BinaryDay

The sixes are sexy, macho and unsurprisingly fans adore the batsmen who have a capability to hit those large strokes. But then singles are more important than the sixes. More importantly there is a time to try those sixes. Too early and you do not get to play 50 overs. Too late and you end up with too low a score.

Why am I blabbering about cricket on a blog about blogging

Because I just realized that there are singles and sixes in getting traffic to your blog as well. Blog commenting, twitting, stumbling, enabling people to email your awesome posts to their friends are the singles of getting traffic to your blog. They are not sexy and hence no big blogger talks about how he gets 30 visitors a day from the comments he leaves on other blogs. It is not fashionable to talk about the second page rankings for long tail keywords.

Hitting the digg homepage, sphinn home page or number 1 rank for “make money online” on Google are the sixes. They get a lot of traffic at one go, get you 300 backlinks in a single day.

Both the singles and sixes are important. But they have an appropriate timing. Many bloggers start trying to hit the digg homepage and get frustrated because of the failure. And many people get so addicted to the singles that they just forget to accelerate. They get frustrated as well.

Start by concentrating on the singles. Build up your twitter follower base, stumbleupon friends list, the first few hundred backlinks and a handful of loyal users. Celebrate each landmark. It helps you stay motivated and it helps you get that all important user base which will hopefully drive your awesome posts to the homepage of digg.

Having done that do not stop at the singles though. Rather do not get content with increamental growth. Move in to the big league once your blog is ready. Aim for super competitive keywords, digg homepage and so on.

Let me know your views on the topic and do not forget to stumble and tweet my post.

I have been using adsense to monetize all my websites for more than 7 years now. However I am getting a sense that while adsense is the perfect solution while starting a blog/ website, it is not so good for an established blog/website. That is the reason why 1 of the steps in my latest roadmap to blogging success was to think beyond adsense. My view just got a little more confirmed with this post from Ajith where he talks about blog income pattern with age and asks the question, why don’t the probloggers use adsense?

Here are some issues that makes me increasingly uncomfortable about adsense

1. Bad dreams about getting banned from adsense keep me awake at night. I am kidding but Google is known to react in extreme manner to any violation of their guidelines. If I have to depend upon a single source for my online income, I shall like it to be more moderate and consultative.
2. I can make no planning based on adsense income: To make matters worse, adsense income is extremely volatile. With the same traffic, same CTR, the final income tends to vary in a wide range. I can safely leave my day job and work online fulltime, only if someone guaranteed that the income will atleast continue to be at this level.
3. Adsense performs extremely poor with regular visitors and social media traffic: I have got 2 sets of websites. The first set are websites that are created for long term value and to solve some problem. They have what you call quality content and get a lot of repeat visitors. While the second set are more of seo experiments/ projects and get their traffic from search engine but have crappy content. Guess what? I earn more money on my crappy websites from adsense. Unless I change my plan to create more crappy content, I better get a good alternative to adsense.
4. Everyone and their cat uses adsense: While google has made the acceptance process more stringent now, they were allowing everyone and their cats to use adsense. That has sort of created an impression in the minds of the users that any website using adsense must be unprofessional.
5. Adsense treats everyone as equal: I love democracy but only for forming governments. Unfortunately adsense uses the principles of democracy for websites as well. A car blog by the CEO of Toyota and my random ramblings about second hand cars will attract the same revenue per click.

What is your take? Do you need to move away from adsense as well?

There is no point in reinventing the wheel. The internet is full of people who have already done all hit and trial and figure out how to make money, build a successful blog, do affiliate marketing etc. No matter which part of the MMO world, you choose there are some gurus who are way ahead of them. It is really intelligent to learn from these gurus and then use the steps to build your blog / make money etc.

Having said that I don’t listen to what they are saying or writing on their blog. What the gurus say is marketing (well most of that). Because typically they have got a product/ a programme to sell to you. The blog posts are just commercials to sell that product/programmeto you.

A far more effective way to learn from the gurus is to observe what they are doing. The expert blogger may tell you about 100 methods to monetize your blog but he is using only 2 or 3. Obviously he is using them because they are the best. So what should you do? Try out all the 100 or go for the 3 being used by the master himself?

Look at their email marketing campaigns. Many of them use a single product. Do I need to read their articles about the best email marketing product? Think again.

• How did they get you to signup for their newsletter?
• What is the advertisement format that they are using?
• Which blogging theme are they using
• Look at the adsense block placement on their website if they have one
• What does the fact that most experts don’t have adsense on their site tell you?

What is your take? Do you listen to the gurus or observe them?

I have started using godaddy hosting for my domain names. Today godaddy has sent a promo code that enables me to get 15% off on any hosting purchased on godaddy. The offer of this godaddy promo code ends on 5th August 2009 and the code to use is fbhost15.

SEO: I have done extensive keyword research and found out that maximum users in mumbai are searching for second hand mobiles using the keyword “second hand mobiles mumbai”. Let us make some changes to our webpage. The term ‘second hand mobiles mumbai’ must appear in the title tag, in the h2 tag and 2-3 times inside the body. OK? This is going to be a cakewalk.

