Category — Featured

It is always time-consuming, often frustrating and occasionally successful. I am talking about link building. Before proceeding with the article, I will like to share with you my view about why most bloggers ignore link building. If you write more articles, you can see an increase in traffic immediately. Doing keyword research and writing about hot topics will increase your traffic immediately. Most bloggers ignore link building, because it does not give immediate result.

Getting links is like sharpening your axe before cutting a tree. While your progress is zero while sharpening your axe, your speed increases significantly once you start using it. Similarly while you shall not get an immediate increase in traffic because of backlinks, traffic per post increases if you have some good links. If you write about a hot word, you now start ranking 1st rather than being in the 10th place.

• Start with sites that allow you to add links for free. You can find such sites by a simple google seach. Try some of the following searches on google to find these sites. intitle:add+url “keyword phrase” , intitle:submit+site “keyword phrase”, intitle:submit+url “keyword phrase” , intitle:add+site “keyword phrase”, intitle:add+your+site “keyword phrase”, intitle:directory “keyword phrase”, intitle:list “keyword phrase”, intitle:sites “keyword phrase”. This method is useful when you are just starting out. Helps in getting your site indexed and you can rank decently for long-tail keywords.
• Add your site to relevant social bookmarking sites. Prefer the ones that provide a do-follow link. You can find some of these social bookmarking site here. Never spam. Add others’ pages to bookmarking sites. The best way to get a positive attention from me is to digg or stumble this article. That holds true for many other bloggers.
• Comment on relevant blogs. I know most of the comments are no-followed. Target dofollow blogs, blogs with commentluv plugin and blogs with top commentator plugin.
• Identify some influential bloggeres who blog on similar topics as you do. Then link to their posts from your blog and make sure you send atleast 20-30 referral visiors from your blog to their blog. Eventually 5-10 of the bloggers will notice your blog in their referral logs and will either link you back or mention you on their blog.
• Search for pages that are no longer available but are linked to from other blogs/ websites. Then find to who is linking to these pages and contact them pointing out the dead links and request them to link to your page which offers the same service.
  For finding sites which no longer offer a service or have expired:
  ? “service no longer available” [keyword]
  ? “service no longer available” inurl:.co.in
  ? “no longer available [keyphrase]”
  ? “site no longer available”
  ? “site no longer available” [keyphrase]
  ? “site has been taken down”
  ? “site has been taken down” [keyphrase]
  For finding sites which no longer sell a specific product:
  ? “no longer offer [keyword]”
  ? “no longer sell [keyword]”
  ? “stopped selling [keyword]”
  ? “stopped offering [keyword]”
  
• Contact the blogger who you think can link to you and ask him/her to provide a link to you. A good example of email to get a link :

“Hi _________________,

______________ here from the [blog name] and I wanted to drop you line and just compliment your site. Nice layout, good info, good resources. I was looking around at a few different sites for _____________ information and I definitely thought your’s was one of the best.

That being said, I also noticed you guys have some great content related to _______________. I currently maintain a website that ______________________. You can view it at [link to site]. Request you to check out some of my posts especially [link to post1],[link to post2], [link to post3] and introduce the concepts to your readers as I am confident that these informations are quite relevant for your readers.

Thanks,
____________________

• Be active on a new forum, social netowrk etc in your niche. Contribute positively. I learnt this from indiblogger. While my participation was purely voluntary, they rewarded me with a link from forum homepage.
• Syndicate a press release. Submit to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

This is the third part of the result of my project to rank the Indian blogs. I had previously analyzed the Pagerank of Indian Blogs and the top 100 Indian blogs according to Alexa. As Renie from indiblogger noted in his blog both Pagerank and Alexa are not very accurate in predicting the popularity of blogs.

To make the rankings more accurate, I have enhanced the code to capture other measures of pupularity i.e number of yahoo backlinks, technoratiy rank, delicious bookmark counts.

The Delay
The project is taking longer than what I had anticipated earlier. This post was further delayed as the USB drive on which I carry my source code was infected with virus. However thankfully a simple trick helped me to remove the virus from the USB drive. You may like to read my posts about recycler virus or this hubpage about usb virus removal . My post about free rapidshare account has been quite popular.

