Enkay Blog

Kuanhoong.com Contest Review

Kaunhoong Dot Com has a contest going on that ends tomorrow. Unlike most other contests, Kuan wanted entrants to post a review of his blog and I wanted to bring the house down with this review, because I really want to win :). I knew about the contest since July 19th and the reason I waited until the last minute to enter the competition was because I wanted to make sure that I really knew Kuan’s content and blog before I made any comments on it.

Kuan’s blog is about technology, how to make money online and internet marketing. Kuan lives in Japan and his blog is quite successful, considering the fact that he too is in the Top 50K at Technorati, just like myself. The thing I really liked about Kuan’s blog is that he doesn’t waste time with pointless posts. A great majority of his posts have to do with main focus of the blog - making money online. He has a lot of tips and posts that will help current and new bloggers improve upon their blogs and thats what a make money online blog should be all about.

Before I go into the conclusion of the review, I want to discuss the pros and cons on his blog. I want my readers to know that this is my 100% honest opinion and that the reasons this post has no images is because Kuan preferred that there be no images with the review.

Pros
+ Neat Design with Sidebar Navigation Icons
+ Good Focused Content
+ Clean Post Setup
+ Good integration of niche based content

Cons
- The Skyscraper Google Ad stands out quite a bit
- Not having a Home tab at the top menu

Despite the fact that he likes sour fruits, his 8 interesting facts MeMe was nothing shy of being entertaining. In one of his other posts, he mentioned that his predicted PR was 5 and thats mighty strong for a blog thats around 2 months old. He has quite a few 3 step, 5 step and 10 step guides that make it easy to communicate the knowledge that he has to his readers.The design of the blog is easy on the eyes and the domain name is easy to remember too. I wish Kuan the best of luck with his blog and I really hope my entry into his contest is well accepted! Thanks!

Have Alexa On Your Mind?

Are you suffering from having Alexa on your mind a lot? Well its time to find out a cure! After my post talking about my record breaking day resulting from my Jump Start Your Page Rank post, I received some feedback and emails asking me how I was able to drop my Alexa by 10,000 in a matter of one day. A day after I made that post, my Alexa rank dropped by another 30,000 and is now in the 250k range. I still suffer from having Alexa on my mind too much even though there isn’t much you can do about it.

How is Alexa Calculated?
Alexa is different from Technorati mainly because unlike Technorati, Alexa doesn’t see how many link backs you are getting or anything of that sort. Alexa has a toolbar for IE users, and now one for Firefox users that once installed tracks the websites you visits and then reports that back to Alexa. The data that is reported back is used in calculating your Alexa rank. Now you must be thinking, okay, so Alexa is based on how much traffic I get? The answer is yes and no, only because Alexa doesn’t check how many people visit your website daily, but how many people with the Alexa toolbar installed visit your website. This can cause results to be a bit skewed but all that means is that the more people that have the toolbar installed, the better your rank gets.

Alexa for Firefox
Alexa finally realized that 60% of Internet users use Firefox and a few weeks ago they released the Firefox version of their toolbar. What does this mean for you? Well ofcourse it means better ranking, considering that almost 60% of your reading audience was not being accounted for in the earlier rankings. This also means that now the rankings will be a little more accurate. I’m not saying completely accurate mainly because some discrepancies may still exist, but now IE and Firefox users will be accounted for.

You have to remember that only users with the toolbar are accounted for, so if you get a 1,000 visitors with only 100 of them using the toolbar, you still get the same result as having 10,000 visitors out of which only a 100 have the toolbar. Sound unfair? Well, it may not be accurate but it isn’t unfair and the main reason for that is because all websites are graded the same way by Alexa, so in the end, those with the higher traffic are the ones that get the better rank. The higher your rank gets, the more accurate and credible it is.

Raising Your Rank
Earlier in this post I said that there isn’t much you can do to raise your Alexa rank other than provide fantastic content that draws a high number of readers. There are a few other ways that you can help your Alexa rank grow. They are listed below:

1. Encourage readers to install the Alexa toolbar - If you are a blogger, then you probably have the toolbar installed and having a post talking about the Alexa toolbar is a great way to encourage other readers or fellow bloggers to jump on the bandwagon.

