This is to inform you all that I will no more be updating this blog due to lack of time. I am keeping most of my posts for people to view (but not comment). I will also be not replying to any of the comments, hence I am removing comments as well.

Also, we are not more accepting any kind of advertising on the site.

Thank you.

But, around 3 months back I thought of optimizing my site for yahoo as well, so that I can get a good ranking there. My work for the last 3 months has paid me back. I am able to achieve the top 5 ranking from my keywords in Yahoo.

So, what did I do to get my site up in Yahoo SERPs? I am not going to put them exactly on what I did, but I am going to put down some general Yahoo SERP guidelines, which in my opinion, works for Yahoo SEO. Let me call them “Yahoo Search Ranking Factors.”

• Correct HTML - Yahoo puts more emphasis on correct HTML. So make sure your site is W3C compliant.
• Fresh Content - Yahoo likes fresh content more than Google. So, make sure you are regularly (at-least one a week) updating your site.
• More Links From Yahoo Sites Try to get more links from Yahoo sites like Yahoo directory, Yahoo buzz, Yahoo answers, Mybloglog, Delicious.com etc. Google is “just” a search engine while Yahoo is a full fledged portal. Yahoo loves links from its own sites.
• Yahoo uses meta keywords tags for categorization of your site. Yahoo says that they do not use meta keywords for ranking, but I have seen my site ranking for a misspelling of my keywords on Yahoo just because while writing my keywords I added a misspelling. So, I don’t agree on that Yahoo.
• Yahoo gives more weightage to on-site SEO factors like title, headings, keyword-in-domain etc., than Google.
• Yahoo prefers a keyword density little higher than Google. Proper heading & structures are required too.
• Links from article directories like articlemarketer.com, isnare.com, ezinearticles.com etc. seems to have mattered more.
• More weightage to age of the site than Google.
• Yahoo considers click-popularity also in SERPs.
• Your category in yahoo directory also matters.

I hope these tips are helpful for you to rank well in Yahoo search engine.

Persuasion is the art and ability of influencing a person’s thoughts through some specific methods and strategies. Psychologist Robert Cialdini has written a book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It’s a really a great book, which tells you how you can use the laws of persuasion to convert your prospects into actual sales. This is one of the best books I recommend for anybody on online marketing and sales.

Even though some people may not believe it, but it is true that human nature and behavior is quite predictable for some specific actions. For example, if you show them some specific type of advertisement, the viewers will respond in a predictable fashion. This is why the advertising companies are making so much money. By understanding how these laws of persuasion works, you can help doing better marketing and making better sales online.

Laws of Persuasion

There are 6 laws of persuasion.

In short:

1. Law of Reciprocity
2. Law of Commitment and Consistency
3. Law of Liking
4. Law of Scarcity
5. Law of Authority
6. Law of Social Proof

Now we will discuss all these laws in detail. These are called laws because they work on predictable human behavior.

Law of Reciprocity

It is in human nature to reciprocate any favor given to them. If someone gives you something which you wanted (or actually, you don’t want, but
you think that you wanted), you will feel obliged and would try to reciprocate giving something in return.

So, if you are selling something on your website and offering a free sample of it, people feel obliged and would like to return your favor by buying a product from your website. So this law of reciprocity can help you convert better on your website if you are offering something free or doing some sort of favor to your visitors.

Law of Commitment and Consistency

Law of commitment and consistency states that people try to be consistent in their thoughts and actions. Once they have taken a stand on something,
they will try to stick to it and it would be difficult for them to move from that stand. A simple example can be seen in a simple argument between
two people. The person giving wrong arguments sometimes realize that he is wrong, but still he will keep his stand on that side only. Similarly, if you
have made a commitment to some cause, it is easier to convince to increase it. This is why offline sales persons try to get “yes” out of your
mind. It makes your mindset into yes. So after committing yourself to “yes”, you will try to be consistent and will not say “no” to the product
offering by sales person.

This law of commitment and consistency can also be used for online affiliate sales by asking some positive questions on your website for which the customer says “yes” in his mind many times. And then offering your product with positive mindset. For Example:
- Do you really want to help yourself?
- Are you committed to help yourself?
- Do you want to improve your quality of life?
Then download this ebook of ours and achieve all this.

Law of Liking

Law of liking states that if you like someone, you will be more inclined to please them by doing a favor or buying a product. Offline example of law of liking is “good Cop, Bad Cop”, where person starts thinking that good cop is on his side.

The law of liking can be used in affiliate marketing by making your visitor comfortable on your website and making him liking you. So if your visitor think that you are like him and he likes you, there are more chances of him converting into sales.

Example: Let say you are selling a ebook about “Finding Teacher’s Job”. You can use the law of liking by giving statements like “There was a time when I was also searching for a good teacher’s job and wasted lots of my time going places and doing the search. I wrote this book for my type of people who are search for such jobs and don’t want to waste much of their time”. By stating this, you convince the visitor that you are/were like him
and he starts liking you (we like people more who are like us).

