$1,000 Cash Giveaway For Your Suggestions

Posted by Scott on 5th December, 2007 |    35 comments

Calling all website monetization, SEO, marketing, content, web biz experts. I’m looking for your ideas on how to make more money from any of my sites, rank better, get more traffic, improve our services, or to otherwise grow my business. See something we’re not doing right or that we should be doing? See a way to improve upon what we’re doing now? Any of the sites at AllEnthusiast.com are fair game. Post your very specific idea as a comment to this post. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or amazing, it could just be something very obvious that I’ve missed. One idea per comment will be considered so if you have more than one idea, put it in a separate comment. Ideas must be submitted by 12pm Pacific Time on Wednesday 12/12/07 and winners will be selected and announced within 24 hours of that time.

  • First Place: $500 via Paypal
  • Second Place: $350 via Paypal
  • Third Place: $150 via Paypal

Tell your friends! Presently, this blog has about 550 RSS subscribers so your odds of winning are great. Winners will also have their websites featured here.

Update: If you’d rather email your idea, you can use the contact form instead.

Popularity: 36%

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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35 Comments »

Comment by ScreenRant.com
2007-12-05 18:07:56

Heh… it’ll be interesting to see who gives anything away in a public forum. :-)

Vic

 
Comment by James Wilcox
2007-12-05 18:37:51

I should be asking you how you increased your RSS subscriber base so quickly. :)

 
Comment by Domtan
2007-12-05 18:38:09

Scott,

Host a group writing project. And if you can, on constant bases. Perhaps once every quarter?? And, if you’re able, every two months.

All the big players have done it with great results and plenty of back links, and a boost in everything. And, it also creates a huge buzz in the blogosphere.

That’s a group writing project, not a contest where you pick a winner randomly. You give the group the chance to vote for the winner via their blog.

This way, you’ll get back links from the initial submitted articles for the project, and another wave of back links when the participating bloggers vote for the articles of their choosing.

We’ve just participated in a group writing project recently, and it was a great success for everybody involved, especially the host. Whom had his feed and technorati rank sky rocket. Come next Google update, his PR will improve even more.

Group writing project are always a success.

 
Comment by Fili
2007-12-05 21:39:07

Hmm… from an SEO perspective, there’s actually quite a lot that you can do, which in a month-3 months will show substantial growth in incoming SE traffic. One per comment, eh? okay… here goes…

SEO tip #1 - avoid duplicate www nowww

Comment by Scott
2007-12-06 03:01:52

Do you see this occuring somewhere specific? All of our domains.com 301 to www.domains.com.

Comment by Fili
2007-12-06 07:10:08

eh! it wasn’t working when I posted it. Strange. :$

SEO tip #2 (hope I’m not wrong on this one - your robots.txt isn’t, eh, optimized. Try Wordpress SEO : using robots.txt to avoid content duplication”.

(Comments wont nest below this level)
 
 
Comment by Fili
2007-12-06 07:13:33

SEO tip #3 (wrapping up content duplication issues) -
Usie excerpt and noindex meta-tag for duplicate content in index, archives and categories.

And while I’m at it, your “read more” behavior in general is a bit odd. Why is it there if the full post is shown? :S

 
Comment by Fili
2007-12-06 07:17:12

SEO tip 4 - you’re using H1 tag for your blog name and h2 for far too many things. It’s the default in most Wordpress themes, for reasons that are beyond me. How about optimizing your Wordpress theme headings.

 
 
Comment by chipseo
2007-12-05 21:44:05

Scott, ok, I will throw my hat in the ring… I never win anything but who knows… here goes.

Only one suggestion per comment. Mine is an easy one. I find one of the best ways to grow trust among users, visitors, readers, etc is to have a good strong ABOUT page information.

This does not have to be, nor should it be, personal information, but well written content that site visitors will find interesting about your company or person, something not necessarily known or easily found in other places.

1. When I looked at the TechIMO site the about us page was missing and the link

http://www.techimo.com/about.html

current says Oops! The page was not found at the specified address.

2. PhotoPost, could not find any “about” page.

3. dealighted.com did have a policy page but I couldn’t find an about me type info page

4. resellerratings.com did have an FAQ page but no about info.

I know that is not real technical but perhaps it will count for something :)

Scott

p.s. - shouldn’t I get something for being able to start the comment with “scott” and end it with “scott” :)

 
Comment by chipseo
2007-12-05 21:56:06

My other comment would be for PhotoPost on the code side…

I would suggest utilizing the style sheet to a little more extent if it is possible by removing the tags from your index source code.

