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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using adsense to monetize all my websites for more than 7 years now. However I am getting a sense that while adsense is the perfect solution while starting a blog/ website, it is not so good for an established blog/website. That is the reason why 1 of the steps in my latest roadmap to blogging success was to think beyond adsense. My view just got a little more confirmed with this post from Ajith where he talks about blog income pattern with age and asks the question, why don’t the probloggers use adsense?

Here are some issues that makes me increasingly uncomfortable about adsense

1. Bad dreams about getting banned from adsense keep me awake at night. I am kidding but Google is known to react in extreme manner to any violation of their guidelines. If I have to depend upon a single source for my online income, I shall like it to be more moderate and consultative.
2. I can make no planning based on adsense income: To make matters worse, adsense income is extremely volatile. With the same traffic, same CTR, the final income tends to vary in a wide range. I can safely leave my day job and work online fulltime, only if someone guaranteed that the income will atleast continue to be at this level.
3. Adsense performs extremely poor with regular visitors and social media traffic: I have got 2 sets of websites. The first set are websites that are created for long term value and to solve some problem. They have what you call quality content and get a lot of repeat visitors. While the second set are more of seo experiments/ projects and get their traffic from search engine but have crappy content. Guess what? I earn more money on my crappy websites from adsense. Unless I change my plan to create more crappy content, I better get a good alternative to adsense.
4. Everyone and their cat uses adsense: While google has made the acceptance process more stringent now, they were allowing everyone and their cats to use adsense. That has sort of created an impression in the minds of the users that any website using adsense must be unprofessional.
5. Adsense treats everyone as equal: I love democracy but only for forming governments. Unfortunately adsense uses the principles of democracy for websites as well. A car blog by the CEO of Toyota and my random ramblings about second hand cars will attract the same revenue per click.

What is your take? Do you need to move away from adsense as well?

The IT revolution with all its plus and minus has been a wonderful journey for India. It has created jobs, given us hope and more importantly a confidence that we can compete with the best in the world. The IT revolution seems to be slowing down due to several reasons including a backlash against outsourcing in the developing countries in the wake of the global recession.

I have been studying the pagerank profile, alexa rank, overall ranking and earning details of Indian bloggers with a lot of interest over the last few months. Based on these studies and my interactions with emerging bloggers like Pavan, Ajay, Abhishek, Nihar, Tarun and Harsh I am becoming more and more confident that blogging as a profession and business will create even more opportunity than what IT has done for India in the last few years.

I am aware that, it is quite a big statement to make and I do not expect you to accept my words at face value. Hence in the paragraphs that follows, I shall be putting forth my logic for coming to the consclusion above. This is going to be a rather longish post. Hope you have some time on your hand to go through it completely.

1. Large pool of english speaking population: Actually blogging requires English writing skill and we have an even larger pool of English writing population as students from Tier-II, Tier-III cities are perfectly ok writers while they struggle in the spoken english department.
2. 24 X 7 development cycle: In software development working on 24 X 7 time schedule was a choice. Companies embraced the idea to decrease the time to market. However in the online world 24 X 7 is a necessity.
3. Blogging needs zero capital investment: What was great about IT business was the low capital requirement compared to traditional manufacturing businesses. This allowed the entrepreneurial middle class professionals to set up IT companies. Blogging does not need any capital what so ever. That has allowed students and IT profeesional in India to create blogs and earn money from it.
4. Large pool of engineers ready to work for a lower salary: The recession is only going to increase that number. Aspects like Search engine optimization, analytics etc are predominntly logical tasks that can be carried out by Indian engineering students with a lot of ease.
5. Blogging will generate oppurtunity for students of other streams as well: Job creation in IT was restricted to engineers alone. Blogging by its very nature will provide a great opportunity to students of other streams like arts, designing etc.
6. Blogging is independent of cultural bias: In the early years of IT revolution, Indian companies had to fight the negeative bias of their clients about the quality standard of Indian companies. Luckily in the world of blogs, each post is judged by its own merit alone.
7. Blogging does not need no Visa: I do not need to be in the USA to blog about US. If your blog is good, no government will stop its citizens from reading your blog, clicking on your advertisement or buying products from you.

