BinaryDay

We keep struggling for years together, trying to reach 10,000 USD pm and some guys manage to get 1.5 million USD for domain name. Did travelzoo pay 1.5 mn USD for the domain name alone? Here is what they have got apart from the domain name

1. Fly.com has a pagerank 6
2. Fly.com is a more than 12 year old domain
3. Fly.com has more than 27,000 pages indexed in yahoo

Looks like a SEO Gold-mine to me.

You write well thought out attention grabbing titles for your post. Unfortunately many of your email subscribers never get to see that title because it is inside an email with a boring subject line that gets repeated everyday. That pretty much sums up my frustration with feedburner emails.

Here is a simple wordpress hack that will make the subject lines of my feedburner mails dynamic. It sets the title of the latest post on your blog as the title of the feedburner email.

You need to edit 3 files in the wordpress source file for this to work

1. feed.php
2. feed-rss.php and
3. feed-rss2.php

All 3 files are present in the wp-admin folder of your wordpress installation. These files are responsible for generating your rss feed. Please take a back-up of the files before proceeding with the below hack.

Edit feed.php
Locate the function get_wp_title_rss.  Replace the existing code of the function with the following

function get_wp_title_rss() {
global $post;
$myposts = get_posts(‘numberposts=1&offset=0′);
foreach($myposts as $post) :
$title = the_title();
endforeach;
 return $title;
}

Edit feed-rss.php and feed-rss2.php

Look for the line  <title> ………………………</title>  and convert it to <title><?php  wp_title_rss(); echo ” from “; bloginfo_rss(‘name’); ?></title>

That’s it. The subject line of your next feedburner email shall be title of your last post from your blogname.

It is Vasanta Panchami today

Many of you might be knowing it as Saraswati Puja. The day has a lot of emotional significance for me. Especially because Saraswati Puja was one occassion on which I did not have to study at all!!! What fun it used to be. Here I am slogging it out at 12 in the night, hoping that vasanta panchami 2009 will bring good luck to me and Binaryday alike.

I have lost my book of saraswati mantra or saraswati vandana. Let me know if anyone knows an online source for the same.

We bloggers very often feel like Aliens. Our friends think we are crazy to be so excited about that stupid comment on the blog. They look at you with strange eyes when you ask them for treat to celebrate the first PR5 link.

No need to feel frustrated any more. Aliens, I mean bloggers are talking. And honestly some of these discussions are more interesting than any blog post that I have ever read. I have just put some of the discussions that I found interesting. Go through them and I can bet that you can not resist the temptation to be a part of this incredibly interesting discussion among bloggers.

I am no way related to Indiblogger

1. Has blogging created workplace/family problems for You?
2. If you had Rs. 100 to promote your blog/website
3. How many of you use blogs as a stress buster?
4. Do women bloggers have more readers than Men?
5. what matters to you – readership or stats
6. Blogging Ethics
7. Simple & Easy Ways to Improve your Blog and its Traffic and Visitors
8. Top 5 SEO Mistakes new Bloggers should Avoid
9. Are anonymous blogger more honest than others?
10. Would you as a blogger change your views on a subject if offered money?
11. Blogs with Social Networking Funda
12. Different Page rank on Different Page rank cheking sites, Why it happens
13. When do you blog the most? Weekends or weekdays?
14. Traffic driven monetization techniques will die
15. Which one among this you think as the best way to increase blog traffic

I had never thought about why I blog. I never had to. Because this blog was created to create the ground work for my main website for second hand mobiles. However as I find myself spending more and more time on this blog, the lack of clarity to that question seems to get me more and more confused.

Quality leads to success is the biggest BS
The best blog posts do not get you the maximum earning. Don’t trust me? Just check out the traffic stats for some of these posts that I wrote in less than 2 minutes each and these posts that took me 2-3 hours each and then compare them with the traffic stats for these posts that I have prepared after spending more than 60-70 hours each. Get it clear. There are posts that get you money, there are posts that get you recognition and then there are posts that get you respect.

                      There are very few posts that will get you all 3.

What do you want from Blogging? 
Money, recognition or respect? What do you want from blogging? Get that clear today. Print it out on a paper on big bold letters and put it right in front of your laptop. Next time before you hit the publish button for any post, ask yourself what will it get you or your blog. Is it in line with what you want. If yes then publish the post else simply delete the post.

1 post, 500 people who like it and you become an overnight celebrity. That is the promise of Digg to every blogger. This is my attempt to help you get going on this super fast train called Digg.

In this article I shall be discussing the following points

1. Why you must use Digg?
2. What is Digg?
3. Necessary success factors on Digg
4. How to select a good username?
5. How to go about making Friends
   1. Power Users
   2. How to identify power users
   3. Initial set of friends
   4. How to find friends  with mutual interest
   5. How to get attention of power users
   6. Shout or not shout?
6. Articles that Digg users love and Digg-Baiting
7. Digg penalty and how to avoid it

Why you must use Digg

• To succeed on Digg all that you need is a smart brain and an ability to write original and interesting post.
• Digg can bring in massive amount of traffic.
• Simply submitting your article to Digg will get you a highly valuable backlink.
• More importantly hitting the front page of Digg can get your blog a large number of links which will ensure a better performance for your blog on Google.
• If you use Digg regularly it can become a great source of content and post ideas

What is Digg?

