Archive for March, 2009

Step by step guide to making money with blog: My first attempt at an ecourse

I am starting a completely free ecourse on the topic of Making Money With Blog. Sign up for it to learn my views about Making Money With Blog

I have always belived that creating a service is the best way to create a successful online business. Binaryday happened as my attempt to create a web presence for my second hand mobile site while the site was being developed. Development of that site was taking too long and I am completely helpless on UI design. So while waiting for the inhouse designer first and then the outsourced designer to complete the UI, I started my knowledge about internet business in general and seo in particular through binaryday.

While writing for binaryday I have gone through the blogs of some really wonderful bloggers and analyzed their earning reports. The earnings report and my own experience with earnings from this blog has convinced me that blogging can be a good source of income. Not a million dollar income like the pro-bloggers but 1000$ pm earning is definitely achievable. That is a decent amount of earning for a part time work in India at least.

Hence I decided to create an ecourse on this topic to share my experience of creating a successful blog. The ecourse is free to join. Inside the ecourse some of the things I intend to talk about are

  1. How to identify a topic to generate online income
  2. How to get a good domain name, get hosting space and set up your own blog
  3. How to make your blog lively with different widgets
  4. Keyword Research
    • My personal tool that notifies me of any new word that becomes hot within 10 minutes
    • How to find keywords that will keep getting traffic over a period of time
    • Keyword competition analysis
    • Optimum use of keyword on your blog posts
  5. How to get traffic to your blog
    • SEO
    • How to get a lot of quick links
    • My own tool that gets backlinks of a site beyond the 1000 link limit of yahoo
    • Writing content that gets natural links
    • Think beyond Google
  6. Different monetization tricks
    • How I maximize revenue per user by mixing different monetization methods 
    • Cost per action networks specific to India
    • A detailed analysis of Indian advertising networks
  7. Everything else you need to know to succeed
    • As I continue to experiment I will keep updating this list

If you think there is 1 or 2 topic there that you might be interested in learning from me, please sign up for my course about Making Money With Blog 

Btw I have developed quite good friendship with some really good Indian Bloggers. So I am confident of getting some of them to share their secrets with you.

10 social media sites that allow dofollow links on profile page

  1. Flickr
  2. Digg
  3. Propeller
  4. Technorati
  5. MyBlogLog
  6. BloggingZoom
  7. Current
  8. Linkedin 
  9. PostOnFire
  10. CoRank

Must read article about Search Engine Ranking Factors

Recently a local SEO company had requested me for a small talk about ranking factors. I had created a presentation to help me talk about 5 most important ranking factors. Here is my presentation about search engine ranking factors. Make sure to through it. It has knowledge that you will take at least 5 days to gather on your own.

P.S: I will appreciate if anyone can convert that into flash. I will like to be able to embed it in the post.

Posting strategy for a super successful blog

You may be using one of the following 3 posting strategies to build a successful blog

  • Blog about currently hot topics : It is comparatively easier to rank for these keywords as there is less competition for them. So each post ends up getting a large number of traffic. The problem is traffic and hence your income on any given day depends upon the number of posts that you can make in a day. So while your income goes up fast, it hits a limit and normally stays flat or starts coming down after sometime due to ad blindness, increased competition etc.
  • Blog more frequently and target long tail: Here the trick is to create posts that target 3-4 word search queries like “format usb drive“. They get you 10-15 users a day. But they continue to get you users even after 1 or 2 years. In such a strategy your traffic goes up slowly but it keeps adding up.
  • Target a super competitive keyword and keep working on it: More than 61 lakh users search for the keyword resume with another 10 lakh users searching for resumes every month. Can you imagine how much of money I will make when my experiment site reaches no.1 position for that keyword!!!!!!! Well the point is you may choose to target a competitive keywords like make money, seo, blogging etc. If you manage to get into top 10 then you shall be rich beyond imagination. The problem is it will take a very long time and many people simply get frustrated.

So what is my magic formula to creating a super successful blog? Simple. Make use of all 3 methods.

  1. Post about 2-3 recently hot topics in a week. These posts will get you the easy traffic. They will keep your adsense income running and thereby keep you motivated.
  2. Post around 4-5 posts that will keep getting you traffic over the long term. Traffic from such posts will ensure that your blog will continue to get traffic even when you are not blogging
  3. In all these things make sure to post at least 1 post that will add to long term success of your blog. This should be a post that has the potential to get you some backlinks, a post that will make users subscribe to your blog etc.

Hopefully this post would have explained my occasional posts about kyla weber and vince vaughn. I need to pay my hosting bill and internet bill as well ;-)

The Long Tail Trap

The long tail of search is a nice concept. While the search professionals keep focusing on the fat head, we new bloggers get maximum of our traffic from the long tail i.e the large number of 3 or 4 word search queries that generate small amount of traffic each but generate a substantial amount of traffic taken together. I love the long tail because that is what keeps a large number of bloggers going. Unlike a typical website that get hardly any traffic, new blogs start getting a good amount of traffic thanks to the long tail.

What is long tail trap

The problem is when people forget that the long tail is well just a long tail. So you can go to 2000 visitors a day counting upon the long tail. But if you intend to be a pro-blogger and your entire strategy is centered around the long tail, then I can only pray for you. If each post gets 5 visitor on an average then you will need 2,000 posts to reach 10,000 visitors per day.

