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Contact Us

If your facing any sort of issues with the coupons above do let us know and we’ll surely do as much as we can to help you out with it, do contact us using the contact form and if this is your first time visiting this blog do subscribe to our feed.

If we see history, we often notice that most king’s  come back to capture their lost empires the second time before they die, and seeing recent events it makes me think that it might also be true for the internet, as today the internet is no less than a medieval battlefield. By referring to Kings and Emperors I wanted to make you understand that they considered power, reputation and authority as much more valuable than wealth, which is what makes them similar to internet entrepreneurs today.

Whenever I hear about a successful internet firm being taken over by a larger firm, I kind of feel sad for the founders, though most founder’s would be happy about the huge profits they’ve made, I’m sure many of them will feel the pain of loosing control of the company they built with sweat, blood and hard work, and I’ve seen many such entrepreneurs who repent years later for giving up their first business.

The main reason for this is that good ideas come only once, and great ideas come only to 1 in a million, and those of them who give up such great ideas for short term benefits will surely repent later on, I bet atleast some of you have heard about Roy Raymond, the then infamous founder of Victoria’s Secret, if you haven’t heard of him then don’t be surprised as nobody does. This guy got this great idea which was worth billions of dollars, but he decided to sell it for just $4 million. He repented doing so as just a few years later Victoria’s Secret was earning over $300 million a year, and Raymond lost two of his other startup’s and finally ended up bankrupt jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Now lets get back on topic, just a week ago their was huge buzz all over the internet about TechCrunch founder announcing his resignation on the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt, and as expected it was the clash of interests between his editorial values and ethics and that of Aol, and so far TechCrunch has never hesitated in criticizing Aol or its management for any reason, but now I suppose that the Aol management has had enough and Michael being a regular employee at the moment, couldn’t help but quit.

Yesterday, after almost a week the former TechCrunch editor made a small and simple comeback, with a blog named Uncruched, at the moment the blog has just one post titled ‘Here I Am’ but with no text, but even after that it’s received 100s of comments. What he plans to do with this is not quite clear, but seeing the name and style it seems like a direct attack on Aol and even on TechCrunch.

There were certain reasons why Michael Arrington was an important asset even after buying TechCrunch, and this was because in the past six years Michael Arrington has successfully uncovered various secrets of the silicon valley, and TechCrunch’s revenue sources are not really what they seem, TechCrunch earns a lot more by endorsing other firms and internet services than normal advertising, and many of these are against the ethics of blogging and journalism. Now that he is successfully out of TechCrunch, there is no one to keep an eye on what he does and where he does it, so his new blog, Uncrunched may turn out to be the next Wikileaks for the silicon valley.

Whatever I mentioned above might not be true, but at the moment Aol would surely feel insecure as Michael still has a very loyal support from colleagues and former employees. I’m watching Aol and Yahoo quite closely these days

Again do subscribe to our feed in order to receive constant updates about the latest happenings around the world, and if you want to add something here or tell us about any news please use our contact form.

I suppose its been quiet some time since I wrote on this blog, in the past few months I’ve been completely occupied with my humor site, SEO services and a few other projects, but with that I also kept working on my social media bases and I constantly engaged with my audience on Twitter and Facebook, and so far I’ve come up with pretty amazing methods to blast your Twitter and Facebook audience, in this post I’ll be concentrating on Twitter and I’ll be mentioning two methods which I’ve successfully used and which have worked well.

If you’ve ever visited my Twitter account before you’ll see a decent following of 2000, all of whom I know and with whom I constant engage, but as Twitter kept growing over the years it seemed like a puny number, especially if your a social media optimizer and whenever I approach a potential client they often expect a decent following to prove my expertise in the field. These two methods I’ll be showcasing below are pretty old and I’m sure all of you already know about it, but I’m changing a few methods within them adn adding a few more tricks.

All of these are basically inexpensive, but it all depends on how you want to do it, if your planning to do this manually, which is not recommended your sure to save a lot of money and see a rise in your following for free, but at the same time you’ll be spending hours of precious time on this, so it’s recommended that you buy bots and Twitter automation software’s such as TweetAttacks and TweetAdder.

Social Media Swapping (Retweets)

I bet I’ve mentioned this term 100s of times on this blog itself, if you’ve not heard about it, don’t worry because I myself coined this term. This basically means the exchange of social media votes on various social media platforms for increasing traffic and authority, in simpler terms I ask you to retweet my tweet and then retweet yours in return, which is sure to yield huge results if done massively. Over the years I’ve successfully built a huge swapping network on Gtalk which is currently big enough to get to the front page of Digg within minutes of submission.

