Monday, December 15, 2008

Digg clone for online marketers - Sphinn

I think this is wonderful idea:

sphinn.com/

and I can see there are familiar names on top Sphinners.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Monetize blogging efficiently - clone your favourite template.

If you haven't noticed, many top bloggers have paraller blogs and the niches on these blogs may just slightly differ of each others. Usually blogs are using same cloned template.

So why to use cloned template? Why not to make unique design for each blog? If you blogs niches are quite similar, stantard design makes whole thing look more professional and it is also easier to maintain, since you can copy/paste code between blogs.

If you use your own php/sql-based service, you probably can control whole blog package from one admin panel. It also makes easier to maintain advertising, widgets etc. stuff related to your blogs.

So, what I suggest to do. Start blogging with one blog, tune it into top notch condition, then clone it into small army of blogs. Recruit writers or use guest columnists, if you don't have time to create content for all your blogs. You can keep your original blog as the mothership blog, where you drive your sustained traffic to your other blogs.

Comments? Critics?

Friday, December 5, 2008

Are you struggling with iFrames and new banners?

I just added www.125exchange.com banner (size 125x125) to this blog. Without any additional code, banner was causing me grey hairs, because it was destroying left column layout. I think problem was with iFrames, which quite many banner exchane programs etc. are using.

My simple solution - without spending extra time for google searches etc. - was to use good old table structure. With tables it is quite easy to get your banners in decent order and look nice on your layout, no matter if they use iFrames code or not. Check example on www.w3schools.com.

Any other clever solutions for banners with iFrames code? Probably there are 3-column blogger templates with built-in slots for 125x125 banners?


This blog will get major face-lift with gfx and stuff, hopefully before New Year, meanwhile you can enjoy of current modest basic Blogger template. ;)

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Want to know amount of web traffic for certain website or blog?

Forget Alexa, this is much more interesting tool for peaking amount of web traffic:

www.websiteoutlook.com/

Why? Because Alexa only ranks top 100,00 pages and there is plenty of interesting stuff beyond Alexa's ranking.

Basically idea for websiteoutlook.com is to estimate value for your own website or some other website, but you can use it also for other purposes, since it is showing amount of daily page views for any url you feed on it. I think it is quite cool tool for checking how much to pay for ad slot on certain website. You could use it for estimating where to buy entrecard ad slots.

Of course daily page views is not only measurement for estimating value of certain ad slot, but it is a good start. Most of other info (bouncer rate, returning visitors etc.) only webmasters know and they probably won't share that info.

FYI... websiteoutlook.com has 140,000 daily page views and value (based on web traffic) is $304161.8 USD... not bad.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Google search for your niche related blogs which have shoutboxes.

Chat- or shoutboxes on blog pages, how you could use them for promotion? I'm talking about in a way, where you are not going to be considered as pro-spammer, but kind of efficient way, so you don't have spent too much time with it.

My idea, this is actually development of Kid Tech Gurus tip

So original KTG's tip was this:

Type the following keywords in Google:

Cbox - allintext:[get a cbox]
Oggix - intext:"by. oggix.com"
Tagbox - "powered by tagbox"


My tip is:

Type the following keywords in Google:

Your niche keywordX + blog + allintext:[get a cbox]
Your niche keywordX + blog + intext:"by. oggix.com"
Your niche keywordX + blog + "powered by tagbox"

+ including one popular blog shoutbox here:

Your niche keywordX + blog + intext:"shoutmix"


So for example: 'blogging resources blog "powered by tagbox"'

And you get... oops! Check first result. So this was not KTG's own idea or it was just development of someone elses blog posting? KTG busted? Anyway, FYI... it would be allways nice to include source, when recycling someone elses older idea. ;) :D :D

Anyway... lets continue, so you can repeat search so many times as you can imagine good keywords related to your niche. When you find nice blog related to your niche, leave a message and maybe you could have shoutbox on your blog for webmasters to leave their response.

Since you search for blogs related to your own niche, I don't think it is so bad, you could consider it as networking.... or? :D :D

Anyway... I might give it a try, it is not such a bad idea, maybe twitter automated messages or feed flooding could be considered more spam than this idea. I think it is a nice and low cost method to network, specially if you are with low traffic and need to find new readers for your blog.

Any comments? :)

Couple feed automation and social networking tools.

FriendFeed: "FriendFeed helps you discover and discuss interesting stuff that your friends and family find on the web."

friendfeed.com/ EDIT: Actually this seems to be bit old news, for some reason I have totally missed launch of FriendFeed. Is it still hot?


Twitterfeed: "... feed your blog to twitter"

twitterfeed.com/ - Notice: for your followers on Twitter, it is not necessarily good idea to feed all your blog posts to twitter. But it is your choice how to do it.


Are there better tools for both purposes?

I guess both can easily lead also into information overflow.


If you're into social networking, check also power.com ...

Follow me on twitter and subscribe to this blog if you found this information useful.

FYI... all these links I found via my own Twitter network. ;)

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Bad web usability - lesson 1 : Position of latest blog post.

Ok. I have had it enough, I'm not saying my site is perfect either, but I have recently stumbled into so many usability pitfalls and bad designs, that I can't stay quiet anymore...

Go to http://miekejanssens.com/blog/ ... try to click for different posts. What happens?

Exactly. Your latest blog post should allways start from top of the page. People are not going to see it, if they have to scroll for it.

This blog has +500 followers on Twittercounter... how it is possible? Probably good content, sorry I didn't find it.

miekejanssens.com is not alone, I have stumbled to many other blogs with this same irritating problem. If you want to have some fixed content on top of the page, be rational and minimalistic.

13 years old wonder kid Carl Ocab, scam or hot prospect?

Quote from Blog of Famer:

"Carl Ocab is a young Philippines blogger that makes 4 figures USD monthly from the internet.

...

I’ve read some of the advertisers’ testimonials, including a very impressed testimonial from one of the best internet marketers, Alvin Phang from the famous (? there is 42 members on Phang's mybloglog community) AtomicBlogging.com. They claimed that they’ve actually earned more traffic and leads after putting up their blogs’ banners at CarlOcab.com. And you guess what; some even gained more than 400% profits in return! Now I have to say, if you want to improve your blog traffic, you shouldn’t concentrate only on writing good contents, but also advertise at Carl’s blog!"

Read more and check some comments here. Also website which is hyping Ocab, claims they have good google ranks for their website, but on their networking site there is pagerank checker banner which shows rank 1 ( when scale is 1-10 :D ) for their site and actually I made google search with Tyler Cruz and I didn't get Blog of Famers Cruz page on top 10 search results.

I'm not saying it couldn't be possible to make such earnings, but since BoF website doesn't really convince me, maybe the story about Carl Ocab is just sort of hype scam?

Monday, December 1, 2008

Remember to give your visitors a change for networking.




Let's imagine that you got sudden visitor on your website. A visitor likes your website. So what happens next? Bookmarking your favourite website is really old fashioned way to go.

Probably visitor is looking for possibility to subscribe for feeds and do networking with you, specially if you're both blogging on same niche.

You need to offer this opportunity for networking. It should be available on your website without any extra scrolling or clicking subpages. Best place for offering networking is upper left or right corner on your blog.

I started to use entrecard.com (thanks to kidtechguru for the tip). With Entrecard service, I have already stumbled on interesting blogs, which unfortunately don't offer possibility for networking, I think it is a shame.

Do you think there is missing something important from my website? Please comment and I will check it out.