Guide to Blogging

Wordze Coupon for October

Preblogging — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:03:25 PDT

I’ve been a users of Wordze since the start of this year, I’ve also used some other tools, like Google Trends and Wordtracker. But ever since I signed up I’ve been using it more and more, in fact I do 90% of my keyword reserach and data mining via this tool. As I was signing up a friend for the tool today, I saw that the regular price of $47 (which was what I paid) is now showing up as $38.98.

Wordze Price Tracking

I took a look at Archive.org to see how Wordze’s subscription price changes over time. I was surprised to see that right back to the start of 2007 this tool cost $35. And sometime this year they raised the price to $47. So right now you can roughly get the rate they were offering in 2006 ! And a further thing I like about their offering is that once you subscribe, your subscription cost is constant.

What I do with Wordze

I was using Wordze to pull keywords from competitor sites, thus seeing where they were getting their traffic from. Then I wrote some articles and built links around them in an effort to get some of their search traffic. And it worked ! This is one of the reasons why I get so much traffic from this blog, my Alexa rating has been constantly under 200k, and every day I get around 1000 unique visitors to this blog alone. In fact one blogger even accused me of cheating in my stats (why would I ?) ! The reason I get traffic is because I have many articles on how to help bloggers start blogging, and they find them useful. I don’t need to post as often as did previously (so a little bit of research time on my part, saves me a whole bunch of time).

I’ve found that once I started researching what keywords people actually search and what I thought people search for were often two different things. For example you may search for “Blogging Tips” and write your articles targeting this, where as people actually tend to search “Blogging Help“. The difference in the traffic these two terms can bring is enormous. But if you don’t do your research you won’t ever know.

Why I like Wordze

In all honesty there is not a whole lot of difference between WordTracker and Wordze products, they do exactly what they say on the tin. One noticeable difference, is the price point, Wordtracker sells for $59/month, where as Worze currently costs under $40. If you are currently using Wordtracker, I would recommend you switch and save yourself 50% on your keyword tool price. Both tools will give you more than enough keywords.

1 Day Trail Wordze Trial

I know there are many readers who can’t afford to spend the $38.98 right now, but there is an option for the day trial. This costs under $8 and you will have full access to the tool for 24 hours. Before I subscribed fulltime to Wordze, what I did was I purchased the daily access once or twice a month. I did this when I needed to do some keyword research. For $7.95 you can have access to such strong information, things like historical keyword data are a must to have for any webmaster/blogger/affiliate marketer. If you have a website which heavily targets the Christmas market, then you don’t need data from last month or last week, you need data from last year to see what people are likely put into google.

Signup for Wordze

To find out more check our their subscription page at Wordze.com.

Shoemoney Tools First looks

Preblogging — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:53:09 PDT

Update 27/10/2008: This is just my personal experience and it may or may not be valid for you. As I mentioned I signed up for ShoemoneyTools. I played around with the tools for a few days and I even bought a domain name through the market place. It was a domain that had some potential, with some .edu/.gov links so I was happy enough to pay an extra $15 before registering the domain, to test out this method at least. My tests are still running…

I took advantage of the $20 introductory offer, but as I didn’t know if I wanted to subscribe, I cancelled my subscription about 10 days into the program. This was in case I forgot about the subscription and spent $100 by mistake. But once I removed the subscription from PayPal I was left without access to the toolset. Every time I logged in it redirected me to PayPal to subscribe. So I contacted the support, and a guy called Mike said it was in the FAQ and TOS that once you cancelled your membership you couldn’t get back in. I could understand this (in some ways) but at the time (it has since been changed) it was not possible to see these FAQs and TOS before signed up as a member for the tools. The support guy wasn’t offering any help (even after I had submitted some bug reports about the tool. So I CC’d Jeremy and he replied almost straight away saying that he would fix things, just asking for my username. I gave him the details, but still didn’t get my access back to the tools, I even sent a reminder a week later, and still no joy. So now for my $20 I got access to a service for 2 weeks, when I should have gotten 4.

Review ShoeMoney Tools

This morning I finally took the plunge and signed up for Jeremy Schoemaker’s (AKA Shoemoney, www.shoemoney.com) Shoemoney Tools (tools.shoemoney.com). He’s been talking about it for a while, and in the blogosphere it has gotten some good reports .

