But recently, my blog has hopped out of the beginners’ phase. I’m saying that because my blog is now getting over 800 visitors everyday who are really interested in my website and spend time. More than half of the blogs on entrecard are hosted on free hosts and the only source of traffic for them is entrecard.

I had been thinking for a long time for leaving entrecard, but that decision was put to action easily when entrecard deleted my account and gave nothing for the 38, 000 Entrecard credits I had in my account.

Other bloggers, namely John Chow, Syed Balkhi and Problogger moved out of it a long, long time ago. I was just looking for the right time. I used to recommend Entrecard to all newbie bloggers, but I don’t think I would anymore.

Below are 8 reasons why I think entrecard.com will be facing a downturn in the coming months, in fact it already is.

1. The bounce rate used to be near 75% but now it topped over 92%.
2. I got around 170 drops a while ago everyday but visitors from entercard + direct visitors was equal to less than 150 visitors. Which indicates that there are cheaters in the system.
3. Abundant Entrecard Credits - There is so much inflation in the entrecard economy that no one values entrecard credits anymore.
4. More than 90% are low-quality blogs.
5. Entrecard support sucks real-time.
6. Entrecard provides n0 benefit in the long run, i.e. you stop dropping and you stop getting visitors.
7. Traffic from entrecard is next to useless, I’ll discuss that below.
8. Recently, Entrecard started giving credits for completing offers. Have they gone nuts?

I was spending around 42,500 entrecard credits every month to advertise on entrecard’s site-wide 125×125 ad button. Entrecard’s team boasted that they get 8 million impressions out of which less than 3 visited my website everyday. I don’t doubt their stats but I think that their traffic is useless.

Entrecard isn’t anymore what it used it be or at least when I joined it. I wouldn’t really recommend others to use it unless you have a boring personal blog and don’t want it to grow.

Hence, entrecard is now giving traffic that is useless. It is very time-consuming to drop cards at other blogs and end up getting worthless traffic isn’t really worth it. Their team is now concnetrating more on making money and the quality of their system has dropped significantly.

• More than 100 Google accounts are disabled every month for no reason.
• Less than 1% of them are lucky enough to get their accounts enabled again.
• The longest duration of suspension of a Google account that I found was 4 years. Which means: It’s been 4 years since the account was disabled, and Google still doesn’t forgive.
• In my encounter only 1 out of 200 people was satisfied with Google’s official support for Google accounts and their suspension.
• Surprisingly, around 20% of the blogs that had their accounts disabled were about Google or one of it’s product and their hacks, news, etc.
• None of the people who had their accounts’ suspended received a notification from Google.

Now that I built the grounds for the talk let’s get on with the topic. If you’re a regular reader here then you must be familiar with my bad experience with Google in the past. There weren’t many, but one that was devastating enough for me when blogger disabled my account and of course blogger is a part of Google.

What I haven’t shared earlier was that the first Adsense account that I used was shared by me and my friend. We started off with it in 2007 and like a typical greedy teenager my friend clicked his ads a few times.

We got hit on the head with a stone that read, “Your account is disabled”. While  I was taking in charge I thought that it might be a small suspension and I would be re-accepted back. But as I speak of today, it has been 28 weeks since we got suspended from Adsense. We tried re-applying more than 50 times, but no luck.

Turned out that I wasn’t the only one who was bashed by Google on Adsense and Blogger. I mean I would do the same thing if I was in their shoes, but if a guy comes after 2 years and asks for re-instating his account then he might be serious.

What enforced me to write this article was that I recently happened to have a look at the stats for my article about blogger disabling my account and saw that it was gaining increasing visitors from search engines although it has been on top for those keywords for almost 6 months now.

