Link out to get Traffic !!

All of us know that incoming link can bring a lot of traffic. However has it ever occured to you that outgoing links can bring substantial traffic?

I had written a post about release of wordpress 2.5. I started getting an unusually high number of visitors on that post. (Unusual by the standard of this blog :)) Most of the traffic was coming from the trackback link on the wordpress blog.

To test the theory I wrote another article about yahoo microsoft story with several links to techcrunch articles. The post has got more than 100 visiors from trackback alone.

So always make sure to link to the sources from which you are picking facts and ideas for your post. It is the right thing to do and additionally it will help you get some additional traffic as well.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money, SEO

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A seedfund for internet startups in India

If you have a good internet idea and you will like to get it funded then http://www.seedfund.in/ is a great place to try your luck. Unlike most of the other funds that do not look at any proposal less than a million dollar, seedfund aims to invest Rs. 1 to 5 crores in a startup company. It comes with a great team that comprises of Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob came from Infinity Venture and Mahesh Murthy from Passionfund.

They are located in Mumbai and Bangalore and will like to work with companies situated closer to these places. They’re looking mostly at internet or media or mobile or telecom or retail or consumer-facing plays – and also for things that aren’t yet “sectors”.

Their existing portfolio consists of carwale, agencyfaq, redbus.in etc. Since they intend to invest in 15-20 companies, we can safely assume that they shall be funding another 10-15 companies soon.

Finf out more details here

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet

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Importance of retaining traffic

There is just too much of importance given to getting new traffic. Most of the webmasters seem to miss the importance of one of the most critical aspects of growth of a website. Retaining your users and making them repeat users. I have just created an excel spreadsheet to prove the point.

If you play with the spreadsheet a little, you will see that if your website manages to convert 50% of the traffic, then in 3 years you will get less than 1 lakh users. However if you manage to retain 100% of visitors then you shall get more than 7 lakh users. 100% may be a bit unrealistic. However even if you manage to retain only 75% of your users then your site would have recieved close to 3 lakh users.

I hope the data below would manage to convince you that retaining the visitors is the single most important requirement for the growth of a website/blog.

Topics: Blogs, Entrepreneurship, Internet, Tips and Tricks

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Strategies that we use to get more traffic

It has been more than 3 years since we started mywalkin. With more than 24,000 feedburner subscribers and more than 1,00,000 unique visitors a month, it has been a reasonable success. I had never bothered to understand how we managed to get those users. However recently I did some analysis as I want to use the learnings from mywalkin, to get more traffic for binaryday.

If you are starting a new website or blog, then you have basically 3 different options to get traffic. Direct advertisement, Search engine Optimization and creating a word-of-mouth buzz.

Direct advertisement has the advantage of providing immediate results. If you spend X amount of money then you will get Y number of traffic. If the concept needs some initial userbase to start working like some digg like concept or forum or social network, then this is a must. However direct advertisement makes your website grow in an arithmatic progression. i.e if your advertisement budget allows you to get 200 users per month, then the growth of your site will look like 200,400,600, 800 and so on. CPC and CPM advertisement methods shall fall under this category.

Search engine Optimization looks like the most talked about method. If you are not in a highly competitive domain then it is not very difficult to rank high for target terms. It does need some initial investment both time and money. However once the work is over, much less investment is required for maintaining the position. On the downside, you will be completely at the mercy of all mighty google. It takes some time to take effect. While getting to the top 10 may be possible, moving up from there becomes a really big challenge. So with search engine optimization the traffic graph will look something like 0,0,0,50,70,100,170,300,300,300.

