Archive for the ‘Blogging Tips’ category

Phlebotomy Certification: My Latest Project

I keep working on some experimental projects from time to time as they allow me to put all the theories into action. A number of times these projects work as a wake up call that something that I am confident to be working has stopped working in less than 2 months. That is why I thought I will share my learning or rather failings while working on my phlebotomy certification blog. These post is about things that I have learned about the niche till now. Technical details will follow in a separate post.

What is phlebotomy certification

When I first stumbled upon the phlebotomy niche, I had no clue about what the word means. A quick search showed me that phlebotomy is the act of drawing blood from a patient either for testing or donation. We keep cribbing that the medical expenses in the USA is too high. Well that seems to be because even the smallest tasks like drawing blood is done by experts there. Yes phlebotomists are professionals who have passed the phlebotomy certification exam and specialize in this single task.
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Secrets of the most popular posts of Binaryday

This post contains some really good insights about how to write posts that will attract traffic. Do not go by the lack of flow in the post as I am struggling a little right now since I am back to blogging after a long break. Do read the entire post carefully. You will not be disappointed.

The best way to get more success is to look at what has worked for you in the past and then try and do more of them. That is why I went back to the analytics data of Binaryday for the last one year to analyze the most successful posts to identify a trend in them. I define successful posts based on two criteria

  1. Posts that get a lot of traffic and
  2. Posts that attract links

Today’s post is about the former category i.e posts that have attracted the maximum amount of traffic. Before I discuss the secrets of these posts, it will be apt to show you the links to all these posts so that you may analyze them yourself as well.

Identifying these posts was relatively easy. But once I had identified these posts, the next question that I had to answer was Did these posts have something in common that made them get more traffic compared to other posts. I found some really interesting ideas from this exercise.

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How to make money without your own blog

Making money with blogging requires one to do all of keyword research, seo and social media marketing on a consistent basis. My inability to come up with a post over the last few days, made me think about what if I want to focus on only one of the above skills and only when I feel like. Can I still make money? This post is a summary of what I found out in my quest for finding ways to make money online without maintaining a regular blog.

The post covers the following topics along with some handy and actionable tips to enable you to start making money right away. Some of the methods require you to have an adsense id though.

  1. Make money by writing for other blogs/ website (along with a list of 25 such blogs)
  2. Make money from your twitter account (along with a tip that I have used in the past with good success)
  3. Options to make money from Facebook

Make money by writing for other blogs/ website

There are lots of blogs that allow you to put your own adsense code in posts that you write and you get to keep 100% of earning. The main advantages of this method are

  1. You will not be restricted by the topic of your blog. You can  write about any topic and then find a suitable blog that will accept it. If there are no such blogs then you can submit it to some of the websites like hubpost and infobarrel that accept all posts.
  2. You get to piggy back on the strength of these established blogs both in terms of SEO strength and regular user base. The key skill required here is an ability to do keyword research to find high paying keywords that will fit the niche of your target blog. If you manage to select a keyword with decent traffic and optimize the post for the keyword, then it can easily rank well because of the authority of the host blog.

The following are 25 Google adsense revenue sharing sites.

Tip: Interlink the posts to help them rank better and even the blog owners will be happy to see you adding links to their blog posts.

Make money from your twitter account

The following services allow you to make money by sending out sponsored tweets to your followers. Most of them allow you to disclose that the specific message is a sponsored one.

  1. The first one is sponsoredtweets which allows people to set their own price per tweet. Advertisers are then presented with a list of twitter users who have signed up for the service. If an advertiser selects you then you get to tweet out the message and pocket the income. You can always adjust your price according to your follower number and hence you should be able to get a sponsor.
  2. The other services that allow you to make money on twitter are twitads and mylikes

Tip: You should seriously consider making affiliate sales through twitter as well. While I do not do this all too frequently due to time constraint, the method converts very well on occasions that I do.

  1. Select some products that you really like. In my case these may be products that help people to setup a blog by recommending certain hosting services.
  2. Now setup search channels on an application like Tweetdeck so that you can get a notification when someone tweets about issue related to the niche. In my case, I will be observing queries regarding hosts gone down, migrating from one host to the other, incompatibility of an application on a host etc.
  3. Next reply to the person with some well researched articles. That is why I have my pdf about how to create a blog. You can also recommend sites like hostgator discount code.
  4. Help the other guy out with whatever issue he is facing. Then request the person if he may sign up through your affiliate link so that you can make some money without him having to pay anything extra.

Make money from Facebook

Clickbank, one of the largest marketplace for information products, has made it awesomely easy to earn affiliate income from your facebook likes. Simply log into your clickbank account. Select a product to promote and like it. Clickbank automatically inserts your tracking id into the link and you get an affiliate income in case of a conversion. More details on this page. Mashable lists these 9 facebook applications that will help you make more money with Facebook.

How a single guest post got me 600 backlinks

As I noted in my last post, I am suffering from a writer’s block and hence unable to come up with any cohesive post. I was working on the theme of my other blog about price in India and my toolbar showed that the site has got 600 backlinks. I was surprised, since I had done hardly any work on the site till now. I opened up yahoo site explorer to check the backlink profile. Most of the 600 links are from different pages of callingallgeeks.org That is 600 links from a PR3 blog!!!

That is when I realized that I had made guest post about the web not yet dead on the blog around 2 months back. The nice guys at CallingAllGeeks have got a “Latest Contributor” section on the sidebar which directly links to websites of authors that have submitted guest posts on the site. Not every blogger accepting guest post is as nice as Harsh but still Guest blogging is a really awesome way to get some direct traffic and search traffic.

An intuitive take on keyword research for niche sites

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.

Update on my stained glass supplies site

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.

How to Create A Blog

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

What Erin Andrews Peephole Video Cache taught me about internet

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.

Free CNA Training classes

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.

Blogging lessons from 3 Idiots

  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.

Stop reading MMO Blogs

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.

Beautiful design vs useful design

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!!!

You must be stupid if you blog on a free platform

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

A simple framework to select topic for blogging

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.

Have you built your echo chamber?

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.

25 Factors that determine your adsense earning

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.

Do you know who is tweeting your blog posts??

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.

Used Bikes : A real example of niche research

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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Passion or Potential : How to select the topic for your blog?

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?

List of Indian Advertising networks

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.