Now in the past few weeks I used this network to the fullest extent and started aiming and working for 200 to 300 retweet’s, all of which contained 3 to 4 hashtag’s making it even more targeted, now using this method, my Twitter username would pop up with my Tweet for high volume keywords on Twitter 200 to 300 times a day, so surely I got a awful lot of targeted followers every time I did so, and this came with 1000s of visitors and pageview’s almost instantly.

This method does take a lot of time, I took almost a year to build mine, but I’m sure many of you can do it within 3 or 4 months if you can concentrate on this for a few hours everyday. Firstly I’d recommend you to start swapping with your friends on Facebook and Gtalk, which is why I recommend you to connect with as many internet marketers and bloggers as possible, no matter how small your initial network is, it is sure to grow as many of your friends would like to exchange their contacts for your’s and many of them also recommend their friend’s to ping you for votes, so once the initial network is set up most of the other work is done by itself.

If you have a good enough network, start promoting your Tweets, Diggs etc, via exchanging votes from them and I’m sure you’ll see a steady rise in Twitter followers from day one.

Mass Follow Technique (Finding the proper bait)

I believe all of you are familiar with the Twitter mass follow technique, which by far is the most popular black hat Twitter method to increase followers, but over the last 3 years Twitter has made multiple changes to it’s algorithm which makes it extremely difficult to mass follow users manually with an intention to increase followers, which is why tools such as TweetAttacks and TweetAdder mint so much money.

I recently bought TweetAttack’s and so far its working like a charm, each day I follow up to 1000 people and gain 250 to 300 follow backs, and what makes these tools different from manual following is that they have a clear understanding of the Twitter API and try to manipulate it and make our tasks seem highly legit, and today there are hundreds of such software’s and services out their many of which are even free, but what most people don’t realize about Twitter marketing is that it does not depend on the software you use nor the client you manage your account from, it depends on your timing, planning and selecting skills.

No matter how good TweetAttacks was I still had to decide whom to follow on my own, and for the first few weeks I had a very little follow back, but soon it reached to over 50% which is what it is today.

I succeeded in doing this because I made a list of those Twitter users who themselves increased their following through mass following method, and you can easily identify them by seeing the ratio between the number of people they follow and the amount fo followers they have.

It took me almost three weeks of search to find the best and now I have a list that could last me for at least 2 months and can surely bring in over 10,000 followers.

To start off with this method, the first thing you must do is to buy a software such as TweetAttacks or TweetAdder, both are expensive, but they are really important for internet marketers, after that try playing around and learn as much as possible about using these tools, then you can start off with your hunt for baits on Twitter and if you are looking for the signs which I’ve mentioned above I’m sure you’ll find many such users. The best way to search is to use search terms such as #Twitterfollow, #Massfollow etc.

On to our readers

It’s been more than a month since I stopped blogging on this blog, although I cannot promise to get back, I can surely promise all of you that I won’t let this blog to die, soon I have various plans after which I might bring in many more things within this blog, but at the moment you cannot expect more than one post per week.

Do let us know about your questions and suggestions in the comments section below and also do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter to stay updated.

We’ve been hearing a lot of IPO buzz this year, from Groupon to Zynga and recently a few rumors about Facebook’s possible IPO shot up creating a lot of buzz in the social media space, like everyone else I too have kept my ears open for this news hoping to see a few broken records in Wall Street, but off lately I’ve been realizing why Zynga can be an uncertain investment opportunity.

If you’ve been reading my posts in the past I’m sure you realize how much I hate firms which raise millions from investors while being wholly dependent on some other firm, in the past I’ve criticized a few narrow niche firms including some Iphone and Ipad developers who have had millions bet on them, as often I feel that these developers are liable to the terms and conditions of Apple and will always have to keep a honored relationship with them in order to survive, thus creating a total loss of freedom.

Today Zynga and it’s various products maybe highly popular, but the company itself has agreed that substantially all its revenue and all it’s players come from Facebook, and to be clear with that they are just like any other Facebook App Developer and have no legal partnership with the company, so in case if there has been a strain in Zynga’s relationship with Facebook they may be removed from the social network overnight.