The first look at the collection of the tools has left me very (very) impressed. The tools are in 3 sections, SEO Tools, PPC Tools and Link Building Tools. The one I’m having fun with right now is the Link Building tool, it offers 4 ways of finding good links for your blog.

Link Building Tool

I’ve only been playing around with this for a bit and I’ve already found some nice, new, ways to get some links. The tool offers 4 ways of getting links for your blog:

Related Blog Posts (seeks out similar blog posts on a certain topic, and shows you how to ping them, and other nice things)
Most Linked (shows you what domains are being linked to for a specific niche, i.e. association to other popular blogs)
Backlink Analyzer (will perform a full report on your competitors links)
Find Backlinks (Check where your top 10 keyword competitors are getting their best links from and displays them from highest PR to lowest)

These tools alone can show you many ways to get links to improve your website rankings. If you are committed to increasing your blogs’ presence, then this is the tool for you. Of course everything comes with a price.

The Price

Of course these tools aren’t for free. These tools require access to large databases, spiders and other technology that I don’t know. Needless to say there is some serious processing power behind it. It will cost you $100/month, and thinking of the advantages you can get with this it’s certainly well worth the money. Right now I have only shown you about 20% of what the tools can do, there are other tools like the Domain MarketPlace, has some serious money making potential. More about it once I dig deeper. You can check it out for yourself on http://tools.shoemoney.com/

Facebook Ads get their billing wrong

Preblogging — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:10:17 PDT

When you have more than one advertising method, it’s always a good idea to check on their billing. These networks do make mistakes, here is one example.

Hi,

We experienced an issue this week where we may have charged your credit card for Facebook Ads although you had an active advertising credit on your account. We sincerely apologize for this error and any confusion it may have caused. We’ve now refunded these charges to your credit card. There may be a delay before this refund is processed by your credit card issuer. If we tried to charge your card and the payment failed, this charge has been cancelled. You will not be charged again for these ads.

Thanks again for advertising with Facebook Ads.

Sincerely,

The Facebook Ads Team

I know that Facebook put some charges on my credit card, that weren’t warranted.

To Sell or not To Sell

Preblogging — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:01:43 PDT

Over the last few weeks things have been a little crazy with my blogging activities, but now again I am settling down to do some work here. Funnily enough someone approached me last week, in person and started to talk to me about my blog. He started asking lots of questions like RSS subscribers, new visitors, bounce rates, etc. which I know off the top of my head, but I still thought it was strange. He invited me out for coffee after the event to talk more about blogs and blogging. This was when I was starting to get a little suspicious, and asked him why was he interested in my blog. To that he answered that he was thinking of putting in an offer for PreBlogging.com , which was a low $X,XXX figure. To say the least I was stunned, and a little surprised, but I explained to the potential buyer that it would be a little hard for me to sell my blog, because so much of me is invested in things like this.

Selling your Blog

It’s always hard to separate yourself from your projects, if it was easy it probably means that you haven’t put your heart into it. So I was starting to get some separation anxiety, wondering about the possibility of a bit of cash, but also a bit freaked out that someone would actively seek me out to talk to me. Fast forward 5 days, when I’ve had the chance to think about it and to think about what PreBlogging.com means to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that it would be very hard to sell out, not only to I love the domain/blog/my readers, but I also don’t think this blog would be the same without the author (me).

People sell out for various reasons, anything from the need for quick cash to personal reasons. One of the factors that also pushed me not to sell was the fact that indeed I don’t need the cash right now and I would think that if I did get rid of the domain/blog I would not be true to why I started the blog. I also started to think what this blog is worth to me, no purely from ad/affiliate, but from the amount of work I have gotten as a direct result of this blog. This type of residual income can be hard to calculate, some months I earn under $100 (mostly from Wordze affiliate program from people signing up for Wordze) which other months I get to take on 2 or 3 new projects netting well over $1,000. These projects are anything from a business blog setup, to training people on how to blog, to writing custom wordpress plugins for them.