Law of Scarcity

We like to get things which are scarce. For example, lets say there is a product which you may not want to buy right now, but the moment in becomes “last one left”, you starts thinking of buying it.

I see the examples of this law being used on forums a lot where people sell some sort of ebooks. They keep the price to $99 and sell “just 5 copies at $10″ (which is actually the price on which the person wants to sell. But people gets into the law of scarcity and think that this $10 price is scarce and buy it.

So if you are selling a product and mark it as “limited number of copies will be sold” and states that only “last few left”, there are more chances of completed sales. You can later always increase the “number of copies”.

Law of Authority

Law of authority states that, we try to follow what the authorities do. We think that this is good enough for them; it should be good enough for me as well.

Offline examples of this can be seen on “Celebrity Endorsements”. Online examples of this can be seen in forums where people want to buy products reviewed by people who have authority status in the forum (more posts, more itrader, more reputation). If some authority person says that product is worth the money, many people buy them.

You can also use the law of authority on your website by creating some virtual authorities. For example, if you are selling some product related to pregnancy, you can use words like “Gynecologist experts have verified that the product is safe and produces great results”. Now who is the gynecologist expert, it may be you, yourself. Nobody asks that. So try to create some authority on your website and use the law of authority to make more sales.

Law of Social Proof

If everybody is doing it, I should do it as well. Example, if everybody around is laughing on a joke, you will smile as well even if you did not understand the joke. You think that if everybody is doing something, it must be right and you should do it as well.

Offline example of this can be seen on the advertisements of the “bestseller books”. “One Million Copies Sold”. You think that people are buying it, so it must be good. And you buy it as well.

So if you want to use this law to improve your online sales, provide the social proof that your product is being used by other people as well. You can provide this proof by “Testimonials” and “User Reviews”. If you are providing a review of a product and using affiliate link to make a sale on that page, then use the comments box on that page to get other people reviews on that as well. The more comments that page gets from people, there are more chances of sales, as people see that many people are
buying it and happy with it.

Summary:
So in short these are the 6 laws of persuasion to influence the thoughts of online customers and how can they be used.

1. Law of Reciprocity (Offer something free)
2. Law of Commitment and Consistency (Ask question with “yes” as answers)
3. Law of Liking (Prove that you are like them)
4. Law of Scarcity (Only last 2 copies left)
5. Law of Authority (Experts says its good)
6. Law of Social Proof (Testimonials and Comments)

Your site is mentioned on a big PR7 charitable site for some charity work you did. When can you see the effect of this link on your site’s rankings on the search engine. When do you the link link juice of the site propagates to you.

Well, this happened to me about two months back. I immediately started tracking it so that I can get the answer for this question.

Two of my small niche sites were mentioned on a PR7 charity site. My friend who works for the charity informed me about it. Both of my current sites were PR2.

Its been two months for the event and here are my analysis for the same.

• I started seeing the benefit for the same from day 10^th in SERPs. Even after the 10^th day the SERPs were improving. After around 40 days the ranking stabilized.
• The site which were already ranking on page three for a quite competitive keywords came up in top 10.
• The site which was not ranking in top 10 pages (though the keyword was not as competitive as in the other case), the site didn’t come in top 50.
• The keyword which was the anchor text for the link from the charity site was the one for which ranking improved most. But all the keywords “related” to that keyword have also shown traffic increase of around 20% each.
• For the other keywords on the site, which were not related to the keyword in the anchor text of the link, there was hardly any difference in the traffic.
• Even after two months, still both the sites have PR2
• Total traffic improvement is around 45% for one site and around 32% for the other in last two months. I am assuming that the traffic will also increase in the third month.
• All of the SERP changes are first seen in US based datacenters of Google and were very slowly propagated to other datacenters. It took around more than a month to see things on other datacenters what was visible on US datacenters.

I have posted my results here. Tell me what information can you grab from this study? Does this say something about the link juice propagation time? Is PR still the king?

I am attending Mumbai 09 conference in Mumbai tomorrow (July 03, 2009). The event is in the evening. I will be in Mumbai from the morning and will be returning back next day.

So, if you are in Mumbai, why don’t you come to the event. Lets meet up.

The event is being organized by famous Mr. Jason Pareira, who used to run The University Kid website once.

I am sure its going to be good time.

I am also planning to give a presentation there about some SEO tips.

So, if you are coming there, let me know.

By the way, this is the first event by Jason, hence he has kept it free. He says that if this one goes well, he can charge from the next time.

I will be covering some basics for beginners, on how they can make money online through their blogs.

I have attended last two blogcamp and bloggers meets in Pune and Mumbai and. I enjoyed them both. Its really nice meeting so many wonderful guys in one day. So, lets meet up again.

