July, 2009 - Part 2

Interview with SEO Expert – Mani Karthik

Mani Karthik is a professional blogger and SEO Consultant from Cochin, India. And he had previously worked in a full time job, as a in-house SEO Specialist with an MNC for 5 years.
He has worked for many big companies so far, to help them optimize their website. You can see the list of them, in the about me section of DailySEOBlog.com, which is his primary blog.

Now without hurting your curiosity, here is the interview:

Satish: Please introduce yourself and about your online ventures, to our readers.

Mani: I’m an SEO / Social Media Consultant and a professional blogger. So that means I earn a living out of blogging and helping people sell things online with the help of SEO.

Satish: When did you start blogging seriously? What motivated you to choose internet business?

Mani: Started off back in my office days where I was working as in house SEO consultant. Started blogging as a part time fun thing, but it soon grew on me. Made many mistakes, and ultimately settled down with my blog dailyseoblog.com, for which I’m known today.

Satish: Do you have any other day job (9 to 5 job)?

Mani: No.

Satish: With a popular SEO blog, you might be a busy man. How does your day look like?

Mani: Starts off with my regular work out, then scanning through emails and rss feeds, then blogging, tweeting, then SEO work, project reports , client calls and meetings. Then I hop on to social media and pretty much remain there till the end of day. I do keep a schedule and try to remain as organized as possible, but I also love it when I’m having a handful to deal and is overwhelmed with it.

Satish: 3 things that you consider a waste of time, which you do.

Mani: Nothing at the moment, but as I find something I’d be quick to quit it.

Satish: From your experience, what do you think are the 3 most misunderstood SEO myths?

Mani: The myths about link exchanges, meta information and page rank.

Satish: Your best 3 SEO tips ever.

Mani:
1 – Build content that will force people to link to you.
2 – Build your brand on the Internet that your target audience won’t miss seeing.
3 – Develop authority to your domain.

Satish: With all these years of SEO consultancy experience, what are the common mistakes that you see your clients making on their blogs or business websites.

Mani: Lack of content. And sometimes people expect results to appear over the weekend. Also there are people who approach me after having done all possible black hat stuff and expecting a come back.

Satish: What’s your take on Twitter? Many people say that it’s a good marketing tool, while many others dislike calling Twitter as a marketing tool.

Mani: Its unfair to label twitter, because it has developed (by users) over the time into many forms starting from a simple communication device to many different uses. Like once the mobile was, its a communication tool for many, while some use it for tele calling, some even use it for texting, while some use it as a device to browse the web. Similarly Twitter is different things to different people.
For me, Twitter is a great tool to communicate and connect with like minded folks. And the good thing about it is that it isn’t complicated like many so called social networking sites.

Satish: Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz! etc — Order them according to your priority ?

Mani: Digg > SU > Mixx > Delicious > Reddit – But they are not on the same stage. Each of them have different character and uses, its just that I use one more than the other according to my preferences.

Satish: What are your 3 main strategies for blog promotion?

Mani:
1 – Content.
2 – Brand.
3 – Communication.

Satish: What repels you the most from a blog/website(animation at your face advertising etc)?

Mani: Stale content.

Satish: Your tips, advice for newbie bloggers/webmasters.

Mani: Keep consistent, dont lose your cool. On the internet, success doesn’t happen overnight, its a gradual process. If you’re looking for making money overnight, try stock trading.

Satish: One more question of my personal interest.. I have heard the podcasts on your blog, they are really of high quality. What devices/hardware do you use for the purpose?

Mani: Skype and some free sound editing software like Audacity. I record all the podcasts/ video / talks from my Mac.

Some personal questions:-

Satish: Your Personal hobbies and interests?

Mani: Movies, music, and traveling.

Satish: Life before blogging, blogging life, where you want to see your blog in next 5 or 10 years time? And how do you feel about it.

Mani: After 5 years, I want to be doing the same thing as today and earning five times as of now. Honest.

Satish: Some of your life’s ambitions?

Mani: Setting up my own publishing agency.

Satish: How does your family and friends react when you say “I am working in Internet, from my Home!”

Mani: The reason I’m working from home is my family. I don’t want to be feeling guilty staying away from them, working for someone else. So they’re cool, in fact they help me very much with their support. Friends mostly don’t understand the idea except for the Internet savvy ones.

