I Accept The 7 Links Challenge
What is the Seven Links Challenge
I have been nominated for the 7 links challenge at least five times. The last time was by my good friend Praveen Rajarao from Daily Morning Coffee.com.
I was also nominated by Harleena Singh, Sergio Felix and Pete Zafra.
The main goal of the 7 links challenge is to unite bloggers from the blogosphere and create a bank with great blog posts that may have not seen the light in quite some time while making it fun and viral at the same time.
Categories for the Seven Links Challenge
- Your most beautiful post
- Your most popular post
- Your most controversial post
- Your most helpful post
- A post whose success surprised you
- A post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved
- The post that you are most proud of
As part of my change for 2012 I am not commenting nearly as much this year as last year. I spent the better part of 2011 commenting on other blogs. As a result I have over 22 thousand backlinks according to Google Webmasters Tools.
Honestly, I am a bit jaded from all the commenting and I have cut way back this year.
I have been using my free time to go through all my archived posts and SEOing them to the max. When I first started blogging I didn’t even know what SEO was and even after a few months of blogging I still did not get it.
I just had so many things to learn last year that I never took the time to understand what SEO is and how to use it effectively to get traffic from Google.
SEO stands for search engine optimization and basically when someone types in Mazzastick.com into a Google search my blog should be the first site to be displayed. Well all bloggers want their posts to be in the number one spot or at least on the first page of Google for search terms.
So what I have been doing is going to Google Adwords and typing in my keywords for the post that I am working on. Let’s say I am working on my post How To Pacify Anxiety.
I go to Google Adwords and type in Anxiety and see what keywords show up. The term “Anxiety” is searched for over 4 million times a month globally, and it gives me other search words that also contain the word anxiety.
Words like social anxiety, what is anxiety and anxiety disorder show up which are highly searched each month. I find a way to plug in those words into my post.
I use All In One SEO plugin for WordPress which allows me to change the title of the post for search engines while keeping the title the same on my blog.
How to Pacify Anxiety is not a good title so I changed it to: How to Manage Your Anxiety instead.
When you go to the post the title on the blog will still be How To Pacify Your Anxiety but in the search engines it will be How to Manage Your Anxiety. As a result the older posts that were not getting traffic from search engines are now starting to.
Enough of that though and back to the 7 Links Challenge.
I am going to keep this short and simple so here it goes:
1. My most beautiful post – Find Your Passion by Following What Excites You. Self Explanatory.
2. My most popular post - The Moon is a Death Star. Weird October Month Post.
3. My most controversial post – Life Has No Meaning. This one got a regular commenter blacklisted on my site.
4. My most helpful post – Google SiteMap contains and Invalid Url. Many a blogger has had this problem before.
5. My post whose success surprised you – Power Balance Bracelet Review. I had no idea that this post would get so much search traffic and Amazon sales too.
6. My post I feel didn’t get the attention it deserved - Get Into The Zone. Put your game face on.
7. The post that I am most proud of – How to Transform Yourself. The third most popular post on my blog.
Passing the torch
I nominate these five bloggers:
Steve Bloom - Do Something Cool.net
Todd Wilson – Channeling Myself.com
Veeh Cirra – The Way to Full Consciousness.com
Hiten Vyas – Hiten Vyas.com
Noch Noch – Noch Noch.com
Category: Blogging/Business
About the Author (Author Profile)
I became curious about what motivates people’s behavior and attitudes, and what is the secret formula to success. As a result I got my hands on every piece of material that I could find to answer these questions.
I have immersed myself with knowledge and experience for over 15 years pertaining to the fields of Psychology, Personal Development, Spirituality, Physical Health and Vitality, and Metaphysical Studies. I have read over 700 books, 1000s of blog posts and listened to over 100 audio programs pertaining to personal growth. I’ve made tons of mistakes along the way but more importantly I learned from them.Now it is my turn to share what I know with you. Are you ready? Let’s Rock!
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Hi Justin, I think it's cool you accepted and joined the challenge. Isn't a neat idea for meeting new people and sharing some of you favorite articles online? This is cool I look forward to it.
Hey Justin,
I had no idea you decided to participate on the Seven Link Challenge, this is very cool man! (I have updated my own post about it with your direct link to this article) I also wasn't aware you switched your commenting system, any feedback on the change?
Looking forward to read your Seven Link articles, expect some extra comments and take care! ;-)
SergioFelix Sorry for the delay Sergio. I remembered you were the last one to nominate me so I had to get on the ball and write this darn 7 Links post. :)
LiveFyre has been great. I get a lot more commenters coming back and adding to the conversation plus I was able to remove 3 plugins when I switched to livefyre.
