Category — Blogging Tips

You may be surprised to see me writing about Free CNA training. However I have been working on the topic for quite some time now and I have been really impressed with the concept of free cna training in the USA and I thought it will be nice to share the concept on this blog as well.

What is Free CNA Training

CNA training is a training program that prepares people to become a certified nursing assistant. However because of the recent slowdown in the USA many aspirants have been finding it difficult to affors the cost of the CNA Training. The Free CNA Training  is a really intelligent solution to this problem. Free CNA Training programs are offered by nursing homes and old age care homes. The candidate is allowed to attend the CNA classes for free, however he is expected to pay the organization in kind either in the form of free service during the course or by agreeing to work with the organization after completing the CNA certification.

Are free CNA Training courses a fraud?

Some organizations have brought bad name to free cna training courses by promising a free training to candidates while they actually charge an exorbiant fee later. However according to me such people are few and you need not worry about them. Do your homework and basic background check well before joining any free cna training course and you shall not have to worry.

How do I get a Free Red Cross CNA training?

Looks like you are confusing two of the most popular forms of CNA training. Red Cross CNA Training is a CNA training offered by the red cross and it is NOT free. While free cna training are offered by a number of nursing homes and hospitals in America. Many people get both these concepts mixed up and try to look for free red cross cna training. To the best of my knowledge there is nothing like a free red cross cna training though.

I hope you found the information provided above useful. Let me know if any clarification is required and I shall help you out.

1. The most successful bloggers are the ones pursuing excellence and not success itself. Look at even the big daddy of MMO blogging, john or guru of seo blogging. They were simply sharing what they knew about their respective domains.
2. There is only one way to be the best in what you do. Do what you really love without worrying about the money. If the best football player tries to play golf for the money, he will be a mediocre golf player at the best. I am not asking you to stop doing keyword research and all. But do not start writing about automobiles just because it is the highest paying term.
3. Do not become nervous because of others’ expectations. I have suffered from this issue, personally. After some of my most appreciated posts, I was too nervous to write anything as I was worried that it is not upto the mark. That sort of took the fun out of blogging for me.
4. There is no room for even the smallest mistake. Remember what happened in the movie when chamtkar was replaced with balatkar in a speech. Do not let that happen to your blog.
5. Like the hero of the movie, you have most probably not heard of the most successful bloggers. The ones that make a ton of money and are at the forefront of innovation. Seek them out and learn from them.

Until you have put everything that you have read till now into action. I am surprised by how much time we spend reading about how to create a super successful blog and how little time we spend on the blog itself.

There is a BIG difference between the two. The problem is when people give you feedback about a design, more often than not they are talking about beauty aspect. There is only 1 way to find out if a design is useful or not and that is through analyzing user action on your website.

As some of you may know I run a website for used mobiles. The look of my website sucks. But it kicks ass of much better designed websites when it comes to number of used mobiles that get listed and number of users who visit on a daily basis. I think that is simply because of my focus on simpleand useful design.

I used to have text fields for entering the city, mobile brand and model in the page where people selling their used mobiles list the mobile phones. Then around 3 months back, I added simple drop down boxes to these fields. Mobile phones from cities in India that I was not even aware of started to appear on my site.

Next logical thing to do was add a search functionality to the listing pages. I did not have the time to do it properly. So I just went ahead and put the search boxes at the first white space that I could find. And the results since then has taken me by complete surprise.For the same number of unique users, the number of pageviews and my adsense income has gone up by 8 times!!!!!!!

Why am I writing about my experience on the used mobiles website on this blog about blogging. Because I think bloggers need to take their related posts plugin and popular posts plugin more seriously than they do now a days. Most related posts plugins show up posts that are 1 year or more old.

I am so excited and motivated to change the design of binaryday. If I can bring about a 8 times increase in income of binaryday, I can leave my day job and start living the internet lifestyle. Wish me luck guys!!!

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

I have read more than 25 really good blog posts about how to select a topic for blogging and they have suggested different methods including passion, keyword research, income analysis, competition analysis etc. These posts left me confused even after more than 4 years of blogging and they are supposed to be read by beginners!!!!!!

My framework is really simple. Just identify all the topics that you are interested in and then rank them from 1 to 5. 1 being the most attractive and 5 the least attractive one. Sum it and you will be surprised by how easy it is to identify the topic of your choice.

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.

The fluctuation in adsense earnings keeps on puzzling bloggers. And not many bloggers do not think of consequence of something like adding a top commentator plugin on their adsense earning.  This post about 25 factors that impact your adsense earning will help you think about consequences of such small changes that you make on your month end earning.