Scott

Comment by chipseo
2007-12-05 21:57:14

that should say remove the FONT tags from your index source and put them in your style sheet :)

 
 
Comment by Ankur Jain
2007-12-06 01:47:54

One idea per comment….Mine is a one liner…On your site http://www.techimo.com/ homepage, there is a Google Adsense horizontal banner which I see is below the fold, bring it just under the header and see the change(hopefully a good increase) in revenues for yourself!!!

 
Comment by Scott
2007-12-06 03:00:39

Great, keep ‘em coming! :)

 
Comment by Wim Bervoets
2007-12-06 04:05:03

Hi Scott,

I would do some Adsense banner optimizations on http://www.techimo.com/

=> I would move the Adsense banner to the left side, and more at the top; probably as a (wide) skyscraper. For me this increased greatly the CTR (as on a lot of sites a vertical menu is placed in that location)

=> Or a small rectangle ad could be placed left to the ‘Most active discussions’/Recent discussions rectangle. (which is now centered, but then would move a bit to the right).

(the ad could be for example the NewEgg.com one which probably a lot of visitors will not see as it is on the right side of the page)

=> Try a split A/B test with border-less/bordered ads; for me borderless ads work best.

Wim

 
Comment by Hyder
2007-12-06 05:39:49

Hi Scott,

TechIMO.com - Seriously needs a design overhaul. It probably serves your purpose now, but with a couple of design and ad placement tweaks it lead to significant change.

 
Comment by The University Kid
2007-12-06 09:59:41

Nice bunch of cash, hope you get some good ideas. I’ve got a few short, but hopefully decent ones -

For Reseller ratings, have something above the ads/to the right of the store ratings box. Maybe get rid of the Google Adsense ads down the page too, as they look a bit out of place.

For Dealighted.com, maybe have something to the right of the page - looks a bit plain to me. Nice name though :lol:

For TechIMO, maybe cut the posts later; after a couple more lines. You certainly have the space to allow more text, and at the moment there isn’t enough to ascertain what posts are about to the casual observer. Also, no idea what the Adsense link unit is doing at the bottom of the page, but I would think it’s not bringing in much revenue, is it? Last but (hopefully) not least, on the top right of the page (above Hot Deals) you can add a few more ads, as they’re in a nice place - unobtrusive but still in the eye of any reader.

Hope that helped!

 
Comment by Domtan
2007-12-06 10:21:19

Scott,

SEO tip,

Checked out all of your sites and noticed your logo-images have names such as ‘pp_logo.gif’, ‘dealighted_logo_9102007.gif’, etc.

Change those logo file names to the most Important keyword you’re targeting.

Example: For PhotoPost the name of your logo should be, ‘photo-sharing-logo.gif’. Currently it’s ‘pp_logo.gif’. That’s doing you no favors in terms of SEO.

The same applies to any static image you have on your sites. Give them a keyword name, but with a different ending word, such as: logo, image, img, pic, file, etc.

Logos are very important to name as your target keyword, since they are usually the first thing at the top-left corner. And, bots tend to read pages from top-left to bottom-right. Thus, the logo image file name is the first thing they’ll come across when crawling your site.

All of your sites’ logos need renaming.

Comment by Domtan
2007-12-06 10:29:26

Adding to this,

Looking at PhotoPost, you have a ‘Live Out Loud’ and a ‘demo screenshot’ with file names that are not SEO friendly.

It would help you if you changed them too, and any other images on your server, both in terms of SEO, and people finding your site via Google Image, etc.

 
 
Comment by Domtan
2007-12-06 10:34:19

And another SEO tip,

Some of your images are missing the ‘Alt’ attribute (i.e Techmo logo).

All of your images/logos are missing the ‘title’ attribute. This will help you further with SEO.

Comment by Domtan
2007-12-06 10:36:20

To rectify: “This will help you further with SEO [If you apply the title attributes].

 
 
Comment by Tom Printy
2007-12-06 14:02:05

On TechIMO I would you could implement Kontera or something similar. This should give you a nice boost on some content rich pages.

 
Comment by Matt Jones
2007-12-06 14:42:58

Scott,
I would suggest getting a catchy slogan/tagline for TechIMO to help brand it as well as offer a brief description of what the site does - as I see it doesn’t seem to have an about page.

Matt

 
2007-12-07 19:29:40

This is a genius post. Win-Win situation.

I hope you get some good advice.

I am struggling to see what you can do from a SEO point of view as you seem to rank No.1 for most of your keywords (for resellerratings.com at least)

I will try to think of some good ideas.

j

Comment by Scott
2007-12-07 19:37:57

Thanks. How about Dealighted’s SEO?

 
 
Comment by Funny exam answers
2007-12-08 01:09:08

You should be a bit more liberal with your use of no-follow tags, scott.

