3 quick ways to get traffic to your BLOG!

May 14, 2008 by Adnan

Blogging is now a global phenomenon, thousands and thousands blog launching every day, and they are a good vehicle to drive traffic.

Here are quick 3 ways to attract traffic to your blog.

1. Bookmark with OnlyWire.

Onlywire is a service that allows you to automatically bookmark your post on well over 17 high-traffic sites. It’s also helps you to get the search engines index your new post too.

it’s take few clicks to setup everything, so take a look at

www.onlywire.com

2. Contribute BLOG comments

one of the best and easy way to get traffic is to leave comments on other high-traffic blogs related to your blog niche. To find them, you can used google, technorati, or even blog search with blogs like wordpress, blogspot etc.

3. Unique Keywords

For every post, instead of using most obvious or generic terms, use long-tail keywords. Blogs looks for long-tail keywords. Over time with hundreds of these, you will see more value traffic coming to your blogs. e.g.

if you are writing a blog about “best beaches in US”, don’t want the target words like ‘travel;’, beaches’ etc., used “cross country beaches” etc. as they do not duplicate with sites like expedia etc, and will come up top on the Google’s organic list.

So go on, try the above,  will take only few minutes to complete.

Cheers!

Add to Onlywire


Web 2.0 Ideas : Next Generation Info-enabled-Cars

May 14, 2008 by Adnan

Responding to the growing desire of drivers to remain connected to their information and entertainment, even while on the go Microsoft has created a set of platforms to enable carmakers and their suppliers to meet this demands. They are:

Microsoft Auto 3.0 provides an integrated middleware stack and hardware reference design for a more robust starting point. A comprehensive hardware/software reference platform, Microsoft Auto enables carmakers and suppliers to more quickly and easily build a solution that provides consumers with features such as mobile device integration, speech recognition, infotainment and provide rich user experience such as:

- Easily placing a hands-free call from the comfort of their seat

- Voice readout of incoming text messages

- Drivers or passengers can use their voice to select an artist, genre, album, or even a specific song on their iPod, Zune, or other media player – even a USB memory stick – and enjoy it over their car’s speakers

Windows Automotive 5.0 offers complete control over the implementation of your device, with a variety of specialized tools to help tune your designs as you develop them. Windows Automotive helps:

- Enables designers who are not programmers to develop the user interface at a desktop PC.

- Facilitates the development of high-quality user interface “skins” that connect to the core application program.

- Eliminates the need to write user interface code in most applications and shortens development time.

Who are making the waves here:

* Carmakers and suppliers around the globe have based their automotive infotainment solutions on Microsoft’s platforms. Drivers and passengers can now experience Microsoft Auto or Windows Automotive technology in over 150 preinstalled and aftermarket devices from 18 world-class automakers and suppliers including Acura, BMW, Citroën, Clarion Co. Ltd., Chrysler, Fiat, Ford, Subaru, Honda, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, NexTech, Toyota and Volvo.

Microsoft and Hyundai-Kia Automative group to develop next generation of In-Car Infotaintment

* Microsoft Introduces “EcoDrive”. EcoDrive collects all necessary data relating to vehicle efficiency, environmental performance including CO2 emission level, provides tips to reduce CO2, save fuel and be a green-ready card.

How you can leverage from all this?

If you can developed a Windows Auto based application, you can always sell/market to this big giants. At the moment, the market is still in its early stages. So, take a look at

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsautomotive/default.mspx

Go through the development cycle, contact them for the development engines, sample applications, and look for partners.

My take on this is:

“Whatever applications today are available on a PC, mobile etc. would be able to run on a Car System”

So opourtunities are HUGH…

START YOUR ENGINE NOW!

Cheers!

Top Searches in April 2008

May 8, 2008 by Adnan

Below are the some quick stats on most searched keywords on google.

Google Most popular Searches

american idol
youtube
britney spears
2007 cricket world cup
chris benoit
iphone
anna nicole smith
paris hilton
iran
vanessa hudgens

Fastest Rising Companies

iphone
badoo
facebook
dailymotion
webkinz
youtube
ebuddy
second life
hi5
club penguin

Statistics based on Google Keywords Archives.

Creating an Information Product

May 7, 2008 by Adnan

Information Products are the product or services which provide certain information which readers needed. However, traditional practices is to create an e-book and provide the said info.

What I would like is to extend the model. i.e.

1. Pick a Subject

Pick a subject that you are passionate about it. Research on it. Collect Facts and Figures.