2. Install the Alexa Widget - You may have read this elsewhere too, but one of the best ways to get people to notice Alexa is if you have the widget. Chances are that they will click on it out of curiosity and send data to Alexa in doing so, and they may even end up installing the toolbar.

3. Using Alexa Redirect - If you add “http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?” before your URL on places like MyBlogLog and on your own blog, you will notice that it will help your rank. The reason it will help is because every time someone clicks on that link, it sends data to Alexa thereby improving your rank.

Improving Your Rank & Your Feedback
You may have seen other blogs mention a few more ways to kick up your Alexa rank but I am highlighting only the top 3 mainly because you will see a better result by incorporating them into your blog. The widget helped me cut my Alexa rank into half so if you don’t have it on your blog, then go ahead and get it because I have seen many blogs that have seen at least a 25% drop in their Alexa rank. Oh, and a 25% drop is a good thing in case you are wondering because the lower your Alexa rank is, the better it is for you! So, I hope you are able to take something from this post and help your Alexa rank improve. Do any of you have any more tips? and if you have already used some of these tips before, what result did you get? Thanks for reading!

Dont Get Stuck On Traffic!

Thats right, Dont get stuck on traffic! and by traffic I’m not referring to the traffic on your daily commute to work. I’m talking about your blog. A common misconception people have with their newly established blogs and websites is that because they don’t have a high number of visitors, that their site is doing so well. By this, I don’t mean that having a lot of traffic doesn’t mean anything but what I mean to say is that you have to understand where your visitors come from and who visited your blog. Any good statistics counter will give you the following basic information: Unique Visitors, Reload and Total Visitors. Most people look at their Total Visitors to see how much traffic they get and although this is an acceptable method, it can be a little deceiving. Let me explain why.

What Sounds Better To You?
Let me pose a question to you. What sounds better to you, when you have 50 visitors one day or when you have 100 visitors the other day? Most of you would assume that a 100 visitors means better traffic but what you forget to look at is how many unique visitors you had. Unique Visitors means, how many people actually visited your website that way. The unique visitor number doesn’t account for re-visits meaning if someone visits your website more than once a day, then it will still only be counted once. What unique visitors allows you to see is how many different people visited your blog during the day. Going back to our example, if I told you that the day that we had 50 visitors, 30 of them were unique whereas, the day we had 100 visitors, only 25 of them were unique. Now which one sounds better?

Why Low Traffic Shouldn’t Disappoint
So now that we have that understood, lets see why low traffic numbers shouldn’t be disappointing. Here are a few reasons:
1) Any amount of traffic is good as long as it gets better progressively. Just because you have 5 visitors on the first day of your new blog, doesn’t mean that your blog is a failure. As long as the number of figures rises progressively, you are in good shape!
2) Anything good takes time to get noticed. Most of the top ranked blogs haven’t sprung up overnight. It takes a while before your blog will start seeing high amounts of traffic, unless ofcourse you have great networking skills.
3) As your blog gets older and if you are still motivated to put forth the effort, then you will see traffic rise. Dont forget that motivation is the key to keep your traffic coming in. If you start to slack off, you will see your traffic fall, if not dive off a cliff!

How Do I Keep Track of My Traffic?
A lot of people use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic on their blog. I will be integrating Google Analytics into my blog very soon. I have to mention that I did have Google Analytics before but because earlier my blog was running slower, I had to remove it. I logged into my account today to provide for a screenshot so you can see what it looks like:

Google Analytics not only tells you how many people visited your blog but it tells you what percentage of those visitors are direct visitors, referred and how many came through search engines. Best of all, it tells you how long people stay on your blog. Remember, that your goal is keep your readers on your blog longer. When I had tested Google Analytics, my average time was 13 minutes which seems pretty good to me. Aside from that, Analytics is highly detailed and is a great tool to look into to monitor every aspect of your blog demographic. I have re-activated Analytics and will be seeing how well it monitors my blog. It is very important for a blogger to see what posts are the ones that get the most page views because it tells you what type of post do your readers like to read.

Plug-in: Wordpress.com Stats
Besides Analytics, I have a plug-in called Wordpress.com Stats and it makes you get a Wordpress API key (which is free) but it lets you also get more detailed blog traffic reports when compared to a generic stats counter. The plug-in is actually quite useful and easily accessible, considering that it is installed into your own Wordpress dashboard! You should give it a shot. I would like to talk more about the plug-in but I rather dedicate an entire post to it later on with screenshots to better explain how it works.