My latest conversation: Heal the World by Living Your Dream
I've never heard of this challenge! I guess it solves the issues of great old blog posts getting lost in the archives!
That's how it works. It's a great way to showcase some older posts that didn't get much exposure.
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Thanks for accepting the challenge Justin!
I guess with so many nominations, you had no other option but to accept the challenge :)
Wonderful links shared, though I have just read a few of them and would be spending time going through all the others. Hope you had a nice time going back in time to take a look at these and choosing just a handful of them :)
I would also be checking out the 5 bloggers nominated, as I just know Hiten and Noch Noch from the list. Wishing all of the nominees all the very best and looking forward to checking out their posts as well :)
BTW- Just registered with livefyre- so sorry for the delay in replying here :)
Harleena Singh So true Harleena. I couldn't put it off any longer and I shouldn't have either. No problem with the Live Fyre thing. I was hesitant to switch because I didn't want anyone to feel like it was a hassle to log in.
But since a lot of blogs use LiveFyre and Disqus it makes sense to register. :)
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Justin thank you for the nomination. I am very humbled.
The challenge is quite an interesting one, I must say. Your knowledge on SEO is impressive am still getting over being clueless in that area. Will definitely apply the concepts you have mentioned here.
Veeh.
VeehCirra It was my pleasure Veeh. :) Being a blogger you need to know how to use SEO to your benefit to get that search traffic to your site. In the beginning most of my traffic came from people clicking on my comments that I left on blogs.
Now search traffic is my number one traffic source which means I can do less commenting.
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I AM SOOOOO HONOURED!!! :)
Thank you Justin! I accept the challenge
And I just learnt SO much from your post here on all these things i can do. i never knew!!!!! but i do what i can with the time i can. one step at a time :)
i just read all the posts you listed above too. i remember the weird moon one. haha
I will get down to the challenge!!
take care
Noch Noch
nochnoch I was about to contact you to see if you knew that I nominated you. I figured WordPress would "ping" your site to notify you that I linked to your site in my post.
The Moon post got me thousands of visitors because of Stumble Upon. Several of my Weird October posts got me a ton of traffic. Me thinks me needs to write some more weird topics Huh?
Thanks for taking the challenge Noch!
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Justin Mazzanochnoch weird topics always good. i re read the moon posts a few times that first time round and wasn't sure i understood it. i still dont think i understand it. but makes a cool read.
sorry i was a bit late. my wordpress wasn't working - or rather i haven't set up my pingbacks correctly...? but just posted mine :)
thanks so much!
Hey Justin, you have some great posts listed here. I've read most of them, but I think there was one or two I hadn't checked out yet so it was good to see them here. I think lists like these are great so new readers can get a feel for what type of posts to check out. I was surprised that you had to blacklist one commenter on your controversial post. That's crazy. Thanks for the nomination. I'll have to give it a try.
DoSomethingCool Take your time, it took me several months to finally get around to writing my 7 links post. It was easy to do.
My latest conversation: Heal the World by Living Your Dream
Thanks for the nomination Justin, I'll have to give it a try.
Hey Todd, Have some fun with it.
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This is great information and tips on how to get more traffic and how to improve our post to get more visitors and become top of the search engines, I'll follow your advice and tips on SEO. Thanks
EGarimbao Learn as much as you can about SEO because it is a great way to get organic traffic to your site from search engines.
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Hi Justin,
I can't even imagine that Life Has No Meaning would be controversial :)
You are still doing far better than I am with commenting - I think I did an hour in the last two or three weeks! But I am still astonished by how much you did last year. How is the livefyre working for you?
Julie | A Clear Sign I had heard the topic (life has no meaning) and read and listened to it many times before. One of the first comments I ever left when I started blogging was on a similar post that Morty Lefkoe wrote on his blog. People tend to get "up in arms" about life being meaningless or really being a neutral prop that we attach meaning to.
Live Fyre has been great and I have been getting a lot more people coming back and adding to their first comment after I replied to it. I don't get spam either.
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Well...I guess I know where to start reading!!
dshort2010 Alrighty then. Have fun. :)
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Hey Justin,
Congrats on all of the great work! Love the seven post challenge. So important to review the work you've done. I'm super inspired to do some post play myself :-D
Hi Justin,
Thank you for sharing your posts, and thank you so much for nominating me my friend! I'm delighted that you consider my work to be worthy of this! I will definitely be taking up this challenge.