The Result
I have published the raw data about more than 250 blogs below. None of the parameters are accurate on their own. However a good combination of all of them will be quite accurate in predicting the popularity of any blog. I will really appreciate if you can share your thoughts about how to make use of these parameters to rank the blogs.

How to remove usb virus

I was faced with the problem of how to remove virus from usb drive recently. Normally I would have taken the nuclear option i.e format the USB drive to remove the virus. Unfortunately I had the entire source code for my blog ranking project on the pen-drive before it got infected by the virus. That meant I had to show restraint and deal with the issue in a diplomatic manner.

Anti-virus software failed to delete virus from USB Drive

One run of the anti-virus software and the virus will be history is what I thought. However removing the virus from the USB drive proved to be a lot more difficult task than I had initially guessed. I was left scratching my head for sometime. Why the hell did the USB drive continue to be infected by the virus?Frustrated I consulted my best friend ….Google. Well I had overlooked a simple concept. The virus had made itself read-only. No wonder the poor anti-virus software was identifying it but failed to remove the virus.

To remove the virus from usb drive you need to

1. Go to Start—-Run. Type cmd and hit enter. This will bring up the command prompt.
2. Type the drive name of the USB drive and hit enter.
3. In command prompt type attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter. This will remove the Read Only, Archive, System and hidden file attribute from all the files.
4. Now just delete the files using the command del filename

That’s it. The virus has been removed from the USB drive.

Optimizing adsense positions has really worked wonders for binaryday, pushing the eCPM to more than 10$. Primarily, I used optimization tips provided by Google. Here are some of the important adsense optimization tips that have worked for me. However do not just read these tips. Loginto your adsense account and start making the changes. All these changes can be effected in less than 15 minutes and you shall be surprised by the result.

The first adunit shows the ads with the highest revenue per click ads. Make sure that it is the ad unit with the highest Clcik-Through-Rate as well. Use of CSS can make it difficult to know what is the first ad unit. Visit the page from your browser and do a view source. Scroll down the html code. The first block of adsense that you see is your first ad unit. Use custom channels to check that it is the one with the highest CTR.

Size matters. Google’s data says wider ad units outperform the narrow ones. What do you use?

Do you still use wordpress built in search box on your blog. Stop throwing away serious money and start usings an adsense for search box.

Site targetted ads increase the competition for your advertisement place and there by increase your earnings. Modify the default message to convert more advertisers into site-targetted advertisers for your site.

The corner of the ad uniit makes a difference. Increase your earnings by using rounded corners for your ad units.

Go Borderless
Place your adsense unit below the header of your posts and directly below the border. Removing the border between content and adsense unit can result in an increase in CTR of as much as 300%. Binaryday uses this trick to the letter

Match your ads to the content
In May 2005 google published the secret to dogbreedinfo doubling its income to more than $650 a day. The simple tip that doubled the earning was use unobtrusive advertisements. It is not like for nothing that all adsense Guru suggest this as the first tip.

Way back in January 2006, Google published this simple but effective optimization tip for blogs. To get the best results from adsense, you should choose the right ad format for your blog and then place it at a place, where people will see it. Also make sure to use section targetting to get ads targetted to the specific post.

Considering the latest pagerank update that is underway, I thought this is the best time to post about my study on pagerank of more than 6000 (6020 to be specific) Indian blogs. All these blogs have been collected from indiblogger.in, a social network for indian bloggers.

Total Blogs studied : 6020
Maximum Pagerank : 6
Minimum Pagerank : 0

78% of all these blogs are hosted on subdomains of wordpress and blogger. Blogger wins hands down with 3976 blogs present on blogger vs 741 blogs for wordpress.

A whopping 93% of blogs have a .com TLD. However that is because all the blogs on blogger and wordpress have .com extension. Once I excluded the blogger and wordpress blogs, the number of .com blogs came down to 70%. .in was the second most popular TLD with a 14% contribution.

Here is a list of 8 PR6 blogs as a bonus tip for you visting my blog list.

http://visheshunni.wordpress.com

http://www.infosysblogs.com/managing-offshore-it/

http://floatingsun.net

http://www.webyantra.net

http://nitawriter.wordpress.com

http://tech-buzz.net

http://www.sirensongs.blogspot.com

http://www.swaroopch.com

If you are new to SEO, Read my tips for getting free backlinks to improve your pagerank.

