Cross linking all your sites or blogs: Dont try to cross link your sites or blogs inorder to boost your Google PR. Back in 2005, I had about 9 blogs. Some of pr 1, about two with a pagerank of 2 and of course some with a pagerank of 0. Inorder to raise their pageranks, I decided to link to all my blogs from each one of them. A few weeks later, all the blogs lost all their pagerank.
Buying tons of links: Never buy 500 links or submission to 150 directories because if you do, it will send a signal to the Google spam filters that your site should be in the sandbox especially if it is a new site. Focus on getting links from blogs, forums and Authority sites that are related to your site.
Replicating the same content: Google has content filters and will make sure it drops any multiple contents you have (especially if they are linked to each other, or linked to from thesame website.)
If you have to post a single article more than once, make sure you reword atleast 40% of the content, completely change the title and the first few paragraphs of the article.
Dont be lazy.
Discuss on blogs, forums, email bloggers, write and update your site all the time and do some web2.0 marketing. But DO NOT SPAM because it will come back to you.
I have a site about african entertainment which is now 2 years old. I have been link building slowly with blogs, forums and article posts, I was even lucky to be featured in some tech blogs. With the recent Google pagerank update, the site is now a solid PR 3. This is considering we haven't been sending PR releases or asking to be featured. We are totally focussed on rolling out the product.
Happy Birthday to the African TV project.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Change with the search!
If you have been following any web marketing firm's website or any search marketer's blog lately, you would have by now come across Google's change (or overhaul) of it's search technology.
It's time for SEO to change too. Shortly, Web companies like ours that rely mostly on organic search traffic will have to change their ways of thinking. New tests will have to be run, new analysis and more.
My company is doing well on search engines and most especially on Google, we've beaten most of the big guys to get to where we are and we get atimes more than 1500 monthly visitors from Google alone. Upto now, we haven't spent a dime on marketing, or atleast promotion.
In preparation, I went to the Google caffeine sandbox page (not sure if that's what it is called) to test the new search technology, to see if I can notice any changes to search results. I was too late to arrive because from the message I found on the page, Google is done testing it, they think it will work and have taken it off the developer test page.
My guess is, the technology may have some LSI built into it, atleast more than what we have already seen (or atleast think we have).
If any of you has used Google caffeine in test, we would love to have your thoughts here. Just comment on this post.
It's time for SEO to change too. Shortly, Web companies like ours that rely mostly on organic search traffic will have to change their ways of thinking. New tests will have to be run, new analysis and more.
My company is doing well on search engines and most especially on Google, we've beaten most of the big guys to get to where we are and we get atimes more than 1500 monthly visitors from Google alone. Upto now, we haven't spent a dime on marketing, or atleast promotion.
In preparation, I went to the Google caffeine sandbox page (not sure if that's what it is called) to test the new search technology, to see if I can notice any changes to search results. I was too late to arrive because from the message I found on the page, Google is done testing it, they think it will work and have taken it off the developer test page.
My guess is, the technology may have some LSI built into it, atleast more than what we have already seen (or atleast think we have).
If any of you has used Google caffeine in test, we would love to have your thoughts here. Just comment on this post.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
6 signs that your startup needs a new marketing team.
Here is a post that outlines 6 different things that may be a sign that your marketing team is not fit for the Job.
1. Whenever someone Googles your startup's name, pages about your site on websiteoutlook, compete.com, alexa, about.com come up in the first results page.
This means your marketing team has only been updating a few wiki pages and checking up the value of your site instead of getting you valuable users.
2. Whenever someone googles your startup's name, they don't get press releases about your startup on the first page, and hardly one profile for your startup from either myspace, facebook, folkd and definitely not twitter.
Your marketing team is not leveraging the power of press releases and they are so web1.0.
3. Your startup is less than a year old and traffic increase has been less than 30% in the recent months.
Growth is very slow, its time you put your marketing on steroids.
4. The only links you can find about your startup are the ones you put up yourself, obviously no blogger thinks it is worth writing about.
They are not sending the right message about your company.
5. Your webmaster's inbox is always empty, seems nobody bothers to know where you headed.
They lack creativity.
6. The Google Pagerank of your just months old site is thesame after 2 Google Pagerank updates.
They have never heard of authority sites. They have been link building for a while but hardly get a link from any site that is not a low traffic directory.
