BinaryDay – A little better day

Background Note: Approximately 45 days back, I had made a post about my stained glass supplies project. This is a keyword with more than 500$ per month potential. In that post I had noted that I need to be able to move it into the top 10 of SERP to earn the right to write about keyword research in public. Now that it has moved into 7th position, I guess I am at liberty to bore you with my views about keyword research.

On a serious note, what I write below is based on my experience of working with niche sites like the one above. Moreover I am not going to sell you anything/ recommend something with my affiliate link smartly cloaked, so you should pay some attention to the post.

What are keywords

Everyone thinks that he/ she knows what are keywords. I thought so. However as I continued working on niche sites, I realized that the obvious things are obvious to everyone else and hence all lucrative urls are booked and there is an insane amount of competition. That is when fell back on commonsense approach instead of all the jargons that I had picked up till then.

Keyword Research is the process of finding out the terms that users are most likely to use while looking for the product that you are selling.

• For example a USB drive is also known as thumb drive or flash drive. If your website sells USB drives, then you will be interested to know which of the three terms are used by maximum number of users, so that you can concentrate on those words.
• That was a really simplistic case of keyword research. Now ask yourself if you will like to come at the top of Google results when people search for storage device or ways to transfer files from one computer to another etc. Keyword research should help you a large list of such keywords that are being used by your prospective customers and how many of them are using them. I am yet to see any tool that will give you such data.
• Finally people do not simply type in usb drive or thumb drive into Google. You will be surprised by the sort of variations used by a large number of users. This is what is popularly referred as the long tail search.

There are three important terms that we shall focus when evaluating any keyword. These are

1. Volume of search: This is basically the number of people who use the keyword. However as we go along, we shall realize that even this basic definition has many nuances including seasonality, exact match, broad match, wrong spellings etc. We shall look at all these factors in future posts.
2. Competition level compared to our existing strength and potential. That entire sentence is in bold because of its importance. Most guru tell you to go after easy terms. However what is easy for me with a 5 year old blog, lot of experience and thousands of existing income may not be easy for someone who is setting up a blog. As you study the competition level for any keyword, put that into context of the strength of your own blog.
3. Attractiveness of keywords: This is the money making ability of the keyword and will depend on the method of monetization. Some keywords that are highly attractive to people doing affiliate marketing may not be that attractive for people depending upon adsense to monetize and vice versa. Nevertheless, always keep an eye on the money making potential of the keyword that you are studying.

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It has been more than three months now since I blogged about my plan of leaving the job for a startup life. In this time I have been working upon a no nonsense search engine for finding and comparing the prices of books across 10 online book stores in India. I am really happy to introduce MySmartPrice.com to the readers of BinaryDay.

If you buy books online then you should use mysmartprice because

1. It is the most comprehensive book price comparison site in India comparing price from 10 stores
2. A google suggest like feature makes it possible to search for the book only in a few key strokes
3. It provides you information about prices of different versions of the same book, helping you make a better decission.
4. Other important decision points like shipping cost and time of delivery is given as well
5. The result is provided in less than 30 seconds for 30,000 top books. If you are looking for an obscure title, then expect a 2-3 minute delay for getting the information. I am working on improving the timeline.

MySmartPrice continues to be a work in progress. I request you to give it a spin and share your views with me.

I am also looking for bloggers writing about books and voracious readers to get their feedback as an end user. I will really appreciate if you can put me in touch with any such person that you know.

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Binaryday had been started to act as a place holder for my website about used mobiles. That project did not really take off as expected even though the site has gone on to become the #1 site for second hand mobiles in India. There are not that many people buying or selling used mobiles in India.

Still I continue to be bullish about the potential role of online websites to make real life commerce a lot more efficient and I am working on some really cool idea for enabling efficient price discovery of books. I will ask you for a feedback as soon as the first phase of the project gets completed. Trust me that is one of the best pieces of codes I have written till date and I am really proud of the project.

