The way she said that was hilarious. Both ellen and Jay Leno admitted that they do not know what twitter is, But they both have started using it. Britney spears has 778,866 followers and RyanSeacrest is having 428,471 followers. Even Barak Obama is on Twitter.Twitter seems like the “it” thing. It is Hip to have a twitter account. But not a lot of people know why we even need a twitter account.

That lot of people includes me too. I do not want to get cornered being a blogger who is not Twittering. So I have an account here. I normally follow all the people who are following me. I really don’t know why we should do this.

Sometime it gets really annoying. :D So I did a search on google for the term “why we need a twitter account?”. It didn’t help. If some body knows why we really need a twitter account, please let us know in the comments section. I would love to hear your views on this.

One thing I know is, if you are in twitter, you need to have a lot of followers. If you do not have followers, there is no point having a twitter account. I learned that the best way to get more followers is by following lot of other people hoping that they will follow you back. There are lots of new web sites acting as good intermediaries for this purpose.

So, let’s get some followers shall we?

1. We Follow
They have categorized twitter users based on their fields. You can easily connect with people who you like to hang with. Links to lot of celebrity twitter accounts are available here.

2. Just Tweet it.
This is a cool site which lets you add your name to a “twitter directory”. Others with similar interests can start following you and you can do the same. They have a very nice, easy to use interface.

3. Twubble.
This is great web tools which searches your friends graph and select the people who you are most likely to have a connection with.

I found these web sites thanks to the tweet I received from Mr Problogger, Darren Rowse. I guess that is one use of twittering. You get to meet lot of interesting people and can explore lot of new web sites as most twitters are posting links through tweets. I am all open to learn other advantageous of twittering. Pro Tweeters, please share your expertise.

Follow me on Twitter, Itz a hip thing to do :D And I will follow you back.

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Although my blog is nearing to break in to alexa top 100k web sites, I am still not getting considerable traffic from Google and other search engines. Average organic traffic is around 8% and they are coming from keywords I never targeted for.

I do not have time to write everyday to get social media attention. Desperate for some Google love, I searched all over Internet to get some solid tips on SEO. After going through dozens of articles on “blog SEO” and ” wordpress SEO“, I did the following changes in my blog.

1. I changed my blog Title.
Title is the phrase you see in the top of your browser when you open a web page. My title used to be ” Turning cats into lions. Your success starts here.” Although it is a catchy title it has nothing to do with my targeted key words. So I changed it to a new one which includes few of my targeted keywords. Now it says “Money making ideas and opportunities to help you get started“.

2. I made the post titles to be H1 tags.
Any SEO expert will say how important it is to use H1 tags in your titles. By default it was H2. So I changed it to H1 with the help of my friend Nadeesha at rockfuse dot com. When I changed it to H1 initially it gave me a very ugly looking title.

To change that ugly H1 layout, go to your style sheet and find something like this,

{style type=”text/css”>
[!--
H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px }
-->

Change the properties to give it the look you always wanted.

3. Bold keywords.
In individual posts, I made sure to include a keyword in the first few sentences and I made it bold. I did repeat the keywords 3-4 times throughout the entire post and also made them bold. And I did the same thing towards the end of the post.

4. Optimized images and alt tags.
I normally tend to write long posts. I don't write just for the sake of publishing another new post and increase my posting frequency. So I always use few images in my posts to give readers a break.

See this post about drop shipping for an example. I started renaming these images to keywords I am targeting for. And I also started using the "alt tag" to it's maximum potential. These little things are important in blog SEO. Google still cannot read images. So when they come across an image they look at the image name and the alt name. So these days, I am going back to old posts and doing these necessary changes.

[ad#ad-16]5. Using keyword anchor texts in my Internal links.

As bloggers, we tend to do lot of internal linking. They might be in the form of related posts or in the side bar or they might be links within the posts. When linking I started using keywords in Anchor texts.

For example, take a look at the previous paragraph. When I linked to a previous post without just using the “click here” phrase I used “drop shipping” as the anchor text. I learned that these all small tweaks add up in the final equation when it comes to best blog SEO practices.

