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Archive for the ‘Guides and Tuts’ Category

Google PR update coming up.. How to get yourself a PR?

By Mohnish On December 21, 2008 10 Comments

Hey!
Well.. This is not official news as yet but I’m just assuming. The last update was back in September(If I’m not wrong) so I guess the next update will be in Jan 09? Or maybe the last week of Dec 08.. But what I feel now is, that Google won’t have a PR Update now since many websites will lose their PR due to the cable failure.

So what is Google Page Rank and why should you care?

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”. In simple words – More “important” websites linking to your website = higher page rank.

So this is just my definition which I don’t understand myself ! lol.. just kidding..

How do I get a PageRank?

It depends on you! It depends on how to promote your website.. It depends on how you get back links.. It depends on you how to write your content etc etc.. I’ll just share a few tips and a small poem which sounds like a story(lol) on how to get a page rank and how not to get a page rank.

How to get a page rank tips:

  1. Use Social Networking and Bookmarking Websites with a high PR
  2. Submit your sites to PR3 + directories with your keywords
  3. Use your websites link in DO FOLLOW Blogs and Forums
  4. Do Link Exchange, but do fair link exchange
  5. Do not stuff your links on sites which are not of your niche(keywords/content)
  6. Submit videos with your links in the description to Youtube (Your own content)
  7. Always upload the images on your server if your running a blog
  8. Don’t think that you can pay and get these back links
  9. PR also depends on results displayed on Google Search and from where do they link too
  10. DO NOT SELL TEXT LINKS ON YOUR BLOG/FORUM – MOST IMPORTANT!

Now here is the poem on what not to do to get a PR: (I’m very bad at this so please excuse me, its more of a story than a poem lol!)
Little Johnny had a blog.. Little Jhonny made a mistake.. Little Jhonny sold do follow text links to make money and also stuffed his links on Blogs/Websites which din’t match his niche.. Guess what happened to Little Jhonny? Little Jhonny got kicked by Google.. But today Little Jhonny has become a big man making $35k/month and has 45k Subscribers.. But what little Jhonny lost was his page rank and his link on the 1st page of the keyword “Make Money Online”.. But Little Jhonny is smart.. Little Jhonny is now lucky and is making money alot!  Moral of the story: DO NOT SELL TEXT LINKS ON YOUR BLOG AND DO NOT STUFF YOUR LINKS ON OTHER WEBSITES WHICH ARE NOT OF YOUR NICHE!

Little Jhonny was just lucky, since his blog had become famous.. But what he lost when he was small, was huge little traffic from his keyword and thats all.. Now Little Jhonny is happy, but making way less money than he could have made.. So learn from his mistake and don’t think PR is a piece of cake!
Thats all guys.. Story is over.. I hope you learnt something from Little Johnny who is  BIG John Chow now 😉

Why do you need a PageRank?
Page Rank can help you get into the top 10 results of your choosen Keyword.. So whatever you do just don’t stuff the links into websites which are not of your niche and definatly DO NOT SELL TEXT LINKS! No matter you get $1000 for just a link.. You can always make the money by coming on top of Google.

I don’t know what else should I write in here, maybe I’m just out of content atm on this keyword.. But I’ll surely update it if I remember something new 🙂

Thanks for reading at Sensonize.com – Have a Good Day! 🙂

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Top Mistakes Newbies Make

By Mohnish On December 4, 2008 9 Comments

Here are some of the biggest mistakes newbies make. If you are a newbie and making any of these mistake, its time to take your lesson.

This post is for people who are just planning to enter into an online business and want to make money online. With the economy going south and the more and more job losses everyday, this post can be helpful for those people.

So, have a look:

  1. Not believing that money can be made online.
  2. Assuming that making money online is very easy.
  3. Giving up too early (actually, at a time when you are just going to make it).
  4. Starting a “how to make money online blog.”
  5. Buying all those “make quick money” ebooks for $10 to $100 each on digital point forum.
  6. Starting many things together and loosing enthusiasm in completing them.
  7. Creating an e-commerce site (based on BANS etc.) of hundreds of pages and assuming sales will come.
  8. Entering into a niche which they know nothing about. Just entered because it is a profitable niche.
  9. Targeting very generic niches and not giving much attention to long tail keywords.
  10. Not having anybody for their help (its not their mistake, but still).
  11. Not willing to spend any money or actually spending too much money (without know that it will produce results or not).
  12. Assuming that they are clever than search engines/advertisers and breaking their TOS.
  13. Using those link farms to get easy links.
  14. Spamming social networking sites and then getting banned.

