Archive for ideas

9 things I learnt about getting blog traffic

21 February, 2006 at 9:33 pm · Filed under ideas, promotion, thoughts, traffic

A while back Scoble wrote some tips for getting our blog into the A-list.

This blog had been around for (coming to) 2 months – a very short time in blogodom. There is no deny that I’m looking to get into the A-list and earn revenue from online activities like blogging.

This blog is not getting traffic. My two other blogs are.

I surf alot for blog to list on the Best Blog on WordPress. I also looked at blogs that frequently get onto the Fastest Growing blogs and Top Posts.

Here’s what I learn about what gets traffics and what not.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Idea for Week 5-6 – Ken and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

8 February, 2006 at 4:19 pm · Filed under ideas, to do

Ken and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Yes, bookmark that, because it will be a pain to type.

It is almost halfway into the 6th week and I am just announcing the idea. All because I was trying to save a couple of dollars on the domain name KenandtheArtofMotorcycleMaintenance.com.

This was supposed to be a filler idea so, I’m not too concerned. Still I would like to get it up and going.

It is also an exercise too in extra long domain name. I wanted to see the effect (if any) a very long domain name has on promoting the site and getting traffic.

Short names are running out and domain names are getting longer or are mix-mash of characters (meebo, lexxe, riya came to mind). Try hitchhikersguidetothegalaxy.com.

About the Idea

The name of couse is a play on the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Ken is my name so it fitted very nicely.

The site is a full blown experimentation of what I call “idea in the blogging“.

I like riding motorcycle (more about that on the site later) and one of my dream is to run a motorcycle repair shop and look at all the different motorbike coming in – Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, BMW, KTM, Aprilla, Cagiva, Ducati, Triumph … talking to the riders. All motorcycle riders have fantastic story to tell.

Very nice … but not going to happen any time soon. At least I can blog about it!

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About Directory Submission

29 January, 2006 at 6:15 am · Filed under advice, foundational, ideas, promotion, traffic

First, some backgrounder.

Online directories are very much like their real world counterparts. They are classified list of websites.

Two of the most well known directories are Yahoo and dmoz. Getting a listing in these 2 can mean a noticable increase in traffic and search engine ranking but it is not easy.

What about other directories?

There are countless other directories. Some are effective, some marginal, the rest worthless waste of time. But how do you know?

One useful method is to look out for personal testimonies or experiences. My plan is to also report my experience with directories on this blog as time goes by.
As countless as the directories are services that will help you submit to them. Coincident? Just say they mutually ensure eachother’s existence.

So, what about the paid inclusion and paid submission services?
Is Yahoo directory worth $299? Personally I have yet to use any paid service so I cannot comment from experience. Again, report will appear as if I ever try them.

More good readings:

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Idea for Week 3-4 – Whois.la

14 January, 2006 at 12:38 pm · Filed under ideas, online revenue, to do

This is what I am going to gun for on week 3-4 – Whois.la.

Nothing new or ground-breaking about the idea. I had wanted to do it for a while and now looks like a perfect time to get it off the ground.

Background

I brought the domain whois.la end last year. So far I had just left it there with Adsense and affiliate links. It generates some income everyday from Adsense and none from affiliate yet.

Based on the current figures, I am able to recover the purchase price in 1.5 year.

Objectives

  • Increase revenue so that it breakeven faster and contribute to my final revenue target.
  • Improve website and evaluate site-extension options

To do

  • clean up site presentation
  • improve traffic, SEO activities
  • do traffic analysis

Any ideas and suggestions about what I am doing are most welcome!

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How to sign up and manage lots of website

11 January, 2006 at 1:53 am · Filed under ideas, tips

My Web 2.0 Marketing post touches on using the many Web 2.0 services out there to help create network and promote your website.

Many of the services require you to sign up by creating a username and password. Most of the time email is required as well.

Today I share 2 ideas to help make it real easy to signup and manage all those accounts,

  1. Gmail
  2. KeePass Password Safe

Idea 1, Gmail, need no introduction.

gmail logoThe web email service by Google gives you plenty of space to store mails, tag your mails and most importantly zap all the spam.

Use Gmail and not your personal email especially if you are somewhat concerned about privacy.