1. Whenever someone Googles your startup's name, pages about your site on websiteoutlook, compete.com, alexa, about.com come up in the first results page.
This means your marketing team has only been updating a few wiki pages and checking up the value of your site instead of getting you valuable users.
2. Whenever someone googles your startup's name, they don't get press releases about your startup on the first page, and hardly one profile for your startup from either myspace, facebook, folkd and definitely not twitter.
Your marketing team is not leveraging the power of press releases and they are so web1.0.
3. Your startup is less than a year old and traffic increase has been less than 30% in the recent months.
Growth is very slow, its time you put your marketing on steroids.
4. The only links you can find about your startup are the ones you put up yourself, obviously no blogger thinks it is worth writing about.
They are not sending the right message about your company.
5. Your webmaster's inbox is always empty, seems nobody bothers to know where you headed.
They lack creativity.
6. The Google Pagerank of your just months old site is thesame after 2 Google Pagerank updates.
They have never heard of authority sites. They have been link building for a while but hardly get a link from any site that is not a low traffic directory.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Internet Marketing that has worked for me.
Tips on promotion techniques that have brought traffic to my site for free.
>>> Google.
Google will always be on top. Atleast since I don't have a Yahoo! directory listing. Back in 2004 when I cleverly got my website listed in the Yahoo! directory for free, Yahoo! used to be my biggest traffic source.
Now even if I do secure the listing, I don't expect my Yahoo! traffic to exceed the one I already get from Google. My site is doing really good on the Google SERPS with top 10 listing and even #5 listing for my best keyphrase and #1 for many other keyphrases. (Atleast 3 more).
Well incase you want to know what my secret is, content. Content is the key, build more pages, link to them from blogposts, Digg them and more traffic will come from Google.
>>> Yahoo!
I am doing decently well on the Yahoo! search, (though I don't know how well I will still be doing since they turned to Bing). The thing is, this time around my site doesn't have a Yahoo! directory listing so I don't expect Yahoo search to favour my site in it's result so much.
>>> Nairaland
Participating on the Nairaland forum has helped me a lot scoop up some home website traffic. I get significant traffic to my site from 2 of the threads I participated in on the forum.
Here are some tips for participating on Nairaland.
- Respond to threads that have lots of activities, with responses into the hundreds.
- Some Google PR of 1 or 2 would do.
- And please say something reasonable. (it's ok to include a link on your response or add a sig file).
>>> Twitter
As long as you follow the right people and get followed on twitter, you will get some traffic to your site and lot's of mention about you. participate in discussions, send @replies, follow the right people and update your status regularly. Just logging on and listening to what others are saying will give you the idea on what to say.
>>> Digg
Digg it, don't spam it.
>>> Stumbleupon
Make friends with people on related industry, stumble their favorites and make sure they like you so they stumble yours too.
>>> Hubpages
This is really a great service. all you have to do is write and publish articles, ping them and add them to other social bookmarking sites and watch the traffic grow and Google Pagerank rise. You can publish a good article and it can reach a Google Pagerank of 2 in a few weeks. You can also network with people in related industry so they know when you publish a new hub. You can publish weekly, though publishing monthly isn't bad at all.
>>> Blogging
I started blogging early, probably around thesame time that blogging experts like Yaro Starak started. It was really great then back in 2004-2005 doing wonders with blogs and pings.
Well blogging is not like it used to be. I have had blogs with close to a thousand daily visitors. But now apart from this blog, I only use blogs for some link building.
>>> Reciprocal links
links I requeted from other webmasters.
New techniques I will be using
Press release
article marketing ( I have done this to some extent, but not big time).
squidoo lenses
paid ads
>>> Google.
Google will always be on top. Atleast since I don't have a Yahoo! directory listing. Back in 2004 when I cleverly got my website listed in the Yahoo! directory for free, Yahoo! used to be my biggest traffic source.
Now even if I do secure the listing, I don't expect my Yahoo! traffic to exceed the one I already get from Google. My site is doing really good on the Google SERPS with top 10 listing and even #5 listing for my best keyphrase and #1 for many other keyphrases. (Atleast 3 more).
Well incase you want to know what my secret is, content. Content is the key, build more pages, link to them from blogposts, Digg them and more traffic will come from Google.