Long tail and the issue of time decay of post

The concept of time decay of post is so important to blogging success that I shall post a separate post about it someday. However simply put, it means what is the life time of your post. My post about gmail proxy keeps getting me users even 1 year after I had posted it. However my post about sharukh salman fight got me a lot of visitors for small number of days. So a post like gmail proxy has a life time of 3-4 years whereas lifetime of sharukh salman fight was less than 1 month.

So when I say you need 2000 posts to get to 10,000 visitors a day, I mean you need 2000 active posts. If your entire strategy is based on writing about current news that have a life time of 7 days…then only god can help you.

So if your target is to get to 2000 visitors a day and earn may be 1500$ a month from your blog, then long tail is great. But if you intend to be a problogger someday then make sure to target a number of high trafficked keywords like difference between intel core 2 duo and dual core and start writing about them. Get some focused links to them and keep reading to binaryday regularly. :)

Remove stop words from your title to rank better

Stop words are some commonly used words like a,an,the,from, to etc. Since these words occur atleast once on allmost all pages, previously google and other search engines used to ignore such keywords. If you ever conducted a search with these keywords, you would have seen a message the “the keyword from was ignored”. Looks like Google has changed the algorithm and now uses stop words for ranking the pages.

I found a proof of this fact while analyzing the ranking of a post about removing virus from USB drives. While I search for remove virus from usb, the binaryday post appears at the 6th position. While a search for “remove virus usb” finds the same post at 11th position. Similar is the case with my post for gmail proxy. While the entire world searches for gmail proxy, I am stuck with a title that reads gmail for proxy :(

How can you use this for better ranking?

Many users just enter the keywords like gmail proxy, remove virus usb, resume format etc to search for required information. You can make your posts to rank better by removing the stop words from

  • the title
  • backlink anchor text
  • use of keywords in the body

A good way to remove the stop words without making your title to look spammy is to make use of tags. So while my post continues to have a title of “how to remove virus from usb?”, I can add a tag of “remove virus usb”. Next I can edit the theme code to convert the title of the page as “remove virus usb” and that will take care of the ranking issue and the post will rank well for both the keywords. Similarly a little time spent in writing the post copy will help your page to rank for both keywords.

Google favoring blogs compared to static websites : Learning from my resume format site

Looks like I am learning more SEO from the sample resumes website I am working on. It has been more than 4 days since I wrote about  resume format on my resume site and Google has not indexed it yet!!!! When it comes to blogs, Google indexes them in seconds from publishing. And here is a static website with good ranking for several target keywords related to resumes and Google has not indexed it for more than 4 days. I have added a sitemap to it and submitted the same to Google webmaster tool.

Learning: Even if you intend to create a static website, you will do well to base it on a blogging platform like wordpress and then customize the template code to give it a static look.

A google ranking problem that has me puzzled

After advising others about SEO for close to 4 years, I have decided to walk the talk and try and get a website to rank on Google based on my SEO knowledge alone.** I have started working on a website for sample resumes and created 4-5 pages around 1 month back.

I was not able to follow up on the results due to problem with my internet. Yesterday I was checking the ranking of the website on Google. Following was the result for the keyword sample resumes

Google.com               204

Google.co.in              18 

Google.co.in              9 (Region=India in advanced search operator)

I know that Google provides different results based on geographic preference of user. However what puzzles me is “how does Google know that jhingalala is India focused website?” Some of the basic parameters that Google uses to determine geographic preference of a website are

The TLD extension of the website   .com is not specific to India

Server location                                    My server is located in USA

Linking websites                                 I doubt if I have any incoming links from India specific websites.

content on the page                            I have not included any geographic locations on the page

Then what makes google think that jhingalala is India specific website and will it hurt my efforts to make it rank on Google.com in future. I will appreciate your views on this topic.

** I have got some of my own sites quite good ranking on google. However most of that was natural without much concentrated SEO effort other than basic technical optimization

P.S: I seem to be getting much better understanding of SEO by trying to get this resume website to rank on Google. Will be sharing my experience on this project as I go along. Looking forward to your help and feedback on this topic.

I am just wondering if this will hurt the future chances of jhingalala ranking on google.com since

I am back !!!!!

It has been long since I wrote the last post on this blog. It was a simple problem with the internet connection at home but the service provider decided to take its sweet time to fix. That meant I have been away from blogging for all this time. However issues are resolved now and I am back to blogging.

I had a lot of time to think about issues and I shall be writing about them in the days to come. Some of the topics that I shall be writing about includes

  • The true value of your blog. Hint: It is not the daily adsense income alone
  • Completing the link building article
  • A detailed keyword research guide
  • Some new monetization tricks

More importantly I shall be publishing the source code of several seo tools that I have built myself and that I use for my own SEO projects. So stay tuned for updates…you will not be disappointed..that is a PROMISE.

kyla weber realtor and vince vaughn engaged

Rumor mill has it that Hollywood star and comedian Vince Vaughn is getting engaged with long time girl friend Kyla Weber after asking her to move in with him in Los Angeles.

Who is Kyla Weber

Kyla Weber is a realestate agent from Calgary and Vince Vaughn is one of the funniest actors.Since Kyla as a realtor can work anywhere, it is not a problem for her to move to LA, California.