For now, I hope that you see why traffic can be a little deceiving if you forget to see how many unique visitors you had because for all you know, the 100 hits you received last weekend could have been thanks to your own frequent visits! Keeping jokes aside, remember not to be disheartened by low numbers of visitors because all you need to do is stay motivated because sooner or later your blog will get noticed. Also, considering installing the Wordpress.com Stats plug-in that I mentioned or signing up for Google Analytics. The more you know about your visitors, the more you know about what kinds of posts work for your audience and what doesn’t. On a last note, what kind of traffic analyzer or traffic counter do you use?

Plugin: Adsense Manager

This post would have been published yesterday but I am not at home and the lack of images would make this post seem out of place but I decided to write it anyway. Most of you are using Google’s Adsense Ad network and if you are money minded then you probably have the ads integrated into your website. A lot of times, I have talked about ad placement and things of that nature but today I wanted to feature a plug-in that I use on the blog called Adsense Manager. Martin Fitzpatrick is the developer of the plug-in but since he wanted to keep hosting costs down he recently has the plug-ins hosted directly on Wordpress.org itself. The plug-in has saved me a lot of time.

Initially, I would copy and paste the code for a particular Google Ad block onto my posts separately but this code allows me to integrate an ad into a post with the help of a nifty drop down menu located on the “write post” page in the admin section. You can see what it looks like below:

It generates the Adsense code automatically and allows you to position the ad accordingly. For example, I have the Adsense block float to the right of my post as you can see in this post itself. When you go to the Manage link in the admin section, you can create several template ads. For example, you can create a square ad block for your posts and name it “adblock1″ and you can create an vertical banner ad block for the bottom of your posts and name it “adblock2″. The names you create actually show up in the drop down menu mentioned earlier making it easy to integrate the ads. In the Manage section you can also set what kind of ad you would like for this to be - text ad, image ad or text & image ad. Along with that, you can set the color scheme you would like to use allowing you to use different color schemes for your ad blocks, if you like. A screenshot of the “Manage Ads” section can be seen below:

Although, the Adsense Manager doesn’t improve performance it surely makes integrating Adsense a lot easier. The plug-in is the 9th most popular plug-in and is free. The plug-in also allows you to integrate ads into your template by copying a simple piece of code. The best part is, any time you feel like changing the type of ad or color of the ads on your blog, you just have to go to the Manage Ads page to do so without having to change it on every post that an ad is present. If you feel that this could be what you are looking for then please check it out. I will be featuring some more of my favorite plug-ins on a weekly basis. Thanks for reading!

Whats Your Favorite RSS Reader?

There are several choices for RSS readers out there and when I think about it, I actually use two. One is Bloglines and the other is Google Reader. There isn’t any particular reason for picking out these two RSS readers but they seem to be better to me. In my contest, I later added an additional entry method as “Subscribing to My Feed” and sending me a screenshot of it. I was surprised to see that out of the 15 readers that chose to subscribe about 3 used Google Reader and none used Bloglines. The rest of the readers used different RSS readers and I wondered what they find useful about the RSS reader that they use. In my case study post about feed duplication, I worked with 5 different RSS readers for a period of 3 weeks to examine why duplicate posts result and even though I spent so much time with those 5 RSS readers, after the case study was done, I never went back to them.

Personally, I feel that Google Reader is just plain easy to use and provides a great layout while Bloglines is great because it also has a section where you can track your Fedex, UPS or USPS packages. From time to time I also like to see how my posts look in some of the most popular RSS readers to make sure any coding errors weren’t made in the template. For example, for about the first 2 weeks of my blog’s existence, I never realized that my RSS feed displayed all broken up in Google Reader. The images were lined up on one side and the text was lined up on the other.

Looking back, I am glad that I found the error on Google Reader mainly because about 33% of my RSS audience uses Google Reader and 21% use Bloglines. I don’t know if many of you check your feeds on different readers to see if they display properly because even a small error can cause a page to look odd. For example, recently my website wasn’t displaying properly at all in Internet Explorer and after about 3 hours of searching, the cause of the error was a “div” tag that was incorrectly placed! If you blog, do you check to see if your feed displays properly in different readers and what is your preferred RSS reader?