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Very Useful Trick using Majestic SEO

Posted in » Research, SEO & Promotion - by Ades

17 Comments 

By browsing Majestic SEO’s blog I stumbled upon a post that offers great tactic that might be useful to some of you. If you sell things online and offer affiliate program, surely you want to know about your competitors’ affiliate program i.e how many affiliates they have, who are the affiliates (maybe you can win them over) etc.

This post shows step by step how to find your competitors’ affiliates using Majestic SEO.

URL: blog.majesticseo.com/general/finding-affiliates-using-majestic/

Majestic SEO tool, free for your personal blog

Posted in » SEO & Promotion - by Ades

29 Comments 

MajesticSEO offers great set of SEO tools. I think they are the only one that do not require you to install a script to track the statistics of your blog. So how they get the data about your blog? They simply gather it from the internet (referring domains, backlinks, anchor texts etc).

While the service is paid, they allow you to get complete stats for your own blog (i.e for one URL). That’s enough for most bloggers. Check it out!

Website: www.majesticseo.com

Rupert Murdoch to Use Robot.txt to Block Google

Posted in » News, Search Engines - by Ades

21 Comments 

Rupert Murdoch the founder and CEO of the world’s second largest media conglomerate News Corp. has said in his latest interview with Sky News that they will be blocking Google from indexing their sites.

This he said will be their strategic move to increase the profitability of their online versions of their newspapers. Somehow he believes that Google is doing more harm by sending tons of traffic to their websites because he thinks that it’s better to have small number of people who pay (paid subscribers) rather than tons of people who do not pay and read his (News Corp) news from Google News for free (even if Google provides a link back).

News Corp. own tons of newspapers, magazines, tv and radio stations worldwide. Newspapers like The Sun (UK), The New York Times (US), and The Wall Street Journal (US) are owned by News Corp. (full list here)

That’s an interesting strategy indeed. He is the only person I heard on internet who doesn’t want traffic and Google’s indexing of his sites :) Normally everyone is after traffic and always trying to improve their SEO to better rank in major Search Engines.

I personally think this strategy of R.Murdoch will do more harm to his websites’ profitability if he indeed will block all search engines from indexing his sites. Sure, he might have loyal customers who will read WSJ and New York times everyday, but any product and website needs advertising. And free advertising like what Google is doing for them is the best thing that any website can get. He only needs to tweak the website to make it free section and paid section. Perhaps free section could only have some brief news and full articles could be accessed only by paid members etc.

Bad for Google?

In his private mailing list, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo suggested that, this move by News Corp might be bad for Google and good for Google’s competitors. Because he believes, now is the time for Bing and Yahoo to approach News Corp directly and be the exclusive provider of News Corp’s news on their search engines. Obviously this would affect Google’s reach and Google’s competitors could effectively snatch some Search Engine Share from Google. (read his article here).

What is your opinion on this issue? Do you think R.Murdoch is doing a right move by blocking Search Engines? Do you think his move is a loss for Google? (R.Murdoch’s interview on YouTube after the jump) Read more »

Results: Guest posting on Problogger.net

Posted in » Blogging Tips - by Ades

42 Comments 

Around 1.5 months ago I guest-blogged on Darren’s blog at problogger.net. Today I would like to share with you the results of this exercise.

I think the success of the guest-blogging depends on many things, on things like;

• Authority, traffic, user-base… of the blog that you are guest-blogging.
• Topic of your guest-post; how interesting it is, how beneficial it is, how well it is written etc.
• What you have done to capture the new visitors to your blog?

So, as you can see the variables are many. For this reason, it’s very difficult to analyze one guest-post at one particular blog and apply the results on other bogs. However, for simplicity reasons, let’s say what economists like to say “ceteris paribus (all other things being equal)” and proceed with the results. I am sure the results will be beneficial to many bloggers, despite the fact that it’s based on one guest-post on Problogger. Just remember to keep those variables in mind if you decide to guest blog on other blogs. Do some basic research on the blog and its followers, niche, traffic etc. before deciding to give away one of your best articles.

Should you give away your best articles as guest-posts?

When I was done with my blog post titled “5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours“, I was about to push that “publish” button in my WordPress and then I remembered “How about I give away this blog post as guest-post to some high-traffic blog?”. I was satisfied with the quality of the post so I decided to test if it is worth to give away your best articles as guest-posts.

I quickly made a list of potential blogs that I could send my guest-post to. From a handful of blogs that I have selected, Problogger definitely stood out, so I sent a quick email to Darren.

Few things to remember when sending an email:

• Write a brief intro about yourself (name), your blog (give URL) and the topic of your guest-post. Don’t make it more than 5 sentences. No one wants to read long emails.
• Attach the article that you wrote to the email. Top-bloggers are usually busy and do not have time to reply (especially when they do not know you). So make it easy to get published, attach your guest-post to the email.
• Give a time-frame to review and get back to you. 2-3 days should be fine. Let him/her know that if you do not hear back from him/her during this time-frame you will be posting it on your own blog or send to another blogger. This will make things clear for both of you.

The Results

The post itself on Problogger got over 900 tweets. So that’s a lot of traffic, even according to Problogger standards. It also received more than 150 comments.

On my side, Google Analytics is showing that Problogger sent me 384 visitors during the 20 days period after the guest-post was published. Which is not much but then again I am guessing that my WP-Cache plugin might have affected the real stats.

I use caching for my blog and it refreshes every 60 minutes. During the first week MyBlogLog statistics was showing over 100 visitors per day from Problogger. Anyway, my guesstimation is that the traffic was between 300 to 800 visitors for the whole 20 day period. (anyone have details whether wp-cache plugin affects traffic stats?)

RSS Subcribers: +50 (give or take)
Twitter Followers: +100 (give or take)

Conclusion

As a conclusion, for my case I would say the guest-blogging was definitely worth it. Increases in the RSS and Twitter followers and the flow of traffic for the first week was very significant. I certainly noticed the spike in all three.

As for you guys, you should definitely try guest-blogging as one of your marketing strategies. Only thing, like I said in the beginning of this post, choose the target blog and the topic of your guest-post very carefully and wisely. Also, titles play important role too, so make your titles catchy (but not misleading).

I hope you found this post interesting and beneficial. If you did, please tweet, stumble, digg… thanks!

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StackOverflow Careers (Beta)

Posted in » Software - by Ades

17 Comments 

If you are a programmer or an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) then you have probably heard about Joel Spolsky and his company and his book and his blog and his projects. If not, then he is one of the guys you should follow… especially if you are into creating successful startups, products and hiring bright minds to your IT startups.

He has now launched a new project called StackOverflow Careers (Beta) for programmers to submit their CVs. Basically it will be a repository of CVs of programmers. The idea is to reverse the hiring process where instead of employees searching and submitting their CVs for various companies and job openings, it will be employers who will come to StackOverflow Careers database and look for talented programmers.

It’s similar to JobStreet’s PitchYourTalent.com but it’s only for software developers.

Website: careers.stackoverflow.com

Winners of Balsamiq Mockups Contest

Posted in » Contests - by Ades

11 Comments 

Second and Third Winners of the Balsamiq Mockups Contest are Nurbek Jusupov @nurbek and Brad Taylor @bradtaylor_au. Congratulations guys! You are now the owner of highly acclaimed mockup designing software each, enjoy!

I would like to thank Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni, Founder and CEO of Balsamiq Studios for sponsoring three copies of his great software for this contest.

If you want to own a copy for yourself after this, you can get it from www.balsamiq.com.