I’ll normally leave the link building tips to Mixed Market Arts but the other day I came across a neat use of Google and CommentLuv that I wanted to share. This technique is pretty smooth and I’m upset that I didn’t think of this myself weeks, if not months, ago when I first wrote about CommentLuv.

For those of you who don’t remember, CommentLuv is a plugin for WordPress that will append a link to the latest blog post a person has made to any comment they leave on your site. I use the plugin here so if anyone wants to see how it works just leave a comment on this or any other post.

It’s a cool little plugin that may or may not inspire more people to leave comments on your posts. The clever trick though is something I came upon while going through my stat logs here. It turns out with a really simple Google query you can find blog posts related to specific keywords you are interested in that have CommentLuv enabled.

In the Google search box type something like this: commentluv inurl:golf

Replace the word golf with whatever keyword you’re looking for and you’ll be presented with a list of blog posts that have that word in the URL and have CommentLuv enabled. Visit one of the posts and leave a comment to get an easy link to your latest post. It’s that simple.

I’ve been waiting to write this post for a very long time.

Some of you might remember that I put my auction aggregator up for sale back on the 15th of February. I decided to list the site on the SitePoint Marketplace to see what kind of reaction it would get. I promised I’d give a recap when the site was sold and even though the sale only ran for seven days the site wasn’t officially sold and transferred completely to the new owner until March 31st.

It took me nearly six weeks to sell my site.

The Auction

The act of listing my site at SitePoint cost $20 and was a pretty painless process. I should note that I did all of this before their recent updates to the Marketplace so I can’t say one way or the other if the experience is any better.

Within about 15 minutes of posting my auction bids started to come in. In about two hours my (apparently very low) reserve was met and things just continued to escalate. At the end of the seven days it had basically boiled down to a three-man race for the site with the eventual auction winner taking it for a last minute bid of $900.

Sealing The Deal

Now that the site was “sold” the fun really began. The initial winner of the auction was pretty clearly in over his head. I suspected as much from his questions he asked during the seven day listing but he wasn’t in the running late so I didn’t think much of it. Until he made an 11th hour bid that won the site.

We went back and forth via private messaging at SitePoint about transferring the site. Then one day all communication just stopped completely. The winner had gone AWOL on me so now I was left with a finished auction and no buyer.

Reserve Champion

In the show cattle industry the second place winner is called Reserve Champion. Well, I decided that after my first buyer vanished I should contact the second place bidder and see if they were interested. Luckily for me they still were and even at the first winner’s final bid of $900.

And then this “winner” disappeared from the face of the earth as well. Once again I was back to where I started about three weeks after I listed my site for sale.

Finally, We Have A Winner

I was on SitePoint trying to contact the third place bidder (whom I would eventually find out no longer was interested) when I received a message from someone interested in buying the site if it was still available.

This buyer was not only interested in the site but he was committed to actually seeing the transaction through. What a pleasant change of pace for once.

I won’t disclose what the buyer paid but I will say it was less than what the site went for at SitePoint. After a week or so of sorting out some technical issues the site is now running smoothly for its new owner. And that’s the end of my experience with the SitePoint Marketplace.

If anyone reading has had a similar experience I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment about it.

I’ve been using WordPress 2.5 since the day of its release on this and several other blogs and so far I absolutely love it. The new admin is such a huge leap above and beyond previous iterations that it doesn’t even look or feel like the same program anymore. It’s transitioned from horrible open-source interface to a professional looking product smoothly.

Still Not Enough

I still think WordPress isn’t right for any of my clients at the moment. I really wish it was flexible enough to be used in all of the situations I run into in my freelancing work and maybe 2.5 is a step in that direction.

Part of the problem is that I have a very strong “do it yourself” mentality and would much rather invest the time in building my own content management programs than waste energy forcing a program like WordPress to meet my demands.

Now if a client wanted a blog (side note: not once have I been asked to build a blog for any of my clients) I wouldn’t hesitate to use WordPress with a custom theme built to match their current site design. WordPress is, without a doubt, still the best blogging platform available today and with 2.5 it’s gotten even better. There’s no denying that.

If you haven’t given 2.5 a try you need to find the time to download and install it soon.