6. I registered my domain for a lengthy period.
Google itself has mentioned that they are looking to the domain registration length when they are ranking web sites. There are too many web sites these days. Lot of them die within the first few months. If you register your domain for a lengthy period It gives an indication to Google that you are here for stay. Besides, it does not cost your more than $10 a year.

7. Solved the duplicate content issue in word press.
By default , word press and many other blogging platforms create dozens of different URL’s for the same content. Google will consider this as spamming, in order to avoid this problem use a robots text like this. It will not solve all your duplicate content issues but can consider as a good remedy.

This is what I have done in past few weeks and it has already started giving me results. Organic traffic has increased from just 8 % to 10.5% in this short time. I am expecting much better results once I get some more back links to my web site.

I have not mentioned any SEO techniques used out side the blog. These all are internal SEO attempts. I am sure I have missed many important points. You are welcome to share your ideas and enlighten us on the SEO work you have done in your site.

For more great articles on “blog SEO” and “wordpress SEO” please visit,
problogger
copyblogger
rockfuse

And also I found a great video on “blog seo” from mindvalleylabs.com, the only problem in this video is, they use overture to find keywords. Since it is no longer in use, you can use Google adwords keyword tool for the same purpose. This video is great. It explains how they come to the Google top ten results 10/10 times. Enjoy, And do not hesitate to share your knowledge on blog / wordpress SEO here.

Do not forget to read,
Are you making enough money from your blog?
Can you still make money from adsense?

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My previous post titled “Will Yahoo buzz kill Digg?” had it 5 minutes fame in the buzz “top 10” page.

Spent 3-4 hours at the No 1 spot in the “up and coming” section. (This was the second day of Buzz launch. Now I have noticed they don’t keep posts in the “up and coming section” for that long. )

It spent more than 8 hours in the top 1-2 places in the business category.

Spent another 2 days at the No 2 spot according to voting count.

But I have seen what 100 diggs, dozen Stumble up reviews, few vote ups in reddit can do to your traffic level. I have to admit, if there was no stumble upon and no reddit I would have said good buy to this blog long time ago and focus on my other businesses full time.

Yahoo Buzz is worth the effort for small time publishers. But it comes no where near the impact which other social networks, Digg / Stumble upon and reddit can give to you. That might be the reason why most of the industry giants do not have the yahoo buzz button in their web pages. But in the long run when Buzz attracts more readers this story might be changed. Yahoo got many things wrong in the recent past.
i.e
Sending out emails promoting you tube. You know, yahoo has their very own video sharing web site, what’s wrong with yahoo’s thinking machines? mmmm…Not thinking….Yeah, that is what’s wrong.

[ad#ad-16] Featuring spammy type, made for adsense web sites in their top Buzz is not professional at all.

Did you notice the web site which was under the topic “India VS Srilanka ODI Live telecast”? There was nothing more than huge adsense blocks and few comments in that particular web site. That site made me realize it is really possible to game the Buzz system. Other wise no way in earth that site could come to the top 10 posts and stay there for 8 hours.

And there was another article in the top 10 which directed to a missing link. Yes, it said “the link you followed is not a valid link”. But it was in the top buzz under business category. Wonder how it ended up at the top.

So, Should you devote your time to get a limelight from yahoo buzz? I have a mixed feeling about this. Although they did not send me mind blowing traffic, the quality of the traffic is great. They have stayed on the site bit longer, clicked few ads, few even subscribed for my RSS. So I am not planning to remove the “yahoo buzz button” from my site any time sooner. But all posts will not do well in this system. Specially the posts in the niche MMO. I submitted few from my old posts but did not do that well. If you cover current stories, you have a much better chance of ending up at the top and to get more visitors.

To answer the titled question,” Is It a Big Deal To Be on Yahoo Top Buzz ?” I’d say NO. It is a decent achievement. But not a big deal.

For me the top 3 Social media networks in terms of impact is,
1. Stumble Upon – Give a fair chance to every one.

2. Reddit - You will start getting traffic from the minute someone submit your post to Reddit.

3. Digg – Will crash your servers if your post hits the top. But unless you have a huge following at the Digg community it is getting harder and harder to reach the top.