2. Developed a Dynamic WebSite

Instead of having information compiled into a single e-book, create a membership-based website, which should contains:

* Main Page - Public Page (what is your ‘information’ is about?, and why it is benefits to them)
* Search - Have a quick Google Site search tool embed at your site.
* About Us
* Help
* Support
* Product and Services
     - Audio/ Video presentations
* Fees/Registration
* BLOG
* Privacy / Terms and Conditions
* Refer to a Friend
* Link to us
* Affiliate Program

* Members’s Login/SignUp
* Members Area (secure area)
     - Settings ( Profile, preferences etc.)
     - Payment Info etc.

You can used simple PHP scripts to display and MySQL as web database to stored your information.
There are so many free membership based scripts available that you can used. e.g. look at www.hotscripts.com

3. Turn Information into valuable Asset

Once you have your website ready, and an ability to ADD/EDIT/DELETE Information, you are good to go. As time passes, you will noticed that if you consistently update your INFORMATION DATABASE, it will grow gadually, and eventually in a month, or in a year time, you’ll have a good amount of INFORMATION DATA.

e.g. If you were to offer ‘TIPS ON RECEIPE’, and you decide you will add 2 RCEIPE per day.

On DAY 1         :  You have 2 records
on First Month :  60 records (assume 2 x 30 days)
In a year           :  ~730 TIPS on receipes… ( 2 x 365)

So, as your information database grows, it turns into an ASSET. The more quality data you have, you will see more subscriber to your website. What you can do with that, you can always

a. Sell it to high-end website (competitor)
b. Create a Book etc.

There are plenty of oppourtunities for making money via creating Inforamtion products/services. Some of the extended techniques are to also offer;

a. Your WebSite as a Service
b. Offer Product API ( similar to Facebook APIs)
c. Database to RSS feeds.
d. User-generated data and much more..

Remember, you can always outsource the entire website to freelancer ( see www.elance.com, www.getacoder.com etc.)

Once you have your first Information Website up and ready, you can replicate the same website and offer more inforamtion products.

Pen down atleast 5 Inforamtion products that you want to build, collect data, put in on a database and turn into a valuable asset.

Extend the model from an e-Book to a Dynamic WebSite.

Cheers!

Web 3.0 - The META Tags

May 6, 2008 by Adnan

Across time, the Internet had evolved as companies, individual are pushing the limits more and more. This transformation is going on as;

80’s Email Sending/Receiving
90’s Web Browserl Searching
00’s The APPs Publish/Subscribe Models, What’s your Feed?

The driving factos which are re-shaping the Internet to a complete new levels are worth mentioning. What I though was to create a quick META tags cloud for technologies/trends/oppourtunities to watch for in Web 3.0. They are

 

Review the TAGs, study them, look for the oppourtunities and START’s EARLY.

Cheers!

Internet News - April 2008

May 6, 2008 by Adnan

Google Launches Developer Sandbox for iGoogle

Google opened a sandbox for developers to help them build richer gadgets for iGoogle, which will offer users more powerful and interactive features. Google has also launched an updated developer website which guides developers through building and distributing gadgets to iGoogle’s growing audience. iGoogle’s new features will include left navigation, a maximized or “canvas view” option for gadgets, and social features for gadgets using the OpenSocial APIs.

PayPal growth remains robust
The Online payment giant will continue to take more share from the market. expected earning for payments transactions revenue is around $2 billion.

 

Google Previews Release of Google App Engine

Google announced a preview release of Google App Engine, a platform that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The service consists of Python application servers that interface to BigTable and GFS data store services.

Yahoo! Announces AMP! Platform
Yahoo! announced its intentions to bring to the market a new advertising management platform, AMP!, designed to simplify the process of buying and selling ads online. The AMP! Platform should help marketers buy across search, display, local, mobile, and video inventory, all from a single, integrated interface. This new platform is expected to roll out in phases.

 

Yahoo! to Conduct Limited Test of Google’s AdSense for Search Service
Yahoo! announced that it will begin a limited test of Google’s AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant Google ads alongside Yahoo’s own search results. The new battle is now on.

 

Hotmail Users can now Improve the World Effortlessly

Microsoft’s i’m Initiative, which launched in March 2007, has expanded to include Hotmail. The program donates a portion of the ad revenue generated through Hotmail and Messenger to any of ten worthwhile causes. Microsoft so far attributes more than 20 million new downloads of Messenger to the campaign, in addition to increased usage of all Windows Live offerings such as Live Search and Hotmail.

Microsoft added more data to Virtual Earth Online

Microsoft added 22 terabytes of Bird’s Eye and Satellite imagery to it’s Virtual Earth Online mapping service.