Barcamp Pune 2

Date: 27th June 2009

Time: 10:00AM - 5:00PM (full day event)

Venue: SICSR (7^th Floor, Gokhale Cross Road, Model Colony Pune)

Are you coming? Lets meetup. May be for a glass of beer or two.

This coupon will expire on 25^th June 2009.

After 25^th, you can use a different coupon code “ZINE3″ (without quotes). This code can be used for new registrations as well as renewals. This drops the price for each domain by $2.00.

Scott Trimble has started a service called BlogProfitz to help people monetize their blogs better. This service can also be used as more value to your wordpress based blogs.

Here are some points:

• You can add thousands of targeted affiliate products to any of your wordpress blog. This will help you in fully monetizing their site quickly.
• You can display targeted videos, articles (from our private database of 15k) and news to your blogs for more content and reader value. They have more than 15,000 private articles database.
• the system is integrated with CommissionJunction, Clickbank, Affiliatebot, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, and many more other affiliate network. Its very easy to integrate them into the system. You just need to enter the affiliate ID for each one of them in their system and everything is done for you.
• Its quite easy to use, anyone can jump in and get started. I just finish testing it myself.
• You can use this service for any of your new or old wordpress based blogs.

You can check the site here.

The system works in just 3 simple steps:

1. After registering, just enter your affiliate codes for various affiliate nteworks.
2. Setup your new or existing blogs. Setting up is just entering the URL of your blog and its login/password.
3. And finally, setup the posting rules for the blog. These will dictate what kinds of affiliate products, articles, videos and news you pull into your blog.

It is a very simple system to use. You can also checkout their tutorial videos. Be sure to check out the last tutorial about posting videos, articles, and news.

Its been more than a month since I am using Infolinks, instead of Kontera, on my sites. This post is the review of Infolinks services, providing information on how it is performing on my sites.

First, about the integration of the code in the site. It was very simple, just put the code in the footer file of all my sites. That is it. No other changes required in the site.

About the earnings part, I am damn happy about it. In Kontera, I used to make around $8,000 to $9,000 per month. But with Infolinks, I have made more than $12,000 in a month. That is a big 50% increase in what I used to make with Kontera. So hands down to Infolinks in this regard.

The earnings I am talking about are only from a subset of sites which I had with Kontera. I have still not moved 100% of my sites to Infolinks. I am moving them slowly. I think I will make even more when I move my other sites too. I am moving them slowly with time, so that I am able to track what sort of difference these new sites are making to my earnings.

I am sure when I will move most of my sites to Infolinks, it would be making me at-least $15,000 to $17,000 per month.

About the support part, I contacted their support team many times in last one month for adding my new sites. The response from the team was always within 24 hours. I really like a company if their support is prompt.

Overall, I would say Infolinks surely rocks. Thank god I moved.

If you still haven’t join them, go ahead and give them a try. I am sure you will thank me for it.

Most bloggers go through confusion and usually can’t think of ideas for new posts once they have written their best ones, after which they usually come up with lame articles, stop writing articles or drop their niche and write posts which are aimless to any topic. Below are outlined, some great ways to keep your blog rich with fresh content which is related to your website.

Don’t limit your blog’s topic

It is always best to keep your blog a little on the side from your main niche, you can write articles on your main topic but keep other options open as well. Moreover, try to relate things out of your niche to your niche and write articles about things that you like.

Diversify your blog’s categories

It doesn’t matter which stage your blog is at, you can always pick new categories which are related to your blog and keep them in mind, because looking at each of these categories will bring new post ideas to your mind, for example choose 10 blog categories, when you’re writin a new article pick a category which you haven’t written much about yet and think on it, because your mind wouldn’t be too drained out on that one, you’ll be able to come up with a creative post idea. Keep flipping categories and you’ll remain enriched with ideas. For example, my blog is in the make money online niche, but just because I have a category called ‘Tips’, I’ll write about anything which I feel is worthy for the category such as writing an article on finding the best torrents because it is good tip on P2P downloading.

Listen to your blog’s readers

Sometimes, when you write an article you might miss something which is mentioned by some of your readers. If you feel it is worth a mention then go ahead and write a post on it because after all it is your blog’s readers who will be reading those articles. Also, read the comments on other blogs and if you see a hint of some topic mentioned by a commantator, just go ahead and write on it.

Read your older posts

When you write an article, you might miss something or might have learned something new about it. So it is best to give a look at your older articles once in a while because it might give you good ideas of follow-up articles.

Make routine posts

I’ve seen many blogs with a routine post every week such as a sunday link love or wordless wednesday or funny friday which usually makes it easy to come up with posts because you don’t have to thin k of something entirely new.

Point out to other great blogs

When you see great articles written on other blogs you read and you think they will be useful to your blog’s readers then go ahead and write a second opinion on it, or review it. This will not only cover up a good post but might also help you gain attention by the original article author.

These 6 idea generating tips will surely help you in writing articles at the time when you run out of ideas, because writing articles regularly is the backbone of an active blog.