My Blog

Category: Blogging

  • Promotion Tool Laboratory

    We usually test most of the web promotion tools that are available in our market. We are focusing on the Content Creation and Content Generation tools.
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    Our Promotion Tool Laboratory analyzes at least one new tool every month, and creates a detailed report on its efficiency.

    Subscribers are able to receive the service provided by the tool at special prices.

    There are hundreds of existing Promotion Tools worth analyzing, and dozens new ones coming out every year. After a while we learnt which ones are worth buying and testing.

    Contact us and know which tools are tested every month, how the tool is tested and what are the results.

    Methodology

    How to tell real facts from marketing pitches?

    Some products we are analyzing

    Let us know your data and feedback.
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    Ask about our Web Development Service – We create contents for your site, either writing or programming.

  • Good WordPress rankings

    WordPress is an interesting platform for ranking articles in Google, because all postings are identical in several structural aspects. There are several plugins in WordPress that add positive factors for SEO purposes.

    So far we achieved good rankings with some of our older blogs: DomainGrower and PromotordeSitios (this one in Spanish). However, some postings are very well ranked and others not at all. Why is that? It would be nice to know. And it would be excellent to have a formula for consistent good rankings in WordPress. (more…)

  • What does Demi Moore butt have that my ebook does not?

    Recently Demi’s husband took a shot of her behind, while bending over in panties. He later posted the photo in Twitter and challenged the CNN news chain to reach 1,000,000 Twitter followers before him.

    Of course she still is very attractive at 46, but the picture is not enough for normal viewers to permanently subscribe to Ashton Kutcher’s pointless ramblings in Twitter.

    Demi Moore photographed by her husband

    However, more than a million non-normal viewers subscribed to his Twitt and he won the challenge.

    This is exactly what drives me to the issue of how difficult it is for a non-celebrity to spread ideas �no matter how good� across the Web.

    Publishing an idea by itself is usually pointless. Most news publishing sites receive 100 postings per minute, and the good ones are quickly covered by the immense amount of bad ones. I only obtained a limited success by resorting to very specialized and expensive techniques, like SEO or gray hat Google ranking methods.

    Websites, ideas, photos, articles, press releases and ebooks share similar difficulties for getting known and reaching their intended audience. We website promoters use different techniques, some routine and some creative to get the message across.

    Being creative is very important. We’ve always heard that if a dog bites a person it is no big news. But if a person bites a dog, it is. In other words, improbable facts are more newsworthy than regular ones.

    Back to Demi�s back, it is improbable for a loving husband to take advantage of his wife celebrity status to show her intimate parts to the world. And Demi is not only cute but gentle, because she took it lightly. If I dared to show my skinny wife’s parts to the world I would sleep in the doghouse for a month. Or worse.

    I cannot stop thinking about why this particular picture became so widely famous among men everywhere. What would have happened if the sneaky Ashton would have pictured another part of Demi�s anatomy? This is an important philosophical issue for me. A view of her groin would have been too daring and easily attributed to anyone else. Her boobs are not so distinctive after surgery. I vote for the butt, the ultimate male intrusion.

    Demi breasts

    What if Demi were posing for the photo? It would not have been the same. She posed for a million photos so far, some available on the web if you search for an image under �Demi Moore (before breast implants)�.

    Following this line of thinking I appointed a model to pose naked as illustrations for my ebook on Naked Business Proposals, and it was not enough to bring the huge amount of audience I expected. Of course this made me extremely angry. Why is it that the ignorant, superficial, celebrity suckers, lusty guys of this world would rather watch Demi’s butt than read the insightful book (my opinion) that took me such pains to write?

    Maybe Ashton succeeded because he did not need to. He probably will never have to work again in his life, even if he divorces Demi and hires very bad lawyers.

    Maybe the photo got famous because it was pointless, while most of my marketing actions try to sell something, and the readers immediately sense it and turn away.

    Maybe the idea of a competition between a pointless photo and the CNN giant motivated the public to support David against Goliath.

    Maybe stupid things are more prone to become news than smart ones.

    Maybe her butt is just too good.