These are the few which are coming to my mind right now. Do you know some more and would like to add here, please add them.



15 Tools for Monitoring a Website’s Popularity

By Mohnish On November 3, 2008 6 Comments

As a web designer or developer building a site, it’s helpful to first scout similar websites (i.e. the competition) to help you make design and development decisions. Knowing what websites work and which ones tank can give you insights and inspiration on what design elements, website features, and website content is effective.

To help you in your analysis, here are 15 top-notch, free, and simple web tools to help you learn more about a particular website.

1. Yahoo! Site Explorer

Site explorer allows you to inspect certain aspects of a URL. The “Inlinks” feature shows you details about web pages that link back to the particular URL you are exploring. Site Explorer gives you some insights on how popular a website is based on how many web pages are linking to it.

2. Compete

Compete is a web-based analytics tools that allows you to compare the traffic statistics and trends of up to three websites. It gives you an estimate of how many unique visitors and page impressions a website gets and how fast a website is growing in popularity (called Growth Velocity).

3. Quantcast

Quantcast is another popular site traffic measuring tool. Quantcast allows publishers to “Quantify” their website – a process in which you place a script in your web pages so that they can measure your traffic statistics directly. With that said – sites that aren’t quantified may not have accurate/complete data  and many people aren’t comfortable about placing third-party scripts on their websites.

4. Alexa

Started in 1996, Alexa is the most popular traffic ranking service today. It tracks traffic statistics of websites and provides a numerical rank based on the data that they collect. You can find a website’s Page Views and Reach (the % of internet users that have visited the website).

5. Feed Compare

An effective way to determine a website’s popularity is by tracking its RSS feed subscriber trends. If a website uses FeedBurner – the leading provider of RSS feeds services – you can use Feed Compare to see trends in subscribership from websites and compare growth/decline of subscribers for up to 4 feeds at one time.

6. popuri.us

popuri.us - screen shot.

popuri.us is a tool that can help determine how popular a URL is based on web services and statistics such as Alexa, Technorati, Delicious bookmarks, number of subscribers, and more. It’s a one page tool that gives you a quick overview of how popular a website is. popuri.us even gives you the option to post a widget on your site to display your popularity.

7. socialmeter

socialmeter is a web tool that scans how popular a web page is throughout major social websites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, and Delicious. It gives you a “socialmeter score” which is currently just a summation of the results found (useful for comparing social media website popularity of different websites).

8. TweetVolume

Another way of monitoring a website’s popularity is to see if people on Twitter are talking about it. TweetVolume allows you to search key words and phrases (i.e. – a website’s name, URL, author name, etc.) to see how many tweets have mentioned your search terms.

9. Quarkbase

Quarkbase is a comprehensive web tool that presents a myriad of information about a website. Quarkbase has a “Social Popularity” tab that shows you information about a website’s popularity among social media sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and Delicious.

10. BlogPulse Profiles

If you’re interested in finding data about a specific blog or blogger, The BlogPulse Profiles tool is a simple web application that provides a blog’s rank, how often it’s cited in other blogs, and other information such as how many posts are published each month and blogs that are similar to it.

11. Technorati Blogging Central

Technorati is the leading blog search engine. Technorati’s Blogger Central allows you to see the ranks of a particular blog to gauge its popularity among the 128 million+ blogs in the world. You can find the Top 100 blogs in Blogger Central. Technorati determines a blog’s rank by the number of reactions (links that go to the blog) it has.

12. Statbrain.com

Statbrain.com is a simple tool that tells you how many visitors a website receives per day.

13. Cubestat

Cubestat is another simple web tool that provides you with a host of information about a website’s popularity daily page views. What’s unique about Cubestat is that it estimates a website’s monetary value (in U.S. dollars) – the more expensive the website is, the more popular it is.

14. dnScoop

dnScoop attempts to estimate the value of a website based on factors such as links pointing to the domain, popularity of the domain, page rank, traffic, and more.