While I don’t think that I am the only person on the planet that can do these things, I also don’t think that just anyone would be able to do it. This means that selling to a potential buyer could also lead to problems for them. Would the be able to do the types of things I do, do they even care ? I would have a problem with selling a blog, if I knew that the buyer would not be able to make their money back in a year. So there is the two sides of the argument, how can you possibly replace the original blogger and how can you achieve the same (or more) success ? These are things you should take into consideration when thinking about selling your blog.

While these points are valid for people thinking of selling their blogs, they are things that you should ask yourself as a buyer.

Recent Known Blog Sales

Here is a collection of recently sold blogs:

http://www.onemansgoal.com sold for $10,000
http://www.cashquests.com sold for $15,000
http://www.johncow.com sold for $25,000 (estimate)
http://www.bloggingexperiment.com/ sold for $15,000
http://www.bloggingfingers.com sold for $6,000
http://www.blogohblog.com/ sold for $10,000
http://www.dailyblogtips.com sold for $168,000
http://www.bloggin-ads.com/ sold for $5,000

Wordze Keyword Tool - July Offer

Preblogging — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 06:07:10 PDT

A fresh Wordze offer - access for the month of July for just $4.95!.

All I can say is that from a lot of experience in the business, that this tool is well worth signing up for. Knowing the frequency of what people search for, and the relative frequency helps you to pick higher searched keywords. This will result in more traffic, and more targeted traffic.

I can definitely say that if you have $5 to spend on a product, which normally costs $40/month, then you need to try this out. If you are serious about marketing,bloggging or SEO (or all three) this is one of the tools you should have under your belt.

But hurry, the offer ends on July 11th.

Declaring Email Suicide

Preblogging — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:46:15 PDT

You know that feeling, you’re overwhelmed with people trying to contact you and you don’t know where to start. The phone is ringing off the hook and virtual and real post box are over flowing. And you don’t know where to even to start to tackle things. And what’s worse, is that tomorrow you will have an even bigger backlog of things to catch up on. If you’ve ever felt like this you will be able to emphasise with me. I tend to take drastic action when this happens, twitch off the cell phone, and deal with the more urgent tasks. Tackling your email can sometimes seem impossible, (see a screenshot of my current inbox below), and for the 2nd time in my life I need to I declare email suicide.

Email Suicide

Email Suicide is when you say that you can’t deal with the number of emails you get, and that to have anyway of dealing with new emails you will need to delete your current inbox. And this is what I am going to have to do today. Well kind off…

The emails in my inbox, currently 574 are now in a seperate folder and I will try to tackle 25 of them ever day. Only 25, no more, no less. And I will try to keep on top of my new emails. Sorry if you are in this group, but there is no other way I can deal with these things (for my sanity alone). This is alot better than deleting all the emails, but if could take another 3 weeks to get some some of my emails !

Another alarming number, is the number of SPAM emails I am receiving. GMAIL removes these emails after 30 days, so in the last month I have received around 14k SPAM emails. I do know that their SPAM filter is not 100% accurate. Sometimes I do go through these, as I typically find that 1 or 2 in 100 are false positives. But you can see my dilemma here, to go through these would take hours and hours of time, and by the time I get to these, I’m sure there will be hundreds, if not thousands in their place. So in one click of a button, BAMM ! all my SPAM folder with the possible false positives are now delete.

Moving forward, I am going to use better use of the GMAIL’s filter functionality, to sort emails automatically when they are coming in. Also there is an extended feature where you can add special labels. Log in to your Gmail, select the Labs tab, and enable Superstars addon. Then in your Settings tab select what SuperStars you want to have.

How do you deal with all the emails you receive ? If you have any tips, I’m ALL EARS !

Free FaceBook Ads $100 voucher

Preblogging — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:44:51 PDT

Maybe you have been sleeping for the past 6 months, and you are not aware of FaceBook, or FaceBookAds, here is a great way to try it. The trail is completely free, and via VISA you get a voucher for $100 worth of ads on the social network FaceBook.

As part of VISA’s Business promotion, you can get a voucher for $100 advertising credit. To get this free credit all you have to do is

Log into FaceBook
Add the Visa Business Network App to your FaceBook profile
Once added, Facebook/VISA will send you an email with a code, and you can use this to claim your advertising credit

This offer is open to existing and new users of the FaceBookAds system and is valid for both CPC and CPM campaigns. With $100, you are sure to be able to get quite a few leads. Maybe some people will find this of interest.

