Last month I was honored to be invited to contribute to personal branding magazine published by Dan Schawbel.

In my article I was sharing my experience building my personal brand which is one year old already! Here is an extract:

Starting and developing your own business is tough - you never know where you’ll be successful and where you’ll fail. My business ended up being very broad - I didn’t limit myself to SEOsmarty.com. I participated in numerous other projects that generated income and gave me more exposure. Ann Smarty has become both my business and personal name.

Unfortunately, I am not attending IM Spring Break (my daughter is only 2 months old and I can’t leave her even for a minute) but a good friend of mine really wants to go - so this post is for her!

As I am not going to the event, I can’t participate in the contest - so I am writing this post so that Aly had a pingback from me!

Hey, everyone! Let’s support SEO Aly! She has no money and REALLY wants to go to IM Spring Break. She is enthusiastic, smart and always willing to help, so you please create a post and link it to 7 Things Aly Thinks Will Happen at IM Spring Break.

Are you addicted to all-things-search? If yes, this pretty nice little start-up will amuse you:

JustFoodStuff.com offers “reverse recipe search”: give it ingredients and it will search for recipes for you! With me it worked not so smooth - but I just loved the idea!

Image by *clairity*

Check out this awesome dictionary of sniglets - words that are not in the dictionary but should be. That’s a great source of inspiration to brainstorm new link-bait or a domain name!

A sniglet is a word that should be in the dictionary but isn’t. Sniglets are the brainchild of comedian Rich Hall who, with a little help from his friends, wrote a series of books containing sniglets in the mid-eighties. While Rich Hall invented the word “sniglet” itself, sniglets are actually a long-running popular joke in which people make up their own humorous words to define things or concepts that have no “official” definitions.

Also check out this cool list of worst 100 nonexistent words of all time.

Dooblet is a new search engine that offers to find the best alternative for anything:”car model, software name, music group, technology name, philosophy term, medicine, company, … “

Here is the suggested alternatives for “apple” (note: all I meant was the fruit:)):

[Post credit: FriedBeef.com] Even if you never publish your email address online, you can still receive spam because you use this email address to sign up for various newsletters or membership-only services. One of the methods to avoid that I’ve been using so far was to keep a separate free email account for all sign-ups. But this way you can miss some important alerts from the service you have registered with.

An excellent post “How To Sign Up And Avoid Email Spam” offers a geekier approach to registering online and I thought it should definitely be shared with my readers.

And here is another great free no-registration service for that: Mailinator.com that creates temporal account for you to check the site you are going to sign up.

Post image: “hooray, no spam here!“

I for one am going to show it to each web developer I will be partnering in the future. And besides, it can be a good reference material for an HTML newbie.

Basically, Tabbloid does nothig more than conerts the RSS feed you submit into a pretty two-column magazine-style PDF file - but congrats to the guys for a clever linkbaiting idea.

Acronym dictionary gives a nice collection of modern funny acronyms (you can check Urban Dictionary for more user-generated ones).

Here are just a few of them:

• AKK = Asleep at the keyboard
• BIL = Boss is listening
• BTDTGTTSAWIO = Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and wore it out, etc

Here is how the heatmap of SEOsmarty.com looks:

According to their FAQ:

The Feng-GUI heatmap service is an automatic alternative to eye-tracking. Unlike eye-tracking or click-based heatmaps, Feng-GUI creates heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at.

Simply put, the algo is based on:

• color;
• orientation;
• density, contrast;
• intensity;
• size;
• closure;
• curve.

The tool is also claimed to be 70% as accurate as Eye and Mouse Tracking.

I never did any eye-tracking research for SEOsmarty.com, so I can’t compare but clicking through their recent submissions, I do find the tool worth checking.