To add to this another issue questioning investors is what’s the main source of revenue for Zynga?? The answer is the sale of virtual goods, which is surely a great source of income, but not efficient or reliable as just a small portion of their massive user base actively buys them, and I believe almost all of those users are from Facebook. Zynga surely has got a hell lot of options in order to effectively monetize themselves, but it seems they prefer running their firm like entrepreneurs on the 90s. Zynga currently has got a market valuation of $970 million and after this $1 billion IPO there valuation is sure to touch somewhere between $15 to $20 billion (including secondary exchange), but the hard truth here is that the company earned a income of just $11.5 million during the first quarter of 2011, making it highly overvalued.

IPO ‘Hysteria’

So far there have been 64 IPOs this year in the United States itself, due to favorable market conditions almost all of them have been a success, so I figure even Zynga is bound to do well during the issue. This year has witnesses the highest rise in internet IPOs since the year 2000 which was followed by the deadly dot – com bubble.

Zynga being the most popular and most successful of the lot is surely bound to issue upwards of a billion dollars, and if it does so it would be the largest IPO for an internet company since Google in 2004.

Today due to massive networks and huge communication platforms, remote PC control turns out to be extremely important for smooth management. If you are or know any IT expert, consultant or technical support group you’ll see that the variety of tools they use in order to take care off and manage client issues.

I myself use Teamviewer with my partner in order to collaborate our resources and for various other activities, but Teamviewer as popular as it is, has a few issues which causes computer’s to get stuck and many times people lose connection from their partners which can create serious issues, to deal with all that I stumbled upon Techinline.

Unlike Teamviewer, Techinline is a web based controller which I think would surely make it more stable, efficient and faster and in the past few weeks while I’ve been using it, I don’t think there were any sort of issues or errors with it. Techinline basically uses SSL to transmit proprietary remote desktop protocol as in HTTP, an SSL certificate is created for each remote desktop and is used for cryptographically secure communications between the remote desktop and the accessing computer.

In order for one to connect with a remote PC he or she must have a 6 digit code, which is just like how Teamviewer works, other than this Techinline also provides chat, file transfer and many more. It has been criticized for being a total copy of Teamviewer, but I completely disagree with it asTechinline goes up for a simpler and faster approach and being completely web based makes it a wholly different system altogether.

Where Does It Come From?

The company is yet very small, but seems to be doing really well when it comes to business, it was started by a group of IT veterans in 2006 and this seems to be their first masterpiece, and I’m sure we’ll see and hear a lot from them over the next couple of years.

Due to competitive challenges the company has evolved rapidly in the remote access products niche and has got various big time customers including Dell, Intel and Microsoft.

Cost And Pricing

Good products such as these always come with a price tag, but in this case I believe the pricing has been very reasonable, Techinline provides two pricing systems, one allows you to pay as you go and the other is subscription based, you can decide which system suits you the best according to your needs. The monthly subscription starts from $30 per month and allows unlimited sessions and pay-as-you-go starts from $20 for 5 sessions.

Maybe Teamviewer stood at an advantage here, as it’s completely open source, but for professional purposes and remote software support that require immense speed and accuracy, nothing can beat the expertise of Techinline.

Try it out

You can decide more on this topic by trying it out for free for 15 days, and I’m sure you’ll realize the worth of this software later on, I do agree that most of you here may not be able to afford it, but whenever your deciding to grow your business and its communication, I seriously urge you to have this in mind.

This is a sponsored post, in order to get your product or service reviewed please visit this page!

I bet most of you were alive during the 1990s and the first few years of the 21st Century and even if you weren’t there are very few possibilities that you haven’t heard of AOL, the internet giant which once ruled the entire cyberspace, but I’m afraid there are very few remains of its glorious past today, it started with AOLs merger with Time Warner in the year 2000 and at that time it reached its highest point and it was only downfalls after that.

Well I’m pretty much sure very few of you have an account in AOL, and that few includes even me, and of course that wasn’t one of the best decisions I made, but at that time I was pretty young to be called net savvy and in the year 2006 AOL made its presence in India with a bang with all sorts of promotional programs, advertisements and marketing stunts all of which came for a heavy price, at first it was a success, but that didn’t stand for long.

Three to four months down the line, many of AOLs Indian subscribers started to move towards Gmail and Yahoo which provided a faster and much better user experience, although I wasn’t one of the them I knew the mistake I had made, as it was during those years that my presence on the internet began to grow and my AOL id was my identity and it was then that I figured out that AOL does not allow mail forwarding, so even though I could have dealt with it, I guessed it was too much of work and decided to go with it.