Word of Mouth This is perhaps one of the most important and most difficult strategy to use. And this is what differentates between a good site and a great site. For this strategy to work, you shall need to make your customers to talk about you. You can do that through quality and innovative features. However if you manage to achieve this, then this is effectivly a zero cost method of getting traffic. The importance of this method is that it makes your traffic increase in a geometric progression. assuming you manage to convince 10% of your visitors to talk about your product, your traffic numbers will look like 100,110,121,133,146,161,177,195,214 i.e the traffic will double in 8 months.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money, SEO, Tips and Tricks, Tools

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DotGyan - There’s more to selected text than cut/copy & paste

I have been working on this idea of “There’s more to selected text than cut/copy & paste” for past few weekends.
What do we do when you come across a word whose meaning you don’t know or a term you want to know more about while reading a Charles Dicken’s or Shakespeare’s work or may be just a newspaper?
Most of us simply ignore it or think “I’ll lookup in a dictionary when I get up” and we never do that. There are a very chosen few of us who purposely keep a dictionary with us while reading.
Consider this scenario while reading on the web. It’s lot easier, right? just select the term, right click, copy, open a new window, open google, paste and then wait for result. Fast enough but also irritating enough to break your concentration.
I came up with a widget to try to solve this problem. As of now I call it “DotGyan”. It allows you to search a word/term there and then with least interference in your reading pleasure.

It works like this…
1. You see a word like lagniappe whose meaning you don’t know. The word can be there any where on the blog or webpage.
2. Select the word as you would do for cut/copy & paste.
3. You see a dot at the end of your selection.
4. Click this dot.
5. You get the options (on what I call a “GyanBox”) to search the term in Google, Wikipedia or Wiktionary.
6. Click on one of the three options.
7. Rest you will get it yourself.

TRY THIS OUT, RIGHT HERE ON BINARYDAY !

What if I don’t want to search the selected term? Simple, just ignore the dot. It will go away in 3 seconds.
What if I want to edit the selected text before searching? Well, just edit it in the text box you see on the GyanBox.

Some may argue that we already have such softwares. True but almost all of them are available as browser plugins and how many of us actually know about such plugins and even if we know how many of us install them? Also plugins are browser dependent. DotGyan is browser independent and it shifts the installation trouble from user to web-master.

I have installed DotGyan on BinaryDay. Go ahead, Try it out Please! (Just select any word or phrase and click the dot)
DotGyan is right now in a very initial phase. Please give your valuable comments and suggestions as comments to this post or mail me at vineet7kumar@gmail.com.
Your comments and suggestions can pertain to anything from looks & colors to any new feature you would like to have. Also suggest some good names for the widget.

Team BinaryDay will be more than happy to hear from you

PS: If you are a blogger or a webmaster and would like to install DotGyan on your blog or page please drop me a mail at vineet7kumar@gmail.com … I will love to have DotGyan on your Blog or page.

PS: Currently safari browser and Internet explorer less that IE7 are not supported.

Topics: Internet, Plugin, Softwares, Tools, Uncategorized

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A good proxy for gmail

if your favorite proxy for gmail has been blocked by administrator then try http://www.criclover.com

Update : A more detailed list of 15 gmail proxy sites

Topics: Internet, Mail, Resources, Tips and Tricks

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Searchme … a new and nice search engine

Just happened to come across this new seach engine called searchme It’s a very new search engine with right now, just an index of 1 billion and is still in beta. But the best thing about it is its user interface and graphics. …yeah not just the graphics but the UI is also nice. Have you seen the cover-flow design on itunes? searchme uses the same beautiful cover-flow for its search results unlike the text only results in Google. (It has text only results also if you want that).
Searchme is backed by Sequoia capital.
As I said right now it’s in beta so u can’t use it directly . However you can register on it by giving your mail id . just visit http://searchme.com and you will know what to do.
Till then you can watch this demo.

Happy surfing

Topics: Futuristic, Internet, Uncategorized

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The increased importance of image search engine optimization

They say you can never understand women. I think for us webmasters that translates to you can never understand google. I thought I knew quite a lot about SEO (Search engine Optimization). However I was pleasantly reminded by google that there is just too much that I do not know even after 3 years of trying to understand it.

