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Archive for the ‘Guides and Tuts’ Category

Evil Alexa Ranking

By Mohnish On March 21, 2009 28 Comments

Do you know how is your Alexa rank calculated?  Alexa rank is not calculated on your page rank, google analytics or any other stats! It is calculated on the number of visitors that visit your website with the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser. I never believed this until I did some research and found more on this.

Evil way to increase your Alexa Rank
This might be one of the only blogs that might give you this method. As I mentioned above, Alexa ranking depends on the number of visitors you get with the Alexa toolbar installed, hence the visit is not a unique visit. Alexa toolbar doesn’t check the IP and counts 1 refresh as a visitor.

1) Install the Alexa Toolbar

2) Install the Auto Refresh Firefox Addon

3) Open your website and turn on auto refresher
Longer auto refresher is on, the better. Open it in atleast 10 tabs for 10x speed. Keep the refresher at minimum 10 seconds.

4) Do this everyday for 1-2 hours
Depending on your speed and the time you do it everyday, your alexa rank will rise faster and faster. ( Rise = lower in number)

This is what Alexa is! People feel proud of being in top 100,000 Alexa but it is really worthless! I can get there by having a blank website, so can you 👿 Advertisers fall for the Alexa gimmick. It is not always that way, many websites have a legit Alexa Rank.

Sensonize.com has an Alexa rank of 118,784.. Interested in advertising, anyone? 👿



Evil way to make commentators subscribe to your blog

By Mohnish On March 19, 2009 7 Comments

Not exactly subscribe to your blog, but subscribe to your blog comments. I was just browsing the WordPress plugins directory to checkout some new plugins which could be useful for my blog. I found the plugin Subscribe to Comments 2.1 which is an amazing plugin if you are running a blog which gets alot of comments on your articles or a blog which gets a few (like Sensonize.com).

Using this plugin the good way
You can use this plugin in 2 ways. 1 is the good way which would be simply installing the plugin and allowing your commentators to choose if they would like to subscribe or do it yourself for them 👿 This good way will make readers subscribe and stay, the evil way might make them unsubscribe and never visit your blog again.

Using this plugin the evil way
The people who have been following me on Twitter, know exactly how evil am I lol. Lets get started –

1) Install the plugin
Installing the plugin is really simple, if your using WordPress 2.7.1 just search for “Subscribe Comments” and install it. If your doing it the manual way: download the plugin, upload it in wp-content/plugins and extract it, then activate it from your WordPress Admin Panel.

2) Tweaking some codes
This is really simple. Once your done installing the plugin, login to your Cpanel or any other panel you use File Manager and open the wordpress directory you have installed your wordpress blog in. Then open: domain.com/wp-content/plugins/subscribe-to-comments After you have done the above you will see a 50.41 KB file named subscribe-to-comments.php. Right click on it (in Cpanel 11) and click “Edit”. Once your there, Press Control + F(find) in Firefox and it will open a search box. In the search box search for: This is the text that is displayed for users who are NOT subscribed. You will see that line highlighted on that long page full of codes.

Just few lines below that you will see a code like this:
<input type=”checkbox” name=”subscribe” id=”subscribe” value=”subscribe” checked=”no” style=”width: auto;” <?php if ( $checked_status ) echo ‘checked=”checked” ‘; ?>/>

Replace it with:
<input type=”checkbox” name=”subscribe” id=”subscribe” value=”subscribe” checked=”yes” style=”width: auto;” <?php if ( $checked_status ) echo ‘checked=”checked” ‘; ?>/>

All I did in the above code was, changed checked="no" to checked="yes"

comments-subscribe

Now the visitors that leave comments to your blog will automatically get subscribed to the blog post they have commented on. This is a good way to make them subscribe to blog posts without letting them come to know 😉 But yes, a visitor can uncheck the subscription option in the comment box if he/she wants.

Benefits

  1. It subscribes the commentator to a single blog post and informs him/her about the new comments.
  2. The  commentator will visit your blog again to see what has been posted and will also reply to the comments.
  3. The commentator will also subscribe to your blog if you have quality posts.
  4. You can also add text in the email – Eg: There are new comments on so-and-so post, please check back and give your feedback and also add a line below that: “If you like reading my blog, do subscribe to my RSS feeds”
  5. Your blog becomes more active and gets feedback from the visitors that like your blog and would leave comments back again and again.

Loss

  1. That commentator might not come back if he is bombarded with alot of emails for a single post.
  2. The good way can gain you readers but the evil way will just make you lose readers.

My suggestion would be to use the good way if you get 5+ comments on your blog posts. If you get less than 5 comments on your blog posts, use the evil way! 👿



How To Convert Daily Blog Traffic Into Loyal Readers

By Mohnish On March 13, 2009 11 Comments

So you’re a blogger, eh? Who are you actually blogging for? Readers or yourself? Well.. If you don’t have any readers, do you think it is worth ‘investing’ your time on blogging? Blogging is an ‘investment’. The time, content, money you spend on writing your blog pays off later on when you grow big. The traffic you get from Social Media sites is more of one-time visit traffic. Those visitors won’t visit you’re blog again unless you have something interesting to offer. I have got over 200k visitors from Stumble Upon but only about 8k have bothered to come back. Well.. I don’t blame them! Its entirely my fault. I never made an attempt to make use of that 200k traffic which I got from Stumble. I could have used it, seriously!

