me luck on this experiment.

My list of trends to blog about:

1.
mackenzie phillips

2.
del martin

3.
hurricane gustav track

4.
one day at a time

5.
for better or for worse

6.
kimberley conrad

7.
hurricane katrina

8.
dead sea scrolls

9.
the n

10.
topix

11.
suge knight

12.
archbishop demetrios

13.
united kingdom

14.
play frugooscape

15.
light wedge

16.
beachy head cliff

17.
frugooscape home

18.
labor day 2008 calendar

19.
lynn johnston

20.
new orleans news

21.
mapquest driving directions

22.
foxy jacky

23.
tomb of the unknown soldier

24.
att wireless

25.
nola

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Read Write Web posted a article detailing three futuristic search engines, and I discovered SearchMe.com and thought it was a pretty interesting find. I even made a video on the features and uses of Searchme.com Check it out below. What are your opinions?

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Google has too much power online, they can make and break anyone that they choose.

If you write a bad article about them, or sell links, or do this or that, they can remove your site from search, not that I get much traffic from search, thankfully I’m a social marketer more than an seo marketer, and most of my traffic comes from pinging identi.ca, twitter, friendfeed, and facebook.

Apparently if somebody clicks a bunch on adsense ads on your website, you WILL get banned from adsense, does this seem fair? I didn’t do a thing, one person ruined me from collecting my adsense revenue. After a year I was at $90 and then in one day got $7 worth in ad clicks. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if someone who works for google made all the clicks so they wouldn’t have to pay me.

I even told google about the suspicious activity, before I was banned. Does this seem right? Sure, I could go register a new adsense account in my wife’s name, but what would stop them from banning her account when we reach $90 again?

Which is why I’m launching a new facebook group: Google Haters. This is a group of people who basically hate google, perhaps a union of bloggers standing up for our own rights. According to google the internet is a tyrrany and google rules, but I believe we can fight back.

Have you been banned from adsense, adwords, or search rankings? Drop your comments or join the Google Haters group on facebook. We’ll have adsense click-off weekends, and do our best to wreak havoc on the internet king. I’m totally peeved at this and I believe in fighting back when I’ve received an injustice. If you’ve been hurt by google in anyway this will be a great way to fight back.

Join the facebook group now!

Of course you can call me mad, or an idiot, or over-reacting, but just wait - anyone can be hit by google, I always did my best to follow all the rules, I never broke any rules, and I still got banned. It can happen to anyone, I highly recommend just quitting google and trying another ad network.

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Image via Wikipedia
I’m just going to make this quick - Chris Brogan reported(When Google Owns You) that google had shut down the who account of a Nick Saber, just an average guy, for no apparent reason. Here’s what Chris posted:
Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:
Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]
That’s it.

Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:
Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information
about this account.
And that’s it.
That’s just an excerpt. The question posted was are we giving google too much power by relying in the arm of google too much? Does google control our lives? What would happen tomorrow if you couldn’t login to Gmail, or similar?

These are all troubling issues, remember once upon a time when Google’s slogan was ‘Do no Evil?’ What the hell ever happened to that? It’s been a scenario in the bible, and philosophical circles for ages: With power and / or money comes corruption (not always but quite often…).

It seems Google has free reign to run unchecked and do just about whatever they want to.

WHY I’M PISSED: Today I found out that my adsense account had been shut down. Apparently someone thought it would be funny to click on a bunch of my links, and raise my daily revenue. Do they get punished? Nope, just me. I’m sure I’m not the only person having issues like this…

I was about to cash out my adsense for the very first time too.. I had like $90 before the 97 fraudulent clicks… Yes, I did submit an appeal, but from the way google seems to be acting lately, I doubt I’ll even get a response. Nick eventually did get his account back, you can read about the reply he got from google here.

On another note, apparently google can make their own rules when it comes to ads served on google UK. They apparently are serving a large interactive ad in their sponsored section see the pic below.

I found this via Google Blogoscoped. Google’s stance has always been that google won’t use any ads that adwords users can’t access in their user panel. Apparently Google’s new stance is “go F*** yourself, we can do whatever we want <hwa hwa hwa>…” Blogoscoped also pointed out that this isn’t the first time they’ve proved themselves wrong. You can view the search your self: Secured Loans.

In closing, I’d like to say that I’m moving to another email provider, and closing down ALL my google accounts once and for all.  Shutting down my adsense account was uncalled for, especially since I went to their help forum to report the suspicious activity 3 days before it was shut down. Perhaps people should be notified and given a chance to rebuttal. Perhaps googlers should be innocent until proven guilty…eh?

What’s your take? Google Evil or Nay? Would you join a Boycott if there were one?

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