Blogs – No miracles

Is blogging a good way for website promotion?

Many articles said so. But there is no miracle for such kind of thing. Blogs are just blogs. They are websites too. Some people may get good traffic from blogging. It is not because they write blogs. They may talk about hot topics. They may have good fames. They may use effective platforms to spread their information. Their blogs may be ranked high in search engines.

Having a blog will not give you good quick traffic. Good promotion strategies do. As the same to regular websites, you got to promote your blogs too.

I'm not saying blogging is not a good thing. Blogs do have some advantages. At least blogging is relatively new things in this virtual world. Search engines love it and treat it differently. People love it. As a trend, there is no good not to catch it. It gives you different chance to expose yourself.

Unlike regular websites, people can find your new post immediately after you publish it. Search engines index new blogs much quick than regular websites. For my website MaPaGuides, Google took two weeks to index it. But it took only two days to index this blog after I published the first post.

When I check the SEO score of my first post in this blog, it got 69, which is higher than that of my website MaPaGuides (currently it drops to 32 after modification) even having less inbound links. But both of them have very poor traffic (less than 5 unique visitors/day).

Another good thing of blogs is that you can build links to your websites as you wish. Many people may use blogs for this purpose. But will this give your websites good ranks in search engines? You betcha.

You may also be interested following posts.
>Secrets of Top Ranked Websites
>Why people fail in website promotion
>A Lesson of Adsense and SEO
> What I have done and failed to promote my website

One wise strategy – learn from newbies and losers

Why should you learn from losers and newbies?

First reason is these people may be your potential targets, if you are looking for new market. Many specific websites are built to teach newbies to learn new technologies, such as web design for dummies, Google Adsense for beginners, and so on. In fact, it is much easy to earn money from these people, if you can learn their requirements.

If you provide new services, you got to learn from newbies. They may have bunch of strange questions or problems, which are out of your imagination. For example, I do often have problems to find the pages to pay my credit card in one of my bank’s websites. So if you want to provide high quality of services, you got to get feedback from these people and improve it.

For most people, you could learn what to do from successful people. However, you could learn What Not to do from losers and newbies. You may think you are smart. But everybody think he is smart too. You will fail as others do. If you can learn from their failure and frustration, you may lower your risks. This is what wise people usually do.

Newbies have to learn and try. They want to ask and talk. Most of them will fail and complain. But at least they know the problems and risks. Some of them will keep trying and be creative, even do some crazy things till success. These people are the backbone of a society.

Unfortunately, we have little opportunity to hear the voice of these people. This is the same in scientific research. All publications we can read are successful reports. You don’t know how many times they may have failed. It is not a shame to be a loser. It’s a normal process to success. Why should people let such precious experience hidden? It can be good fortune for others. If you like to share your experience of online marketing, don’t forget to let me know your url or leave your comments below.



You may also be interested following posts.
>Secrets of Top Ranked Websites
>Avoid website ban
>A Lesson of Adsense and SEO
> What I have done and failed to promote my website

Why you should learn problems first before starting your business

Usually people pay little attention to possible problems they may meet in their future business. Even after they have trouble, most people only focus on searching the experience of success or problem solving. But they will meet different new problems after they solve old problems. So it is wise to learn problem before launching the business.

Only if you consider possible problems firstly, you will be careful and can choose appropriate strategies to avoid different risks. As you know, there are lots of traps in real life. So is in virtual world of Internet.

For website promotion and online marketing, there are some problems you may need to know.
1) Get penalized by search engines. In fact, nobody exactly knows how search engines rank a website. Many SEO (search engine optimization) companies don’t know either. They may give you a list of things to consider. But what they thought may not be the case (check my previous post for details). They may use some tricks to cheat search engines for high ranking. But your websites may get penalized or even banned. It is important to choose good SEO companies.
2) Waste money in advertisement. Google Adwords is an effective way to get traffic. But not every website earn money. You got to choose appropriate keywords for your advertisement and monitor the effect. Your competitors or some website publishers may make fake clicks to lose your money.
3) Cheated by scam websites. There are lots of websites that tell you how to get your website ranked high in Google and make thousands of dollars in a week. But they ask you to buy something. Do you belive them. No, I don’t. If it is that easy, why they don’t do it. They are only people to earn money.
4) Spaming and spaming. Many SEO people said it is important to get as many inbound links as you can to your websites. This encourages lots of webmasters to spam the Internet. But does this really work? Will you get penalized? If you don’t know this, you may waste lots of time and fail to the end.

So besides digging the secrets of success, you do need to learn problems from other people to lower your risk.