Webmaster: But we are already using ‘second hand mobiles in Mumbai’ in all those places. What is the problem?

SEO: Man you are not listening carefully. Our users are searching for us without using the ‘in’. Do you get it now, we need to drop the in.

Webmaster: But without the ‘in’ it will be grammatically wrong. How can we use terms that are not correct.

SEO: *%#….@! stupid webmasters!!!!!!!!

I think everyday the seo and content development team of each decent sized website faces questions like this. What do you do when what google likes and what my users like are at loggerheads. The question in the second part of the title is the one that I faced while trying to optimize my used mobile phones site for Mumbai. The problem is aggravated as I happen to be both the webmaster and the seo for the site which means I can not even use the expletives to take out my frustration Looking forward to your suggestions to solve the dilemma.

P.S: If you have some additional advice for the above website, you are most welcome. Some other issues I have been facing with the site are

1. While the site ranks well for second hand mobiles, it is yet to get into the first page for used mobile phones
2. The difference in ranking on google.co.in and google.com. Already discussed on an earlier post titled missing some easy traffic?
3. Should I change the recent design of http://www.contacthello.com/mobile/index.php?city=mumbai to http://www.contacthello.com/mobile/index.php#city=mumbai. I shall discuss this point in more detail in my next post.

A quick question. What is the no 1 search engine in India? Obviously google.co.in. Next what is the no 2 search engine in India? Yahoo/microsooft? I also thought so, untill I looked at alexa. The second most popular search engine in India is Google.com. The fact that google.com is the second most popular search engine used in India, is important because the search results of google.com and google.co.in is not the same, even when the search is happening from India.

A simple trick to get this easy traffic

Just log into your analytics account and identify the keywords that bring in the maximum traffic. Now try the keyword in google.co.in and google.com. I am sure there will be atleast 5 keywords that rank high in one but not on the other.

Think about it. Already google recognises that your page is good for this keyword. Only thing you need to convince google is that you are relevant for traffic from outside india as well. That should be much easier than creating content for a new keyword, acquiring the necessary links to get the new page to rank well.

Let me know your take on this topic.

Blogging does not come naturally to me. But I want to succeed as a blogger. So this weekend I did what I do really well. Breakdown a goal to smaller steps and then go about getting each of those tasks done. That is how I came up with my roadmap to blogging success.

Having done so I realized that many of my regular readers may find it useful, it can be improved further with your comments and publishing it online will motivate me to stick to it longer. Hence here is the roadmap that I have created for myself. Detailed breakdown is available below the fold.

1. Create great/ useful content
2. Make the posts interesting and easy to read
3. Use tools to improve efficiency
4. Participate on other blogs
5. Make efforts to get more readers to the blog
6. Even more effort to convert them to long term users
7. Think beyond adsense

Read the rest of this entry »

You may want to find out the pagerank of a blog or a particular post

1. To know where your blog stands
2. To identify the strongest pages on your blog
3. To analyze the backlinks of your competitor
4. To analyze the competitiveness of a keyword that you may be planning to target

All these 4 types of task need 5 different types of tools.

Read the rest of this entry »

There is no other seo metric that is as widely tracked by webmasters as the toolbar pagerank. Everytime google updates the same, the entire blogosphere goes crazy. I have no doubt that you have already heard enough arguments about how the toolbar pagerank is for fun purpose alone and we need not give any importance to it. If you are talking about ranking on google alone, then I completely agree with the above. The pagerank of binaryday went down to 0 (zero) around 4-5 months back and since then my traffic has more than doubled.

While toolbar pagerank is not important for Google, it makes a big difference to our life as bloggers because of the following 5 reasons that I will explain in detail in the later part of this post

1. The attention span of other bloggers is impacted by the toolbar pagerank of your blog
2. To know if your seo attempts are moving in the right direction
3. To identify strong pages on your blog and use them to improve ranking of other pages
4. Sheer bragging value

Read the rest of this entry »

Seems like google news is the latest target of seo tactics. I have been aware that blogsearch was always vulnerable to spamming as it focuses too much on the title and recency. However over the last few days, I have been observing the disturbing trend of the same thing happening with google news.

People just target the keywords that are hot on google trends, write an article without much of research and try to monetize the traffic that flows in especially after integration of google news into universal search. I have been researching the trend for quite somedays now and got an awesome example today.

For some reason the keyword kidd kraddick divorced has become hot on google trends today. Searching for the keyword gets you 2 articles in the google news section. Both the articles are wirtten in a menner as if the kidd kraddick divorce happened recently. The fact is it is a pretty old news which was obvious from the wikipedia article that puts the date as April 2008 and this forum post dating back to September 2008. The 2 guys do not seem to have done even basic research as a 5 minute search got me to these articles.

May be Google needs to think hard about the quality control of the sites that it is serving up under the news section. Especially since we put a lot more trust on topics appearing under the news section.

Update1: Tarun of techbanyan seems to have done his homework better as he atleast refers to the divorce happening in April. The other site is a blatant copy paste of wikipedia site and google is serving it up under news section!!!!!!