Zoho added new features to its spreadsheets

Zoho’s web-based spreadsheet application added support for macros, pivot tables, and named ranges.

eBay partnered with Buy.com

eBay has partnered with Buy.com to list all of Buy.com’s new and in-season inventory on the Buy.com eBay Store.

AP Launches Mobile/iPhone News

It’s like newspaper in the phone. A lot of big news corporations are on board. The service include International and local news.

Eye-Gaze Tracking - Keyboard not required

More and more advancements are coming through, where a keyboard is not needed. Have a look at the video.

Do your Due Diligence

May 2, 2008 by Adnan

You have a great idea that you think can move the wold. That is good, however It is important to ask some fundamental question first. It is like Self-questioning. This will help you during the whole process. So, here is the quick list:

- Why your e-Business is unique?
- What is your Hollywood pitch?
- What value you will be adding to the marketplace?
- Is there is a real demand, need for your offering?
- Can you backup with stats, facts etc.?
- Have you identified your target market?
- How big is your potential customer based?
- Who are your competitors?
- How your e-business will be different from competitors?
- Will market be willing to pay exactly what you are asking for your product/service?
- How much money and time you can afford to invest?
- What will be your commitment level?
- What is your anticipated money that you planning to make?
- Would you consider buy your own product/service at the first place?

The above are some of the questions to ask. However, add more and more. It is important to brainstorm and BE REALISTIC as possible before starting your own business.

Cheers!

Idea Creation - The 2 ‘E’s

May 2, 2008 by Adnan

Solutions always comes from Problems. And then enhanced solutions come and cycle goes on. e.g. In a social networking world, it always start with an email, then web email, then social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and other new similar but enhanced services are keep emerging. For creating an idea or product or a service, your don’t need to be original to invent new things. Most products are results of Enhancements, Improvements on existing products.

Most of the people thinks the products or service were always ‘good enough’. They are wrong. If you have an attitude to refuse this and always looking to IMPROVED FROM EXISTING, then you are always on the path of creating a new thing. Even, frustration can cause innovation as well.

If you are passionate about something, research existing products/services in the same area, understand their model, current offering, how they are getting customers, selling strategies etc. Find the current ‘NEEDS/WANTS’, and see if you can provide a solution on top of it. Ask yourself the question:

“HOW CAN I IMPROVE FROM THIS?”
Take a look at some existing products/services and the products that are the results of an enhancements:

Brand Improved Model
Jeans Levi’s jeans, but more comfortable
You Tube Blip.tv, Serial based video hosting
Email Your Idea!
AdSense Your Idea!
PayPal Your Idea!

See if you replace ‘Your Idea’ to your next big idea.

In a nutshell, we can create an idea for any existing service/product etc. via 2 E’s i.e. From

2 E’s = Existing -> Enhancements

Cheers!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The Basics

May 2, 2008 by Adnan

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is often referred to improving the amount of the traffic originated from various search engines to your website. Many site owners will engage in using SEO in an attempt to obtain qualified visitors to their site. The quality of these visitors will often be measured by what specific keywords they are using in order to reach the desired result they want, such as making a purchase, or it could just viewing or downloading a particular page on that site.

You will need to have plenty of patience, as results do not happen overnight. So if you are looking to improve the search engine position of your site, you should consider this very early on when looking at using SEO.

Following are some of the points of consideration in terms of SEO.

THE FRAMEWORK

The Content is King

Your site may be technically perfect as SEO, but you may still find less visitors, because of the lack of good contents at your site. Your site contents should be unique, fresh, specific, grammatically correct, and appealing to the user.

Page titles are bold and descriptive

Make used of h1-h6 (header tags) to make it bold, clear and descriptive all your page titles.

Search Engine friendly URLs

Most of the robots of the search engines does not recognized URLs with “?” so used search engine friendly URLs like www.google.com/trends. By using a search engine friendly URL; you are helping both your ranking and users of your site. There are so many scripts available to accomplished that.

Links

It is crucial that what sites are linking to your site, as it helps to improve your PAGE RANKING on search results. For any site on the web, incoming links are very important, especially for SEO. But many people have found that incoming links are less important, especially where you have more specific and unique content on your site.

Search Engines are not fools

Never use such methods as cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, alt text spamming or any other dubious ways. Although they may work for a short time, you not only risk getting your site penalized, but it could actually be banned from search engines altogether.

SITE Structure

No Frames on your website

Do not used HTML Frame Tags, instead there are workaround to achieve similar results, as search engines robots do not understand that.