My theory that a place holder should always be created as soon as you start working on a project that will take more than a month to be completed. That is why I have started a website about prices in India which will work as a place holder for this cool project of mine. This website is going to have pages like Nokia mobile price list in India and Nokia 5230 price in India among other things.

I have a strong hunch that to be truly useful, I need to convert this site to make the prices dynamic. So that post about nokia mobile prices should be able to get the prices updated whenever the price of a model changes, automatically. What do you think is the best way to accomplish the same?

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I have got an adword coupon for Rs. 1500 today. I have already used a coupon of 100$ on my account and hence I am no more eligible to use the coupon. Let me know if someone may be interested in the coupon.

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I have been planning to start a series on keyword research for quite some time now. I had started working on a website about stained glass supplies as a live example for the topic. I planned to cover various topics related to stained glass items like stained glass windows, stained glass panels and stained glass lamp shades etc. I had heard of the sentence plans are made to be changed.

Looks like my little site has developed some sort of stage fear and is refusing to move beyond the third page of google result My first thought was to abandon the site and start working on a new site. But then one of my close friends suggested that I can not earn the right to lecture others about research unless I am able to move this site to the first page.

That is why I have decided to use this post as an open challenge to myself to work on my stained glass website and get it to the top 10 for a search about stained glass supplies. I am giving myself time till the end of August to accomplish this result. Right now I intend to publish posts about other stained glass items and continue to try different methods to push it up.

I hope I will be upto the challenge. If I fail then may be I will jsut delete this post and continue to give gyaan to people about keyword research. Shameless Btw if you have got some suggestions about how I can improve the ranking, then please let me know.

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Will it not be great if you can know list of keywords from which one of your competitor gets its traffic? Well, I have recently purchased the pro membership of one such tool called SEMRush which provides upto 10,000 top keywords of any website. The pro membership allows me to query as many as 3000 websites in a day and it has been awesome. But I need to query hardly 5-10 websites in a week or so.

The membership is valid for a month and I am willing to provide the keyword list for upto 10 websites to anyone who needs the same, for FREE. You may simply send an email to ask[@]binaryday.com with the list of websites for which you need the keywords.

You do not need to do anything else to get the keyword list. But I will appreciate if you can tweet this post or share it with others in some way.

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Use coupon code SOCCER99 to get domain names for 99 cents on Godaddy. I have tried it myself and it works. Tweet this post to say thanks.:)

We have published a free ebook that takes you step by step through the process of creating a blog

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I have finally implemented one of the most repeated advices of all blogging gurus i.e build a list. In order to encourage people to part with their email address, we have created a 16 page FREE ebook answering the following questions

1. Why should I blog?
2. What should I blog about?
3. How to create a blog?
4. How to migrate my free blog to my own blog?
5. What will my own blog cost to me?
6. How to get earnings from my blog?
7. How to attract viewers to my blog?
8. I do not like the technical details. Can you help me with the setting up the blog?

The ebook is aimed at people just contemplating to start a blog. Even then I am sure that many of established bloggers may find my take on the first two points i.e  why should one blog and how to select the niche quite useful. You can download the ebook by going to my page for create a blog.

People who download the ebook, will get regular articles about skills required to grow their blog. That itself should be a good enough reason for you to download my ebook about how to create a blog

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In my last post, I had promised to focus on seo and blogging. In line with that me and my partner have completed our first ever ebook targeted at people considering to start blogging. It is 1.00 AM now and I am feeling really excited and energetic about the entire thing.

As I said, the ebook is targeted at absolute beginners and hence there is nothing innovative in it. But it is the first time that I have been able to put down my thoughts over 16 pages in a coherent manner and that is quite a personal achievement.

I intend to put up the ebook on a separate page on Binaryday and then experiment with building a list on Aweber with the ebook being the free download. I have seen most internet marketers being crazy about “the list”. I am about to find out the reality first hand.