Later on, it turns out that AOL India had lost almost all its traffic and was burning cash at a huge rate in the fall of 2009 and that was the first time AOL sent chills down my spine, and today they are at there worst possible state.

Huge decline in traffic

For a company like AOL the traffic their sites receive is the blood of the company, and because they failed to keep up with other competitors they noticed consistent decline in traffic over the years and that was sure to lead towards lower ad rates as 80% of AOL’s revenues were generated from advertising sales, so within a few months AOL took a direct hit on its bottom line and soon enough the entire company faced internal conflicts resulting in Layoffs and cutbacks which often make things worse for a media and internet firm.

So during this time the site’s traffic kept falling with the company’s share price and profits and the management team tried all its might to improve their hoaxed businesses and when it didn’t work they decided to sell many of their toxic and unprofitable assets in order to raise funds and increase profits.

But this again was a short term relief as this disintegration of its online assets resulted in a much faster fall in traffic, this was because most of its sites such as Bebo, ICQ and MapQuest were inter-dependent on each other and on the AOL main site as much as it was dependent on them, so basically there was a steep decline in traffic after the various sales during 2009 and 2010.

Separation from Time Warner

In 2009 AOL Time Warner had lost a lot of its wealth and it saw plenty of investor agitation and by the end of that year they were forced to separate the firms which brought down the $226 billion company to a valuation of just $20 Billion.

This can be considered a good sign in one way as now the executives of AOL had much more freedom to take decisions, and of the factors of AOL’s downfall is said to be slower management and decisions. After the disintegration AOL formed a new business plan and basically started concentrating on an entirely new vision, though there hasn’t been much results so far I surely do think it could regain its old status.

Takeovers and change in business model

In the past one year AOL has made numerous acquisitions which would sum up to over $700 million, and all of this investments were made on a similar niche which gives us a brief idea about AOL’s new business model. They bought TechCrunch and The Huffington Post both of which produce aggregate amounts of content and now they plan to distribute this content across their network sites, well this is just a part of it and the actual plan is pretty complicated.

One benefit of this as we can already see is that these particular sites are niche sites and as usual sites like these tend to have a high advertising rate, which has helped AOL revive its broken advertising wing and improve its network.

The idea seems pretty clear, they raised over $1.1 billion selling various assets and now they are using the same to acquire new age internet businesses which are sure to help in building AOLs brand identity. But I see this going in a way through which the main AOL site could be turned into a mere content delivery network.

Operations in India

AOL’s operations in India were started in 2006 and I’ve already mentioned briefly about the initial success and the factors which contributed to the later failures, but there are also a few issues with India itself.

Firstly AOL was late to enter the Indian market as by 2006, groups such as Google and Yahoo were well established, so the only way AOL could quickly market itself was through expensive advertising which did work, but their degraded user experience spoiled it all. Even though AOL India never made a profit, they still had over 1000 employees which consisted of engineers and developers who provided services to its other projects.

One of the key reasons why AOL India remained unprofitable was due to the high bandwidth costs which prevail in India, the high costs don’t matter much on the consumers side as India already has a huge number of internet users, but the issue is with the bandwidth costs which AOL incurs. Big internet firms with self hosting have to get a leased lines of their own for faster services and that does not come cheap in India, which was one of the main reasons why internet startup’s here have slow growth.

But now they have even decided to cut down on their development team and within a month a team of over 1500 employees was reduced to just 100 and it’s said that the Indian team will focus on building AOL’s mobile applications.

Shutting down of AOL India

In 2011, just one month before writing this post, I had a shock of a lifetime when I realized that I could no longer access the AOL India site, after a few hours of searching I figured that AOL mail does work if accessed directly and I quickly changed all my important account IDs from AOL to Gmail and saved all my important mails in a folder outside AOL.

After two days they started redirecting aol.in users to coolage.aol.in which is a social network for college students, but still I couldn’t find a single piece of information on this anywhere. It took TechCrunch and other tech sites more than 2 weeks to realize this problem and that’s when all of them came out with a post, this also shows the lack of popularity which AOL suffers in India.

Many rumors started filling up the net, one such rumor was that AOL was coming up with a redesign, but its clear that its not true as they wouldn’t risk weeks of traffic for a redesign, but I do think that this was just a way to save on bandwidth costs which they have and they also seem to be promoting their CoolAge service, which I’m sure won’t stand a chance.

Bugs and technical issues

Though the main AOL India page was brought down, people still had access to their mails and fearing the worst I had stopped using AOL completely and was visiting it once in a week, but recently something much worse happened which got me extremely angry.