Then, I happened to check on the blogger.com’s official forum and several other webmaster forums and I was surprised to find that there were more than 150 bloggers claiming that their accounts had been disabled for no reason. I had a good laugh when I read this reply by some person:

Ouch! I can see the red rash on your face from the hard slap from blogger. Don’t lose hope and create a new blog elsewhere or on blogger again if you still have a slice of trust for blogger and google. No need to rant about the disabled account. I’ve been roaming on the forums and Google’s contact forms like a wandering dog for a year and a half now to get my 15 blogs back and the dog’s brain tells me that it is as hopeless as a twilight obsessed girl. So please move on…

Another person wrote:

Don’t waste your time expecting a Google worker to come through this. They won’t help you - they don’t help anyone.

Those folks sure don’t sound too happy with Blogger’s support with their responses.

Since I’ve been getting quite a lot of people coming from search phrases like “Blogger Disabled Account”, I was fortunate enough to have a word with a few of those who left comments.

Around 60% switched to Wordpress while the rest just quit blogging! I’ll tell you the most funny part of the whole story, I know spammers inside out. If Google deletes a Gmail account for spam, the spammer will create a new one.

If Google deletes one of their Adsense accounts for click fraud, they’ll have 10 other accounts running in no time. They’re professionals and in my opinion Google tries to take the frustration off by disabling the accounts of innocent users.

The bottom line is, Google thinks that it is acting very smart with it’s account suspension policy but I suppose they would also not know the shocking facts that I listed out here. In case they did, it’s not very nice of them to overlook that.

In my case, I wanted to figure out a solution to the problem of having my website sit at level zero when it is in the Google Sandbox. Practically there is a 99% chance for you to get thrown into the sandbox, you may be quite lucky if you escape it.

During that 6 - 12 months in no-man zone sandbox, you get no traffic from search engines. You know, ideas come and go. By the time your website escapes from the sandbox, you might have lost interest in that niche.

This happens a lot of times and there is a very practical way of getting out of this situation without having to rely on traffic from social bookmarking websites. They say: At times, examples explain better than definitions. So I’ll also sum it up on an example.

You choose to enter the niche as an electrician’s affiliate. You just start a website and you try to rank for the keyword ‘wiring management’. Then you  discover that after 2 weeks it got sand-boxed. Now, we all know that search engine traffic is the best converting.

An alternative could be to use PPC, but I have a better idea. By doing a simple search  on Google I found that it has some competition by the fact that the first ranking website is a company, they have their website’s homepage ranking number 1, plus the website has sitelinks which makes it almost impossible for us to rank number 1 without having our website compete for it.

So my strategy is, if you can’t get the first position then get the 2nd, 3rd and 4th position. I’m not talking about each one individually. I’m talking about getting all three positions. Next you go to ezine articles and write 1 article. That’s right, 1 article which you think would be highly targeted for the keyword which in this case is wiring management.

Next create a squidoo lens and write a review of the affiliate. This will be used to generate direct sales for yourself and now you will put link to your main website on both the article and the squidoo lens in nofollow. Why? This is where my indirect organic traffic theory comes into play.

I say, use your main website as a middle way between customer landing and the merchant’s website. So basically, in both the article and the lens you will encourage the visitors to go to your website from where they will go to the merchants website.

This will lower your CTR on your main website by 1-2% but this technique is highly effective. I’m currently on holidays, but when I come back I will detailed article on all services that you can use and achieve the best out of it. Once your website is out of the sandbox, remove the nofollow from the links and your website jumps directly into the top 30. As I said SEO isn’t everything, there are many other ways to achieve the same aims you have for a page you’re trying to rank for SEO.

Moreover, ranking for a keyword using ezinearticles or squidoo is 10 times more easier than having your website’s page rank itself on the SERPS. If your website is already out of the sandbox then you can use this technique to dominate the top 10 results and maximize your level of conversions. So what do you think about this technique?

Unlike the average contest I am not putting any 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes. I am categorizing the prizes and letting people choose what they want to win. All packages are equally luring and I’m sure you’ll have a tough time deciding between them.