Previous Posts
>Avoid website ban
>A Lesson of Adsense and SEO
> What I have done and failed to promote my website

Secrets of Top Ranked Websites

Are there any secrets in top ranked websites? I’m sure there are some. If we analyze these websites carefully, we can learn a lot.

Let’s search keywords “creative kids” in Google (as my website MaPaGuides targets this keywords too, so I used it for an example). Google showed 5,520,000 web search results (the competition is furious). You can see the screenshot shown below. The first ranked website is “Creative Kids Magazine – the National Voice for Kids”. The keywords are the first two words of the title of this web page.

We can find the keywords are also the first two words in the meta description and body portion of this website, but not in the url. When checking the keywords density using software, there were 16 repeats of phrase “creative kids” (5.16%). It contains 31 words “kids” (5.00%) and 18 words “ creative” (2.90%). Detailed results were showed in below screenshot. When checking the links to this web page in Google, it showed only seven links to this webpage, 160 links to the homepage. The file size is 28k. The Alexa rank is 939,981.

Secondly ranked website is www.myweb3000.com. The keyword “Creative Kids” only appeared once in top portion of the body in this website. It contains 4 words “creative” and two words “kids”. The file size is 19k. Nine links were found for this website. The Alexa rank is 1,016,141.

The third ranked website is http://www.kidscreative.org. It has 10 words “kids”(2.92) and 9 words “creative” (2.62%). The title is ”kids creative” and there are 6 keywords “kids creative” (4.66%). The file size is 8k. It has two links. The Alexa rank is 6365644.

The fourth ranked website is http://www.creativekidsathome.com. It contains 58 words “kids” (5.60%), 10 words “creative” (0.97%), and 6 phrases “creative kids” (1.16%). It has 140 links. File size is 18k. The Alexa rank is 199,717.

So it looks like keywords density, number of links is not that important. The domain type, file size, or good contents are more important for page ranks in Google. But it is more than complicated just considering these factors. Many SEO and website promotion strategies may mislead people.

Previous Posts
>Avoid website ban
>A Lesson of Adsense and SEO
> What I have done and failed to promote my website

A Lesson of Adsense and SEO

Three days ago, I resubmitted my application to Google for Adsense. I thought Google would have approved my application this time as my website MaPaGuides was already indexed by Google. But I got an email last night; Google guy told me my application was rejected. The reason was there were too many keywords in my website. This is a new lesson for me.

I admitted I tried SEO (search engine optimization) for my website. As mentioned in the previous post, I searched overture to check the search frequency of related keywords. So I put different keywords with high, middle and low searching frequency in the url, title, head, body and links (such as keywords like parenting skills, creative kids, creative imagination, creativity, imagination exercises). But the highest density of keywords is less than 6%, which is lower than the percentage suggested in many SEO websites (5-16%).

However, everyone knows all websites top ranked in Google search results did SEO. If new websites don’t do this, how people could find us in Google. So what is the limit of keywords density in a website? Did Google treat new websites and old websites differently? Or Google treats popular keywords more strictly? I don’t know.

As so, I got to remove some keywords in my website and resubmit Adsense application again.




Previous Posts
> Avoid website ban
> What I have done and failed to promote my website

Why people fail in website promotion

Last night I read an article talking about Google Sandbox. It says Google may take time (6-8 months) to rank new websites (especially for popular keywords) in order to deter spammers. I heard some other search engines might have similar rules. This may be one reason why it is so hard for new websites to get good traffic.

All web pages of my website MaPaGuides (providing parenting tips to raise creative kids) were finally indexed by Google. The SEO score increased from 46 to 51 in these days (as all pages of my website focus on the same topic, the SEO score increased when more pages were indexed). But the rank of my website is still 0 in Google search results. However, some websites searched using the same keywords with lower SEO score ranked pretty high. Is this because of Google Sandbox?

In addition to such kind of Sandbox delay, search engines ranks pages based on the number and quality of inbound links. This takes time. Meanwhile, your experience and knowledge will build up. In addition, search engines love old websites. So if you can persist, you will rank your website high at last. But many new webmasters can’t tolerate such kind of time torture. They fail in the half way.

I’m always confident although my experience told me failure would follow me all the time. So far, the traffic is still very low (3-7 unique visitor per day). But there is some good progress.
1) Google finally indexed all the web pages of my website MaPaGuides. It took nearly two months. But Yahoo only indexed half of the pages.
2) More links are displayed in Google search results and SEO scores increased from 46 to 51.
3) Google already indexes this blog. It only took two days.
4) Another surprise is, some videos submitted to youtube were embedded by several other websites, which contains active links to my website. It is not my original intention. So submission of videos to youtube is a good decision, at least it can build links.