Annoying Corporate Jargon

Preblogging — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:20:52 PDT

I actually heard somebody mention “think outside the box” today in a meeting, and I almost lost my lunch. What types of Jargon get on your nerves? There’s loads on buzzwhack, but here are my top 25 annoyances. Which ones annoy you?

1 - Think outside the box
2- (This one’s a gas) “Natural Tea Break” (logging of away-desk/bathroom break time, particularly in call centres)
3 - Downsizing (ie making redundancies and annoying both employer and employee)
4 - Outsourcing (ie can’t be bothered to do it yourself, so pay someone)
5 - Wrinkle (aka challenge, but really means problem)
6 - EBITDA (if you see EBITDA mentioned in a powerpoint, run a mile. It can only be boring stats)
7 - Venting; to vent (aka having a good whinge)
8 - SMART (Specific Measurable Agreed Realistic Time-bound. In other words, anal…arghh)
9 - Walk The Talk
10 - Walk The Floor Management (ie hovering around, looking like a spare wheel, and getting on the nerves of all employees)

11 - “Seamless” (usually combined with “integrated”)
12 - E-business/E-commerce (ie 1% of the activity and effort happens on-line, and 99% happens off-line)
13 - B2B (ie we only deal with other businesses, because we hate whinging private customers)
14 - Networking, particularly at conferences (having a good gossip and drinking a lot)
15 - CRM, or CRM IT solutions (doing what you’re supposed to do anyway - look after your customers)
16 - Contact Centre (previously call centre, face it it’s a CALL CENTRE)
17 - Deliverable (somebody comes to your office asking about deliverables, run and hide. Take a natural tea break or something)
18 - Helicopter View (I’ve seen this in job adverts quite often…)
19 - Vertical Markets (usually best studied while horizontally reclining with a martini in one hand)
20 - Work-Life balance (I’m guilty of using this one big time. Erm, you live, and you work. We’ve been doing it for centuries - in former times even with large extended families and in more poverty-stricken eras)
21 - Grow the brand (products need to photosynthesize, you know…)
22 - Event Management (organize training sessions, conferences, annual sales meetings and you’re now skilled as an Event Manager)
23 - Escalate, to demand an escalation (complain to your colleague’s boss because they ain’t getting the work done quick/good enough)
24 - SME (already confusing because it’s either Subject Matter Expert or Small and Medium Enterprise - either way, you deserve another natural tea break for it)
25 - (And everyone’s favourite when compiling a CV) “multi-tasking”

Bye bye Google Browser Sync sniff

Preblogging — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:14:37 PDT

Today I read that the handy tool Google Browser Sync is to be discontinued:

It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.

Personally I used this a lot and I’m sad to see it go More about this from the official google systems blog.

Increase Sociability Covered on SEOMOZ

Preblogging — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:12:51 PDT

Last Thursday I noticed that Increased Sociability managed to get a mention on SEOmoz’s roundup. They were kind enough to give me a 3 out of 5 for the plugin . To be honest I had kind of forgotten about the plugin, and the increased traffic from SEOmoz came as a bit of surprise. This also pushed me to upload the latest version of the plugin, this version has just been updated on the Wordpress Plugin Database. In the last few months the plugin has been covered on a few websites like SearchEngineLand / Wolf-Howl, and the feedback for the plugin has been much better than I expected.

It did take me a bit of time to get the plugin on the Wordpress Plugin Database, but for any plugin author I think it is a must for you to have your plugin there. They provide statistics on the number of downloads and they will host your file for you in a nice .zip file. This also allows your visitors to use the automatic plugin update.

New Features for Increased Sociability

This version has some nice new features like the option to enable a test mode, this will include the DIGG message to everyone, this allows you to navigate your pages and see how the message will appear on your wordpress pages.

Also I added the option to add a custom website, currently I am using mine to welcome the visitors from SEOmoz. This 3rd welcome message is customizable, so you can either add another social media website (sphinn, rededit etc) or you can just a pick a random website that gives you traffic (maybe google searchers_ , and you can display a message to them.

Anyway the plugin can be downloaded here.