(Anyone still needing invites can send an email to 59ideas, at gmail of course).

Idea 2, KeePass Password Safe, is nice, simple program that helps to save and track all those accounts your had created.

If you are like me, paranoid about using the same password for each service, KeePass can generates password which you just copy and paste to sign up.

To sign in, simply use the hotkey Ctrl-Alt-A to auto-fill the username and password.

No worries about keeping track of which site you signed up adn forgetting the passwords.

With these 2 ideas, you can now sign up all the services on the net and mange them with ease.

ps. Remember to share any new ideas and sites you found with 59 ideas.

digg icondigg story

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Web 2.0 Marketing

9 January, 2006 at 3:17 am · Filed under ideas, marketing, traffic

For a while I thought I coined a new term. But a quick search on Yahoo! reveals that many others had used the phase to mean similar thing.

What do I mean by Web 2.0 marketing?

By now you must have heard of Web 2.0. The very open nature of Web 2.0 lent itself to creative meshing of different services and information into new services. An example is a country travel guide that mesh Google Map, Flickr photo, RSS news and books from Amazon.com services.

Now, what have I just done? Exactly! Web 2.0 marketing!

The observant reader will notice that the openness of web 2.0 services are also allowing creative webmasters to promote their website in more ways then before.

Create satellite content sites on Squidoo and promote your site. Tag your blog entries so that Technorati could return it for searches on that tag. Bookmark and tag your sites on del.icio.us. Add your URL to personal profile on many services.

Do not spam! Note that this is not an invitation to spam. Sometimes the line is fine between good intention and spam. Be responsible.

Be creative! Think of ways to leverage those Web 2.0 sites out there. They worked hard to bring in traffic, ride on their coattail.

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Building Traffic – the begining

7 January, 2006 at 3:04 pm · Filed under ideas, thoughts, traffic

Another big topic around that cannot be covered in one single post. First the basic here, then the specifics over the course of this project.

In anatomy of online revenue, we saw why traffic is the lifeline of every website, especially those that planning to profit.

Building traffic is a continuous and iterative process. Like all action, there should be a plan. There may be a point that traffic generates traffic itself, but that will be very far down the road. Even so, activities should relax not stop.

First, more about traffic. There are 3 broad kinds of traffic by arrival

  1. search engine
  2. external links
  3. remembered/typed-in

Search engine we are most familiar. Someone makes a search, your website appears and the people clicks on it.

People arrive from external links when they clicked on a link to your website. These links can be on a directory, website, newsletter, email or nowaday, RSS.

The last kind is when people typed-in your website URL directly. They could have remembered it or from an offline source (like books, magazines or business card).

Search engine and external links are closely related. External links influence how the search engines rank the site. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. (More about this later.)

With these background information, let’s start building links.

How?

The common link building methodologies are

  1. link exchanges/reciprocal links
  2. directories/link page
  3. online places like forum, blog
  4. create and syndicate content

It takes time, so pace yourself, work hard, don’t expect overnight result.

Right now I’m doing method (3), slowly. The idea is to network and make friends. Join me at digital point forum and DomainState. Any suggestions of other good forum?

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Action Plan

3 January, 2006 at 3:50 pm · Filed under ideas, plan, thoughts

This is the overview of the plan for this year. Certainly it will be fine-tuned over the course of this year.

Going from the broad to the specific, the first step is to breakdown the year into weeks. Every 2 weeks, come out with an idea and develop it. The first 2 weeks will be preparatory work so that leaves 50 weeks yielding 25 ideas.

Week Idea Description
1-2 Preparatory work Setup the main blog 0toindependence. Do research, write basic content, think of idea for week 3-4.
3-4 ? ?
…    
51-52 ? ?

Next breakdown the week into days. I can work anytime, day or night, any day of the week. But because I also have other things going in my life, it is not realistic (and indeed counterproductive) to work a full day every single day. So a week is divided into 6 days.

Finally, split day into hours allocating 7 hours a day. That gives about 42 hours a week.

To be very frank, I am not a person fond of meticulous plan. Plan are meant to be changed but a framework is still necessary.

The 42 hours, however, is useful for producing a TO DO list for the week. As we go along, we probably get better at estimating the time required.

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