What to do when you are getting huge traffic from StumbleUpon?
1) Don’t panic!
The first thing I was afraid of was getting suspended by my WebHost. Which never happened, I quickly opened a support ticket as soon as I got the huge traffic of frekkin’ 1300 users online!!! This was the craziest thing that ever happened in my virtual life and I hope I have more crazy moments like these in the future 😉

2) Setup a quick comment contest and link it to your post
This traffic won’t last longer than a week or two and after that the effect will die off slowly. Setup a small 1 GB iPod Shuffle contest or something which is between $20-100 and attractive to the Social Bookmarking kind of traffic. When your done, link it back at the bottom of the post which is getting thousands of visitors. Your done! Atleast 1 from 10 quality visitors from Social Networking traffic will check it out. You also need to keep in mind to reply to the comments you get. You have your loyal readers list building up 😉 Also add a message at the bottom of your Stumbled Post asking youre visitors to leave an comment 🙂 This is gonna build your reader database too. Read on to know how…

The Traffic And Contest Are Over – What do I do next?
So you have got about 100 comments? 200? 500? Lets just leave counting and go ahead with out next step! 😉 Download the WordPress Plugin – Thank Me Later, Install it and activate it. Not many people are yet aware about this plugin as I hardly see only 4,000 plugin downloads – all time. This plugin emails the people who have left comments on your blog a “Thank you for commenting on my blog” email. You can modify the email format as you like. Add your subscribe URL, your furture updates and whats new with your blog. The best feature is that this plugin makes your 1-time commentators into a mailing list/loyal readers. Thats right! You can send them an email every X weeks/days or you can also send them a custom email. How cool is that?

This is one awesome way to make your one time readers into daily blog traffic. No, this is not an evil way. A more evil way is yet to come 😀 Muwahaha..



Link exchange with other blogs

By Mohnish On March 12, 2009 13 Comments

With the rising population of bloggers in the blogosphere and their blogs, Link exchange has become very popular amongst bloggers and their friends. Many bloggers exchange links with their their friends, fellow bloggers or their own blogs. Link exchange not only helps in getting a higher SEO value but also gets you traffic. Today, there are 1000’s of free services to help you find the relevant blog(s) of your niche and exchange links with them.

Why should you link exchange?
If your a start up blogger the best option for you to advertise for free would be to link exchange and leave comments on other blogs. Link exchange helps you increase PR, traffic and search results. If someone with the keyword/anchor “Coupons” exchanges a link with me, I will also get that keyword counted as my blog content. Sometimes it is not possible for you to leave comment on each and every article of the blog, so a better option would be to link exchange. But you should also keep in mind that Link exchange cannot be done with anyone you wish, it needs to be done with your friends, fellow bloggers or your other websites. Links can be purchased on blogs but this is HIGHLY NOT RECOMMENDED!

Link exchange can get traffic?
Yes, its true! Link exchange can get you a couple of hits everyday. It won’t get you the stumble or digg kinda traffic but the traffic you get from link exchange will be the readership traffic. Atleast 50-75% of the traffic you get from link exchange will turn out to be your loyal readers in the future.

Benefits?
As I named a few benefits above, I’ll name some (more) again:
1) Increase in PR
2) More back links on search engines/ SEO
3) Traffic
4) Increase in readership
5) Free Advertising

It also gives you and your brand quality exposure. If you have a unique product say “Blogging for dummies” you can link exchange with multiple blogs for the keyword “Blogging for dummies” or “Learn to blog” whichever is easier and has less results on Google and has more number of searches every month.

How do I link exchange?
Its simple, Search Google for blogs of your niche and simply contact the owners via their contact page. You can also use  the free services will allow you to find blogs of your niche and level(Page rank, Alexa, Popularity etc) and exchange links with them or just check out forums like DigitalPoint 😉 Link exchange is highly recommended in friends.

Link exchange is not limited to only blogs, you can also exchange links if you have a website. A recommended website to exchange links would be an Image Hosting/File Hosting Website if you have a regular website, you know the reason 😉

Link exchange with Sensonize.com
Sesonize.com is now open for link exchange with everyone 🙂 As long as you have a website on Money, Blogging or Tech and its a PR2 or higher. You can use the contact page to get in touch with me regarding link exchange.



Strange characters ’ and  in WordPress posts

By Mohnish On March 7, 2009 No Comments

After upgrading my wordpress theme I faced this error.I figured it was a character encoding mismatch problem and a quick search on the WordPress forums confirmed it. You have to comment out two lines in your wp-config.php file (found in your main blog directory). The line:

define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Comment them out like this:

//define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Fixed it in no time! 😉

NOTE: This is still a BETA Fix. If anything does wrong uncomment the line and everything should be back to normal.