Bloggers love comments. Comment is our weapon of choice to fight amongst ourselves and comment is the way for us to show our love and appreciation for a great blog. On a serious note, comments make a blog post more interesting by adding new viewpoints. They also increase stickiness by building a community feeling amongst the users. Hence you must actively incentivize your users to comment on your posts. These are some of the wordpress plugins that are expected to encourage discussion on your blog.

CommentLuv This plugin shows a link to the latest blog post of the commentator. Definite encouragement for other bloggers to leave a comment on your blog especially if your blog gets decent traffic.

Top Commentators widget Shows the top commentators of your blog. You can select the duration over which the top commentator is calculated. Avoid the temptation to set it to 1 day as then only spammers will show up. If you set the time period to 7 days or a month, regular commentators on your blog get a free link from you.

Show an email to first time commentator: It does exactly what it says i.e sends an email to the first time commentator on your blog. I wish it could check my rss subscription list and send a message asking him to subscribe to RSS as well. (Let me know if you know any such plugin)

Most recent comments Displays the recent comments on your sidebar. Keeps the discussion alive by getting attention to posts where discussion is going on.

subscribe to comments plugin lets a user know when someone has replied to a comment that she has posted. Works like a charm in getting some passionate discussion going.

Nested comments is a great way to keep different threads of discussion among the users separate. Not necessary for smaller blogs with less than 10 comments per post though.

Finally the comment highlighter allows you to make the comments by the author stand out by highlighting the same in a different color.

Let me know your experience with plugins related to comments that you might have used.

And you have no right to expect your dream to come true, unless you are ready to pay the price. In my previous post , I had written that it is possible to keep your job and start your own business. Now if we accept that there are many young Indians like us who want to start their own company, why are we not seeing many more startups?

Well the reason lies in the fact that we are not ready to pay the price of our dream. What do I mean by that? Right now I could have gone for the latest release with my freinds. Instead I am writing this post on my laptop all alone in my room. This is the price that I have to pay if I have to make my dream of my own company come true.

Make no mistake. It is a choice that everyone wanting to own a startup has to make. Your dream or a nice time. And you can not have both. Anyone who thinks otherwise is only making a fool of himself.

The question that you need to ask yourself before starting your business is “Am I ready to pay the price?”. If your answer is NO, then stop fooling yourelf and go back to your 10 to 10 job, enjoy your weekends with your freinds and girlfreind. It is perfectly fine and perhaps the most logical choice. Afterall why to leave what you have for a mere dream?

But if you are the illogical type, who believes in listening to the heart, then welcome to the tough world of entrepreneurship. But before you enter this, make sure that you understand what you are getting into. There is no guarantee that we shall be successful. But even if we fail, we have failed while daring greatly, so that our place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Many of us have the desire to start a business of our own. However the dream is typically cut short by the question “Job OR Business“. Because of various reasons we are not in a position to give up our job. However I think that we have been making a mistake in asking the question. Because the real question is “How do I get the time to run my business?” The easiest answer to the question is leaving the job. But that is NOT The ONLY answer. If you can find enough time to run your business without leaving your job then I do not see a problem in having a job and a business, atleast to start with.

Do What You Love

That is the only way you can make yourself go to that damn computer and work on your business after that gruelling day. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you’ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You’ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.

Possible but Difficult

Does that mean it is too easy to get success on the internet? Nothing can be farther from the truth. Let me reiterate what I am trying to say “It is definitely possible to keep your job but it is damn difficult“. Make no mistake in reading that statement. Possible but difficult. If you are not ready for that then please do yourself a favor and stop reading this blog. There are too many gurus out there who will tell you how to get success in seven days. But I am not a guru. I can tell you the hard way to get success because that is the only way I know.


Remember we have only 24 hours in a day and when you decide to do something along with your job, you will have to compromise somewhere else. You will not get the time to read the latest hit release, you will have less time to sleep, you will be too busy thinking about your website to stare at the beauty next to you. In short life will be hell. But believe me if you really are the entrepreneur type, you will be happy like never before because you will not be thinking only if I could leave this job ………………………….