Challenges for Blogging becoming the next IT

1. Our habit of getting paid at the end of the month: We are accustomed to working in an office and getting paid at the end of every month for the work we have put in. Unfortunately blogging does not work that way. I had to put in close to 6 months of blogging before I started to make any money.
2. Our reluctance to learn marketing: Blogging is not about writing great content alone. To be a successful blogger, you need to promote those posts, convince others to link to you and convert the readers into subscribers. I see a distinct reluctance amongst Indian bloggers to take up these other aspects of blogging.

These are tips that help you increase your earning without any increase in traffic or without having to make a new post.

1. Optimize your adsense blocks right now. Proper optimization of adsense blocks can increase your earnings by as much as 100%
2. If your site is already optimized, change the font/color of the ad blocks. Works like magic to fight off ad-blindedness
3. Replace that default site search feature with adsense for search. There is nothing better than google for search and it increases your earnings
4. Make use of several advertisement products. Start using in-text advertisement, paid review etc. On Binaryday Infolinks now earns as much as adsense. I am so sad I was not using them for all these days
5. Replace the last adsense block with an affiliate link. Unlike adsense, affiliate links may not earn on a daily basis. But on the days they do, you will get a good return
6. Start selling some private advertisement on your website. The great thing about direct sales is you do not have to pay any commission to anyone else.
7. Create another blog with some high paying niche like make money online, automobiles, legal or medicine. Advertise the blog on your main blog. I have been amazed by the results. You will be amazed as well

Let me know your experience on this topic.

If you have been blogging for sometime and especially if you have been reading some seo blogs, then I am sure that you have heard of the term “Long Tail”. Before I proceed with this post, I will let you on one secret. I can almost guarantee that you can take your blog to at least 1000$ per month by followin the advice listed on this one post alone. Hence even if this is the only post of mine that you are going to read, so be it. But read it very very carefully.

This is going to be a long post. I shall be discussing the following topics in it.

1. What gives me so much confidence that my advice can be used to easily take any blog to 1000$ pm earning
2. What is long tail of search
3. Why is it easy to succeed by targetting the long tail?
4. The steps to succeeding with the long tail
   • Setting up the blog
   • Identifying long tail keywords
   • Writing a post targetted to long tail keywords
   • Monetizing the long tail
   • A strategy that will increase your chances of success
5. Improving the performance of the blog post

What gives me so much confidence that my advice can be used to easily take any blog to 1000$ pm earning

I have talked about many seo topics and monetization tricks previously. However I doubt if I have ever sounded as confident as this blog post. It is quite simple though. I am confident because I have done it myself. If you have been reading my blog for sometime, then I am sure that you must have been irritated by my posts about Ron Pratte, Intel core 2 duo and dual core, Catherine Gomez Boxxy, How to format USB drives etc. The fact all those posts as well as my recent posts about Abraham Biggs Suicide Video, Melissa Huckaby and IPL 2009 are all part of my experimentation of getting traffic by taking advantage of the long tail of search. And I have been successful at it beyond my imagination to say the least.

So what exactly is the long tail of search

Many of you must have heard of the 80-20 principle. It basically says that 20% of your customers/product bring in 80% of your sales. 80-20 is the basic rinciple that every large organization runs on. You see if I am a large book store then I need to concentrate on 20% of the titles that bring in 80% of my sales.

The concept of long tail was made popular by Chris Anderson in an article in the Wired magazine. The basic premise is quite simple. The remaining 80% will be good enough for you if your cost of production is low. I will not get into theoretical detail as this is not a post about long tail but rather about how to attract traffic to your blog using this strategy of targetting the long tail.

Why is it easy to succeed by targetting the long tail?

The basic premise of this strategy is quite simple. If I have a new blog, I will find it very difficult to compete with more established blogs for a given keyword. Think of a new blog trying to compete with Digital Inspiration on a technology related blog. It does not matter how great a post you have about twitter, Amit’s post about he forgetting his twitter password will outrank you on Google in all probability. So what do I do?

There are 2 types of blog posts that you can write to take advantage of the long tail.

