At the beginning of every year, you always see articles and blog posts about “Top xxxx for 2008″.   Top music, top mtv, top destinations, top this and top that.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, we all wait for the “2008 Top Searches”.    These are the sort of keywords that you might want to check out and see if you can rank in either of these.  If you can, then you’ll probably get a whole bucket load of traffic.

In the UK the top overall searches are

1.      Britney Spears
2.     Big Brother
3.     X Factor
4.      Oasis
5.      High School Musical 3
6.     US Election
7.     Amy Winehouse
8.     Heath Ledger
9.     Kate Moss
10.     Eastenders

I got this from yahoo.  The nice thing about yahoo’s top 2008 searches is that it is categorized.  You can actually see the top searches for  Celebrities, News, Music,  Tv programs..etc.   Check it out at http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/buzz2008.html

For yahoo philippines

•     American Idol
•     Boracay
•     Charice Pempengco
•     Friendster
•     High School Musical 3
•     Jobs
•     Mall of Asia
•     Marian Rivera
•     MV Princess of the Stars
•     Olympics 2008

http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/sea/search/phtopsearches2008.html

For people who are into adsense,  the best tip is to check out variations of these keywords and try to see if it is worth ranking.

For example,  “american idol”.  You might want to check  “american idol 2009″ or “american idol 2009 schedule” “american idol 2009 audition”  and similar keywords.

Just think about what other people might search for this 2009 and get ahead.  Create content for those keywords and start building links to have an early lead in the SERPS.

Tags: 2008 top searches, keyword, SEO
Posted in SEO | No Comments »

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!   I’ve been busy over the  last couple of days apart from the 4 day DSL downtime I got a few days ago.

Anyway,  Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you.

I’ll be posting more often this coming 2009 so watch out for more content and exciting stuff on how you can earn thru blogging and other income sources online.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

If you’ve heard the term “house flipping” before, then you probably know by default what “flipping websites mean”.   In the real eastate world,  flipping houses means you buy a undervalued (below marketprice) house, and then sell it at marketprice,  or buy a fixupper then hire a contractor to fix the house and then sell the house for a profit.

The same goes for a website.  A website doesn’t have any real value unless you have visitors on it.  A typical lifecycle of a website being flipped is like this.

1. buy domain

2. setup website

3. upload/fix the template

4. create content

5. add monetization

6. generate traffic

7. measure traffic and income

8.  sell the website.

The nice thing about flipping websites is it costs a whole lot less than flipping houses.   However, if you do a lot of sites at the same time, then you might be on your way for a good website flipping income.

Posted in Income Sources | 1 Comment »

Wordpress 2.7 is now available.   I’m so excited to implement wordpress 2.7 on some of my blogs.  I think this is one of the best wordpress release ever.

Some of the best features I like about it is

- You can browse/download/install plugins directly from your wordpress installation.

- The one click upgrade.  No more downloading zip or tar.gz files and uploading to my webserver

- Of course, the beautiful dashboard

Those 3 items alone is already a good reason to upgrade.   I can’t wait to get the Wordpress Mu version of WP2.7

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Article sites are still, stickiness wise, one of the single best ways to drive traffic and build a name as a expert, all at the same time.  So how does this tie to your blog?

Well, for a start, if you’re blogging on the same topic as you’re writing content on, you should have a fairly good niche to promote into – and can use any of your longer, more coherent posts as article content.  But if you want it to work really well, there are a couple of steps you MUST follow.

1)    Make sure your article is coherent.  Blog posts, by their nature are supposed to be less informal than the standard ‘article’ – like you’re having an intimate conversation with a group of friends, instead of a more impersonal discussion with your readers, but at the same time,  the best blog posts make TERRIBLE articles.  So a blog post that is also going to be used on article submission sites should be both interesting, and slightly more ‘formal’ than standard blog posts.
2)    Post it on your blog, and add your resource box at the end – you can make it clear that its a free reprint if you want, or you can simply post it in a category for your reprints.  That way, you can offer a feed of your reprints too, and include the link in your resource box.  Also include the permalink to the post itself in your post – which means you will need to edit the post after posting the first time.
3)    Wait a month – in that month, submit the article to any bookmarking sites, and ensure that you maximize its impact by encouraging your readers to ‘vote’ for it too.
4)    Ensure your post is in the search engines by searching for the first line of your article.  If its not in the search engines, work on getting it there – read up on site maps and other products designed to get you in the search engines.
5)    Submit your content to a maximum of 10 reprint sites.  Make sure your resource box doesn’t break any of their rules, and make sure that you leave comments OPEN on these posts (if you close them ordinarily.
Following these five steps won’t guarantee your success in using article marketing, but they will eliminate most of the serious beginner mistakes people make when submitting to article reprint sites.

Posted in Article Marketing, Blogging | 2 Comments »

One of the hottest things to include nowadays is to add some social web2.0 widgets.  I’ve added 2.  One is Mybloglog which is powered by Yahoo and another is Google Friend Connect which is powered by of course Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).

Google friend Connect is still in its infancy.  It just started last May 2008 but I think the power of Google Friend Connect is that it is basically a platform for social gadgets.  Later on,  I expect a lot of people making social gadgets that will run on Google Friend Connect.

Social Gadgets basically allow you and your community to do something together.

Posted in Traffic Generation, Web2.0 | No Comments »