On Digg users share content that they find interesting/useful. Other users then vote on the articles of their choice and the popularity of the article determines whether the article gets lost in the bylanes of Digg or the article hits the front page.

Necessary success factors on Digg

Actually succeeding on Digg is not complicated. Consultants/marketing gurus make it sound that way so they can justify their fees and keep you away from this wonderful source of traffic and links.

Forget about Digg and ask yourself what are the qualities common to the guy/girl popular in your office/society/college/school. Mostly these are people who were original/funny, they had the courage to stand up for things they believed in and most importantly they knew other popular guys.

Success on Digg requires you to display these 3 qualities as well

• Be original and funny/controversial
• Have the courage to stand up for something you strongly believe in
• Know the popular guys, actually make sure that the popular guys know you

How to select a good username?

Remember that the typical digg user is always in a hurry. She will look at your submission for may be 5 seconds before deciding whether she wants to see more or not. There is no proof but my personal belief is that a good, geeky username will help you get the attention of Digg users.

Never choose a user name which is same as your blog name. Digg users do not like people promoting their own content. Having a username different from your blog name will help you promote your content from time to time.

Who are Power Users: Digg may be a democracy. But unlike real world democracy in the world of Digg some votes are lot more important than other votes. These royal users are the power users of Digg. You can understand from the fact that 56% of the articles, that hit the home page, were submitted by the top 100 users

How to identify power users: Previously Digg used to publish the list of power users/top diggers. However Digg has recently stopped publishing that information, thereby making it difficult for us to find the power users.

Some methods that I use to find the power users include

• Look at the homepage of Digg. See the users, whose submissions have hit the front page.
• Find users in your niche with good number of friends
• More importantly find users who are regularly active and who tend to digg articles from different sources

Initial set of friends:

This is one thing that I think most gurus have got wrong. Everyone seems to advise the beginner to add the power users as friend. Do not add the power users as friend. At least do not start off that way. Try to think from the perspective of the power user. They get flooded with thousands of request from spammers everyday. You think they will befriend anyone who does not have a single friend?

Start by finding friends with some common interest. Finding friends with mutual friends is not that difficult. Just go to digg and search for your keywords. Digg by default gives you results from the front page. Change it to get results in the upcoming page. These are typically users who are starting out themselves and hence they love it when they get a friend request. Locate users whose submissions have got more than 5 diggs and digg their submissions.

Better still comment on those submissions. Commenting is very powerful in getting attention. Effective commenting is a great way to get the attention of power users of dig.

Shout or not shout? Shout is a method to let your friends on Digg know that you liked a particular interest. It normally increases the chance that your friends will digg your story. However do not shout everytime you digg an article. Users will tend to value your shout if you have a habit of shouting only when you have a great article to share with them.        

Articles that Digg users love and Digg-Baiting

There are certain types of posts that the community at digg loves. Several articles have been written about this topic. To summarize posts that tend to get popular on digg tend to be

• Top 10 lists
• Positive articles about Apple/Google/Firefox
• Negative articles about Microsoft
• Digg loves itself just too much. So write articles about Digg. (Why else I am writing this article. )

Read this article from wolf-howl about how to write a post that Digg will simply love.

Digg penalty and how to avoid it

Digg offers this seemingly gold-mine if you can play the games right. So some players try to game the system and Digg hits back by banning them. The problem is some innocent users get caught in the cross-fire. So stay away from any activity that may be construed as gaming the digg system. Never, never use any script that automates any part of your digging activity.

If you likes this post then show your love with a digg/ stumble or link.

1. Stumbleupon gives you instant traffic No need to wait for 6 months for your blog to age, then beg other bloggers to link to you and then wait for another 3 years to see your blog on the index of big G. If you have a half good post, then stumbleupon will send you traffic immediately
2. Stumbleupon values quality Google loves crap. Just look at the pageview numbers on my posts. Absolute nonsense like some ron pratt car collection has got 1500 visitors from google whereas the post about ranking of indian blogs, created after some 30 hours of coding has got hardly any traffic from Google. I actually notice the power of Stumbleupon when it started to send traffic to the posts that I am rather proud of.
3. Stumbleupon lets me do what I love i.e blog No keyword reasearch, no worrying about h2, h3 tags.
4. My friendship decisions are not affected by the size of the green bar

Do you Stumble?

In this post I have included the first-hand experience of 6 people who have managed to get reinstated into adsense successfully. This can be a lifesaver if godforbid, you ever get banned by Google. If you use adsense on your blog, then make sure to bookmark this post.

