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Did You Pass the BlogRush Test?

BlogRush thinks DEVTRENCH is a Great Site


Sign up for BlogRush and start getting more traffic to your site today!

Yesterday I got an email from the BlogRush team congratulating me that I passed their strict quality test:

You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict Quality Guidelines and criteria — we believe you have a high-quality blog and we are happy you’re a member of our network!

It feels good to know that BlogRush (BR) thinks I have a high quality blog, especially in light of them erasing 10,000+ blogs from the system :) I’ve had my doubts as to whether BR will be successful on this site, but I’ve stuck with it and it looks like it is starting to generate traffic for DEVTRENCH. I think that the combination of this tool along with the power of StumbleUpon might be a very good way to generate traffic.

Have you signed up with blog rush yet? You should if you haven’t yet. I think this tool and ones like it will start to become the norm as we move into the future. And if it doesn’t, it’s still a cool thing to be a part of. I really admire the BR team for their dedication to their product and swift decision making during the aftermath of their launch.

Some quick rambling about BR:

  • I hope they get the stats and dashboard online again soon, because the text stats just don’t cut it for me.
  • I wish they a text only version of the widget because I think people will start to ignore the widget because of how it looks. It would be nice to change it up a bit, and to be able to design it myself.
  • Now that they’ve gotten rid of the cheaters, it will be interesting to see if our stats go up (it already looks like they are).
  • I wonder how many blogs are in the network now.

Sign up for BlogRush and start getting more traffic to your site today! The End

if you liked this post :)

Category: Marketing | 2,400 views | Posted: October 23rd 2007 07:48 am

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Fun With SEO - Ranking for Waxed Meat

I was kind of in an odd mood this week and I thought it would be a fun experiment to try to rank for an odd keyword. I’m pretty much an seo n00b, so I thought this experiment would help me bit to find out what works when trying to rank for a keyword. Well, I’d had the tagline “DEVTRENCH is not Waxed Meat” going around and around in my head for about a week, and decided to go with Waxed Meat for my keyword.

At this point you might be wondering what in the hell is waxed meat. Honestly, I didn’t know before doing this, and I have no clue where or why that phrase popped into my head. I’m just going to decide it was fate. If you want to know click here (warning this is kind of gross).

After setting my sites on my odd keyword, I did a Google search and was quite surprised that Google thinks there are 2,290,000 web pages about waxed meat. However the Overture Keyword tool reports that, surprise, surprise, no one searches for it. So we have a lot of indexed pages, and no competition, perfect for my experiment.

To be begin the experiment I used Shoemoney’s serps tool to see if I was in the top 100 already, which I wasn’t (no surprise there). Then I added the bold link in the footer of the page: NO WAXED MEAT. Then I added a link back to my site in my Digital Point forums with the text: DEVTRENCH is not WAXED MEAT.

That’s all I did, and in 2 days I was listed 7th in Google and 4th in MSN. Today, it has been 5 days and I’m 4th in Google and 2nd in MSN (yahoo and altavista apparently don’t like me). So, my experiment shows that this was apparently pretty easy to do :)

EDIT: I’ve made it to #2 so far!

So is there any practical application to this? Sure there is, a lot actually. If you want to build your search engine traffic, then one strategy would be to rank well for as many low competition keywords as you can. You’re probably not going to rank very high for the big keywords in your niche for a while, so why not knock of all of the smaller ones first? It’s good to build a list of low competition keywords and find out where you rank on them. A good place to start is the Google Analytics keyword section, or another web statistics program like Awstats. That will tell you what people are already searching for to get to your blog. Once you get your keyword list, the use Shoemoney’s serps tool to find where you are at. You should then target any keywords that you rank in the top 100 and get those up to the first page. Once you do that, you might be surprised to find out that you rank somewhere in the top 100 for that keyword you’ve been dreaming of. The End

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Category: Marketing | 694 views | Posted: October 10th 2007 08:39 am

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Adsense just downright sucks!

No More Adsense, cause it sucks!That’s right, Adsense sucks — at least it does on this blog anyway. I’m sure that others are doing very well with it, but on this blog, the ads are not targeted very well, and no one clicks on them. I’m thinking that the readers of this blog are like me and are just to savvy to click on Google Adsense ads.

I’ve been controlling my ads with OpenAds for the past 3 weeks and its been very enlightening to see the stats. The stats say that the Text Link Ads ad gets clicked on about 1/3 to 1/4 of the time that it is shown, while the Adsense ad gets clicked on less than 1% of the time. This says a lot about the readers of this blog, like they are interested in how to make money online, or text links, or are web developers who, like me want to get links to their sites. I also think it speaks to the relevance of Adsense on the blog. I’ve been trying for 3 months to get more relevant ads on this site and have tried everything I know how to do, but I still get ads about trenching and other things that I know wouldn’t interest anyone coming here. This annoys the crap out of me, and since I’m pretty sure it annoys the crap out of you too, there won’t be any more Adsense ads on the site. In fact, I’m even removing them from all older posts as well. Its just not worth the effort at this point, and I really only want to display stuff that people aren’t annoyed by.

I came to this conclusion after listening to the podcast on the last post. I hear Shoemoney say over and over again not to monetize a site until you get good traffic, and that ads in body content are just bad. I’m starting to believe more and more what he is saying and he’s inspired me to try to connect with my readers (you) more instead of annoying them to death. If you haven’t listened to that podcast yet, I highly recommend it. Maybe it will inspire you to do something positive on your blog!

So, is this the end of monetizing this blog? Sorry, no. I’ve been using this blog as a platform to bring web development ideas that work for almost four months now, and have also been using it to train myself in how to increase traffic to a site as well as how to monetize a site. And while this is not a make money online blog, I think it will always be an experiment in monetizing a website, and this change reflects that experimentation. In fact, there may be a point in time that Adsense does work for this site, but until that time arrives…no more Adsense. The End

P.S. Other changes going on: I’ve been placing an image in every post that is a graphical representation about what I’m posting about. I was afraid to make this image the same size as the adsense ad because I thought that would look bad, but now that there is no adsense, these images will be smaller now (250×250). Yeah!

And thanks to Internet Babel for letting us know that the rest of the videos for the Shoemoney/John Reese interview are up.

if you liked this post :)

Category: Marketing | 1,369 views | Posted: September 24th 2007 07:41 am

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