    More Demi Moore

  • Domain Development Plans

    After 8+ years using SEO tools we arrived to the conclusion that most clients are not willing to buy and learn new complex tools, but they would be willing to purchase of services instead. This is the age of Instant Delivery, after all.
    For this reason we are puting together a series of plans that convert empty domains into Google-ranked, money-making, marketable sites.
    Creating quality content is possible, but requires a real writer. They charge about 15 cents per word, with standard quality. With our products, we can charge less than 8 cents per word.
    A valuable resource for websites is a script that provides interactive features: a blog, a forum, a news aggregator, a classified ad system or others. We can install any of those for a minimum value.
    The whole thing can be hosted and surveyed to avoid spam attacks in one of our servers, all with different IPs to avoid being marked as web spammers. We also monitor the web rankings and traffic, to ensure the search engines are not excluding the client’s site.

    Plan 1 – Small Site

    Setup

    Host the site in a Linux Server with 10 mb of space and 100 mb of monthly transfer
    Define Keywords (in collaboration with client) – Create a logo – Create 1000 keyword phrases to use along the site – Create 100 content pages with original text – Install a script for content management – Create a sitemap and a Google Webmaster account to manage it – Submit to 50 directories

    Maintenance
    Hosting – Monitor legitimacy of traffic and Google ranking – Write 300 words per month

    Cost: U$D 300 and U$D 30 per month

    See our Domain Development Plans for more details and options.

  • Investing in Domains: revenue thru Adsense – How much and when

    Investing in Domains in these days more profitable than putting the money in bonds, stocks or any other financial instruments. Of couse, this is November 2008 and the markets are quite upset. My view is that they will come back to almost normal in a month or two. In the mean time, Domain Development is a very good alternative.

    Since I started DomainGrower.com I am trying to predict how a domain will perform, depending on its name, the intended market, and the investment the owner is ready to do. Every domainer wants to make sure the investment will be highly profitable, and they ask about Google Ranking, Traffic, Adsense revenue, maintenance cost, increased domain-site value and finally, profit.

    I am not able at this point to provide exact projections or a formula. However, I have now a pretty good idea of how the domain can grow and how much will return.

    Very good domains convert visits into sales at 1% or more. This is quite unusual, but sometimes we see it. When your domain does not sell any particular item, just adsense clicks, the conversion rate can be 0.5% and be very good. It is also important to assess the quality and quantity of the traffic. If your visitors are real estate investors ready to buy expensive property, the clicks will be very valuable. Maybe U$D 40 or 50.

    On the other hand, if they are poor Hispanic teenagers looking for free music or porn, their clicks will be much less valuable, maybe $ 0.03.

    My advice would be to focus on a niche audience, providing some free service that could mean value for them. Adsense revenues will help pay the bills.

    After that, you can start thinking into selling some valuable items. As your audience grows you can find new demanded fields where you can offer quality contents. At that point, maybe 6 months after start, you will jump from red to black numbers. In a year, the increased value of your site will be also reflected in the domain name value.

    Ask us about the value of your existing domain or developed site, and listen to our domain growing suggestions.

  • Life imitates Digg

    Ideas have a complex, little-known dynamics. As humans do, they are born, grow, reproduce and die. In the struggle to survive they fiercely fight other ideas. Being slim, original, useful and fertile are good attributes for them, while complexity, similarity to others and poor expression are forces that keep ideas in the obscurity.

    We idea-marketers are in charge of dressing-up ideas and send them thru the appropriate channels into the battlefield. Digg.com is one of the preferred channels, because of the wide exposure for winners. In addition to sending my fighters to Digg, I optimize them for Google and Yahoo. In the Web business that activity is known as SEO, search engine optimizing. To advance the comparison, getting a good position in the search engines is like a long tournament between 2 knights, where horse, armour and other weaponry play a heavy role. Digg is  more like box: only pure idea strength leads to victory, in no more than one hour.

    Speed is critical in our times. Today, the 100 Year War would be a 100 Minute War.  A Digg posting titled “Let’s Declare War on Britain (or France, or Iran)”, will soon get a couple of diggs with several buries, and that would be the end of it. A huge bullet saving.

    It happens that many ideas in Real Life, as in Digg, are faced more often with indifference than with opposition. If my boxer is good but unknown, he will probably never reach Madison Square Garden. On the other hand, a John Doe pushed by Don King will get immediate exposure.

    Digg has the “celebrity effect” built into his algorithm, privileging the known, successful coaches. Once you are famous, you blow your nose and you are in the news. If you are a Top Digger, your crap will always be noticed. It is a combination of good diggs and buries, good submissions and good friends, what gets Digg fame. As any politician knows, if you vote for the proper guys, and against the bad ones, and you have many powerful friends, you get to the top. Again, life follows Digg…

    Do box promoters ever fix matches? Do actresses ever sleep with a producer to get a role? Quite likely.