1. http://www.pinoymoneytalk.com/2007/03/06/how-to-reinstate-banned-adsense-account/?cp=all
2. http://www.devilsworkshop.org/how-i-got-my-google-adsense-account-back-in-14-days
3. http://www.legalandrew.com/2007/04/19/how-to-get-back-into-adsense-account-reinstated/
4. http://stason.org/articles/money/how_to_bring_google_adsense_down.html
5. http://www.seopedia.org/contextual-advertising/google-adsense-adwords/google-adsense-account-disabled-the-faq/
6. http://yfs1.com/2006/you-too-can-be-banned-from-adsense-with-no-money-down-enquire-within.html
7. http://www.yfs1.com/2006/you-too-can-be-banned-from-adsense-with-no-money-down-enquire-within-part-2.html

Dofollow blogs are blogs that do not put nofollow tag on the comments and hence you can increase your pagerank by commenting upon them.

Is this just another list of dofollow blog list?

There are many list of dofollow blogs available on the internet. However all of them are absolutely outdated. Many of the blogs listed on these lists are no longer dofollow and many are not a blog anymore. I am checking each of those blogs to see if they continue to provide dofollow links or not.

http://www.rivertorivernyc.com/blog

http://bakkouz.net

http://www.ashotiwoth.org

http://www.universalhub.com

http://www.blogpi.net

http://www.neilshearing.com

http://weblogtoolscollection.com

http://www.411mas.com/blog

http://www.knupnet.com

http://www.kabalyero.com

http://www.code4gold.com/blog

http://julianschrader.de

http://blog.campaignblasts.com

http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog

http://schwoit.com

http://silkenhut.com/blog/

http://standalone.blogsome.com/

http://review.miss-kate.com/page/2/

http://www.bisnis-net.info/

http://table4five.net./

http://www.magicalrosegarden.com/

http://momreviews.net/

http://www.jtmusicreview.info/

http://aprobloggermom.com/

http://www.yourmoneyinfo.com/blog/

http://www.lauralohr.com/wordpress/

http://silvermelody.com/

http://boatinginbeautifulbritishcolumbia.com/

http://www.whatcanimakewithit.com/

http://hotchickwriter.com/

http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com/

http://www.simplerandomness.com/

http://ericsocia.net/

http://fatladysingz.com/

http://www.pixelheadonline.com/blog/

http://revellian.com/

http://www.triathlontraining.us/

http://yourwebsiteprofit.blogspot.com/

http://www.howtowakeupearly.com/

http://www.londonerlife.com/

http://jakeldaily.com/

http://www.lifeintherough.com/

http://www.thedailyfuzz.com/

http://marketingasolicitor.com/

http://secretofunlimitedprosperity.com/

http://jennys-corner.com/

http://www.newsnotion.com/

http://www.brilliantcheers.co.uk/

http://blog.achille.name/

http://chrishoyt.com/

http://blogthatoutside.com/

http://www.layercake.net/

http://pajamaprofessional.com/

http://crayonwriter.com/

http://tagskitchen.com/

http://trademacro.com/

http://www.brianpratt.net/

http://andybeard.eu/

http://armymomnj.name/

http://www.bodyfitnessinfo.com/blog

http://poundingheartbeat.com/

http://richardxthripp.thripp.com/

http://bloggervention.com/

http://focusorganic.com/

http://www.delightfulwork.com/

http://www.buymeblog.com/

http://www.communityspark.com/

http://www.ecommtips.com/

http://emoneymarketing.com/

http://www.jonespc.com/

http://kansha-shite.blogspot.com/

http://lastblogger.com/

http://magicalrosegarden.com/

http://marketingblagger.com/

http://www.momisnutz.blogspot.com/

http://www.patricksays.net/

http://pimpmypagerank.com/

http://thereasoner.com/

http://selfhypnosisprogram.com/

http://www.simplekindoflife.com/

http://blog.techiezone.in/

http://blog.c-yoga.de/

http://www.agentsheaven.com/blog

Visit the pages and leave meaningful comments. Most of the dofollow blogs have very strong moderators and hence any spam comment is sure to be deleted.

What is the most popular adsense format?

There are many gurus in the world who have talked about this topic. However I was not satisfied with only listening to what they had to say. I wanted to find out what are the formats that real bloggers use. What follows is not my view but my findings based on study of usage of adsense by real bloggers. The link to the excel file with the raw data is here.

The most popular adsense format is 468 x 60
Out of the 15000 blogs that I studied around 3000 used adsense. All these blogs had a total of 6272 adsense blocks. The 468 x 60 format was the most frequently used format followed by 160 x 600 format. Surprisingly link units seem to be used by far too less blogs.

Result of my study of most frequently used adsense format

How many adsense blocks should you place on the homepage
I was expecting atleast 2 adsense adblocks to be used on the homepage. Surprisingly 955 bloggers have only 1 adsense block on the home page. Another 722 bloggers 2 units of adsense. I am unable to think why so many people are using only 1 or 2 blocks of adsense on their homepage. Any ideas??

P.S: These studies take up way too much of my time. I was just wondering if anyone other than me finds them interesting or useful. Else I shall rather concentrate on technical posts.Will appreciate if you can let me know what you think of the above data in comments section.

P.S to P.S: Let me know if you want me to analyze something else.