1. A detailed post about a very specific topic that target search terms with 3 or more keywords. So since I can not compete with existing websites on the keyword virus, usb or virus usb I write a blog post titled how to remove virus from usb and  Everything you may need to know about how to fix errors in USB Flash drives and how to Format USB Flash. Those long titles are there to target search terms that are 3 or 4 words long.
2. A post about a topic that established websites have not already written about: Google gets to see around 30% of search terms for the first time on a given day. Many of those are search terms that have become popular only recently. Typically these are news items. However do not write about news items that are going to get coverage from big websites. Rather focus on smaller issues like Melissa Huckaby and  Princess Kemeria Abajobir Abajifar that are going to have a decent amount of interest and not mch competition.

The steps to succeeding with the long tail

The idea of this blog post is not to tell you that you can succeed by focusing on the long tail. Rather I am going to reveal my secret of getting traffic and money by focusing on long tail. I strongly believe that all the steps that I list down below are essential for succeeding with the long tail strategy.

Timing is the most important aspect of success: We shall be removing competition from established websites and blogs by using this strategy. However keep in mind that you still have to compete with 1000s of other blogs for your success. That makes it quite important that you are amongst the first few guys to write about a topic, especially if you are targetting the hot words for your traffic.

Setting up the blog: When I say timing is important, it is not the time of you publishing the post. Since we shall be focusing on Google to get much of this traffic, it is actually the time when Google finally indexes your blog posts. A well designed wordpress theme with some essential plugins like sitemap plugin, all-in-seo plugin will normally do the trick. However to get the maximum benefit your theme must take care of many other issues including avoiding duplicate content issue, ensuring good internal linking etc. Do not worry if you are not too good at SEO. I am working on a wordpress theme that will take care of all these issues. But it will be available to the members of my how to make money with blogging ecourse. The course is absolutely free. So go ahead and signup with your email id alone.

Identifying long tail keywords

I think this is the single most important trick to succeeding with the long tail strategy is to find out keywords that have decent amount of traffic and not much competition. The simplest way to do this is to monitor google trends. Just go through that page and you will find 100 keywords that you can blog about. You can even target country specific google trend pages. However if you read that last line carefully, you will realize that I said Google trends is the simplest method and not the only method. Some other tricks that I use to find hot keywords includes analyzing submissions to social sites like digg, propeller, indianpad etc and Predicting what keywords will go hot on google trends in 2-3 days hence by going through event calendars like movie schedule, movie releases, valentines day, bloggers’ meet etc. Keywords identified by above methods are not targetted by many other sites. Hence you may use the above tricks to find superior result.

Another method to find long tail keywords is to use google adwords keyword tool. Let us say you want to do a post about seo. Enter the keyword in this tool and it will throw up a large number of terms related to seo. Depending on the level of competition for the keyword, you may choose a particular topic to create your blog post.

Find out low competition terms: It is not enough to identify terms that will have a lot of searches. You need to identify terms on which there is comparatively less competition to worry about. And the number of search results is not an indication of competition. Rather use the methods suggested by me to find out the level of competion for a keyword.

Writing a post targetted to long tail keywords: Ranking on Google is decided based on 2 types of factors off-page factor and on-page factor. Off-page factors include backlinks to your blog, age of your blog etc. While on-page factors include stuff that is on your page like keyword usage, formatting of your post etc. If you have a comparatively new blog you will have a disadvantage in the off-page factor. Hence it becomes extremely important that you make the most of the on-page seo factors. I have covered this topic in depth in my post titled The best way to use keywords on blog post for maximum impact.

Some exclusive tips to increase chances of success dramatically

1. It is difficult to get links to a blog targetting long-tail keywords. Start your blog on some other topic like make money online or technology, get good number of links and then migrate to long tail keywords.
2. Alternatively you may mix these posts with some other linkable topics like I do.
3. Read my Beginners guide to building free backlinks to get free backlinks
4. Hire me as a consultant to kick start your blog. On a serious note I am ready to work on other blogs on a revenue sharing basis.
5. Avoid the issue of duplicate content by all cost. Never user ctrl+c and ctrl+v. Read others’ posts and then rewrite them in your own english. Do not reproduce the entire post
6. Make use of images on your posts.

Finally become a member of my how to make money with blogging ecourse. The course is absolutely free. So go ahead and signup with your email id alone. Trust me I shall be revealing at least 3 more secret tips about how to find super hot long tail keywords in the ecourse.

If you found this blog post then please help me reach more people with a digg/ stumble/ twit or link from your blog