Package 1 - Blogging Package (Worth $276.24)

1. Bloggers Bible Course from Caroline Middlebrook (Worth $119)
2. Ultimate Blogging Theme from Carl Ocab of Make Money Online (Worth $67)
3. 1 hour blog consultation from make money on the internet (Worth $60)
5. 5, 000 Entrecard Credits from tips to save money (Worth $30.12)

Package 2 - SEO Package (Worth $300.48)

1. SEO Page Analysis from Nicolas Prudhon (Worth $100)
2. 1 month PR4 Link from Symphony of Love (Worth $20)
3. 1 month site-wide Blogroll Link on make money on the internet (Worth $60)
4. 10, 000 Entrecard Credits from Vanilla Seven (Worth $60.24)
5. 5, 000 Entrecard Credits from Halloween Items (Worth $30.12)
6. 5, 000 Entrecard Credits from mature not senile (Worth $30.12)

Package 3 - Internet Marketing Package (Worth $304.23)

1. Recording of a Seminar about marketing and copywriting from The Bad Blogger (Worth $197)
2. 1 month membership to the winning circle from Gyutae Park from Winning the Web. (Worth $47)
3. 4, 000 Entrecard Credits from Seek No More (Worth $24.09)
4. 6, 000 Entrecard Credits from How to make money on the internet (Worth $36.14)
   

Package 4 - Advertising Package (Worth $300.60)

1. 1 Week Advertisement on The Journeys of Cactus Jack Splash. (Worth $5)
2. 3 months advertisement on The Bad Blogger (Worth $60)
3. 1 month advertisement from Fat Man Unleashed (Worth $40)
4. 1 month advertisement from webmaster peers (Worth $30)
5. 1 month advertisement on seek no more (Worth $15)
6. 10, 000 Entrecard Credits from a little boy’s blog (Worth $60.24)
7. 10, 000 Entrecard Credits from subjective soup (Worth $60.24)
8. 5, 000 Entrecard Credits from Weird Stories (Worth $30.12)

Package 5 - Mix Package (Worth $307.24)

1. 1 Ultimate Blogging Theme from Carl Ocab of Make Money Online (Worth $67)
2. 1 hour Blog Consultancy from of Make Money on the Internet (Worth $60)
3. 1 month Site-wide Blogroll Link on Make Money (Worth $60)
4. 1 month advertisement on vanilla seven (Worth $10)
5. 1 month advertisement on simple happy life (Worth $10)
6. 3, 000 Entrecard Credits from Earn Money Online (Worth $18.07)
7. 4, 000 Entrecard Credits from simple happy life (Worth $24.09)
8. 3, 000 Entrecard Credits from Random Detox (Worth $18.07)
9. 1 month advertisement on mature not senile (Worth $25)
10. 1 copy of easy Cash Blueprint from mature not senile (Worth $15)

Miscellaneous (Worth $80 and counting)

Prizes will be put under this heading as they are entered into the contest as it has started. When choosing the category that you want to enter the contest for, this category cannot be chosen. All participants are automatically be entered for these prizes.

1. 3 x 1 Week Advertisement on The Journeys of Cactus Jack Splash. (Worth $5 each)
2. $10 from Lee Kahong of Make Money Online.
3. 3, 000 Entrecard Credits from Mommy’s Little Corner (Worth $18.07)
   
4. 3, 000 Entrecard Credits from Cacais Step and Journey (Worth $18.07)
5. 3, 000 Entrecard Credits from moms…check nyo (Worth $18.07)

How To Join?