Please wish me luck for the release of the first ebook and my experiment with aweber and affiliate marketing. I am a complete newbie on all these three things and will appreciate any suggestions that you may have.

P.S: I shall be signing up for aweber tomorrow. I will like to buy it from the affiliate link of one of the readers of this blog. So please let me know if any of you has an aweber affiliate account.

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Binaryday has been more of an experiment ground for me as I dabble in other online activities. That sort of explains the erratic posting schedule, posts under several categories that include entrepreneurship, technology, news, seo and blogging.

Having made my decision to leave my day job to pursue online business opportunities full time, I think Binaryday deserves a little more attention from me now.

I intend to cover blogging and SEO on Binaryday. I shall need to find a new experiment ground now

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I have made up my mind to leave the job and start my own company before end of September and I am scared to death right now. Leaving the job with a four month old daughter, unpaid education loan taken for my IIMB degree and without any clue about what I will be starting is definitely stupid.

Perhaps scared is the wrong word. I feel more like a guy about to propose to his love of 6 years-scared of rejection and excited at the thought of what is possible. It is such a funny situation to be in.

I must thank three people for providing me the necessary courage without their own knowledge. Watching the success of Rahul and Harsh, gives me the confidence that I can pull it through. I have never talked to Swaroop, but going through his blog posts made me realize that failure is not exactly end of the world.

I hope my decission is right because it definitely feels damn too scary.

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People can recommend anything to you but they will always choose the best for their own blog. That is why instead of listening to which web host other bloggers recommend, I decided to study the web host of choice of more than 2000 Indian blogs for selecting one for my new blog about cna training. (The selection of Indian blogs is only because I am in the middle of a detailed study involving several other aspects of Indian bloggers). I have not considered the large number of blogs hosted on free hosting like blogspot, wordpress, rediff or sulekha.

Google provides a free hosting option for your blog

The graph below provides information regarding top 10 web hosting choices of these 2000 bloggers. A look at the top will justify all the effort put into this study. The free hosting from Google that allows you to have your own domain name seems to be the choice for majority of bloggers. I am just wondering if no affiliate commission pay out is the reason behind no one recommending them to new bloggers.

Top 10 web hosting choice of Indian Bloggers

Please encourage me

Important : This study took me more than 60 hours to complete as I had write code to identify the 2000 blogs, get their web hosting data and then learn google chart api to produce the graph in this post. There are no affiliate links here. If you find this useful then please share it with others via twitter/email, sphinn it or link it from your own blog. That is the only way bloggers like me can get the motivation to conduct studies like this instead of giving you personal opinion. Thanks in advance.

P.S: You can download the detailed excel file from http://www.gigasize.com/get.php?d=lq2fy1hqqnf

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Came across this really useful post about earning more money through referrals. This is one of the best posts about blog earnings along with my post about 25 factors that impact your adsense earning.

Coming to referral income, have you observed the way most of the successful online products gets launched. Take the launch of Membershipmastermind as a case study. It does not matter which MMO blogger you have subscribed to. Everyone has sent at least one post writing about the virtues of the programme. The programme may be good, I am not contesting that. But there is a lot to learn in the way it is being sold.

It is difficult to believe someone when he says I have come up with this great training programme but you need to pay 750$ to subscribe. But the credibility factor increases when a third person says Yaro has come up with this awesome course. You will be stupid not to enroll for as little as 750$. It becomes even more irresistible when 4-5 top bloggers that I have subscribed to and take daily advice from recommend the product.

The question is if you are planning to use referral products, you need to build up your own echo chamber. You need those 3-4 guys who will say binaryday has come up with this great programme that you will be stupid not to enroll.

Who is there in your echo chamber? Let me know in the comments if you shall like to be part of my echo chamber.