While I shifted all of my important mails I didn’t care much about deleting my contacts, as little did I know that bots could easily takeover AOL. Just a week ago many of my friends started complaining that they had received a mail from me with nothing but a link which they claim was infected, after logging in I noticed that all the contacts on my list had received the same mail and this was the worst issue I had faced with AOL, and after a bit of search I figured that all AOL India users faced this.

I figure that the shutting down of their main site provided bots with easy access as many of the security procedures too were down with it and that may have caused this issue, after this AOL was not accessible for almost 6 hours which I think was used to combat this bot, and this surely removes AOL from my list of trusted companies.

On to our readers

Right now they are surely in a bad state, but so far they have worked out well in order to regain their status, and I am pretty sure they will spring back up if they follow this path.

If you’ve faced any such issues with AOL please do let us know and do subscribe to our feed and follow us on Twitter.

The infamous and widely populated micro-blogging site Twitter may have gained a name as a game changer on the internet, but for its investors who have bet billions on it, its nothing more than just a hole in their pockets, as Twitter is not just burning cash at a high rate, but its not even having any plans as of now to monetize itself.

In 2009 it made a series of search agreements with Google and Microsoft which resulted in a cashflow of $20 to $25 million and I guess it covered up their overhead costs for the next two quarters after that, but later again they started burning cash at a heavy rate. In the beginning of 2010 Twitter again came up with a new way to monetize themselves, which was known as promoted tweets, which will allow individuals and companies have a trending topic on Twitter in their own name, so then people other Twitter users would tweet about it creating widespread brand exposure, and the cost of such ads were upwards of $100,000.

It did generate some revenue, but that initiative was called just an experiment and was never enough to cover up Twitter’s huge management costs. Today Twitter has over 300 full time employees and the biggest expense they face is their bandwidth charges which I think would go in millions every month, so basically they are burning a hell lot of cash than they are actually bringing in.

Are they running an NGO?

The top executives of Twitter are running their internet company like they used to in the 1990s and we all know what happened to the internet after that, though many people disagreed with me already I’m sure that Twitter is running like an NGO, all they want is to serve the society, but ‘What is to happen to the patient, if the doctor himself falls sick?’. Even if I was going to start an NGO I wouldn’t have taken $3 billion in venture capital for it.

I guess its pretty clear, Twitter isn’t doing any social service here, they aren’t generating any profits for its investors, so either the top execs are planning to pull off their interest in an IPO or they are just interested in earning a handsome salary and bonus.

The best monetization methods for Twitter

Though most people think that Twitter is incapable to provide returns, I feel its got great potential and can even overtake Facebook if it wanted to. I have found out a few methods through which it can continue the way it worked without hurting its user experience, many of these methods are taken from other startups and firms.

The first way Twitter can earn a good profit is by charging users for registering their own custom domain for $10 to $20 and Twitter can easily earn a 30% commission on that. On top of that Twitter can provide premium services for businesses and corporates which allows them to add extra tabs, pages and features onto their profile, both of which can generate enough to cover up their overheads and if it goes the way I’m thinking they would surely generate $20 million a quarter.

Last and the best of all is the Twitter search advertising, all of us know the amount of searches made on Twitter everyday, so why can’t Twitter use this to promote potential advertisers, it would surely be much more targeted than Facebook advertising and if Twitter can use the Google Adword’s style bidding then even small and medium sized businesses can promote their presence on Twitter, and thi method would surely make them a fortune, and will surely not destroy the user experience.

On to our readers

The above methods are just my views on this, your completely free to disagree with me or have your own opinions, to keep up with future posts of such sort do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

A year ago Digg and Reddit weren’t worth a competition as Digg was many times bigger than Reddit back then, but within a year things have changed drastically altering the entire competition.

Digg was doing great in the first two quarters of 2010 and had constant growth when it came to traffic and page views and the entire social web had great expectations from Digg’s ambitious version 4, which they claimed would improve discovery and sharing of content. Everything went on great initially, but Digg lacked behind when it came to proper application testing.

Digg version 4 was a huge failure, and Kevin Rose failed to test and review before launching it, which resulted mass disappointment among their users for whom the next best place was Reddit. I believe that Digg failed at the application testing process, even when they released the beta version there were plenty of complaints, suggestions and issues from their users and from critics for which they turned a blind eye. You can see the number of negative comments on their blog post announcing the launch here.

How was Reddit to benefit?