15. WebsiteOutlook

WebsiteOutlook allows you to determine a website’s popularity based on its estimated value, daily page views, and revenue.

What’s your method of measurement?

How do you measure a website’s popularity? Are there tools and web services that should be on this list? Share it with us in the comments!



How NOT to Ask for Sponsorship or Advertising: 6 Deadly Mistakes

By Mohnish On October 16, 2008 1 Comment

1. Not using the name of the person. If you want to get someone’s attention, you must make sure that you will address him or her by the name. When people start their email with “Hi Daniel” I will make sure to read it and give it enough attention, cause I know at least that the person on the other side knows who I am.

2. Blatant ass kissing. If you are going to make a compliment, make sure it is genuine. If it is clear that you are just saying that to please the person you are asking something, it will do more harm than good.

3. Crap writing. When you write emails to your friends or relatives, I guess you could be informal and not pay too much attention to grammar and punctuation. If you are writing to a potential sponsor, however, you want to make sure that your message is perfectly readable. Capital letters to start a sentence and spaces are the very minimum you wanna go with….

4. No link or URL. So you want me to sponsor your blog eh? That is all right, but what is your blog? Give me the link, or I will sure not sweat myself in Google trying to find it by searching for your name.

5. No explanation of what I have to gain. We got be frank here, there is no charity going on around the Internet (well perhaps some, but you get my point). People will just sponsor your contest or website if they have something to gain out of it. It is in your best interests therefore to make this part as clear as possible!

6. No explanation of how the contest is structured. You also need to explain how the contest is going to work. Some people might not want to get involved with certain practices (i.e. blackhat or affiliate marketing).

There you go. If you want to get someone to sponsor or advertise on your blog, try to avoid those 6 deadly mistakes.

Source: DailyBlogTips.com



Beginners’ Guide to Proxies

By Mohnish On August 5, 2008 No Comments

Proxies are very popular, so I thought I’d make a quick guide to explain how to get started in the proxy business. I do have my own proxy network, but I’m not a “proxy expert”. Everything I say here has the disclaimer that your results may vary and like any investment, there is a risk of not making back your initial investment. I am in no way responsible for your results, good or bad.

Ok, that being said, it’s pretty easy to make back your initial investment, and hopefully it shouldn’t be too hard to make a profit too 🙂 . Of course, this is not the Word of God on proxies, and you don’t have to do anything I say, and you probably will be able to find a way to make some money. This is just the way I did it, and it’s worked well so far.

So, what is a proxy? A proxy is a website that basically plays man-in-the-middle for people who are blocked from accessing certain websites. People at work, students at schools, and people in certain countries are all blocked from going to different sites for one reason or another. A proxy gets around this by making sure they never actually go to the site they want, but instead the proxy does and then shows them the site. For example, instead of going to Facebook directly, a student would type in your domain and your proxy would get the page from Facebook. Then your proxy would show the student the Facebook page and the school would never know (in theory).

Great, how do I get started? Well, I’m glad you asked. First, you need a domain name. Godaddy is a popular option, and if you decide to go with them do a Google search for coupon codes. I host my domains with them (sort of, see below), and have been very happy with their service so far.
Of course, you can buy a domain anywhere. One of the most important things to keep in mind is not to have “proxy” in the domain name. Now some people say that doesn’t matter, but I’d rather not take the chance. The reason you don’t want that is because a lot of web blocking programs block domains with “proxy” in them automatically (or almost automatically). If someone can’t get to your domain because it blocked, it doesn’t do them a lot of good does it? Along the same lines, avoid any questionable content in your domain name if possible. So go with something with “cloak”, “surf”, “hide”, “browse”, etc. You want to make it easy for someone to tell their friend about your site, so avoid hard to communicate names , e.g. 4-hiddin-ur-stuffs.ws/you_get_the_idea.

Ok, I found a domain and shelled out no more than $8 (buzz, buzz). What now? You need hosting. Here’s where you need to decide how much you want to put into your proxies. Digital Point Web Hosting here has a million and half threads (or 12,000+, same difference), and you can find pretty cheap hosting (although that doesn’t mean it’s great). You can also probably find free hosting if you look around hard enough, or just post in the Freebies section and ask nicely. Of course, not every host allows proxies, and so you need to find out before you sign up. I think you shouldn’t spend more than $10 dollars a month per proxy, and you can find it cheaper. One thing you don’t want to do however, is buy shared hosting from Godaddy (or any of their lame resellers 😀 ), because it won’t be enough.

