BinaryDay

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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.