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What will you do if there is a real estate that you can buy for 20$ a year or you may rent it for free. Will you buy it or rent it knowing fully well that it can easily fetch 20,000$ after 2 years? What will call someone who decides to rent it because there is a 1% chance that it may result in a grand 50$ loss to him.

That was easy wasn’t it? Now let us say what you get into when you decide to create a blog a free blogging platform like wordpress or blogger.

1. There is a good chance you will never see any payout from your blog. Wordpress does not allow you to post advertisements. Blogspot allows you to put advertisements but then I doubt many advertising networks will be too keen to accept something.blogspot.com
2. You are bound by the stupid rules of the blogging platform. They may change the rule any day they want and you will loose a blog that you developed over years of hard work. I have been astonished by the number of people that have lost perfectly genuine blog because the stupid software thought they were spamming.
3. You can not extend your blog to anything additional. If I wan, I can add a forum, a private members only area or anything else to binaryday. Can you do that on your  something.blogspot.com?

I can go on and on about why it is stupid to have a blog on a free platform. However before you curse me and leave, I will request you to go to the top of this post and read my real estate example once more. That real estate available for 12$ a year is a self hosted blog with your own url and own hosting space. I am sure you know a lot of people who make a decent amount of money from their blog. If you do not then I shall suggest that you read December earnings report of 15 bloggers.

You are lucky if you have not already created your blog on one of these free blogging platforms. Create a self hosted blog today itself. If you already have a blog on one of these free blogging platforms, then you are in luck. Harsh at shoutmeloud provides a very valuable service of migrating from free hosted blog to self hosted  platform. No that is not n affiliate link nor Harsh has paid me any money for linking to his page.

P.S: Feel free to contact me at ask[at]binaryday.com if you need any clarification regarding how to get complete website for less than 20$ a year.

Other posts of mine that you may like to read

1. A simple framework to select topic for blogging
2. 25 Factors that determine your adsense earning andList of Indian Advertising networks
3. 6 websites to get your indian startup profiled and get free backlinks and
4. My roadmap to blogging success

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I have been away from the blog for quite sometime now. However a document released by Google that analyzed seo friendliness of 100 Google products and provides detailed instructions for improving the rankings and click through rate inside the SERP, has managed to get me back to blogging. The document contains sort of official confirmation about some hotly debated seo topics. Here are some seo insights obtained by me from the document.

1. Title Tag:
   • A descriptive title tag helps search engines to understand the content better
   • Most search engines use 60 characters from the title tag.
   • Search engines may give lesser importance to keywords after a certain point – Keep main keywords to the front.
   • Some users only look at titles – If you skimp on your title tag, you’re missing out on clicks from users who only
     scan result titles on a search results page Really!! (Page 5)
   • Prefered structure is <title> Brand Name – Target Keywords </title> : Leverage the brand if you have one (Page 6)
   • Do not copy title tag from some other page. (Page 7) Show this example the next time your boss shouts for a wrong copy paste job. Even Googlers use it
2. URL Structure
   • A descriptive url structure helps search engines to understand the content better
   • It plays a part in improving user click through rate
3. Meta Description Tag
   • description meta tags and keyword meta tags don’t count in Google’s ranking  (official confirmation of what we knew) -Page 9
   • The text from meta description tag is sometimes used for result snippet. Absence of meta description tag may result in non sensical text from the page to be shown as snippet.
   • Fill your two lines – Similar to the title tag, you want to use all of the space given to you in the snippet. You’ll describe your product better to users, have the opportunity for more bolded words, and take up more real estate on the search results page Page-9
   • Missing snippet for a page is a signal that something is wrong like google bot being denied access through robots.txt
4. Sitelinks
   • Webmasters can improve the chances of getting a sitelink by using 1. Hierarchical site structure, 2. using descriptive anchor text for internal links and 3. avoiding deep nesting of content behind many subdirectories. (p-13)
   • Google’s algorithm for creating sitelinks is not perfect. You should block unappealing sitelinks to get better sitelinks (p-15)
   • Google chooses popular and relevant content as sitelink (p-16)
5. Consolidating link juice
   • Either 301 redirect or canonical tag can be used to consolidate link juice from different pages showing the same content.  In the entire discussion about duplicate content, the emphasis is on split of link juice and not any duplicate content penalty. Is there a hint there? (p-19)
     