Previous Posts
> Avoid website ban
> Who master tools, who will win the battle of website promotion
> What I have done and failed to promote my website

Avoid website ban

Yesterday, I found my Digg account was banned. What is the matter? It really shocked me, as I was so careful to avoid such kind of ban. I didn’t set up more than one account (Digg’s rules). I posted more than 10 high quality websites I visited often. I did add 3 pages of my website and blog. Is this the reason getting banned? But as a social bookmarking site, why can’t I add all my favorite websites even if they belong to me? How could Digg know these websites belong to me?

I remembered, maybe it was because I added my website url in the links setting of my profile. Hmm, this is a lesson. Look at many other people’ profile, they have their own websites too but not get banned. You will find no links set in their profile. Is this a trap Digg for website owners? So I set a new account and leave the link part blank. Fortunately, my IP address is not banned.

For newbies, there are many website ban in this Internet world. Don’t get banned, as it is not worthy to waste your effort. But even if you are very careful as I am, you may still get banned. So risk is always there and most people don’t pay much attention, which is one reason why many people will fail in their business.

So always read their terms carefully, abide their rules. Here are some website ban I can share.
1) Don’t add too many keywords in your websites. Search engines don’t like SEO.
2) Don’t try to fool search engines. They are getting smarter and smarter. Write your website for people not for machine. If you want to add keywords, try to put them into sentences and let them make sense.
3) Don’t add doorway pages and cloaking pages for your website.
4) Don’t spam search engines. Repeated submission with duplicated contents will get your websites banned.
5) Avoid bulk email spamming.
6) Choose related websites for inbound links, avoid to link with website banned by search engines.
7) Build inbound links gradually. If you try to establish hundreds of links in one day, you may get banned.

If you have more, you are appreciated if you could let me know.

Previous Posts
> Who master tools, who will win the battle of website promotion
> What I have done and failed to promote my website

Who master tools, who will win the battle of website promotion

For a new website, it is really not easy as what some people thought and said. Sometimes we spend a whole day to submit our websites to tens or hundreds of directories. But we only get a few visitors. How disappointed it is!

Is this because the contents of the websites not good? No direct relevance. I have tried to submit some websites ranked in top of Google to Digg and del.icio.us. Few people had bookmarked them. Why so? One reason is there are too many websites to be chosen by people.

In fact, most webmasters know the importance of search engine optimization and have to read lots of articles about website promotion. They must try all kinds of approaches people have introduced. So how could one new website beat others?

As the number and quality of inbound links of a website is the key ranking factor in most search engines, i.e. who get more high quality inbound links, who will then rank high in search engines, and who will get more traffic, I think only those people who master good tools or skills will succeed in website promotion if we don’t think about other factors such as persistent hardworking, attractive and creative website contents, good social networking, or other supporting platforms.

For example, if you submit your website to different directories manually, you may spend a whole day to build 100 links. But if you can do this automatically or semi-automatically or other people may help you, you will build more links and save more time to write good website contents. So webmasters do need spend more time to master more useful tools for search engine optimization and website promotion.

Here I got an idea to improve the efficiency to build inbound links of my website. Currently, I have to build such kinds of links by myself. One approach I will use is to submit some good posts to different blog directories and social bookmarking websites. So I will list such websites in excel. Some websites need to log in. So I’ll try to register using the same username and password. I will put those websites together that have similar submission requirements. So when I do submission each time, I can open tens of websites together and do submission quickly. This will save me lots of time. If you like, I will publish my list soon for sharing but don’t forget to add me as your friend.

Do you think if this is a good idea? If you know some good tools and tricks, please leave comments in my post. Your kindness is appreciated in advance.

Previous Posts
> Make Friends in Digg
> What I have done and failed to promote my website

Make Friends in Digg

Yesterday, I submitted this blog to Digg, del.icos.us and a list of blog directories.

Can you imagine how many visitors I got? Only two immediately after I submitted it to Digg yesterday morning.

Why is it so hard to promote website and blogs? So I’m thinking if it was because the title of my blog is not creative and attractive। Another possibility is that I didn’t do much detail work and had no social network. So I searched Google how to find friends in Digg and did find some good articles (check my Digg profile). I then thought I should try this. So I added a Page Element (Add Me to Your Digg Friends) in this blog (see right sidebar). On the other hand, I edited my Digg profile and add more interesting websites to my favorite. I hope somebody can make mutual friends with me.

Let's find out if this try has any effect later.