Alright, I got some hosting, and I know proxies are allowed. But how do I actually get a proxy on my site? Well my young Padawan, you must now find a good proxy template. Do a Google search for “free proxy template” or search on Digital Point. I really like Free Proxy Templates (who I have no connection to). You want to find a theme that has a lot of space for Adsense, that’s how you’re going to get back your investment. You also have a choice of what type of proxy you want. There are two different popular types. First is a php proxy, of which there are several different varieties, such as PHProxy, Zelune, and Glype. The other type is CGI. Php is easy to install and doesn’t take up much space or server resources, but chews through bandwidth. CGI is easier on bandwidth, but is harder to install and uses more server resources. Some hosting companies only allow php proxies (and some might only allow CGI, I just haven’t seen anything like that), so that’s something to keep in mind.

Great, I’ve got a freaking proxy! I don’t hear the money trucks backing up to my house. What gives? Ok, now the fun part. You want to make some money from your proxy, so you need to put Adsense on the front page. But only the front page!!!. Adsene is very picky about not being on the proxified pages, and it’s not worth getting kicked out of Adsense for a proxy. You want the ads to blend in, so set the colors of the ads to match the colors of the site. Now each template is different, but the basic idea is that you need to edit the config file and fill in all of your site’s info, like meta data, a few sentences so Google has some content to base ads on, and most importantly, put your Adsense Publisher Id in the Adsense code. You probably could get away with just swapping out pub-ids, but I would recommend making sure everything looks good and it all has your branding (e.g. the text has your domain name instead of some fake domain). This might require editing a logo file to have the name of your site, but nothing too complicated.

If you are a little more adventurous, you might want to look into putting ads on the proxified pages. Of course, these can’t be Adsense, but Adbrite allows their ads to be on proxified pages and you could also put a pop up (or under, as the case may be) company like Adversal’s ads on the pages. There is a guide about how to put the code in your template at Free Proxy Templates, or you can do a Google search as always. I should warn you, however, that Adbrite probably won’t do that well, and I can’t recommend a popup/ under company because users hate them. But it’s up to you.

Dude, I have a proxy that frakking rocks. But nobody knows where it is? How do I get people to my site? This might be the most important part, so pay attention. You need traffic to make money, and the more the better. How do you get traffic? By getting the word out. First you should submit it to Stumble Upon. It’s free and it will deliver traffic. Of course, it would be great if you could make sure your site got a lot of people to stumble it, maybe through some sort of …I don’t know…exchange, but I don’t have any idea how to do that (Google it 😉 ).

Next up, put the link in your signature here at DP. Make sure to monitor the threads for post about proxy topsites, newsletters, groups, etc. and reply with your proxy. Now most may not bring you much traffic (topsites, I’m looking at you), but as part of a concerted effort to promote your site, do as much as you can. Look for some people to do link exchanges with. With proxies, it’s about driving traffic, not Page Rank, so don’t worry too much about links from sites that are less than perfect. They send traffic just like everybody else.

Another way to reach your intended audience is to work MySpace and Facebook (and all the other social networking sites). Students are a big part of your audience, and they need proxies. Make a group and get the word out about your proxy. Post a bulletin to your friends about your site. Don’t spam, but give people a chance to discover your site. You may or may not want to make an account just for promoting your site. Your smart, do what you want.

One of the best ways to get targeted traffic is to post to Google/Yahoo proxy groups. Here is a big list of groups. Don’t spam, and don’t be stupid. Some of these may require registration, and who knows, by the time you read this, some may not exist anymore. This is not a complete list by any means. Be smart and find your own.

There are always the regular SEO ways of building traffic too, like commenting in dofollow blogs and what not, but I think targeted traffic is better than non-related links.

You might also want to buy advertising or a listing on a site like Proxy.org, but I think you’ll be alright without that. Once you see some money coming in, rinse and repeat.

Thanks to Anemene at DigitalPoint Forums for this Guide! 🙂