Archive for April, 2008
April 17th, 2008 at 07:12am
Under Email+ Freebies
Email marketing is essential for a business.
However, I am a blogger. Is there any email application that is designed specifically for bloggers?
Now there is one. Zookoda provides email newsletter service for free! Zookoda enables you to send a daily, weekly or monthly summary of your latest blog posts directly into your visitors inbox. And most importantly, it is FREE!
We know how important it is to post regularly in our blog. It is the way to encourage visitors coming back to visit the blog. However, how do we inform people about our posting?
I have both in this blog - RSS feeds and emails. In addition to the usual, Zoodoka provides an alternative way to broadcast your blog post, at a frequency that you specify.
Zookoda also use an auto-opt-in method to save you time. You don’t have to manually accept or decline a subscription. Zookoda does it all for you. You can choose a template design for your email, or customize one.
Traffic tracking is important. By analysing the click, open, and bounce rate, you can unlock a lot of hidden information about your newsletters!
And who hates spam? Everybody does! All emails sent via Zookoda are spam compliant. No worries anymore!
Not a surprise at all, Zookoda enables you to:
- Manage your email list
- Design your own email to match your blog’s design
- View Traffic Report, real time
- Newsletter subscription form for your blog
- Control broadcast frequency
- Email in text format
By Leo
April 15th, 2008 at 07:36am
Under Blogging+ Link Building+ SEO
Link building is essential for off-page SEO. Google counts each link as a vote to your website. The more links you have, Google would think your site is more important. The higher the pagerank where your link is placed, the more important the vote.
There are a few ways that link building can be done easily. They are:
1. Directory Submissions
The first thing I would do is to submit all websites to all sorts of directories, both local and international. Dmoz would be a good example of it.
One thing to note is that the page rank is usually higher on the homepage, but if you submit a site to the directory, the page that you landed onto might not have a pagerank as high.
To speed things up, I would suggest using the ‘Directory Submittor’. It is a free software and of course, you can pay to update it. The free submittor allows you to access 350 directories for free! You can sort the directories by page rank and work on the ones with higher page rank first.
Submission is not really automatic, hence I still regard it as white hat. The program would bring up the registration page of the directories one by one, with some information already filled in. You just have to fill in the missing bits and click “submit” and that’s done. (Click here or the icon to download)
2. Article Submissions
The other popular way is to submit your articles to the online article sites. As you probably know, search engines love article sites as it is usually full of contents (text). Therefore, submitting your articles to these sites would produce a lot of quality 1-way link to your site.
Again, this process can be automated (a bit). Using ‘Article Submitter’ would surely help you on this. The free version of this would allow you to submit to 85 article sites. And you can upgrade it, which would allow you to access 668 sites! And it is not one time access. In fact, you can do that everyday! Imagine how the 85 links, accumulated everyday, would help you on link building.
Click here or the icon to download.
3. Social Bookmarking
Sign up to as many social bookmarking sites, so that you have all the buttons sitting on your browser toolbar. After you have finished a post, click on those buttons. Easy!
Most of them allow you to tag your article. Tag as much as you can, as each tag produce a unique URL would links back to your article.
The popular social bookmarking sites include Del.icio.us etc. Well, you probably know more than me.
4. Link Exchange
Many believe that link exchange is not going to produce any results. Reciprocal links would produce less results, hence you have to do a lot of it.
I am using a service named Link2Me for link exchange. You can browse through their database and choose the sites that you want link from / link to. Pretty easy to do. No need to explain.
5. Blog Comments
Commenting on blogs would allow you to create links with the anchor text you want to target. Blog Commentor Lite can help you to speed up this process as well.
Blog Commentor Lite allows you to search for blogs of your niche, and you can load the pages within its own browser, leave comments and get onto the next one.
The Lite version only finds WordPress blogs, but it is already good enough.
Read my post here for further details.
6. Forum Signature
I am sure many people are active in forums as well. Why not having your blog’s URL as signature? Remember, each signature is a 1-way link. Forum pages, if informative, are likely to have pagerank as well.
7. Offline
Well, this is not exactly link building. Put your website on all your email signature, stationery, banners, advertisement… Anything that you can think of. Something to give away in exhibitions (eg. a green shopping bag). Just something to make sure everyone knows your URL.
By Leo
April 11th, 2008 at 12:20pm
Under Freebies+ Newest Technologies+ Web 2.0+ Web Design & CSS+ Web Hosting
Do you want to host a website in Google? Now you got the chance. Google announced the preview release of the new Google App Engine, which allows you to build and run applications in Python in Google’s server infrastructure.
And guess what, it is free!
The Google App Engine applications are easy to build and maintain. You do not need to maintain your own server or hosting, as Google generously provides 500MB space for free. All you have to do is to upload the application, and it would be done. You can use a free domain name from appspot.com, or your own domain. You can also choose to share the finished application with the world or limit it to just yourself.
Did I mention free? Same as most of the other Google applications, having an account is free. The bandwidth should allow you do serve about 5 million page views a month, according to Google.
At this stage only free accounts are available. However, in the near future, you would probably be able to purchase more disk space.
Other features include (but not limited to):
- Sandbox - The sandbox isolates your application in its own secure, reliable environment that is independent of the hardware, operating system and physical location of the web server.
- Python Runtime Environment - The App Engine only supports Python at the moment. It is running Python 2.5.2.
- Datastore - App Engine provides a powerful distributed data storage service that features a query engine and transactions. Just as the distributed web server grows with your traffic, the distributed datastore grows with your data.
- Google Accounts - You can of course associate your application with your Google account.
- URL & Fetch Service - Applications can access resources on the Internet, such as web services or other data, using App Engine’s URL fetch service.
By Leo
April 4th, 2008 at 06:01am
Under Blogging
Who don’t want free traffic? No matter how good your blog is, if there is no free traffic, it means nothing.
However, dependent on your niche, sometimes Adwords can get quite expensive. And you should not really rely on advertising to bring you traffic. After all, free traffic is — free!
You may have noticed that I have installed the Blogrush dashboard on the right hand column of this blog. What it does is that it syndicates YOUR blog post to the others who has got this dashboard installed. If the readers are interested, then they would click on the topics and would read the post directory from your blog.
To install is really simple; just go to the Blog Rush website and register, then copy and paste the code and you are done.
To bring more traffic, make sure you write a killer title. That’s all you need to do!
By Leo
April 3rd, 2008 at 07:11am
Under E-Commerce+ Reviews
Are you thinking of buying a house? Or maybe build your own dream house?
House Plans And More offers house plans that you can buy online. If you are not sure about your Home Plans, then have a look at their site and you would certainly gain some inspiration. If you are into log homes, they offer Log home plans as well.
The site is very comprehensive. This is good because it certainly gives you a lot of information regarding house plan purchase. The search function is on the most prominent spot above the fold. It is quite obvious what they encourage the users to do when they arrive at the site.
On the left hand side they have listed all the architectural styles that they have. New to this? Have a look at their project plans and you would be delighted.
The only things that I don’t like about this website are the buttons on the right hand column. They are images instead of text links, and hence would hinder SEO effect. We all know that spiders likes text but not images. “Alt” tags might help but text is even better.
By Leo
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