How I failed to promote my website

Continued from 12/3/2007

So before I created my website MaPaGuides, I used overture and Google trends to search which keywords related to my website are popular and how often people use these keywords. Then I decided to target some keywords like creative kid (1320 in overture), creative imagination (1099), parenting skill (1649), creativity (14167) and so on. Some keywords are popular and competitive. Some are not. I hope those keywords not searched frequently may make my website ranked high quickly and bring some traffic for me. Based on above knowledge, I did some search engine optimization when I built my website although it is not professional. To avoid search engine ban, in fact I didn’t do much SEO, as I know the most important thing is to get enough inbound links and more traffic.

After I created my website MaPaGuides, I then tried some ways to promote my website as described below.

1) I submitted my website to several search engine and open category.
2) I tried to find top ranked forums, websites or blogs relevant to my website using some keywords like parenting forum, parents, kids education, post a comment and so on. Then I tried to post some comments in these websites. As I don’t want spam them, I got to read their contents and think how to make meaningful comments. Most of them also ask for registration. It is really time-consuming. After I come back to check, I found most links to my website are inactivated. So this is not a quick way to build inbound links. It needs persistent effort.
3) I tried to answer some questions in Yahoo Answers. It permits links. But several days later, I found I couldn’t add links any more. But I did get some inbound links.
4) Then I submitted my website to several social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, del.icos.us and Furl. But nobody added my website to their favorites although I got some links.
5) I learnt to write a simple RSS for my website and submitted it to a list of websites. Many websites were already heavily spammed or not exist any more.
6) I tried to submit some videos to youtube and wrote relevant description to link my website.

So how is my promotion effect?
1) Since I published my website on Oct। 5,2007, there were only several first-time visitors coming to my website everyday. You can see my traffic as shown below. Check the ranking of my website in Google and Yahoo using those keywords I targeted. You can’t even find it. How failure it is!

2) But if you can see from other data, there was some progress.
· More and more pages of my website were crawled by Google (on 10/30, 11/7, 11/17, 11/18 and 11/19, 11/25/2007) and Yahoo.
· 35 inbound links were established.
· SEO score of my home page increased from 26 to 46.

What‘s the problem? Why are there so few people coming to my website? The low ranking of my website is sure the major reason. But why all my links in top forums, websites and social bookmarking sites can’t bring me more traffic? Is the contents of my website not good? But people didn’t even take a look, how could they know it is good or not? So there must be some reasons for me to find out like follows.
The title and description is not attractive.
Young parents are too busy to surf Internet.
Parents don’t go to these websites.
Parents love to buy iPod and games for kids other than caring how to improve kids’ creativity.
I might submit my website at wrong time.
My links were not in good position.
There are too many competitive websites or links.

My future plans:
1) I should spend more time to analyze my competitors and learn from them.
2) Most web surfers may not pay much attention to kids’ education. I may add some contents for young people and adults about creativity improvement.
3) I should add more funny, attractive and relevant contents in my website. I do have some good ideas.
4) I should submit my website to all search engines, social bookmarking sites I can find.
5) I should spend more time to establish links in forums and blogs.
6) I should create some blogs to promote my website, that is one reason why I built this blog.
7) I should write some articles and submit them to other popular websites.
8) I should try to make more high quality videos and submit them to youtube.
9) I should try to promote my website through sending emails to my friends.
10) I should translate my website into Spanish, Chinese and Japanese and submit to corresponding search engines.
You see, I have lots of things to do. But who knows which one may work? As I know in research, most things we learnt don’t work very well. Doing business may be the same. We need watch carefully, think in details, work hard and do it creatively. So let’s find out if my creative ideas will work in the future.

What I have done and failed

Firstly, let me give a brief introduction about what I thought and learnt when I built my first website, and what I have done and how I failed to promote my website. That is one reason why I decided to create this blog. From then on, you can watch me how I will think, what I’ll try and how I will fail again and keep trying till I successfully promote my website. I hope you can learn a lot from my failure, as you may not have such kind of opportunity before.

Currently I’m doing medical research in United States. I love my work and have lots of creative ideas. One day I asked myself why not to open my own company. Then I spent some time to learn how to set up a company, how to utilize patents, how to promote my product and so on. I told one of my friends I’d like to open my company in the Internet. But he suggested me to create a website firstly to build up experience of doing business. That is why I create my first website MaPaGuides, which provides some exercises for parents to guide kids to improve their imagination and creativity.

