Blogging
June 25th, 2008 at 02:14pm
Under Blogging+ Link Building+ SEO
Recently I have blogged about John Chow’s contest for Market Leverage. And then John Cow’s contest, also for Market Leverage. They pretty much have the same system to attract you to join.
Contests, contests, contests… Have you ever thought of why there are suddenly so many contests happening?
Market Leverage, John Chow, John Cow and many others are doing this for a few reasons:
Increase number of Comments
John Chow asked us to leave a comment to gain the first ticket to enter the contest. A large number of comments surely reflects the popularity of the blog.
RSS / Email Subscription
To gain another ticket, they have asked you to subscribe to their RSS feed. That is an effective way to increase their number of subscribers.
SEO - Link Building
To gain extra tickets, you have to blog about the contest linking to John’s. By specifying the link text they have gained a quality / juicy backlink, which search engines count for ranking.
They have also asked to link to Market Leverage. Again, another juicy link, but this one is to ML instead.
Affiliate Marketing
To gain more tickets, you have to sign up with Market Leverage using a referral link. This way when you earn money through ML, they would get a commission.
What have you gained?
By placing a comment on their popular blog you have also gained yourself a link. If you have put your targeted key phrases onto the link then you got a higher quality link. I am not sure if they have got nofollow enabled though.
And of course, you have gained more chances to win the present!
At the time of writing, John Chow has gained 712 comments and John Cow got 74 (oops big difference). That effectively means they would have gained a large number of links as well.
By Leo
June 20th, 2008 at 09:29am
Under Blogging
How can you be successful in blogging? It is not just about posting once in a while with what you had for lunch (well, John Chow is an exception). To be successful, you need to be able to:
1. Identify your target audience - research for a lucrative niche that you would really love to target. Then, think about who would actually be interested in your niche.
2. Market your product effectively - research for all marketing channels available and choose the most effective ones. Market through them and measure the results.
3. Plan your steps properly - make a goal and plan your ways towards it. Don’t take up 100 tasks and plan to finish it overnight. Plan ahead what and when to launch.
4. Organize - be an organized person and stick to it. Eg. spend 1 hour in research, 2 hours to write, 2 hours to market etc.
5. Expand your niche - now you have a nice blog running, what else can be added to it? If you blog about superheroes and sells action figures on your site, think about trading cards. Even think about the Batmobile duvet covers.
By Leo
May 28th, 2008 at 03:05pm
Under Blogging+ Link Building+ SEO+ Web 2.0
Yes, you have read the title right. Microsoft is going to launch their own social bookmarking site. Apart from Live bookmark.
A preview version should be available for MSDN and TechNet in a very short time (probably within a few days).
Not a surprise - this new social bookmarking site allows users to:
- Bookmark a site on the web
- Tag it
- Bookmark a site on the upcoming “My bookmark” tool
Why is there another social bookmarking site? MS reveals that the new site should open another stream of advertising income, and also to collect tag data to improve search result relevancy.
By Leo
May 13th, 2008 at 09:00am
Under Blogging
Best Web Ezy’s New Home
I have just moved this blog into the new hosting environment. As I mentioned before, I am moving this blog to a US based hosting because I figured out that most of the audiences are from the US. And I want to keep my AU based server for the Australasia clients. Therefore recently, I have migrated to Cirtex Hosting.
So far, no complaints. All goes well. Uptime is good, technical support is fast in responding to my emails. If you are looking for a web host, I would suggest you to use Cirtex Hosting.
Best Web Ezy’s New Skin
As you probably have noticed, I have changed the theme of this blog again. This time, it is an SEO friendly theme. I am planning to keep using this theme for a long time. There are a few bits and pieces to be fixed, but generally, I am happy with this.
I chose this skin because it is not the usual John Chow style theme, which you might have noticed a lot of similar themes around. They look like copycats of John Chow. And the color is fresh. It is the 2-column style that I always like to work with. I am still tweaking it a bit as I plan to put a few products of my own here. Talking about that, please look out for my upcoming publication. I am sure (I hope) it would be a good reference for webmasters.
Best Web Ezy’s New Backbone
Last but not least, Wordpress 2.5.1. I was always lazy to upgrade the blog but I thought I should use this chance to upgrade as well. I think this is the best version so far. The admin interface is so different now, but it is so much easier to work with.
I had a bit of problem migrating the database across. There was an encoding problem. Apparently the previous version of Wordpress was using Latin 1 Swedin as encoding method for the MySQL database. When I got it imported into the new version, there are strange words all over the place.
After a bit of search on the internet (well, where else) I have found the solution:
- Export the database into a .sql file
- Change the encoding from Latin1 to utf8
- Import into the new database with utf8 as default encoding
- Edit the wp-config file by commenting out the encoding line
- Upgrade the Wordpress version to 2.5.1
And that’s done. Nice and easy.
By Leo
May 13th, 2008 at 08:43am
Under Blogging+ Link Building
How do you distinguish between blog comments and blog spams? Why does people hate spams so much?
For me, even people want to leave a spam on my blog, I probably won’t delete it straight away. All they want to do is to place a link on my pages. I don’t really mind. As long as the comment is *somehow* relevant, or even if it is just a simple “Thank You”. I would be more than happy to leave it there.
However, for the obvious spam and for those that didn’t even make any effort to write something but just crap, I would delete straight away. I don’t like them. But then, I won’t feel angry, too. Why do we have to be angry about such a small thing.
Everyone is trying to do business here. If you don’t like the comment, just delete it. Don’t make a big fuss about it. People would only feel that you are such a jerk and narrow-minded person. What good is it to make a big fuss about such things? Only downgrading your personality.
For link-builders, I understand that you may need to put some links on blog comments. You just need to really read the post and put something relevant. In this case, you won’t get into any trouble.
By Leo
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