These days you cannot simply ignore the impact of social media networks. If you are running a product promoting web site or an online store then you do not need the attention of social media much. PPC will take care of your sales. Otherwise try to master at least 3 networks. It would be wise to get familiar with my recommended top 3 social media networks.

I feel, I went out of focus from my blog overall goal last week. It is time to get back on the right track and be back on turning cats in to Lions :-)

From tomorrow, I will be running a series of inspiring success stories of entrepreneurs who made it to the top of their lives. Real people who started from zero to become a hero. There will not be anything on morans who claim to made $10000 over night with affiliate marketing, Or with adsense. All the articles will be on real people with real identities who can inspire us with their true life story.

If you like what you are reading here, Subscribe to get the latest updates to your Email instantly.

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Will it be possible to game the yahoo buzz system? You only need a yahoo account in order to vote. I know people who have dozens of yahoo accounts. And almost everyone have friends using yahoo accounts. Personally in my country I do not personally know anyone with a Digg account. But everyone is using yahoo mail accounts. Which is just what the system needed for a vote.

But Yahoo has done something smart. They do not consider votes as the only way of moving stories to the home page. They take the search volumes and the emails shared when choosing the stories to be featured in their home page. And most importantly these stories will be in the yahoo home page. Not just in the yahoo buzz. Which will be an amazing boost for the publisher since yahoo is the No1 visited web site in the world. I would trade anything to be featured in the yahoo home page. (hmm. I did not really mean that.)

So how we add our posts to yahoo buzz?

There are no 3rd party widgets at the moment. But I am sure all existing services are in the process of adding yahoo buzz to their code. For the time being you have too add it manually which is not a difficult thing to do at all. Go to the yahoo buzz buttons page here, and select the button image you want to use.

Scroll down to the end of the page to see the yahoo buzz button I am using.(which is the best in my opinion.)

Once you select the button you will be given the script code which you have to paste in your site. Not like in Digg you will have to manually enter your post’s URL here. Replace it with the line “ARTICLEURL” in the button code. That’s it. Now, anyone with a yahoo account (Literally the whole internet population.) can vote for you. Within the next couple of weeks internet marketing gurus will publish ebooks on “how to get traffic from yahoo buzz”. And most will update their existing books with a new chaptor on “yahoo Buzz”.

But will all this hype be enough to kill Digg,the Already established No 1 voting system online. I cannot predict the future. But there is no such thing as “established No 1″ in this world. Who knew China would give USA a hard time like this in Olympics medals table. I say Yahoo buzz have a fair chance of beating Digg in the long run. With that said, if Digg can make their system more democratic and if yahoo failed to capitalize on opportunities (Common trend in Yahoo for the past few years.) Digg will be emerged the winner.

While the world is figuring out who is the best, I am submitting my stories to both Digg and Yahoo buzz. Helping my self to become a winner.

If you enjoy the post please digg and give a buzz on yahoo :-) And if you own a web site do not forget to add the all important “yahoo buzz” button to your posts.

—–New Update —–
It is being 2 hours since I publish this post. Yahoo Buzz started sending me quality traffic for this.
For the time being it is 6 times more than the Digg traffic I am getting. I will post the latest results after 24 hours. Buzz me up till then :-)

Join my RSS Feed to get the latest updates.

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If you cannot process a credit card payment online just forget the idea of selling online.True,You can always use your own credit card merchant if you can bear the extra cost and go through the months long verification process.

So the easy way out is to go with paypal.Almost everyone now days have paypal. Don’t they? But the problem is they offer a shitty deal to some countries. Paypal say they support 190 countries. But I don’t know how they define support,Because I can’t receive any money but I can send money anywhere I want. What kind of a support is that ?

Well,Thanks to few other great online processing companies emerged last few years, now we can finally say ,bugger off PAYPAL. We don’t need ya. Boy’I am so happy after typing that.
Today I received a check from Alert Pay. Well,Actually 2 since I made two withdrawal requests the same day.