Satish: Please tell something, to all your fans and followers ..

Mani: Feel free to add me to your social networks. 🙂

We take this opportunity to thank Mani Karthik for the interview. And wish him a greater success in coming years.
Hope you have all enjoyed the interview and would practice, some of the practical things shared by Mani Karthik. Hope to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

Mani Karthik has moved his blog to a brand new domain called DailyBloggr, to focus on a broader topic. Make sure you visit the new site.

Simple tweak, to maximize the chances of getting Re-Tweet

This is a small tip, but worth a separate post! So here is the small tip for this Sunday, hope you find it useful.

Always use less characters in the tweet that you want people to re-tweet. Do not expect people to rephrase the sentence and tweet it for you. If you are using a long URL in your tweet, then it will get shortened and the number of characters will get reduced automatically. But when you are tweeting the shortened URL or when you are tweeting only the plain text, always make sure that you use less words, interesting and conveying words. If you cover the whole 140 characters then how will your followers or others re-tweet your tweet? [ Here I am talking about only those tweets, to which you expect or ask a Re-Tweet ]

Recently Darren Rowse released his e-book and offered it for 25% less price, for some time. And announced it on twitter. He had used almost all the 140 characters. I found that the offer was very valuable, so wanted to re-tweet it, only to find that I was exceeding the word limit!

I could have shortened it myself, but still wanted to inform Darren that, his other followers might be willing to re-tweet it and that he should rephrase it with less number of words. Darren immediately rectified it and sent another tweet, with less and effective words. This also reminds me of “The Power of Less” ( Choosing only the essential ). Removing the unwanted things or less useful thing and using only the most wanted things.

After seeing Darren indirectly agreeing to the fact that “Tweets which are originally less than 140 characters tend to receive more re-tweets”, I started experimenting with it. We know that it’s a mere common sense, but twitter is a new phenomenon and we need to experiment before coming to any conclusion. (Experiment atleast before publishing the post on the blog 🙂 )

So I started asking for re-tweets once in a week or once in two week. I use to phrase the tweet with full 140 characters and would receive re-tweets only by friends with whom I chat most of the time in twitter. They never mind taking the pain of re-phrasing the sentence for me and retweeting it. But when I asked for the re-tweet on some other days, which had 100 or less characters, many people re-tweeted it. I had never seen those guys on twitter till then. I started following them after getting those re-tweet!

Remember, it may not make much of a difference for people with less number of followers, but for people with lot of followers, following this one simple technique will drastically increase the number of re-tweets.

Some other things to keep in mind are:
1. You need to give before you ask: Retweet interesting things of others, before asking for a re-tweet. If you give before asking, people will be glad to help you.
2. Ask for retweet only when you have really good piece of thing to share. Because many people wouldn’t like to recommend anything which they think will not bring value to their followers as well as to their recommendation.
3. And remember, twitter is not just about sharing links and marketing. Ofcourse it’s a very good marketing tool. But use it wisely. Provide great value to all your followers. Do not just try to sell them some thing. If you do so, one day you will end up with no followers (or just some boots following you), who will not provide value to your links or anything that you tweet.
Be genuine, be real, help people, involve in the discussion. Tweet the links or retweet only when you find the links interesting or when you think that it might interest your followers.

If you have any other small or big tips, that you have observed or experimented with twitter, then please share it with all of us..

You can follow me @technotip

Recover Your Google Account Password Using Text Message

If you are hooked to internet for more than one year, you will surly know or experienced the difficulty of remembering the passwords.

Google has a wide range of service, and many people are so much addicted to these wide services. So its very important that we remember our Google Account password. If we are on a world tour and need to stay away from internet for long time. Then, when we are back to work and try to access our GMail and wonder, what’s the password! And we might have forgot the password of the alternative email ID too!

So Google has introduced yet another useful feature, using which you can recover your Google Account Password. To do that, you need to connect your mobile number to your Google account first.

Google Account Password Recovery Option
Source: Gmail Blog.