I am exceptionally thankful to every person who has ever tweeted the link to any of my blog posts. However till date it was next to impossible to figure out who have tweeted about your post thereby providing the all important traffic. That is why I love this new tool called tweetiator. Tweetiator lets you track all the people who share a link on your blog directly or through a url shortening service.

While it is a paid product, you get a 1 month free trial. Go and give it a try and find out who are tweeter power users.

Warning: This post is a comparatively new one. However make sure to read it as I share a step by step method of finding profitable niche (used bikes) with a real example. This is my most successful strategy through which I have been making good amount of money.

Niche sites are a great and popular way to earn some really good passive income. The most critical part is the process of identifying the niche. There is no dearth of sites that talk about the concepts in a theoretical manner. However most of these sites do not share the real niche sites from which they have been making money for the fear of attracting competition. In this post I am going to share a niche site about used bikes for sale that I am starting to work upon and most importantly I shall share the exact process of how I zeroed down to this particular niche.

In this post I shall talk about

1. Requirements of a good niche
2. Identifying the broad industry
3. How to find out potential niches inside the broad industry
4. Competition analysis
5. Identifying the income potential
6. Selecting the niche to work upon
7. Designing a niche site
8. Preparing for niche domination

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When it comes to one of the most important question, there are two distinct schools of thought and a large number of confused bloggers. How should one select the topic to blog about?

• Option 1: Blog about a topic you are passionate about. You enjoy learning new things about this topic. It will be easier for you to excel on the topic. And if you become the best in any topic the readers will eventually come
•  Option 2: Blog about a topic that has the potential to earn big bucks. Do proper keyword research, study the competition. Don’t worry if you know zilch about the topic, you can always learn these things later.

To be honest I have been searching for the answer for quite sometime now and have used both the methods. While keyword research driven method got me more traffic and hence adsense revenue, my blog posts about blogging (my passion) has earned me some really valuable friends and backlinks.

It will be interesting to listen to what you think about this topic and hence I have setup a forum on binaryday for this purpose only.  Head over to the forum and let me know your views about Passion or Potential : How to select the topic for your blog?

Seems like Adsense has made the entry criteria tougher thereby making it really difficult for new bloggers to get into adsense for first 6-8 months. While a number of adsense alternatives are available, none of them cater to the Indian population. This list of advertising networks that focus on Indian audience has been created to solve that issue.

1. Admagnet is one one of the only 2 Indian networks that I have used. While I had a really good experience with them, there site is silent about terms and conditions. I shall contact them to get more details if people are interested
2. DGM India is the other advertising network that I have used on my website with good result. DGM India is a CPA advertising network. However they have the best websites as their client and hence conversion is not that difficult. For example I used to run the affiliate programme of Shine and Monster on mywalkin.com through DGM.
3. Komli.com seems to be the most high profile indian advertising network having got fundings from multipleVCs. They deal in CPM/CPC and CPA ads.
4. Tyroo is the best option for beginners as it does not have any size restriction. Tyroo offers CPC advertisements. Minimum payout is Rs 2,500.00 only
5. AdsforIndia needs at least 500 pageviews per day and minimum of 75% users from India
6. Social Media Exchange was previously known as Axill India. They provide CPM and CPA advertisements offers. They do NOT have any minimum traffic requirement. Moreover they accept sites in languages other than English as well.

Hope this list is useful to some of you and let me know if I have missed out any India centric network from the list.

I have been confused on a number of times thinking what should I do next? Should I write another post or should I concentrate on getting more traffic or do I try out different advertising networks. Even after I have decided to get traffic which method should I use? Blog commenting or article marketing or link building or social media marketing? Do I write keyword driven posts or posts that will do good on social media. The confusion meant I ended up spending more time reading other blogs and less time working on this blog.

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The importance of feedburner is evident from the fact that it is rare to find a blog that does not have a feedburner subscription box. So I will directly get into how you can get the maximum out of it. I shall be dealing with 3 broad topics  in this article

1. How to get more visitors to subscribe to your feed
2. How to make more % of subscribers to actually click into your article
3. How to get more benefit out of the subscribers once they land on your page

[Read more →]

Ajith just published a really intelligent way of exchanging deep links. That just got me thinking. Can we not do more together that does not risk the wrath of Google.

1. Tweet my post and I will tweet yours in return. Not only increases traffic to both the blogs, it increases followers and makes your twitter page more valuable as well.
2. Stumbleupon: Increases the profile strength and gets more traffic
3. Social bookmarking
4. Nofollow linking : A nofollow link from the body of the post gets traffic.

What do you think. Hope you will give me a tweet or stumble.

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?

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.