Archive for July, 2008

New Search Tools for Your Blog, Lijit

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Yeah Lijit seems Ligit, it’s a new search tool for your blog with statistics and the whole works.  Lijit is a set of search tools for your blog that will give you “compelling and detailed stats that help you better understand and serve your reader community.”

How can you use Lijit to your advantage?  For starters, these search tools will give you a better idea just what people are searching your blog for.  So lets say the majority of lijit blog search engine toolspeople want to read about White Hat marketing techniques, maybe you could do them a favor and cover that subject.

At the same time, Lijit doesn’t distance itself from Google.  Lijit knows it’s not a search engine, and therefore compiles a search tool for you using Google custom search.  You’ll then get such statistics as, latest searches, where the searches were from, and the top searches on each day.  It’s probably overall my data than you thought that you’d even need, but it just gives you multiple angles to look at your search data, to come up with the most effective strategy.

To get started, visit Lijit.com.

The Google Commandments, Getting Slapped By Google in the Face

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

You know we all have a love hate relationship with Google, it loves us, then we get slapped in the face.  Who bringeth the traffic, may also takeitawayth.  One day Google loves you, then you realize, what happened, where did my high page rank go?  Why are other sites taking away my highest ranked searches?  What happened?

As I recently had commented on an earlier post “$1091 last September (highest adsense check) – but then Google decided to bitch slap me for some reason!”

You Get Slapped When You Make the Google Angry 

(Follow the Google Commandments)

1. Thou shalt not sell links.

2. Thou shalt not trickith the Google with invisible links.

3. Thou shalt not steal, content from other sites without proper accreditation.

4. Thou shalt use Google Adsense and love thy Google Adsense.

5. Thou shalt not covet another search engine.

google commandments

Image via Somewhat Frank

Are You in Email Bankruptcy? Bombarded with Emails

Monday, July 28th, 2008

What happens when you have so many emails you just give up?  You’ve been nailed with so much spam you don’t know what to do.  We call this email bankruptcy.  The point where you just delete everything and ask anyone who emailed you to write you again.  Maybe you decided to outsource this to someone else to sort through, but maybe you didn’t.

As I’ve covered before this kind of email bombardment is inefficient and completely unproductive. It wastes our time more than anything else…

How to Increase Your Free Time, Increase Productivity

Monday, July 28th, 2008

Whether you realize it or not you probably could increase the amount of free time you have and reduce the amount of work you do.  If you believe in the 80/20 rule, then you know that 20% of your work actually is what makes a profit, while the other 80% goes toward other activities such as answering emails, making phone calls, deleting spam… By finding ways to lower that 80% you can increase your free time as well as increase your days productivity.

Removing unnecessary productivity wasters…
If you run a blog, you know that spam can be a problem.  You probably delete 80 messages a day, like I did.  Recently I installed peter’s antispam plugin for wordpress.  It basically makes it so a word has to be entered before comments may be made.  Most spammers won’t take the time to do this (they use automated comment systems) so I save the time of having to delete spam messages.

Email productivity wasters…
Do you check your email ever hour? What a waste! Check your email twice a day, before work starts, and just before you finish. If anything was life altering or urgent, you’d get a phone call right?

Outsource your life?
Sometimes little things in your life take up more time than you’d need. A new website called AskSunday.com allows anyone to have their own 24/7 personal assistant for as low as $30 per month. Basically people in India will take your requests and fullfill them. Say you send a quick sms, “Large Pizza from Dominos, delivered at 4. They will go ahead and call up Dominoes from India, and have that pizza delivered for you. Amazing or what?

The main key is, to look at your life and figure out anything that you’re wasting time on. The more you can reduce this 80% of things that aren’t profitable, you’ll be able to have even more free time.

increase productivity

Image via forestfortrees