Meta Tags are Important

Put specific keywords in META name tags, explaining your website function, services offered etc.

HyperLinks pages

Hyperlinks pages are links with <a href=”"> attributes. It is important that you make sure that all pages link to at least one other page. Pages which do not link out are known as “dangling links”. Organize your topics, sub-topics links accordingly.

Hn Tags

H Tag <Hn>some heading words</Hn> The “n” in this tag represents a number from 1 to 6. The biggest heading is represented by 1. You will find that H tags are given more weight than ordinary text in a page, and so the bigger the H size, the more weight it will have. So it is important that you include your target search term in the H tags at least once on the page, but if possible two or three times is even better.

Images

Alt Text <img src=”url” alt=”some text which is displayed or mouse over”>

Always include the alt text to all your images, as search engines do not understand an image but looks for alt text.

THE KEYWORDS

Keywords are an important part of SEO. These are like ‘hot buttons’ of your website pages. It’s reflect what your website is all about. Do a good amount of research to come up keywords, research the competition to get ideas (go to competitor website, on browser, click on View/Source to see keywords in meta tags),

Include Keywords in Title Pages, Meta Tags

It is important to include Keywords in your title pages <title>title page, keywords…</title> and meta tags <meta …. </meta>. It is vital that, for each page of your site, you include the appropriate keywords within all the page’s tags.

Bold Keywords in Contents

use h1-h6 in your contents with Keywords, this will help the search engine to index your pages based on the keywords chosen.

GETTING TRAFFIC FROM OTHERS

In a SEO world, it is important that who knows your website. It is called ‘backlink’. A backlink is a link which directs others towards your site; they are also often referred to as inbound links (IBL’s). So, the number of backlinks that your site has is an indication of how popular or important it is according to your peers (other site owners).

There are a number of ways in which back linking can be achieved.

1. Reciprocal Linking
This is where you link to another site that provides the same service or product as you and they in turn have a link to your site on theirs.

2. Site Submissions.
Submit links for your site to directories which allow free submissions, or if you can afford it, some paid directories. There are many sites around which offer a service where you can submit your site details to numerous sites. Plus, if you want, you can always create your own directory of similar websites.

3. Articles.
This is another way of getting great backlinks. So if you have a reputable looking site that contains informative, well written reviews, then there is a good chance that your articles will receive high search engine rankings also. But it is vital that any articles you write are on the subject, informative and thorough in relation to your site. Also you could always write a few articles for submission to article sites such as EzineArticles.com or SearchWarp.com. This is another great way of getting even more backlinks to your site.

4. Blogging.
This has now become an integral part of the internet, and is one of the most effective ways of linking. You either have the choice of placing a few words of comments on to someone else’s blog, or you may want to link to them from your own blog. In fact, you will find that most blogs will be happy to link back to you. However, it is important that you try to update your blog regularly and post interesting content to ensure that people will want to link back to you.

Although everybody wants good listings, there are unfortunately many sites which appear poorly or not at all in search engine rankings. This is because they have failed to consider just exactly how a search engine works.

Later, will include some of the upcoming SEO techniques that we can used on our websites.

For now, my rule for SEO is;

Build WebSites for HUMANS and not be pleased the Search Engines… :)

Cheers!

The SUBJECT line! - You have 10sec or less

May 1, 2008 by Adnan

Research shows that people look at an email or a website for less then 10 sec or even less to decide either they want to read it, or move on to another website.

So what catches the eyes of a reader. Your SUBJECT LINE.

This rule applies to both when designing the MAIN PAGE of the website or an email. Use the following to keep the main page or an email subject confined, to attract the viewer:

- Simple, short subject line.
- Must initiates curiousness, demands viewer to continue viewing it.
- Please Please stay away to make outrageous money claim ( e.g. Earn 5 figure income in 7 days?).
- Quick good practical facts about your topic.
- If you an expert, enlist your facts clearly (Don’t make outrageous claims!)

There are millions of onepage website, with the following in common;

- A long sales letter
- Takes 2-5mins to load the page
- Outrageious claims of making money
- Too many referrer claiming they benefit from the said product
- At the end, ask you to pay for the product.

The above seems to be VERY COMMON, and now user are smart and they are avoiding such websites. My advise KEEP IT SIMPLE, use:

- New Tools like VIDEO INTRO
- Preview of your actual prdocut via VIDEO ( you can used Adobe Flash etc.)
- SHORT SELLING COPY
- QUICK HARD FACTS

As I said, no one has time to read those LONG SALES LETTERS rather, they need a quick, to-the-point summary of what you are offering them.

Cheers!