   • 301 redirect will not help if the page is blocked through robots.txt (p-19)
   • Don’t use 302s when 301s would be more appropriate (p-27) 302 redirect does not consolidate link juice.
   • 301 to the canonical or use the rel=”canonical” link element. Hopefully dobuts about effectiveness of rel=”canonical” tag will be removed now. (p-30)
6. Heading Tag Use
   • Use of heading tag helps search engines to understand your content better (p-34)
   • Smart use of CSS to get the same effect will not help (p-48)
   • H1 tags are better than H3 (p-48)
7. Images
   • Link images to the canonical destination pages to consolidate internal link juice (p-39)
   • Appropriate ALT text for linked images help search engines learn about target page and the image itself (p-42)
   • the alt text of images is  treated as anchor text by search engines (p-43)
8. Internal Anchor Text
   • Use of descriptive anchor text for internal pages helps (p-45)

Please let me know about any point that I might have missed or wrongly interpreted.

Please help this content reach more people with a tweet/sphinn or any other sharing medium of your choice, if you liked it.

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Techcrunch is celebrating its 5th Birthday. The post just made me realize what can be achieved in 5 years time……….Btw If any of you is feeling down about lack of comments on your blog, then just check the first post of Techcrunch. There is a grand total of 0 comments. I am already feeling good

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I just got an email from (supposedly) Adsense team informing me that I have crossed the payment threshold for the month and I need to update the payment details to be able to get the cheque. Clicking on the provided link takes me to a sub directory of a website with url yogawebsite.

I am reasonably confident that it is a phishing attack. Has anyone else got a similar issue yet??

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will only take you farther away from the goal.

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As already noted by Ajith in the comment to my post about free VPN service, I am involved in a detailed and extensive study of keyword research. That is why I have been away from Binaryday. I hope to complete the study soon and get back to blogging here.

One of the well known and widely accepted seo wisdom is the ability of aged domains to rank easily. Google seems to be using this criteria along with trust algorithm to combat spam. However what I have figured out is that buying an aged website may create some problem as well unless you take care to avoid such issues.

Tanning lotions is a great niche having a large number of interested buyers. Just one keyword ‘Tanning bed lotion’ got more than 40,000 exact searches in March and each click was worth more than 1$. It is easy to create content as well since there are lots of controversy and confusion regarding tanning. So you can imagine my excitement when I saw that an exact match domain for tanning bed lotion is available. What made tanningbedlotion.org even more attractive is the fact that the site has been around since 2006. My studies over last 3 months show that a 4 year old, exact match domain can rank for most keywords within weeks. More about this will be coming in future posts.

So I created 2 articles about tanning bed lotion and best tanning bed lotion, and submitted a couple of articles in article directories. The goal of this step was to get these 2 pages indexed before adding more pages. Even 15 days after creating the links, only the homepage is indexed. The site is in the 400-500 range in the SERP. That made me convinced that there is something wrong.

A quick visit to the webmaster tools, showed that there are 14 pages indexed in Google !!! Most of the time I put a lot of effort to get more pages indexed but this time I was completely stumped as I had created only 2 pages and 14 pages were indexed.

Next I used site: command in Google to find the list of pages that have been indexed. A glance at the result was enough to realize that the previous domain had been spammed extensively and it had ended up with links to large number of bad domains.

I have now requested removal of all the pages from Google index. I shall be requesting for a re-inclusion in 1-2 weeks. This lengthy post is to tell you that if you are buying an aged domain, then make sure to do a site: search to figure out what the previous owner has been upto and why he did not renew the site. It may save you a lot of wasted effort.