While Binaryday has managed to get a pagerank of 4, our sister blog adoholik has a pagerank of 2 only. Binaryday has a lot more text rich pages compared to adoholik. Hence I was quite confident that binaryday would receive a lot more traffic from search engines than adoholik. Boy, can I be more wrong? In the last 15 days of march, while binaryday has got little less than 500 visitors from google, adoholik has managed to get more than 2000 visitors.

Where did I go wrong? Well I seem to have underestimated the popularity of google image search. If my experience with the SEO world is anything to go by, then the entire SEO community commits the same mistake. Here is a screenshot of search engine traffic of adoholik to convince you that image search can indeed send you some serious traffic.

The 2,000 visitors may not look great but when you consider that it is for a website with pagerank 2, in a competitive field like advertisement that number starts looking quite impressive.

How image search became so important?
There is a reason why the seo community by large seems to avoid optimizing for image search. Not so long ago, very few people used it. However some timeback google introduced universal search. Basically universal search brought search results from different verticals like image and video and showed them up on the main Google SERP. I think that was the turning point in the history of image search.

Why you must concentrate on image search engine optimization?
As I have established with the above data image search represents significant opportunity to get search traffic. More importantly you should do it because not many others are doing it. The text search engine optimization is such a widely studied subject that everyone is doing it and if you are targeting a popular term, you have hardly any chance of ranking higher. However image search represents an opportunity to rank higher with comparatively less effort.

How to do search engine optimization for image search?
I am yet to find out myself. Over the next 15 days I shall be doing some serious research myself and using them on binaryday. I intend to keep writing about my experience here. So stay tuned in for more updates.

P.S: If you are a webmaster and you are interested in image search engine optimization then please leave a comment below with your mail id. I shall like to talk to you on the topic.

Topics: Internet, SEO, SEO Experiment

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Get a pagerank 4 without any external link !!!

At the beginning of this blog, I had planned to keep writing about my SEO efforts. There were only 2 posts (here and here). There were no more posts after that because I got busy with content creation and with another venture of mine. I had forgotten all about SEO till I happened to install google toolbar on my browser and surprisingly I have a pagerank 4 for binaryday. I was surprised because I have not tried to get any external link till now.

The reason I am posting it here is because the pagerank goes against all conventional SEO theory I have read till now.

The domain is not old. It is less than 6 months old.

I write about diverse topics. I have never thought about SEO while writing an article. So you will not find any keyword concentration on my page

Most importantly the blog does not have absolutely any external links to it. There are a couple of linkbacks from comments I had left on other blogs like techcrunch, but I am sure google must be heavily discounting those links.

Then what explains this sudden jump in my google pagerank? I am not sure. If any SEO expert happens to read this post, then will request to let me know what is it that I am doing right.

Topics: Internet, SEO, SEO Experiment

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Understanding Web 2.0


slideshare id=5316&doc=web-20-5316-25603&w=425


Topics: Internet

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Some famous web browsers compared

March 1, 2008 was a historical day in the history of web browsing. Official support for all Netscape client products was removed . (Please read about Netscape in wikipedia to know how much Netscape has contributed to our online lives).
Also another big current news in the browser world is that Firefox has crossed the 500 million downloads milestone. Read below and you will know why…

Recently I have been working on some javascript codes and for testing I tried six common browsers. Here I would like to present a comparison of these five browsers. The browsers I tested are

1. Mozilla-Firefox 2.0 (Windows and Linux (It’s called Iceweasel on Debian))
2. Opera 9.26(Linux)
3. Netscape 9(Windows and Linux)
4. Flock 1.1 (Linux)
5.1. Internet Explorer 5 (Windows)
5.2. Internet Explorer 7 (Windows)
6. Epiphany (Linux)

PS: The list misses Apple’s Safari browser. I don’t have a Mac yet and Safari for Windows sucks so much that I did not even bother to test it. (Sorry, Apple fanboys)

Internet Explorer 5 is now a stone age browser. It doesn’t support .png images and has limited support for javascript … In simple terms you cannot get those beautiful, translucent images and cool animated effects (which are now so much a part of any website). It does not have tabbed browsing and is really slow. For all of you who are still on IE5 I beg you to please switch over to firefox or atleast IE7.