>>> Yahoo!
I am doing decently well on the Yahoo! search, (though I don't know how well I will still be doing since they turned to Bing). The thing is, this time around my site doesn't have a Yahoo! directory listing so I don't expect Yahoo search to favour my site in it's result so much.
>>> Nairaland
Participating on the Nairaland forum has helped me a lot scoop up some home website traffic. I get significant traffic to my site from 2 of the threads I participated in on the forum.
Here are some tips for participating on Nairaland.
- Respond to threads that have lots of activities, with responses into the hundreds.
- Some Google PR of 1 or 2 would do.
- And please say something reasonable. (it's ok to include a link on your response or add a sig file).
As long as you follow the right people and get followed on twitter, you will get some traffic to your site and lot's of mention about you. participate in discussions, send @replies, follow the right people and update your status regularly. Just logging on and listening to what others are saying will give you the idea on what to say.
>>> Digg
Digg it, don't spam it.
>>> Stumbleupon
Make friends with people on related industry, stumble their favorites and make sure they like you so they stumble yours too.
>>> Hubpages
This is really a great service. all you have to do is write and publish articles, ping them and add them to other social bookmarking sites and watch the traffic grow and Google Pagerank rise. You can publish a good article and it can reach a Google Pagerank of 2 in a few weeks. You can also network with people in related industry so they know when you publish a new hub. You can publish weekly, though publishing monthly isn't bad at all.
>>> Blogging
I started blogging early, probably around thesame time that blogging experts like Yaro Starak started. It was really great then back in 2004-2005 doing wonders with blogs and pings.
Well blogging is not like it used to be. I have had blogs with close to a thousand daily visitors. But now apart from this blog, I only use blogs for some link building.
>>> Reciprocal links
links I requeted from other webmasters.
New techniques I will be using
Press release
article marketing ( I have done this to some extent, but not big time).
squidoo lenses
paid ads
Thursday, July 30, 2009
4 reasons why Nigerian startups are not funded
1. Traffic does not hold value. No analytics to specify value of each and every website visitor, advertisers are acting blindly.
2. The issue of online scam or 419. reminds me of my post where I said this lies on the back of the netpreneurs, It's time we start seeing b2b startups in Nigeria that solely address the problem of security.
3. Infastructure. see the post "can we build silicon valley in Nigeria?" well, do we have the infastructure.
http://www.sturvs.com/Science_Tech/Startups_Nigeria_-_Can_We_Build_Silicon_Valley_in_Nigeria/
4. Absense of a developed ecommerce system. Most startups have to run on the ad revenue model. The question is, how many companies want to advertise online in Nigeria? Since no one is buying online.
2. The issue of online scam or 419. reminds me of my post where I said this lies on the back of the netpreneurs, It's time we start seeing b2b startups in Nigeria that solely address the problem of security.
3. Infastructure. see the post "can we build silicon valley in Nigeria?" well, do we have the infastructure.
http://www.sturvs.com/Science_Tech/Startups_Nigeria_-_Can_We_Build_Silicon_Valley_in_Nigeria/
4. Absense of a developed ecommerce system. Most startups have to run on the ad revenue model. The question is, how many companies want to advertise online in Nigeria? Since no one is buying online.
Friday, June 19, 2009
June so far
This month has been the busiest since we started out online TV startup. I just sent a draft copy of a paper I am supposed to present in a conference in November, and ot looks like we have finally secured a technology partner.
I can't remember the last time I blogged here, it's probably been about 2 months. I am hoping I will post a few things before the month ends including a review of a hot new Nigerian startup.
The month is still not over and I am looking forward to reaching deals with about 5 content owners before the month end or early next month.
I have to go now, I have think and respond to an email.
I can't remember the last time I blogged here, it's probably been about 2 months. I am hoping I will post a few things before the month ends including a review of a hot new Nigerian startup.
The month is still not over and I am looking forward to reaching deals with about 5 content owners before the month end or early next month.
I have to go now, I have think and respond to an email.
Monday, May 4, 2009
I am not a travel blogger, but I blog when I travel.
I have not been on here for a while, I have been away. I really miss blogging but don't have the energy to write.
Anyways I am enjoying my trip and hop to blog something good from the trip.
Anyways I am enjoying my trip and hop to blog something good from the trip.
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