BinaryDay

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.

Damn too apt…..

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.

Just a quick update. Seems like the long awaited pagerank update is going on with active discussions happening on webmasterworld and Digitalpoint.

To understand why you need to keep track of your pagerank, read my article 5 reasons why Toolbar Pagerank is still important.

The following posts on binaryday will help you get backlinks and hence increase your pagerank

1. Beginners guide to building free backlinks
2. Why you need to know what type of backlink your blog needs
3. 60 dofollow blogs
4. 6 websites to get your indian startup profiled

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.

Many regular readers of Binaryday will be aware that I have been working on a used bikes website for quite sometime. Around 1 month back I moved binaryday and the used bikes site to a new server on bluehost. While doing some routine seo checkup on the site, I realized that google has not indexed the site since September 15 i.e almost 1 month time!!! A quick check on other sites showed that all sites that had been moved to bluehost, were showing the same issue. I was really scared at this point as that meant google might have flagged off something about my site.

I logged into google webmaster tools and went straight to the crawl stats page. Here is a screenshot of the crawl stat page that confirmed my fear that google has stopped crawling my pages. From an average of 200 pages per day, Google had stopped crawling my pages all together!!!

My next stop was the sitemaps section of google webmaster tool. The sitemap for used mobiles site was showing some stupid error i.e robots.txt unreachable. I never put up a robots.txt file on my website out of my love for GoogleBot. It has always worked fine. What is this new issue??

A quick search on google led me to this file. This is a google webmaster help file.I found the problem at the bottom of the page. It is OK to not have a robots.txt on your site if an attempt to access robots.txt results in a 404 error. However if you do not have a robots.txt file and the server is giving some other error status then google does not crawl your site at all !!!

I have just added a new robots.txt to the site and google has started to access the files. Hope everything will get back to normal soon. This has been one of the stupidest mistakes that I have done in the last 5-6 years. I am confident of going past it in future though.

Used bikes section completed

I just added a new section to my contacthello.com website that will allow users to sell used bikes online in India. Unlike the used mobiles niche, the used bikes niche is dominated by some really well established and old websites and hence I am expecting a much longer time before I start ranking well in this niche.

KW research for used bikes broke my heart

The keyword research for the used bikes keyword has been the most depressing work that I have done  in quite sometime. After spending close to 10 days, developing the website for used bikes I went to Google adwords keyword tool and tried out the keyword used bikes with geo targetting set to India. Less than 4700 people are searching for the keyword every month. That means I will get less than 100 users a day even if I were to reach the #1 spot for my target keyword

I am still bullish on the used bikes segment though

The above goes on to show that you must always get your keyword research done even before you start writing the first html page for a site. However I am not giving up on the used bikes market. I am confident that sale of used bikes, cars and used mobiles will increase in India over a period of time and more importantly more and more transactions will move online thereby increasing usefulness of contacthello. Only I am not expecting to start getting 1000s of visitors overnight.

Final thoughts and way ahead

I know the aesthetic of the site sucks especially the index page. I intend to hire a web developer to give a consistent and better look to the site as soon as I am done with adding the used cars section. I intend to develop the used cars section as a vertical search engine more like bixee for cars. Wish me luck guys!!!!

Getting the initial users is one of the most difficult tasks for any startup. If you are targetting online users then a good ranking on google will solve the problem to a good extent. As all of us know getting links from authority websites goes a long way in obtaining a good ranking on Google. The good news is that the following 6 websites specialize in writing about Indian startups. Hence try to get your website profiled on all these 6 and a good amount of your seo work would be completed.

1. http://www.killerstartups.com/(6)
2. http://headstart.in/(5)
3.  http://www.pluggd.in/ (5)
4. http://www.webyantra.net/ (5)
5. http://www.yourstory.in (4)
6. Startups.in (3)

The numbers in bracket represent the pagerank of the website. That is one PR6, 3 PR5 and 1 PR4 and PR3 links each. No website can get a better start in less than 1 week work.

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 »