Next in line IE7. Well it’s somewhat better than IE5 but practically again a nuisance. No doubt it is fast, has tabbed browsing, Support for various image formats (transparency included), better support for javascript BUT the problem lies in its security. It is too secure to use … won’t open anything you use Internet for, mostly . You can compare its security to a building without a boundary wall but a big gate with a big lock !!! And yes, there are still issues with javascript … Mr. Ballmer please understand that not all coders work for MS and if not support Open Source atleast live in harmony with it.

Opera is a good browser (for Linux users) if you are able to install it. I use Debian etch . I downloaded the debian package , installed it, ran it and booooom …. My CPU fan started shouting at me… had to kill the opera process. Then I downloaded the source code and ran the script without installing (installing from the source code was also useless) … it worked fine but your PWD must be the directory where the script is present . I had to tweak the script a bit to get it working from anywhere. Once you get Opera working you will love it .

Epiphany … Don’t even think about it … It’s a counterpart for IE5 ….OK, a little better.

Flock is a young browser … I did not play much with it but it is recommended by our old experienced , late Netscape so I trust it is good .

Netscape is awesome but unfortunately there is no more official support for it … so it’s not the browser of the future. Now the Netscape users are recommended to use Firefox or Flock.

Finally, Mozilla-Firefox is a clear winner… With a huge community support and so many useful plugins (more than 2000) and such a good support for almost anything there is no doubt that it is the best.

Happy browsing !

Topics: Internet, Open Source

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Give yourself a hike

Imagine your boss telling you, you will get a 200$ or 10,000 Rupees per month increament after 6 months if you work for 2 more hours everyday. The best part is you get to choose the work you want to do in these 2 hours. Will you say no?? Then you will be surprised to know that everyday this deal is being offered to you and you keep saying no !!!

Here is a list of things you can do to accept that offer

Trust me earning money through these options are easier than you think. However make sure that you are ready to work for those 2 extra hours everyday. If you are interested in blogging but do not want to handle the problem of marketing it, then please leave a comment with your contact details. We will like to talk to you.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money

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How Google Became the No 1 Search engine

Google is perhaps the most inspiring story for most of us davids trying to take on the Goliaths. There is a lot that I have learnt from the rise of Google. Thought of sharing some of those points with you.

Most of us believe that Google became the no1 search engine because of its superior algorithm. Google did not win because of its superior technology. I know you will not take my word for it. So watch this video. This is a presentation by Seth Godin to the employees of Google. And he tells them that Google did not win because of its algorithm. A study in early 2000 found that users could not distinguish between results of yahoo and that of google, without the branding.

Then how did Google become the no 1 Search engine. I will say there are 2 important points that made google win and those 2 points apply to every startup trying to become the next Google.

Take the less obvious and more risky path
Google won because it concentrated on a solution that was not considered important by the established players. When Google started working on search, search was not hot. Email and instant messengers were the hot themes of that season. Consider this, till February 2004 Yahoo did not have a search engine of its own. Yahoo search was powered by Google search engine. and till end of January 2005, microsoft search was powered by yahoo search. This meant that Google had close to 10 years to develop its product, perfect it and get users addicted to it before yahoo and microsoft started to compete with it. Actually microsoft and yahoo helped google make a better search engine by using it on their search page. Just imagine what would have happened if microsoft had thrown its best engineers onto search way back in 1998. May be google would have won but there is a very good chance that it would not have.

As a startup the most risky project is the most obvious and least risky one. Because if it is obvious that there is money to make in a particular domain, then all the big guys will be already there. I will rather work on idea that will be a winner 2 years down the line so that when the big guys realize its importance, I will have a headstart to support myself.

