Posted by: srini28 in seo, link building on
Mar 31, 2010
Over the last couple of years, frustrated webmasters that have tried all other SEO measures unsuccessfully (or with partial but not significant success) have turned to link networks to build links very fast very quickly.
I am talking about sites like articlemarketingautomation.com , seolinkvine.com (which launched today - Brad Callen's latest venture), Etc. There are many more. The idea is thatyou are part of a network where your articles/blog posts with links to your sites are picked up by others in the network (who benefit from the free content) and post it to their blogs, giving you quality contextual links. The idea sounds great, IN THEORY.
In reality, what happens is something totally different. People looking for free content usually DO NOT have great quality blogs. Which means you write awesome quality articles but they get published on crappy blogs. This approach can work for some websites though because of the sheer quantity of links you can build this way. seolinkvine.com gives one example where they built 29000 links for a site and got it ranked at #3 on Google for a competitive phrase. That's great, but now you stand the risk of Google changing their algorithm to weed out the effect of these mass-acquired low-quality links at some point (and it will happen at some point if you know Google). So may be a good idea for a short-term website. For example, if you launch a blog that you are going to write only for a year (like the Julie and Julia blog) or something like that - then may be I'd go for this (hesitantly.
Posted by: srini28 in entrepreneurship on
Mar 31, 2010
Check out this entrepreneur quiz . I got only a 27 on this, which according to them, means I may not enough of the characteristics of a typical entrepreneur.
Some of the questions really did make a lot of sense. While I was answering them, I could see what they were getting at, and sometimes, sadly, why my response is not the one an ideal successful entrepreneur would provide. I guess reminded me that there is SO MUCH more to being a successful entrepreneur than having the right idea and the money.
This questionnaire helped me a lot. Go try it, and more than the score, focus on the questions and what a successful entrepreneur that you know of (Bill Gates may be your uncle who made it big in business or if you really can't think of someone, pick someone from this list of entrepreneurs) and think of what their response would be...
Posted by: srini28 in Untagged on
Mar 19, 2010
Zecco.com is my favorite stock trading platform . $4.50 trades can't be beat. And I am not a day trader so I don't care if they take 3 days to transfer money in and out or don't offer the absolute best rates (which I don't know if they do or not) or don't offer the industry best trading software (which I don't think they do). Their forums are good, and customer service is decent. And the site is always up - never had any issues with unreliable service or downtime. So that's all I really care about.
One of the things that I also liked about Zecco was the free trade simulator game - Zecco Zimulator. I even created a couple of stock pick groups, etc. to test. I am sure there are better stock trading simulators out there but this was not bad. But today, I noticed it's gone. Poof! Unless I've lost my mind, it really izz zead!! No explanation, no notice, just dead?
If you search zecco simulator on google the first search result goes to a PageNotFound.asp page. Pretty sad. I wish they'd at least informed users about this! Or may be it's only a glitch and it'll come back up tomorrow....???
Posted by: srini28 in Untagged on
Mar 19, 2010
Guys at Outlook, Yaho0 - look and learn!! This is my favorite thing about Gmail - if I say the words "is attached" in my email and forget to add the attachment, Gmail shows me a popup asking me if I did indeed forget an attachment. How cool is that? Such a simple feature - I am sure it's like one line of code. But it's awesome. Small wins - low hanging fruit, call it what you want, but this is THE deal in my opinion. A company that thinks like that must have some great people. Ok, may be I am over-reacting because I've sent hundreds of "oops, here's the attachment" emails over the years and this helps me a lot...
A lot of other things about Gmail suck though in my opinion - see this post
I love the new yahoo mail - September 18, 200...
Posted by: srini28 in Untagged on
Mar 15, 2010
Srini Venkataramani: My site is live at razzamatazz.net. Coupons are giving me trouble. The first three worked and there were several redemptions too. But then I tried to add one last night and I kept getting an error "This coupon could be used 0 times" or similar.
Srini Venkataramani: If I raised the coupon usage limit to 100, it would still not take the coupon and produce an error "this coupon could only be used 100 times" but the coupon obviously wasn't used yet at all.
CRE Loaded Support: I highly suggest not using coupons at this time if you can avoid it, the developers are working on quite a few bugs on them at this time, and they are going to update how they work soon in a new patch
Posted by: srini28 in Untagged on
Mar 11, 2010
Yet another Google innovation...and this one has some promise - one of the better releases from Google in the recent past. Buzz was pretty good, but is unlikely to change Facebook or Twitter's domination in my opinion. Anyway, I digress.
The Google Apps Marketplace holds the promise of bringing Enterprise Class apps to customers via Google Apps. More integration is good. There are a million web apps out there. This one will help bring more into the Google Apps framework.
First thoughts were - WOW - this could be a game changer. What a great way for smaller players to enter the Enterprise Software marketplace. Google Apps has over 2 million Corporate customers. And adding your apps here makes your company known to them almost right away. No better way to market to that segment than integrating your web app with Google Apps. And that's enough reason to expect thousands of apps to crop up in no time.
Posted by: srini28 in Untagged on
Mar 10, 2010
I invest in Qualcomm stock so I follow their news - and read this REALLY interesting piece today about them that talks about how BREW - Qualcomm's mobile phone software platform for "NON-smart phones" registered sales of $3B through its applications . But the interesting piece was that there are only 18,000 apps in the BREW platform as of now, and only a small number of these are popular. Assuming 10k successful applications, and averaging the $3 billion across the 10k apps, that's $300,000 business per app. Not bad at all, I would'nt mind being the developer of one of those apps.
I read another piece recently about how Apple-platform App developers are not in as much demand as they used to be just 18 months ago. There are just too many apps out there already and too many app developers too. There is still a TON of demand for new apps, no doubt, but it's a commodity now, whereas, BREW app developers are still in demand, despite the relative lackluster platform. BREW apps carry a regular cell phone archaic interface, but at the end of the day, their developers make more, at least that's what these 2 articles seem to suggest. Now, my conclusion is obviously not based on a lot of research but let me get to the point.
It is almost always more profitable "as a provider" to be in a market with steady low demand with a small number of providers (supply). Your skills are difficult to find and it's easier to charge a higher fee and you are not constantly worried about competition.
Posted by: srini28 in seo, integration on
Mar 10, 2010
Joomla upgrade from 1.0 to 1.5 can be an ordeal. There are tons of sites that provide info on how to do this but very few seem to really nail down the BIG TICKET items - the stuff that is almost guaranteed to give you problems. At least I didn't find any. So here you go. There are still plenty of of 1.0 sites out there so hopefully this will help some:
o. Joomla upgrade from 1.0 to 1.5 is NOT straightforward and something that you can follow a script and complete. I would allocate anywhere from 5 to 40 hours of effort to it depending on the size of your installation, the
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