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How NOT to Ask for Sponsorship or Advertising: 6 Deadly MistakesToday

Often times I get emails from people that want me to sponsor a contest or event on their blogs. Most of the times I take the time to at least check it out, and if the contest is structured well, I am happy to donate free copies to my eBook or licenses to premium WordPress themes.

Sometimes, however, the email is so bad that I just think “Man, you got be kidding!”.

Last week one of those came through. I asked permission to the sender to republish it here, but I will keep it anonymous for obvious reasons. Here is what the email said:

hello friend congrats for your pr6.I am organizing a contest in my blog.So if you are interested then please sponsor in this contest.we will be happy if you sponsor here.

So many things wrong here that I don’t even know where to start. I will break it down in 6 points so it is easier to follow:

1. Not using the name of the person. If you want to get someone’s attention, you must make sure that you will address him or her by the name. When people start their email with “Hi Daniel” I will make sure to read it and give it enough attention, cause I know at least that the person on the other side knows who I am.

2. Blatant ass licking. If you are going to make a compliment, make sure it is genuine. If it is clear that you are just saying that to please the person you are asking something, it will do more harm than good.

Perfectionism is Bad For YouOctober 11

I used to be a perfectionist, and it damaged me in more than one way. Over the years I have recognized this problem, and I am almost getting over it. But one step back, what is perfectionism? Quoting Wikipedia:

Perfectionism, in psychology, is a belief that perfection can and should be attained. In its pathological form, perfectionism is a belief that work or output that is anything less than perfect is unacceptable. At such levels, this is considered an unhealthy belief, and psychologists typically refer to such individuals as maladaptive perfectionists.

When you behave with perfectionism, you basically want to make things perfect, or not make them at all. Why is this bad for you? Because more often than not you will get blocked and paralyzed if you try to make things perfect. Even if you manage to make them perfect at one point, it might be too late to reap the rewards from it.

Practically speaking, how can perfectionism affect you badly on the Internet? In several ways, here are some examples:

• You might never launch that website you had planned just because you can’t seem to find the perfect structure for it
• You might spend too much time tweaking your design because you want to make it perfect, and on the mean while you neglect the content part which is far more important
• You might never publish that big article just because you can’t seem to make it perfect and ready to be published

Blogging Questions & Answers 20October 10

This Friday’s Questions & Answers are live. The questions we covered here were posted on the batch 16, so if you left a question last week it might take a while before we arrive to it. But don’t worry. I am not skipping any questions, it is just a matter of time before I get to yours.

1. Rahul Bansal asks:

As I said earlier, I blog on too many topics (internet, social networking, PC, mac, linux, mobile, coding, wordpress, firefox). But there are two topics that makes most of my blog, like wordpress and orkut. So I am troubled with this question from long time that whether to start dedicated blog for them. The alternative, I feel is to improve blogs navigation in some way. One thing I did long time back, is introduced dedicated feedburner feed for posts related t orkut.

But I am still wondering whether to keep “tweaking” one blog or go for multiple blogs. Of course, I have already anticipated additional efforts it will take to maintain multiple blogs, but what I am worrying is about total readership/visitors. How it will impact them?

Well, considering the topics you mentioned, I would say that you could keep them on the same blog. They all gravitate around the web and tech

Website Traffic Series Part 16: Promoting Your Content on Social Networking SitesOctober 9

A couple of weeks ago we talked about how you can use social bookmarking sites to generate traffic to your website. Social networking sites represent another sub-category under the social media umbrella, and they could also be used to generate traffic. Below you will find how.

The concept: The term social networking site encompass a wide range of websites and applications where the goal is to let users of a certain group, or having a certain interest, to connect, interact and share things. Popular examples include MySpace.com and LinkedIn.com.

Most of those websites allow its members to write a small bio or profile, and usually they also let you include a link there. Given the popularity of social networking sites around the web, it is possible to use those websites to generate traffic to your own.

Does it work?: Yes, provided you are minimally active on the social networking sites where you plan to promote your website. The traffic can also be significant depending on how popular your “profile page” will get. I have seen webmasters rece

SEO de Janeiro: The Coolest Industry Event You Will See in a WhileOctober 9

Probably you heard about SEOktoberfest right? If not, it was basically an event organized by QuadsZilla from SEO Blackhat, aimed at expert SEOs, marketers and webmasters. It took place in the Oktoberfest festival in Germany, and it combined both business and fun. Here is what one of the participants said about it:

SEOktoberfest was the opposite of most webmaster conferences: no BS, no fakers, no newbies, no self-promotion. Just 25 or so serious internet entrepreneurs from the four corners of the world.

I’ve never been to any webmaster conference where people speak so frankly: how they make money online, which traffic tricks work now, which strategies will pay off longer term.

I met people driving more traffic in a day than some of my sites get in a year. I met the man whose site took 5% of Google.de’s traffic at one point. I saw huge deals signed on a BlackBerry screen at 5am.

The success was so big that Quads is already organizing a second edition to the event, but now it will be hosted at the beautiful beaches of Rio de Janeiro, during the craziest period of the year: Carnival!

Since I am Brazilian and got many contacts around, I will be helping him to organize it. The event will take place along 3 days and 4 nights, starting on February 20th 2009 (Friday) until February 23th (Tuesday).

We already