1. Follow me on twitter @3arn and tweet: “Just got 2 entries by following @3arn and tweeting about his $1600+ contest. Join and win cool prizes! Details at: http://bit.ly/3arnc”. (2 entries)
2. Write about this contest on your blog and also tell about the package you want to get entries for. 1 link should be pointing to this contest page and the other to the blog. (10 entries) Get 5 extra points by copy and pasting the list of sponsors of the package you have chosen.
3. Review my blog. (10 entries) If I think your review is detailed and at least 250 words, I’ll give you +2 entries.
4. Review any other article on this blog. (2 entries each) (Maximum 3)
5. Review the blog of any sponsor in the list. (5 entries)
6. Subscribe to this blog by mail and confirm. (1 point)
7. Fave this blog on Technorati by clicking here. (1 entry)
8. Thumb up this post on stumbleupon. (1 entry)

Rules

1. Your twitter account should not be a dummy account, to prove that you should have at least 200 followers and an active account.
2. Your blog must be indexed by google and must have at least 10 posts.
3. My blog’s name is not 3arn! 3arn is just the domain, the blog’s name is what you see on the title bar of your browser when you visit this blog. Keep that in mind while writing the review. If you still have any confusion then contact me.
4. All review must be at least 100 words.
5. Each participant can enter for only 1 package.

Once you’re done doing all these things head over to the contact page and send me an email telling all that you’ve done. For example:

Hey Abdulrehman, I’m mailing you to let you know about my entries. I blogged about this contest at ABC (10) and blogged about your blog at DEF (10). I also blogged about sponsor Z at GHI (5) and subscribed to your blog with example@example.com (1). I tweeted the message with my twitter account @Jkl (2) and also thumbed up this post with username MNO (1). This makes 28 entries. I would like to enter for the ‘Mix Package’. Please confirm my message and my entries.

After sending this message you must post a comment at this post telling that you have done so. After that I will confirm and mail you to let you know about your entries. Please make sure that you enter the right name and email address in the contact form.

The contest has started and will run for 1 month until the midnight of 20th July and the winners will be announced shortly after that. The winners will be picked through random.org’s list randomizer. Now get those fingers moving and get your entries rolling to participate and get your hands on these cool prizes. I wish you all the best of luck!

I remember having a chat with this guy from UK and he asked me about getting traffic. I asked him, “Do you know about SEO?”, “Who? the Senior Executive Officer?” he replied. For such a guy, it’s hard to explain what SEO is and how it can benefit you and your business.

This is not only for those who do not know about SEO, in fact this is also for the people who do know about it. Let me just say: Would you be able to rank a domain you just bought for a keyword within 4-5 days.

If you’re a whitehat SEO believer I could expect a no. So where does you SEO go then? What if the keyword you’re targeting is time-sensitive. I mean, you just bought a domain yesterday (15th June) and you want to rank for keyword targeting America Day (July 4th), it is next to impossible to rank for keywords in 2 weeks.

So what I’m trying to tell is that keep you options open. Look for alternatives to SEO. I’m not talking about pay-per-click ads or traffic from social bookmarking websites.

Have you ever heard of the term indirect organic traffic? I’m sure you haven’t, because I just made that up. But what it will reveal to you might just change the ways you get traffic.

Yesterday I was talking to this guy who just received his $600 cheque from ShareAsale which was what he earned in a total of 2 weeks. I got him to tell me his marketing strategies and I was surprised when he told me that he didn’t know a thing about SEO and never used any PPC program.

Basically, this guy did not spend a cent and he made money with even les knowledge than me. Of course, he had his website which isn’t even indexed by Google as of now (around 3 weeks old). Curious to know his strategy right?

He joined a forum related to his niche. He spent 1 week gaining authority in a forum. Posting, answering, asking and helping like crazy. So once you have authority you obviously have a great deal of newbies asking you questions. So all he did was refer people to his website and after 2 weeks he makes 23 sales and makes approximately $600. Not bad eh?

The story doesn’t end here. I’ve been doing this for 3 months now and have gotten traffic to website which have been sitting in the Google Sandbox for around 3 months now. I will write a post sometime this week illustrating how you can get the best out of no SEO and let it prove to be more effective.

Everybody wants to make easy money online. Why? More than 50% of the people in the make money online niche don’t even want to aim for making a fortune. While the fact is that more than 90% of the people in this niche will not be able to even make a living making money off the internet.