    Do Web Promotion agencies ever force a Digg story to the top, using Black Hat techniques? Also true.

    Black Hat, in SEO terms, means doing what the search engines, or Digg, do not want you to do…

    In both lives, virtual and real, those with a decent budget and a good manager have an edge against the immense competition.

  • Winners of the Innovar Contest 2007

    I wrote an article about the winners of the Innovation contest in Argentina, with images and a brief description of each invention.

    http://www.domaingrower.com/innovar-contest.htm

    Since it was full with the photos I preferred to publish it as a separate page, with tables, in this website.

    I also submitted the article to Digg.com, to see if an original article with quality contents (not mine) could climb to a decent ranking in Digg.

    The poor results confirm that you need a little “push” from paid voters in order to get decent exposure in such a croweded unspecific social network.

  • Please bet on this article final Diggs and win…

    Do you know how to Digg this article? It is easy enough: Go to Digg.com, get an account (only need is email) and vote for it. This is the URL:

    Digg here

    The number of Diggs in the first 24 hours is critical for the article positioning in Digg. The most voted articles go to the top, and eventually make it to the front page, gaining lots of visibility.

    However, Digg.com and the other sites using a similar engine, are very hard to tame. Most of the incoming thousand articles per hour get no diggs, and are quickly sent to nowhere land and forgotten.

    The article needs to be very attractive and well written to achieve some readership.

    The positive aspects is that it is FAST. You can climb from non-existance to fame in 10 minutes. And popular, because there are millions of readers that come every day to the site to check the news.

    I have tried in this blog several strategies to seduce the Diggers. Or the Top Diggers, those users with good in-site reputation (sometimes called Karma), and heavy voting power. The Digg-like News Aggregators are non-democratic: some users have valuable votes, while most of them have negligible voting power.

    This article uses bets, a popular way to draw public. Second only to naked girls, which was the subject of my previous post in DomainGrower.com…

    So, you need to bet on How Many Diggs will This Article have 72 hours from now, this is, Saturday December 1st, at 2 PM London time.

    Your votes should be Comments to this article.

    You are not allowed to artificially inflate Diggs.

    The winner will get 3 Digg accounts, at least 1 year old, and 10 Diggs to his/her own story.

  • Why I have 2 accounts in each of these 80 social networks

    I want to be able to test every social network for its promoting power for my stories. Some of them are going to be more receptive than others, depending on its size, difficulty, subject and to the importance they give to old, reliable accounts.

    Social networks give a value to each user, sometimes called ‘karma’, and that value is useful for promotion of stories, either the own user stories or stories from ‘friends’ and strangers.

    I am sticking to 2 accounts per network because it is well known that they detect some features that could point to spam, namely IP. Of course, IP can be defeated by using a navigation proxy, but that needs information, expertise and a potentially self-destructive desire to spam the sites. The second account is used if the first one loses value, or to start polemic discussions that are often followed with more attention.

    I read about a “snowball” effect while promoting stories in the Digg-like sites, started from a minor network, where it should be easier to get noticed, and bringing users/friends/voters to the other sites. It would be useful if the home of your stories included the links pointing to the other social networks where the visitor can vote you. For that, I included a couple of plugins in my WordPress blog.

    Stories are improved by user feedback and testing as they pass thru networks.

    I am starting to test the power of this promotion technique, not too fast because I need my accounts to be mature enough. An account is mature when it had some time and healthy activity in the networks. As in real life networks, you cannot arrive, post your story and expect everyone admire you.

    It is also good if your stories refer to the same subject, and if you develop virtual ‘friends’ that show their trust in you. It is important to complete a profile and include a photo.

    This is the partial list of the networks where I am now. If this story gets enough Diggs, Propellers, Reddits, and so on, I plan to add the age, votes and karma of all the accounts, to help value them.  (more…)

  • I want to get my ideas accross the Web, and make money from them…

    I have been studying the way to communicate my good bizz ideas across the Web, and maybe find a buyer, a partner, an investor or other kind of supporter.
    I have some expertise in SEO, so I can rank my sites quite well in Google and Yahoo. However, there are social networks that are faster and probably more targeted.
    So, I am experimenting with Digg, Meneame and many others.
    It is not easy to get a news promoted by those sites, unless you have a lot of time to spend increasing your karma.
    This is done by reading many news every day and voting the best ones.

    The links that I obtain by publishing in those sites are very helpful for my medium-term efforts of ranking into Google. So, both strategies are concurrent.