The point is, I am so happy to the fact that I am using 3 great alternatives to paypal at the moment and Have been able to both accept credit card payments and successfully withdraw them. I was waiting for my alertpay checks to arrive to write this post So I can declare without any doubts that all 3 alternatives have been tried Tested and have been successful.

Without further a due let me Introduce the first paypal alternative I am using.

Moneybookers.

Registered in England and Wales under Company No 4260907 moneybookers is my favorite online payment processor without any competition. It might not have the same user base as paypal does.

But none of my buyers whom I referred to moneybookers to do their payments , have never refused to go through the payment process. The complete professional nature of moneybookers might have played a major part of it. I recently withdrew Rs 100,000 from moneybookers account and they only took 5 days to complete the whole transaction.

And here is the best part. They charged only € 1.80 and all I had to do was just fill in the withdraw form and after 5 days walk to my nearest ATM. I am happy with the great support team also. They were quick, professional and never had a problem that they couldn’t deal with.

My post would not be completed If I only write the good parts and neglect the cons. The biggest problem with moneybookers is that they do not allow the buyers to send money without verifying them.

So If a customer clicks the payment button from my website hoping that they can complete the payment in the next page, They are wrong. In order for them to send a payment to me, they should open a free moneybookers account and their credit card should be verified.

This is not a problem if the customer is already a moneybookers user. Then there is no need for a new verification process. But if they are new to the system moneybookers will charge a random amount from their credit card (A very small amount.) and the customer has to enter the exact amount in order to be verified.

For them to know the exact amount , they either have to wait till next credit card statement, or they have to call the bank and ask.Which I consider bit inconvenient. And which also led me to the discovery of my next best alternative for paypal, ALERTPAY.

AlertPay

Some people are afraid to use alertpay since most of the scam networks use alertpay as their payment method. For example most hyips,network marketing scams use them.But I hope, you all are intelligent enough to understand that we cannot label a processor as scam If the users of the system involve in scam businesses.

I do run 3 honest businesses using alertpay and never had a major problem with them.

Click here to see a check I received today from AlertPay.Their Credit card processing is excellent and very quick. And most importantly very convenient for the customer. They allow my customers to send me the payment before opening a free alertpay account or having them to complete the verification process.

But after they complete the payment, they will be redirected to a page where they have to open a free account.And I do not think that would be a problem for the seller since they will not have anyone abandoning the process and as a result loosing a sale.

Lets go to the cons part. AlertPay is almost perfect if not for their lousy customer support department.They take ages for respond to something. But I got to know that they are hiring more and more people to the support team So I hope this situation will change in the near future. And if they are to become No1 they should look in to this customer support matter immediately. I highly recommend them If you are to start an online business.

And the final paypal alternative I use is 2Checkout.

2Checkout

The site has about 50,000 active vendors and signs up 1,500 new clients every month. And they are very professional too. I use 2checkout only with my web hosting business at the moment ,But I am planning to use more and more of 2co in the future.

The only disadvantage of using 2co is the high cost when comparing with alertpay and monebookers. They have a set up fee of $49.00 and takes a 5.5% commission plus $0.45 for each sale. And there is a 5% rolling reserve for 90 days.

Great thing about 2co is they offer a the 2CO re loadable MasterCard.You can simply load the 2co balance to your master card and use it to purchase goods or withdraw from the nearest ATM machine. If you can bear the small extra cost 2co would be the best paypal alternative for you.

In this post I have listed the best paypal alternatives I am using. There may be few other,But I have first hand experience only with these companies. You can always share your experience in the comments field and introduce the programs you are using.

There is no competition yet to paypal when we take the number of users. They are part of the world’s biggest marketplace "ebay" and ebay users are literally forced to use paypal. The fact that paypal have the largest member base would make them the best payment processor? It is up for discussion.

I have seen lot of scary stories about paypal in number of online forums. Sellers have experienced nightmares with frozen funds in paypal and paypal chargebacks. Feel free to post your comments here. As for the paypal alternatives they all have their pros and cons. But without paypal am I losing sales? I don’t think so. I am doing more then great with my alternative processors.