Make it easy for your users to spread the word
If Google’s search was not significantly better than yahoo (They were powered by the same engine actually), then why did more people use Google? Let us say you are a first time internet user trying to find some material for your project and you do not know either yahoo or google. What do you do? You call up one of your more geeky freind and ask him for help. He tells you that you can easily find the information with the help of a search engine. You ask him which search engine. What will he say? Let us say he likes yahoo and so he suggests yahoo. You go to yahoo.com. There are too many other things on the page apart from search. You being a new user, get completely lost. You call up your freind and start bugging him with 100 questions. So what does he do when another person calls him with the same doubt? He suggests google. Because on google’s page, what the user needs to do is obvious.

So make it as easy as possible for your users to spread word about you. Put a email this link. ask him to input the bare minimum information necessary to send out the message. (The email id of his freind) Asking him to fill in 10 fields while he is doing a favor to you is too much. Pre fill the body of the mail, with a description of your website. An occasional thank you mail may not be out of the order either. I am yet to start doing the thank you piece though

These 2 points apply to most of the startups that have made it big. Think facebook, youtube, del.ic.ious or flickr. When they started, the domain was not hot. They went ahead and made it hot. What are you doing? Starting another social network?? Do yourself a favor and give it a second thought.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money

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It is different this time

Long long time ago (i.e in 2000) there were many websites that spent a lot of money for getting users. They planned to monetize the users through advertisement. However that plan did not work out and most of them had to close shop.In the process they lost a lot of money. I am sure you have heard this famous story about the dotcom bubble and bust.

Why am I writing about a 8 year old story? Because it seems like the story is being replayed again. There are many starry eyed (including me) kids trying to create websites that will make money from advertisement. And many pundits do not take us or our business seriously because they think if it did not work in 2000 and hence it will not work this time. They are WRONG. This time it is different. It is different because

We are not creating websites to earn from advertisements. We are creating the websites to solve real life requirements of our users. Advertisement is just a side story and not the story.

In 2000, the only guys who were advertiseing on the internet were other websites. This time it is the brick and mortar companies that are selling their stuff on the internet. We have realized that internet is just an enabler and not an end in itself.

The advertisement revenue for 9 months of 2007 has reached more than $15 billion.

People are buying real stuff on the internet on amazon and ebay

I believe that monetization through advertisement is a perfectly good business plan to have. So stop listening to the experts who think they know everything. and start working on your idea and on getting users to your website.

P.S: If you have an India centric website, that you monetize through advertisement then please leave a comment below. I will like to write about you.
If are new to entrepreneurship then you may want to read about how to select an idea and how you can start your business without leaving your job.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money

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Miahoo ? Where does the MS-Yahoo deal lead us?

First of all I was thinking of a name for the MS Yahoo deal. Micro-ahoo doesn’t sound too good. Please suggest some creative names…Will be fun.

Anyways the Question is where does the deal lead us? How’s it gonna effect the today’s win-win situation of the Internet? Some say that MS has in a way accepted that it can’t beat Google on its own that’s why it needs Yahoo’s support. Now the question arises …even if MS accepts it’s defeat from Google, will it be able to defeat Google after the merger?

Experts say that the deal will be harmful for MS itself. Most of the employees at Yahoo and MS also are not happy with the deal. Another thing is that Yahoo’s servers mostly run on Linux…(need I say more?)

We have all seen that in recent times MS has been a failure in most of the things. Vista is a failure. Zune is a failure. MS Office 2007 is a failure. MSN live is a failure. Surface was a hype when launched and is just lost now somewhere in News archives. Also Bill Gates is no more the CEO. All this suggests that
MS is going to do something wrong again.

But I have great faith in Steve Ballmer’s abilities. Is he playing some unthinkable game?

Read the post above by Sita Sir. You will also believe in Ballmer’s abilities.

Fingers crossed…that’s all I can say.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, News, Uncategorized

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