BinaryDay

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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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.

1. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.