So for people who are from countries which paypal do not offer the receiving option, And people who get kicked out of paypal for any weird reason, or for people who just hate paypal for their monopoly, The world does not end there. Make sure you use of the available opportunities you have. Start your online business adventure. Good Luck.

——-Update- 19/Aug/2008——-
So far I have deposited 4 more checks from Alertpay. All were cleared without any problems. In my country it takes 21 days to clear the check and there is no extra bank fee. I have launched 2 more web sites after writing this post and those 2 sites offer alertpay and moneybookers as the payment option. I am more than happy with AlertPay and moneybookers so far.

You may want to read the following posts too.

One easy way you can start earning in the next hour.
The story of self made millionaires. 

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Before going any further make sure you are ready to do this.[ad#ad-16]There is no cost involved, you do not need to place links in your site, and You Do not have to scratch behind other web site owners, but lot of manual labor is needed. You will gain more than 5000 back links to your site which means search engines will love you.

My site is 2 weeks old and I am only getting less than 5% of my traffic from search engines. I want it to be over 90%. In order to do that I need lot of links directed towards my site. And I learned the best way to do that is through web directory submissions.

I am not trying to be smart, I know lot of web site owners already know about web directories but only 1% has gone through the pain of doing this. So to make everyone’s job easier I compiled a PDF list of 5000 web directories where you can submit your site for free of charge.When you have all the links in your hand I think the job would be much easier.

So before downloading the list, Make sure you have all the data they require. Open your favorite text editor (i.e. note pad) and type the following data for easy access later.

1. Your web site address with http://
2. Site name.
3. Site description. (This is very important. Prepare an awesome 3 sentences long site description.)
4. Your Email address.

That’s it. Open the downloaded 5000 web directory list and start submitting. This is where the early entered data will come in handy. I started doing this yesterday and thought of submitting to at least 15 directories per day. This is pretty boring stuff and if I do it more than 15 times a day it would definitely kill me. And I skip all the sites which do not have a quality appearance and a google page rank. Keep in mind that there are many web directories which have a page rank of 5+. So coming links to your site from them will not do any harm for you unless you are john chow and could care less of another freaking link back to your site.

Before proceeding to the 5000+ web directory list I thought of listing few good ones here, because I know not more than 5% who read this will be interested on the whole list.

dmoz.org have a page rank of 8 but take a long time to get listed.

webworldindex.com is fast and have a google page rank of 5.

onemission.com/d.pl has instant link approval and has a page rank of 5.

wikidweb.com also have instant listing and they have a page rank of 4.

If you are too lazy I found 2 good companies which can do the job for you. If you do not have enough time to kill then this would be the best alternative rather than skipping the whole idea of getting 1000’s of links pointed to your site.
Submit Equalizer.(aff link.)
directorymaximizer.com ( not a aff link.)

Or else you can simply download the 5000 free web directory list here and start working on link building. Remember , You do not need all 5000 back links in order to see results. Good luck.

………Edited on 09th July 2008………
I found the best blog directories that you should submit your site to.They all have a high page rank and they are absolutely free. And the best thing is, there are only 8 in the directory list and there is a high chance that you have already submitted to at least 2-3 by now.

1 blogcatalog I know, I know you already know about this.But this list will not be complete without this.

2 lsblogs They have clean categorized listings and a page rank of 6.

3 bloghop Another well organized blog directory with a page rank of 6.

4 search4blogs This is more like a search engine and you must register before adding your blog.This site has a page rank of 5.

5 Technorati Again, The list will not be completed without this.

6 wilsdomain Relatively new one with a page rank of 3.

7 MyBlogLog If you are not already a member seriously consider this.

8 BlogTopList Unique directory with 100% live stats. A must consider one.

I could have easily turn this in to another blog post , But I thought it would be much better to add value to my existing posts. I am a human being and I might have missed some of the top blog directories. Feel free to add them to the list by simply leaving a comment here. If you think I have done a fair job at listing this blog directories please vote for me at BlogTopList. If you like the post please DO share….And all comments will get some link love as I have enabled "Do follow".

Do not forget to checkout the following posts too.

Don’t do stupid things to earn money.

Your Internet is freaking slow..Mine is not…

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