I'm going to have to now. I've just come from deeone_higgs blog, and saw he has nominated me too!
I'm so excited!!!
Thanks again Justin! :-) It's very kind of you.
Hiten Vyas Oh, it's great to loved isn't it. :)
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Justin Mazza Hi Justin,
Yes, it sure does feel good to be loved! :-)
Hey man! Been a while lol wow 5 times! Good to see some of your posts which I haven't had a chance to read. Great post buddy and thanks for sharing! :)
PJ Zafra Thanks PJ, And thanks for nominating me way back when. :)
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Hi Justin,
I have also been thinking of doing some SEO on my old posts, but I haven't done anything about it. It takes a lot of time, and I have been keeping my focus on creating new content instead. But it's definitively something I have on my list of things to do, and now that I've read Ana's post about removing bad links, I have even more things to do :)
I have been nominated to the 7 links challenge myself a few times, but so far I haven't written the post. It's so hard to come up with the right posts. I just keep stalling it.
I'm going to read your posts, I can see that I like them already, just by looking at the titles :)
Jens All of my bad links were in the comments (I read Ana's post too). I am curious to see once Google re-crawls those older posts to see if I get more search traffic. I procrastinated too on writing the 7 links post but I finally had to stop resisting it and write the thing.
take care..
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Glad that you took up this challenge Justin because it gives us an opportunity to go back and revisit some of your posts that we may have missed. I know they all got some love at the time of their writing but it never hurts to give them more attention.
I know you've been a little quiet this year and I can understand where you need to put your concentration. I hope that doesn't mean though that we won't be seeing you around still. So many blogs, so many to read. I wish that's all I could do all day long and I would be in heaven.
Looking forward to your new blog header, I'm sure it will be awesome. Keep up the great work and thanks for sharing your posts with us and what you've been up to lately.
Hope you're having a fabulous week.
~Adrienne
AdrienneSmith Thanks Adrienne. I've been wanting to add to one of my posts that I have put commenting on the backburner so to speak, at least at the level that I was commenting before.
My older posts weren't getting the traffic that I want them to so I have been spending my normal commenting time "tweaking" and Seo'ing them. I'm curious to see the results.
Have a great weekend Adrienne!
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Hi Justin:
I am not surprised on your most popular post :) I actually saw your blog heading in that direction. I hoped weird October month would not end. As a regular reader, I know what you write about, but one of the thing I notice missing from your blog is a succinct tagline letting new readers and existing readers understand what your blog is about in one line.
- Wendy
visionology2 Hello Wendy, I will write some more paranormal stuff again. I purposely did not add a tagline to my header because I wasn't quite sure what it would be. I finally came up with one and someone is working on creating a new header design for me with a small, catchy tagline now.
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Justin Mazza Great. Look forward to seeing what it is.
Hi Justin,
I have been preparing my own 7 links post for a little while. One of the benefits of putting a post like this together is that one gets to reflect on what you've created and figuring out what's worked well and what hasn't. It's a great stock taking activity. :)
Thanks for sharing Justin.
~Marcus
marcus_baker It took me forever to get to this and I felt bad for not writing it sooner. I said 5 people nominated me but I only have 4 names in the post that I remember who nominated me.
I can't remember who else did, I will have to do a Google search to find out,
Take care
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Wow, had no idea you got in to blacklisting, especially to a regular commentator. Strange. Funny how topics can turn in to heated debates. Big things have been happening here, loads of traffic. Congrats. I took a 'break' and wound up with high Alexa. Go figure.
Congratulations on receiving your nomination once again. Keep it up, Justin!
Brock Blohm The guy that I blacklisted comes across as very snarky. I think it is just his personality though because I see his comments on other blogs and he leaves the same negative comments.
Like I said, I got to focus my energy on other things than commenting at the moment. I still comment just not nearly as much. Maybe an hour every other day.
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Congrats in taking the challenge AND having enough patience to understand SEO. It still confuses me, but I'm only 40 days in and I have over 3000 views, so I'm following your 22k back link love.
You've got a great blog. Some great 'challenged' articles too.
-Brian
Http://www.progressivetransformation.blogspot.com
Brian at PT blog Thanks Brian, It takes some time but it will get there. LiveFyre comments count as a backlink.
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Justin,
I like it! I plan to do the same thing on my blog; I'm sure nearly a dozen people will see it...
Be easy on yourself Rick.
My latest conversation: Master’s Lesson – Intuitive Exercises to Awaken The Divine Self tarot cards – Mazzastick LLC | Personal|Spiritual Growth