Log into your Google account, click on the Change password recovery options . And enter your country, mobile number, a security Q&A and save it. You are done. No mobile number verification! As Google may be thinking that, you won’t enter your friends mobile number by mistake 🙂 But if you ask me, a verification (mobile number verification by sending a verification code etc) is a good, secure way. Because if someone enters a wrong number by mistake(Many time we do typo or it just happens, that’s why it is called by-mistake!), and we will be in the illusion that our account is safe and now there is no worry of forgetting the password, only to realize later, that we had entered a wrong number.

To send yourself a recovery code via SMS:
1. Enter your username on the password-assistance page. After completing the word verification, you’ll receive confirmation that a verification code is sent to your phone. Keep this page open so you can get to the page where you enter your code.
2. Check your phone for a text message from Google.
3. Enter your recovery code and click Submit recovery code.
4. Type your new password.

Caution:
Note that there’s a limit to the number of recovery code requests you can submit in one day. If you think that you’ve exceeded this limit, wait 24 hours and try again. We are not sure about the exact limit though. Knowing that there is a limit, itself helps!, be careful.

Anyway, nice feature, if made use of properly. Next time you forget your password, enter your username on the password-assistance page, and Google will text you a recovery code. No need to check another email account!

Feedburner – Tips to add latest post’s title as Subject of email

Most awaited feature of feedburner is now live(without any official word!).
How it feels to see 10 to 20 emails with the same subject line/title and from the same person? Even if the content of the mail is different we get irritated to open it and read. Many times, when we are busy and want to clean/process the inbox, we just delete such mails.
email-subject-line
Feedburner used to send a static subject line with all the email updates. But now they have added a feature, using which we can customize the email Subject line and make it more meaningful.

Use ${latestItemTitle} to insert your latest post’s title into the Subject/Title of email.

If we have multiple blog posts?
With two or more items in the update, ${n} shows the total number of items, and ${m} shows the number of items beyond the latest.

Examples
Technotip.org: ${latestItemTitle}
Technotip.org: “${latestItemTitle}” plus ${m} more
Technotip.org (in this message: ${n} new items)
feedburner-email-title

To activate this, log into your feedburner account. Click on “Publicize” tab. Next, look for “Email Subscriptions(Offer feed updates via email)” link at the left side side bar, click on it. A number of sub-menu items will be shown, among them, click on “Email Branding” link. Now you can follow the above tips to customize the email title/subject line. Actually those tips are given by feedburner on the customization page itself.
Thanks Feedburner..also fix the chicklet count fluctuation problem!

If you are a blogger, make sure you make use of this feature and stop annoying your email subscribers!

Google has now announced about the introduction of this feature on Adsense for Feed blog.

Technotip.org included in Alltop®

Happy to share a moment of happiness with all the readers, who actually made it happen. With the completion of 1 year, our blog has been included in the Alltop® . Have a look at the end of this page blogging.alltop.com. Its a honor to get included in such reputed sites. We will surely work to provide value to all its users.

For those of you who do not know about Alltop, watch below video for clear explanation:

Here is a quote from their about me page:

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

If you want to add your blog to Alltop, all you need to do is fill this submission form. And wait for the Alltop staff to approve it manually. As its a manual process, it will take little longer before you hear from them.
If your blog is of good quality and if you are providing RSS feed, then there is high chances that your blog will be included in Alltop.
Till now I haven’t seen significant traffic from Alltop, the reason may be because, its been added recently and that our blog is placed at the dead end of the site. Lets hope for the best in the future. All things apart, inclusion in such websites is really a honor and a motivational factor to keep working.
And a good way to increase traffic to your blog. Remember, every small thing helps in getting good traffic to a blog. So if you have a good blog with RSS feed, then make it a point to apply for Alltop, killerstartups.com and other such sites which will increase your traffic over time.

If you know of any directories or feed aggregator, which can bring significant traffic, then please share it in the comment section. Many people do not have time to submit to directories and aggregtor sites, as they are busy with the content creation of their blog. While content is still King, marketing is the queen, so do not ignore marketing your blog. Whats the use of a valuable content which is not read by any or many. Do not waste your time in submitting to all the directories, instead pick only selected once and invest your time in submitting to them. Make sure you have been blogging consistently for atleast 6 months(this will increase your chances of getting included) and read their rules before submitting.