That’s when the question drops in that do you want to make easy money online? If the answer is yes then there is one warning: By nature all humans are greedy, if you cannot control your greed you will still make money but will never make easy money. This is different than making extra money, as I’ve already talked about how you can earn extra money in my previous articles. However, it’s only different when you look at it from the perspective I want you to, which is the money-maker’s perspective.

I can see the words coming out of your other ear. What I was trying to say was that you can never make money to your maximum capability if you’re resting. When you’re greedy, your greed want let you take work easy and hence you will make more money but it will not be easy.

The only reason why thousands of people are joining us every year is because of marketers telling them that they can make easy money online. Showing pictures of themselves resting at the beaches, their ferraris and the good life which certainly depicts that making money online is easy which is not the case to some extent.

Many internet marketers argue that there is in fact no such thing as ‘make easy money’. I’ll agree with them when you see that at every other website, they don’t even know what they’re talking about. They grab a few of their friends & family members to write testimonials and the newbie falls into the trap.

I agree with that thinking. However, if you learn things yourself and learn from free stuff from experts, that’s how you’ll succeed. This can also help you make easy money. This time I mean, getting more output from less work. For example, you work 1 hour a day and average around $100 per day. So that gives an hourly pay of $100 which I call easy money!

I decided to write down a plan that a person can use to make easy money. It would not involve a lot of efforts and can be easily used to make easy money unless you’re greedy as mentioned above.

Make Easy Money With A Blog

I know it sounds hard when you hear the fact that more than 98% of the blogs out there get less than 50 visitors a day which contributes to somewhere near 1 cent a week. Only 2% of the blogs are generating more traffic than that and even out of those more than 50% cannot make money out of it, forget making easy money.

The problem is: Either they’re doing it all wrong or they don’t want to get traffic and make money. Well whichever the case is, I suppose you do want to make easy money, don’t you? Then please read what is necessary and don’t skip that out.

I will not get into lengthy details, instead I’ll just highlight some points that can help you improve your chances of success or tell you where you’re going wrong. If you don’t have one, just look around the blog and you’ll find a guide on how to start a blog.

Pick a niche that you know something about. Don’t put Adsense yet! Write around 2-3 unique articles a week and put in some effort to write 1 pillar article a month. Be active in social networks and other blogs. Try to link bait.

After 2-3 months, if your blog is pulling in 200-300 unique visitors a day and has a pagerank 3 above then throw in the adsense ads. For the adsense placement, make sure that the ad is above the fold (the user does not have to scroll down to see the ad) and is on a place where the user is likely to look.

That should get you around 15-20 clicks a day (depends on the type of traffic) and if the advertiser pays well you can make $15-$20 a day and could check in a $500 cheque from Google at the end of the month. Now that’s what I call easy money!

Make Easy Money Online By Creating Online Assets

This might be a little linked with the previous ones but this wouldn’t exactly fit the definition of easy money but once you do a little work then I’d consider it the most highest level of easy money.

By online assets I don’t mean flipping website and all or having valuable domains. What I mean is that make a website, work on it to get recurring traffic and then put it on auto-pilot and make money with it.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I’m talking about niche blogs. Unlike the first ones, these involve less work and are easier to set up. First you need to find a money making niche and get all your keywords. Next, start a blog over the keywords and the whole topic.

Write around 2 articles a week, each article targeting a sub-keyword. Start building backlinks slowly. After a few months, you may reduce your posting frequency to 2 or 3 articles a month. But as before, do not put adsense before 2-3 months. Or before your website/blog starts appearing on the first page for the keywords you’re targeting.

The advantage of this method is that, some niches take a lot of time for people to find them. Hence, if you find them at the right time you can profit off those keywords for almost little or no work. I call this complete automation of making money and totally easy money once you’re done and trust me neither one of the method is as hard as it sounds so have a strong gut to try them out.

Don’t neglect the importance of these words, I’m giving valuable information out for free. This might be the very time in your life when you start to make easy money online!