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This post about free vpn software or free vpn service is the first technology related post after a long time on binaryday even though my previous posts about directx 11 free download, ntldr is missing vista and dual core vs core 2 duo had been quite popular with the users. I have been working on mostly internet related projects for last 1 year or so and that is why I have not been getting many post ideas for technology related posts.

Requirement of a free VPN Service

While working on a project, I realized that some websites are banned in office. Previously I have written about how to use gmail proxy to access blocked websites in office. However one of my co workers told me that using a proxy may not be safe as system administrator is monitoring the usage of proxy sites. Moreover one of the problems with proxy sites is that many of them may get your system infected with virus. That is when I came across the idea of using free vpn to access these blocked websites. Unfortunately many of the top ranked posts about free vpn services had outdated information.

A word of caution about using free VPN service

I have myself worked in organizations that had very strict policies regarding internet usage. Please remember that using websites that have been blocked by the administrator may be looked at very seriously by your employer. Especially if you are working in a client premises where any breach of confidentiality may result in cancellation of contract or imposition of penalty on your company. Hence please use your common sense while accessing any of these websites.

AceVPN

AceVPN is one more free VPN service based on openVPN that allows unlimited surfing. The similarity between the services is not a coincidence since I was specifically looking for a free vpn software based on openVPN for the sake of data security and software that provides unlimited access.

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I just noticed that there is google pagerank update that is going on right now. Binaryday has moved to pagerank 3. In case you are wondering why I keep posting about such a useless event, please read my post about the importance of pagerank. As a proof of those concepts, one of my popular posts about seo insights from google has moved upto pagerank 3 on back of 2 really good backlinks that it earned.

What happened to your greenbar?

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I have been closely following the news of Erin Andrews Peephole Video for quite some time now. I think there are several important learning for every one active on Internet in the way Erin Andrews peephole video cache story has unfolded. That is why I have decided to make post about a not so related and not so hot news after I stopped doing that with the post about Gomez Boxxy.

• Story based on Google hot trends continues to get traffic for long : Most of the time people will tell you that if you blog about topics from Google trends, then you will have a sudden spike in traffic which will go away in 1 or 2 days. The logic is that interest in topics like erin andrews peephole video is alive while the news is hot and it fades away as soon as some other news replaces it. I had already experienced the fallacy of the statement in case of the story of Boxxy on binaryday and I have been experiencing on my niche news site where I have been following up on the erin andrews story. The traffic has remained steady as first the news started reaching the mass through mainstream media who then came to the site to know how to watch erin andrews peephole and then once the videos were taken down from most major sites, people kept coming to the site looking for video cache of erin andrews.
• Controversy sells, even on the internet: The main stream has always been aware of this fact and they have aways used it to improve viewership. Even on the internet if you go through the 100 terms on google trend for a day then most probably the most contorversial ones like a peephole video or a murder will remain popular even after 3 months while others will fade away.
• You can not remove a page That is one scary thought for bloggers like me. We have the freedom to put up any content that we want. But when it comes to removing them, it is impossible with cache of each page stored on a large number of servers. While the Erin Andrews peephole video has been removed from a number of sites the cached copy is still available for public consumption.

What is your take on the subject? Btw should I post about ways to watch erin andrews peephole video on this post as well. Let me know.

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I had logged into my blogging console to write a post about free cna training and observed that Binaryday has got the little green bar back. The pagerank of binaryday is 2 only. The pagerank is not exactly great considering that this blog has been a pagerank 4 blog in the past and it has earned a lot of good quality backlinks since then. However I am extremely happy considering that the pagerank bar had gone gray for more than 1 and half year now. Google seemed to have penalized Binaryday.

Most importantly, I resolved the issue with a method that can be replicated for any blog suffering from google penalty. I shall write a post about the method soon. For now I am going to celebrate with some Vodka

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