I think thats pretty clear, as Reddit was the next best destination for sharing and discovering new content, though it has had no change in interface since it was launched in 2005 which was regarded as a primitive design and often considered as no threat to Digg, some even hated Reddit at one point claiming that they had entirely copied Digg’s idea.

When Digg version 4 took off, most users hated the concept of removing the upcoming page, the bury button and making ‘My news’ the default user page, which again reduced traffic to those sites which pop on the front page and biggest issue was the reserving of the front page for a few selected publishers, which was reported by Digg top user GenPanda and even we reported it in one of our previous posts. All of this contributed to a huge decline in Digg traffic and Alexa reported that Digg’s traffic plummeted 33% within a weeks time.

Reddit did all it could to benefit from this and when it noticed the tremendous rise they started welcoming their users with ‘Reddit 101 for new users’. To add to this many Digg users started off an online revolt against the company and I feel this was fueled by bloggers and webmasters who felt they were cheated due to Digg’s policy of favoritism, all of them started submitting images and small posts onto Digg with titles against Kevin Rose and Digg itself, many of these stories received 100s of Diggs, though Digg moderators tried to stop them, they didn’t want to go too far ahead.

Recently I saw an IMA (I am a) thread on Reddit which criticized Digg, it also received more than 200 comments, if you can take some time to go through all those comments you’ll realize that most of them were former Digg users who had revolted against Digg, many of them claiming that Reddit was a better place to hang out.

The main reason behind the fall of Digg

Most people claimed that the New Digg had some extra love for sites such as BBC, Techcrunch, CollegeHumor and Wired which is why they revolted against it, other than a few minor issues with the features and the back end of the site, but according to me the entire issue was started off by internet marketers and bloggers rather than common Digg users themselves.

First of all, the old Digg’s algorithm valued the number of Diggs and comments a story gets to determine its rankings and a story could stay in the upcoming section for upto 2 days, and today your story will move out of the upcoming section within 12 to 18 hours of time, moreover other than just Digg’s and comments the new Digg algorithm has many more factors regarding from where the votes actually come from and the sources of traffic for a particular story.

If your an active social media user you’ll know that marketers use the method of social media swapping, that is exchanging of votes on various social networking sites in order to gain popularity, most marketers either do it on their own or they outsource it and undoubtedly Digg was a marketer dominated community, most of the popular stories in the old Digg came about in a similar fashion and maybe thats what Kevin Rose wanted to end.

On top of that Digg made a few changes such as making the ‘My news’ page as default which resulted in the drop of traffic for front page stories, all of which made marketers unhappy and resulted in the fall of Digg.

Well I’m sure all of you disagree with me arguing that less than 1% of Digg constituted of internet marketers and they cannot make the difference, but its a well known fact that 90% of the popular stories on Digg are submitted by 10% of the users and often the Digger’s dominate the front page, so undoubtedly they are the ones who have all the power. Take LTgenpanda for example, he was the one who exposed the Digg’s policy of favoritism, he was a top 100 Digger and his story was popular on Digg and Reddit.

The current status of the two sites

Now most people claimed that Reddit has gained a lot from Digg’s failure, well yes it has, but now I also feel that Reddit has overtook Digg when it comes to traffic. I have few of my own evidences which I feel even you would have noticed if you’ve promoted your sites on both the platforms.

I have been promoting my new site Farrrt.com quite a lot lately and in these stats are of one single day and both are for the same post I had made and Digg had received special attention which took me till the top of the upcoming page, but no matter what it still stood lesser than the other sites.

If you can notice I’ve received a total of 2 points made of 29 upvotes and 27 down votes and on Reddit not going into the minus section means your content was good, and on that particular day I had touched 9 points, so you can see the amount of potential reddit has for traffic.

And although Digg has got double the votes and even after I made it to the top of the upcoming page I didn’t receive more than 10% of the traffic I received from Reddit.

These two screenshots are taken from Compete.com, and I don’t seriously think Compete and Alexa provide accurate measurements, but for big and high traffic sites I’m sure both can be pretty close to the actual, so this I suppose can be enough evidence that Reddit gets more traffic than Digg, on top of that Digg’s traffic is on the fall since the past four months.

Like all of my other posts, this too is based on experiments and experiences, so I’m sure I was right on this one and seriously encourage you to talk it out if you have anything in the comments section below, also do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

This is pretty old news, I had heard about this 6 months ago, but sadly I failed to see this closely, it was just a week ago that my partner came up with this idea while we were working on our content development plan. Bankaholic, was a pretty interesting blog, with a catchy name, design and sticky content and like most other blogs all its content came from its sole writer and owner Johns Wu, but today the blog gets millions of hits, has got more than 20 full time writers and its 23 year old founder considered himself retired.

