By now we’ve all heard the hype about how GREAT .edu links are and how much Google Juice they carry.  But let’s face it, it’s hard enough to get regular links, so how are you ever going to get linked from a respected .edu domain?  Without any more fanfare, here’s how you do it.

1.  Find, and woo some student bloggers.

Here’s how you find them.  Open up Google and type in the following search:

site:edu inurl:blog OR inurl:blogs

Millions of them; it brings a tear to my eye.  Now, if you want to do a more targeted search, add a search term (like “travel") to the end of the query.  Ok, you know the drill now, so get to networking.

2.  Participate in .edu hosted forums.

A simple Google search again turns up the gold:

site:edu inurl:forum OR inurl:forums

I also tailor this search by adding search terms to the end of the query, for example “vbulletin travel.” The vbulletin ensures a forum I’m familiar with, and most likely no membership restrictions.  Now, register, and start being helpful.

3.  Lazy?  Do some .edu link submissions.

Don’t want to do all the work of networking with bloggers or participating in forums?  Then try this gem of a search:

site:edu inurl:submit link

About 50,000 places where you can submit your link to an .edu site.  These are bound to be selective, so focus the search by adding relevant search terms to the query.

4.  Put up a page at your alma mater.

Many colleges provide students and alumni with a way to put up a page on their domain.  For students, this is often a full-blown website while for alumni it might be a simple directory page.  Regardless, this is some valuable real-estate and creating that page and adding links back to your sites from it is definitely worth the effort.  Now, go contact IT, or the alumni office.

5.  Just ask them, students are nice.

Ok, so now you know that students have access to .edu web space.  Chances are, you also know quite a few students.  So just ask them; they’re always looking for any excuse to procrastinate.  In fact, they’re also broke, so why not throw in a pizza to sweeten the deal.

The StartupLA unconference this past weekend was a lot of fun.  I have to say that the highlight for me was the fireside chat with Calacanis on Friday evening, he’s quite a character.  He may have been called a lot of things in his life but boring is definitely not on the list.

Jason was up on stage for about an hour and a half fielding questions from the interviewer and the (small) audience, and every answer was punctuated by a funny anecdote or story.  He somehow managed to be obnoxious, humble, paranoid, and self-effacing (many quips about his spelling) all at the same time.  The main takeaways from his talk were,

• Just go for it, already.  The downsides to starting something are negligible, while the potential upside are unbounded.


• Business is war, and if you’re not willing to act like it, you’re gonna get reamed.  He was very adamant about this and used the war metaphor throughout many of his answers.  It made for great humor, and there is definitely value in having someone in your organization paranoid about how your competitors are plotting your demise.  It keeps you on your toes and planning ahead.


• Persevere.  To continue the metaphor, the spoils of war go to the last competitor left standing.  If business gets tough and your competitors start quitting, good!  You keep going.

After selling Weblogs, Inc. to AOL (for a rumored $25 million), Calacanis stayed on at AOL for a year, an experience he compared to grad school.  “You learn a LOT, bu you know, sometimes it makes you want to kill yourself.”

Now, he’s moved on and started Mahalo with Mark Jeffrey.  Mahalo is a human-powered search engine; I believe he said “Google meets Wikipedia."  I think introducing human editing into search results is a decent idea, but my worry would be about scalability.  There’s no way they can provide good, up-to-date results for everything, or even most of, the web.  Then again, maybe they’re not trying to.

Here’s a quick round of updates, and also an excuse to do a bit of off-page SEO.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been most busy with my argentina travel site, posting great content almost daily, optimizing, and networking with other bloggers in the niche.  It’s a slow process, but it’s showing results - traffic has doubled since August, most of it from search engines.

My other sites are on the back burner, but mozying along nicely nonetheless.  I recently added a bunch of halloween glitter graphics to ShoutPix.com and I’m crossing my fingers to rank for that phrase, and although I haven’t touched it in months, my text messages via the web site, TextU.org is doing about the same as always, probably because of the decent price per click for cell-phone related terms.

Lastly, we went into beta-testing at my day job, with our preschool planning community.  I’m interested to see how it goes.  We’ve generated some interest and signups, but the preschool advocacy and early education communities are not early adopters, they’re not even late adopters, so it’s proving a struggle to get them to use the site.

It looks like the Los Angeles entrepreneur scene is finally getting their act together!  Yes, we have a massive inferiority complex towards our famous cousin to the north but there are really cool things being done in LA as well.

And this weekend, I get to find out all about them.  I’m ducking out of work after lunch tomorrow to get a good seat at the StartupLA unconference, where many of LA’s entrepreneurs will be giving talks, or listening to them.  It’s a two day event with a great lineup of speakers, a 60-second pitch competition, and of course, schmoozing.

I just got an exciting email from the guys at Text-Link-Ads.  In fact, I get emails from them pretty often, always From: Patrick Gavin, and of all the mailing lists that I am on, this is pretty much the only one that isn’t auto-archived, and that I actually read on a regular basis. Way to go Patrick! I don’t really know how you do it, but your emails don’t annoy me.

It’s probably because when they do interrupt me, it’s either to bring great news (Yea, I just made some money!) or to tell me about something new that I actually find exciting (umm...a purple cow).  For example, about a day ago I got an email announcing the launch of Shopping Ads.  They go something like this:

At first glance they look a lot like Chitika ads, and just like those, you’re allowed to use them alongside AdSense, which is a bonus.  But I inherently trust the TLA team because I think is a great product, and so I’m much more willing to give Shopping Ads a try.  Aahhh, the beauty of selling to existing customers…

Apparently, I was just kidding about being back from Neverland.  Or at least here I was.  I’ve been busy at work on Argentina’s Travel and a couple of new projects, not to mention my day job.

After a summer of inconsistency (albeit lots of fun), fall is shaping up to be a very consistent time and it’s exciting to see the results.  Online earnings continue to increase, links are trickling in, and I’m being contacted ever more frequently about advertising spots.

I’m quite excited about my two new projects (and maybe three), especially since this time around I’ve made the effort to bring other people on board.  These are joint ventures, which means I won’t be doing all the work myself, and which also means I get to focus on what I’m good at.

These should be up within the month, and you’ll definitely hear about them on here.