Why did I decide to build the website MaPaGuides? One reason is it is relatively easy for me. When I was a child, I dreamed to be an educator. So I have accumulated lots of information related to education and have taught some teenage students to practice what I learnt. Now I have two lovely kids, I like to use my creative ways guiding them to read and to learn. So I think it is suitable for me to talk about that topic. Another reason is considering business marketing. As everybody has parents, the potential market should be huge. If I fail in such a big market, how could I win in small one? It should be relatively easy to succeed and can teach me more marketing lessons.

Before I build my website MaPaGuides, I had thought and done some things like these.

1) I believe people can earn money online without investing too much money. So for this learning purpose, I will only use free services to build and promote my websites. That is why I chose Google Page Creator and Google Blogger to create my websites and blogs. Currently they are totally free and my own advertisement is permitted.

2) I have searched how people can earn money online. These include:
· Build a website of your company and sell products or provide some services online to earn money.
· Sell products in ebay and other websites.
· Put ads (such as Google Adsense), search boxes, referral (such as amazon, CJ) or sponsor links in your websites to earn revenue.
· Earn membership fee from your websites.
· Find a job working at home online.
· Write some articles or ebook for sale.
· Create a blog and write articles for a special company.
· Ask for donation.
· Use many other illegal or legal ways with high risk or low efficiency to earn money, such as online gambling, participating online polling or ads click.

To do business, you got to have a clear plan of how to earn money. So my plan is firstly to earn revenue from advertisement and referral put in my website. In the future, I may sell my own ebooks or earn from membership fee. But my website is still in construction and Google Adsense refused my application. That is why I put some referral from Amazon firstly.

3) I have been thinking what people may be interested in and what useful and special information I can afford. So I did brainstorm to list all creative ideas I could think. After comparison and evaluation, I chose to provide some information about kids’ education not any products in my websites as said above.

4) Another question I was thinking is how many potential visitors I may get, who they are. That means how many parents are surfing online and where they are. So I used keywords “world traffic population” and found this website World Internet Usage Statistics. It says there are 6.6 billion people and 1.2 billion people can access Internet in 2007. Most people are in Asia (459 million), then in Europe (338 million), North America (235 million) and Latin America (116 million). Most of these people speak English (366 million), then Chinese (184 million), Spanish (102 million) and Japanese (86 millions). If one tenth of them have kids, there are more than 36.6 million parents who will be potential visitors. If I spend some time and money to translate my websites into Chinese, Spanish and Japanese (Google guy said translated pages would not be considered as duplicated contents), I may got more readers. That is why I added a translation tools in my website (Chinese translation may be added later and treated seriously as it is a fast growing market).

5) I know the most important thing here is how to let people know my websites. So I searched Internet and tried to find out how to promote a website. These include:
· Content is the king. So you got to build information rich websites. Your topic should target enough readers and be attractive.
· Make your websites ranking high in major search engines. So search engine optimization (SEO) is very important although google, yahoo and other search engines suggest you not to do SEO and may even punish such kind of behavior. But all of those top ranked websites do search engine optimization. If you are honest enough and don’t do it, your website will never get found whatever if your website is the best in this world. The reality is so ironic and so unfair. You have to yield to the reality, so do I. Then I spent some time to find out how most search engines work, what difference they have, how they rank a website, what kinds of websites they will ban (more details will be discussed later), how to do search engine optimization (SEO). I summarized them as below.
a. Select keywords most people use. You can use some SEO tools to do so such as Google Trends, overture keyword selector tool, wordtracker, Adwords, and so on.
b. Use keywords in your url, title, meta tag (keywords and description tag), head, body, links, alt of images.
c. Keywords should appear in top and key position of your website (more details will be discussed later).
d. You should target more keywords in your website.
e. Increase keywords density in your website but don’t get banned.
f. Get more high quality inbound links. This criteria is the most important for website ranking now.
g. Submit your website to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and open directories.
h. Submit your website to social bookmarking websites such as Digg, del.icos.us to increase traffic and establish inbound links.
i. Submit your RSS feeder to major search engines, open directories, newsgroup and RSS aggregators.
j. Post comments in blogs, forums and other websites to get inbound links and traffic.
l. Answer question in Yahoo Answers and get inbound links.

· Besides search engine optimization, you can promote your website using many other ways as listed below.
a. Create blogs in major social websites such as Myspace to promote your websites.
b. Submit your videos to youtube to increase traffic of your website.
c. Give out free stuff (Freebies). But don’t forget to add the name and address of your website.
d. Submit articles, news to promote your websites.
e. Do link exchange to get more traffic.
f. Promote your website through email, but avoid spamming.
g. Buy traffic through ads, traffic exchange etc.
h. Promote your website through newspapers, TV advertising, using name cards, in community activities.
i. Promote your website using illegal virus and other means. Continuing…..