For example on http://www.dealighted.com/ front page (PR6) you have a link straight to delicious, that’s fine, but you should be redirecting that juice to some content rich pages.

Also in your title tags you’re targeting free stuff if you do a search for free stuff with shoemoneys serp script (http://www.shoemoney.com/serps.php) then you’ll find that you’re not ranking for that term at all.

Free stuff is a ridiculously competitive niche and IMO not the targeted traffic that will convert well for that site. I can’t say for sure, but unless you’re getting some long tail traffic (e.g ‘free stuff coupons’ or ‘free stuff bargains’ or basically free + stuff + anything) then you should really remove that from your title tags.

Also on http://www.allenthusiast.com/ you have links to all your sites, this is great but your anchor text needs work.

For example linking out to photopost you use the anchor text “photo gallery” you rank 18 for msn search and not at all on any of the other search engines.

What I’d suggest doing is going through your data and finding some keywords that are generating decent traffic - go through them until you find one that isn’t on the front page of results and it’s drawing decent traffic. Then change the anchor text on allenthausic to that keyword.

Also be careful, you’re interlinking your sites quite heavily which is fine - but if you over do it google will give you a minor penalty for a possible link exchange. (They probably won’t because of the size of the sites, but you should definitely be careful.)

IMO, you really really need to look at hiring a SEO, or at least share some of your stats and let your readers do the work for you.

And please man, your contact/legal/about pages no follow them. Like right now. There is no need at all for you to be giving any of them site wide links. I know what you’re thinking “I want users to be able to search for contact dealighted staff” and get the information quickly. If that’s the case set up a couple of links to those pages in the body of any of your pages and it’ll rank for those sorts of terms.

You are literally throwing away like $500 a month links when you give site wide links to your legal information. It’s such a huge waste and you’re doing it on literally all of your sites.

As others have mentioned your images need to be relabeled to be descriptive.

Also make sure all your images are using the alt attribute, google image traffic doesn’t convert great, but free traffic is always good.

I’ll sit down later when I am at home and have a better look as I don’t have firebug installed on this browser.

 
Comment by Patrick Wong
2007-12-08 16:08:09

I think your sites focus more on North American audiences. What about those 150 million Internet users in China? According to Forbes, China Surpasses U.S. In Internet Use and the number is just warming up. Hire some students to post stuff on China blogs/websites to create more back links to your sites, then you know what I mean :)

 
Comment by Turk Hit Box Subscribed to comments via email
2007-12-10 06:04:44

Resellerratings.com:

Your page do not pass xhtml validation with over 900 errors.

Eventhough you have CSS styling, your html is full of html styling like “”

You need to move your css styling to an external file.

Use VB SEO for your forums.

List of Top Deals on frontpage.

You need to have more whitespace with better typography, since the page is lacking in “readability”.

On store pages, use changing backgrounds for comments; its hard to follow the comments.

Use icons instead of “Very Satisfied” or “Satisfied”, you will be saving alot on keyword density

On company pages, use company name, url and caption on meta keywords.

Overall, its too Web 1.0. You should get a overall facelift with more user-friendliness and interactivity.

 
Comment by rakesh kumar Subscribed to comments via email
2007-12-11 08:21:24

Well, you can get your site reviewed by John Chow or any other famous blogger. This is a shopping season and you can get a big boost if you submit your sites for reviews.

I hope this helps increasing the traffic to your site.

Comment by rakesh kumar Subscribed to comments via email
2007-12-11 10:24:37

my advice may not be as technical like others have said but personally I think that you don’t need any tech advice because you are a geek yourself. So paid reviews is what I can think of.

Comment by rakesh kumar Subscribed to comments via email
2007-12-12 19:15:44

I just got another idea for you few minutes back. why don’t you join Cj.com or azoogle ads as a merchant and let the publishers bring in traffic for you. It would be great for PhotoPost PHP. And can work wonders for your other sites also.
ciao.

(Comments wont nest below this level)
 
 
 
Comment by Richard
2007-12-13 18:24:30

I missed out on the contest but I am curious as to whom you picked Scott?

 
Comment by Rice Blogger
2008-01-03 12:01:18

I recommend shylock adsense plugin installation. It is a simple theory that let us place adsense or other advertisements to your post when they are X days old (where X is anynumber of days preset).

http://www.riceblogger.com/blogging-tools/shylock-adsense-plugin/

 
2008-01-21 06:29:23

[…] honest.) Blogetition is a concept I came up with after winning $500 from Scott Wainner’s $1,000 cash giveaway for your suggestions contest, I realized that the only reason I won is because not a lot of people entered.  I […]

 
Comment by Default Layouts
2008-02-03 16:38:04

This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing. Nice prize.

 
2008-05-24 06:26:01

guaranteed targeted traffic

 
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