Ofcourse he just had to retire now, as he got an extremely sweet deal from Bankrate which offered him $12.5 million upfront and $2.5 million over two years, and he went on to make history as the owner of the most highly valued blog on the internet. In 2006 Johns Wu started a stock market and personal finance blog and according to our analysis he got most of his traffic from SEO.

While he started this blog he was still in college and like most teenagers had been struck by the idea of internet business, though science was his strength he decided to go with a stock market blog, which I bet made all the difference. This is a case study on the factors which contributed to the high valuation of this blog,

Content : the key asset

The value of any blog can be judged by the quality of its content, and if it succeeds in providing sticky and catchy content it would surely have a good sale price as quality information has always got its own price tag, even if a particular site fails to get in traffic.

John’s site provides great quality content from the beginning, and at the time of sale it had over 600 posts of the same, which is actually one of the key reasons. Seeing his first few posts I feel he combined quality content, with entertaining articles with a few posts that actually sell.

I also feel that their was heavy keyword research taking place behind all of his first few posts, for example take a look at this post, he has stuffed keywords such as APY, CD rates etc and he has dominated search results for that particular keyword, many blogs which do this will look extremely spammy, but he has made it look creative and of great quality.

Traffic : SEO & SEM

Johns already knew a lot about the internet and internet marketing, although this is just my simple assumption as till now his influence in social media is extremely low for an internet celebrity. I’ve also mentioned in a few of my previous posts that blogs which started off during the period of 2006 to 2008 experienced high growth rates due to heavy growth in internet usage and low search competition, that also was the time when Google’s search results got pretty mature.

As I’ve mentioned above, most of his earlier posts were highly keyword researched and during those times Google provided high search rankings for all quality posts all of which surely got him high traffic.

In an interview with SeoBook he has also claimed to have launched many Adwords campaigns in the beginning, which I think was a great idea. You can grow your blog heavily if you target the right keywords, the Adwords competition was extremely low back then, but still he has done what people were extremely skeptical about.

Very soon he ranked pretty high for high traffic keywords which was again a reason for such high valuations. Bankrate knew that it was next to impossible to rank for such keywords in today’s search market, so they decided to go as far as possible to get this blog.

Monetization : earnings potential

Bankrate surely expects good returns for such a huge investment, as expected they had expected more than just returns and profit by this investment. Bankaholic’s high rankings in search results is surely a great asset, and its content too was no less. But something tough to find out about the site was their initial monetization strategy.

The site got upto 200,000 visitors, so a combination of CPM, CPC and performance based advertisements would have resulted in great income. I’m sure Johns earned a solid passive income even during his first few days of blogging, but Bankrate cannot wait for years to reap back their earnings, as these monetization methods will hardly earn a six figure yearly income.

So far Bankrate has been using the same methods, and I also think they are selling sponsored reviews and promoting various finance related affiliate programs which are surely high paying. I wouldn’t be surprised if their revenues have tripled than the time when Johns used to run the site. But Bankrate already has a lot of financial sites which earn them heap loads of advertising and affiliate revenue, so I have a feeling that they are on the verge of launching a digital product to thoroughly monetize Bankaholic.

Finance niches are meant for success

A few niches on the internet are just made for success, even if my blog got 3 times the traffic Bankaholic did I surely wouldn’t even sell for even half that price. I few niches like finance, stock market, healthcare and education are extremely profitable, your adsense earnings will be comparatively higher, affiliate programs have high payouts and in the end the valuation of ones blog is always high.

This is infact an ugly truth about the internet, I am a strong advocate for the wealth and potential of the internet, but I must agree that all this isn’t divided equally as even today the geography, locality and niche of a blog have a lot of influence.

So in 2006 at the time when the competition for all niches remained low, Johns was lucky enough to chose the lucrative personal finance niche, soon the CPC rates for this niche was sky high resulting in a huge valuation for his site, so his success was partially due to luck.

On to our readers

This is surely one great example of what dedicated blogging can bring in, though Johns Wu had partial luck he had worked pretty hard on his site in the beginning. This case study is purely based on research and assumptions and cannot be back with any proof, but I bet all of you can use the above methods to build a successful internet business.

