Why it pays to check your bookmarks regularly.
We all feel a brief moment of elevated heart rate and adrenaline rush when something goes wrong.
My screen suddenly flashed a warning.
A warning that I needed to do an immediate scan of my computer.
Bugger.
The computer is scanning as I write this, and I'm still shaking a little.
Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have been the disaster it could have been.
What happened?
I had just completed a system upgrade and was using the Firefox web browser, which I don't normally do.
Because I hadn't used it for so long, I was going through the bookmarks to weed out those that didn't work anymore or that I didn't want.
Working my down the list, and sites have gone, changed owners, etc.
Most of them are no good now.
Until the screen flashed.
And panic struck.
What I think has happened is that one site with good traffic has closed down.
A malicious hacker has bought that expired domain and installed his attack software on it for anyone foolish enough to visit.
I suspect that I got away with it because I'm using a MacBook Pro, and the software would probably have targeted Windows.
I also have excellent anti-virus protection on my computer.
I use
https://www.eset.com/
and have done for over 20 years. That's not an affiliate link.
If I had been checking my backlinks regularly, I may have previously deleted that link when the site went down or perhaps before it was turned into an attack site.
It pays to remember that the Internet is essentially unregulated, so the advice is to walk softly and carry a big stick.
Not everyone has your best interests at heart.
Regards,
Brent.
P.S. Today, I watched a video about making money with a blog.
The key takeaway was to target low-value, low-competition, long-tail keywords in a niche related to high-value keywords.
The concept is to have one or two pages about those high-value keywords that have links from the low-value keyword pages.
The low-value keywords have very low competition, so it's easy to rank for them.
You flip that easy traffic to the pages that have the high payout ads on them.
Instead of trying to rank for divorce lawyers, for example, you rank for divorce papers and link to your divorce lawyer pages.
The downside is that you will need to be consistent with adding content to attract the traffic you can flip.
Fortunately, it's not difficult to create that content now that A.I. has arrived.
Using a tool like Frase makes it relatively simple to create reasonable content fast.
I have a video on how I use Frase with other tools on this Evernote page: https://link.wm-tips.com/frase.
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