I found it hard to tweet at first and I still do. Usually, I don’t have something very special going that I’d want to tweet about. So, I decided to go on the hunt to get some good followers. I followed around 300 people and got 230 people following me back which is not bad at all.

After this comes the important part. Was Twitter useful? The only important post that came in between was the last one about Bing. It got tweeted by me and Re-tweeted by two other people. Overall, I got around 50 visitors from Twitter thanks to that. So, this means that Twitter is in fact a great tool.

I was thinking of doing this post a while ago but just forgot about it because I know that many of my blogs readers would be Twitter-ers. So if you use Twitter, you can check my twitter page and follow me and I’ll follow you back. Soon I’ll put up a link to Twitter on the header of this blog. How were your results with Twitter?

Firstly, they still have live search in mind so they think that Bing is no different. Secondly, people have forgotten about searching, they’re too busy googling. So when a new search engine takes on searching, they can’t accept to search when they’re having so much fun googling.

I use Google pretty much every day. Around 40-50 times on an average but that doesn’t mean that I get too accustomed to Google and wouldn’t even have the courtesy to try another search engine. Might sound lame to loyal Google supporters but the following are five reasons why you should give Bing a chance.

#1 - Bing Saves A Lot Of Time

This screen shot became popular on Digg somewhere around 3 days ago. Although the picture speaks for itself, I’ll just say that you don’t see this on Google normally. This is an extreme plus point for Bing users.

#2 - Bing Knows How To Answer Questions

Just because of the small new feature of Bing of being able to display extra information really gives them an upper hand. They really did work on their algorithm which now produces great results if you type in questions. After looking at these pictures below you might say: “Use the define syntax instead”. For your information, the define tag works on both but more than 95% of Google users wouldn’t even know what a define tag is.

#3 - Bing Doesn’t Rely On 10 Year Old Designs

I started using the internet back in 1999. Ever since, I’ve seen Google with the exact same design. They may have added new features every now and then but they have the same faded design. Although I didn’t like their design at first and said “If you ever start a search engine try not to display your knowledge of renewable energy resources like windmills and solar panels“.

I had to change my opinion because that’s dynamic and it changes every day (so far). Moreover, if you hover over the image, at different positions there are some facts that you might want to know. It’s helpful, you can learn a few things everyday. This might be in counter to Google Doodles but I find this one much more useful. After all, this is Web 2.0. you have to keep up.

I’m not saying that Google’s interface is not good, in fact they have one of the most user-friendly interfaces on the web right now because of the simplicity of the design. But some things have to change. Like, when was the last time you used the ‘I’m feeling Lucky!’ button?

#4 - You Don’t Have To Go To Bing ‘Hot Trends’

If you’re an internet marketer, you must be aware of Google hot trends. It basically shows you what’s hot on the web right now or on a more marketer’s approach: It shows you which keywords are being searched the most right now. However, following the idea from Twitter, Bing also shows what’s popular or in other words: Which keywords are being searched the most. Unlike Google, Bing makes it more easy to see what’s popular and more people get to see what’s going on.

#5 - Bing Allows Feedback

“So, Google supporter. When was the last time you got help from google when you needed it?”. Whether that be a search problem, requesting a new feature or whatever, you need to have a feedback form. If you tell me: “Google has so many users, they can’t afford to have a support team answering thousands of mails a day”, I’ll say: “The former number 1 company in the U.S. and the current number 4 company in the U.S. can’t afford to have a feedback form and support staff with that? They have billions in profits every year, squeezing out a million for support will not hurt a bit.”.

Leave that, Google doesn’t even provide a proper contact form for users of Blogger and Orkut. Remember when they disabled my blogger account, and unfortunately I couldn’t even contact them. But wait. I forgot, you actually can contact Google. Why don’t you send them a fax at +1 650-253-0001? Pretty user friendly right?

Now let’s switch the whole scenario to Bing. Even though they don’t have other services yet, they’re providing a feedback form to any user. Moreover, it is at the front page. I found it hard to believe and got to them with a stupid question. I check after 30 minutes and I have a reply. A useful reply to what I was asking by the Bing support team. Can you challenge this?