We’re sure to write more on this topic in the future, so to keep up do subscribe to our feed and also follow me on Twitter.

Classified sites are a fantastic business resource, but sadly most people make the most traditional use of it. Craigslist was once a site that could sell anything and everything posted on it, but as it grew it became increasingly saturated. For a common internet surfer a classified site is a traditional advertisement site filled with deals on various categories, but if your an internet marketer you’ll have to see a great profitable business opportunities in those listings.

Thats what happens in my case, I often surf through classified listings in my newspaper as well as online and try to find something interesting which could turn out to be a money maker, most of the time its just a way me and my partner pass time by discussing various opportunities, but right now if we are serious about it and ready to spend time on it we’ll sure have our hands on a small fortune, that is what one has to look in for a classified listing.

Today the internet is flooded with such sites and quiet often you’ll find the same advertisements and offers in all of them, so right now I find it hard to seek legitimate and worthwhile offers in most of those sites.

As my blog got popular I keep receiving mails very often from new websites and entrepreneurs, I usually reply to all but wouldn’t care to endorse them until it was very special. The site I’ll be endorsing here is a classified site, currently targeting the Indian audience and my main aim is to educate you about the ways you can profit from this site when your buying and when your selling.

Introducing the Indian classified site

Sahipasand is one such free classified site which mainly concentrates on the Indian niche, it segregates adverts on the basis of region first and categories later. Like Craigslist its a free service and allows anyone to post an advert for free. Its a lot cleaner than Craigslist and its less spammy and saturated thanks to effective moderation.

The site has its roots from a Norwegian media company, Schibsted Classified Media which runs few of the webs most popular websites. Right now this site has got about 44000 active advertisements, which means its already well established itself in its niche and because its young our opportunities on this site are pretty high.

The reason I’ve had special attraction towards this site is that the offers here are just great and I’m sure you’ll find many interesting products below market price, which can save you s lot of money and in my case I can just take advantage of it and create a full fledge business. So that is what we’ll be concentrating on over here.

What can you do with this?

If you are an Indian this site is of plenty of use to you, for any casual surfer this can be a source for great personal goods at extremely low prices and if your looking for a big toy you can also get an extremely reasonable real estate deal as now that is what the site is flooded with.

In case your looking to sell some of your old house-old goods their cannot be a better place as almost all of them who have advertised here have claimed to have received a tremendous response. The price may not be up to what you’ve expected but it can surely raise the money you were looking for.

This site has got countless resources, so the things I’ve listed above are very less so I think you can see what its got by examining the site yourself.

What I’d do with this site?

If your not an Indian, which includes most of our audience or if your in search of a simple money making opportunity this site can do a lot of help to you as well. Firstly the site has got a huge traffic, whereas its advertiser strength is low, well moderated and of good quality so almost any new advert posted on this site can provide great exposure.

As many of you might be aware India is home to many goods and services which come at extremely cheap prices than the rest of the world, and you’ll surely find many of those on this site, now you can take advantage of this price difference and easily earn a few bucks into your pockets, or you can also go ahead and make bulk orders and set yourself a huge business opportunity.

For example, take a look at this brand new bar chair which would be about 42 bucks in terms of dollars, whereas the lowest price for such a chair in Amazon would be twice this. This is just an example, in reality there are many such deals out their which would make up profitable opportunities.

Just like Craigslist, even Sahipasand has an option to search for potential buyers, and my one search resulted in many people looking for real estate deals, consumer electronics and a lot more and all of them also have the amount of money they are willing to spend listed in their advert. Using this you can act as a broker and earn a few bucks for sure.

An opportunity for job seekers and service providers

Sahipasand has got one of the best resources for those of you looking for a good job, I don’t think its the best place to look out for a high level job, but for small and medium sized jobs their is truly no better place.

If your an employer, this is surely the best place to showcase your requirements, your sure to get in a hell lot of response and all you have to do filter them out. The volume of job listings are comparatively lower than other job boards and classifieds, but still they are of good quality.

I bet many of my readers are freelancers, and this site can surely be one of the best places to promote your service, not because of high audience, but because of low competition, currently their are thousands of freelancers, most of them who are in the internet marketing niche getting handful of projects from this site.

On to our readers

Sahipasand is still a young and and growing site, but already many of its users are reaping huge benefits from it, as an internet marketer you must be using a site before it gets popular in order to make the maximum use of it.

I’m always in search of new sites of this sort so to keep up please do follow me on Twitter and also subscribe to our blog feed.