Hope that helps change the image of Bing in your mind a little bit and you might give it a try. Take a tour of Bing and I’m sure you’ll find it useful to some extent. In fact, it is already catching fire, stat counter shows that it took a jump ahead Yahoo! in the market share and that was because of a decrease in the market share of Google! By the way, I might have sounded biased on Bing’s side but this was not a sponsored review!

The contest is to celebrate the birthdays of both my blog and mine. However, since I want to make the contest big, I do have to get sponsors. So, I decided: Why not give a call to all my readers and ask them if they want to sponsor something.

But I Can’t Sponsor Anything!

I’m highly aware of the fact that about 50% of my blog’s readers are bloggers and webmasters. You can easily chip in a banner ad for a month, giving cash, etc. In fact, below is a whole list of ideas for you to sponsor stuff:

1. Ad Space
2. Text Links (On high PR pages,  e.g. You can sponsor in-text links from 6 of your pages which are PR3. Not permanent, just for a month!)
3. Cash
4. Domain
5. Web-Hosting
6. Banner/Blog (Re-)Design
7. E-book(s)
8. Blog Consulting
9. Blog Review
10. Other e-products
11. Entrecard Credits (Minimum 3000 credits)

Those are just 11, if you come up with any other thing which has a value of $5 or more then just hit me up an e-mail. Now for the important part.

How Do I Benefit From The Sponsorship?

Simple. You get free publicity. I know that seems kind of short, I’ll list the benefits below:

1. You get free publicity for your website/blog and you’ll get traffic!. (3arn.Net is now averaging around 400 unique visitors every day!)
2. You get free backlinks from 3arn.Net. When the sponsors are compiled, I will post it on the blog and hence you will be mentioned around 2-3 times on the blog. For your  information, 3arn.Net is PR3 and you will benefit!
3. The contest participants will be encouraged to blog about or link to the sponsors to receive more entries, you might as well get some backlinks from other blogs.

That’s not it! Throwing in an ad space which hasn’t been sold for 3 months in exchange for these benefits would not be a bad trade!

However, everyone is encouraged to sponsor as much as they can! Why? It’s simply because participants give most traffic and backlinks to the top 10 or 15 sponsors. So you do want to be in there.

How Do I Contact You?

If you feel you want to sponsor something orhave a question to ask me you can simply go to the contact page and let me know, not here in the comments. I’m looking forward to hear from you!

P.S. I know you can sponsor something at the least so please be creative and sponsor something, don’t be stingy!

Prior to this, a coming soon page was displayed. But yesterday, they released it’s ‘preview’ version. No comments about how it’s working because I’m still not going to use it anyways, although I did give it a few tries. They have kind of jacked up their algorithms and their search is better than before.

But thinking from a marketer’s point-of-view, then here are the facts:

• Live search sent me a maximum of 5 hits per month.
• The search terms were so stupid that made me wish that my website never existed.
• The bounce rate never got below 90%!
• Bing sent me 12 hits on the first day of it’s release.
• The hits were from popular keywords hence giving me useful and targeted visitors.
• The bounce rate is 10%!!

The hits I got from Bing can then again be seen from two perspectives.

1. It’s probably the first day so it did not send me as much hits as it will send me in the future.
2. The buzz is all about Bing. Everybody’s using Bing and there is extra-ordinary buzz about it. Once people realize that it sucks, they might never use it again. Hence, the traffic goes down!

As for the launch, my stats tell me that it is going great :-P. However, the new found success of windows will only be proved once we see a consistent flow of traffic (assuming that we do optimize for bing in the future). My current rating of Bing would be ‘not bad’ from the eye of a search engine user. Although I have no idea why they have windmills on the main page.

Tip: If you ever start a search engine try not to display your knowledge of renewable energy resources like windmills and solar panels. This is a very serious advice.