Friday, May 26, 2006

List of Second Tier Search Engines and Directories

Following from my earlier posting "Second Tier Search Engines and Directories - to add URL or not to add", below is a list of second tier Search Engines and Directories where you can submit your site to for free and no reciprocal link required:

  1. EntireWeb (also will be listed at Mamma, Search66, IXquick, Findtarget, etc.)
  2. Jayde.com
  3. ExactSeek (note: also can auto submit to several of its network such as maxpromo.com, aesop.com, best-searchengine.com, sitesondisplay.com, metawebsearch.com, etc.)
  4. MixCat.com
  5. MavicaNet
  6. SoMuch.com
  7. OnSeek
  8. SearchSight
  9. SearchWarp
  10. Search-O-Rama.com
  11. Kerplop.com
  12. Unasked.com
  13. SearchRamp.com
  14. SonicQuest.com
  15. Portal It
  16. Webxperience
  17. Spheri.com
  18. Searchwiz.org
  19. Network-Room.com
  20. Towersearch.com
  21. Unasked.com
  22. Amidalla.com
  23. Shoula.com
  24. Click2Web
  25. Sertchy.com
  26. Metapillar.com
  27. DevilSeek.com
  28. SearchGalore
  29. FreeBeeHut
  30. CacheDirectory
  31. NetWhat
  32. FyberSearch
  33. WebSquash
  34. Zingtastic
  35. Igwanna
  36. MySeek
  37. DinoSearch
  38. Koogle
  39. Easy Search Australia
  40. Web Directory
  41. CherryDir
  42. Purple Directory
  43. RioDirectory
  44. SimpleDir
  45. SureDirectory
  46. ThaGodz
  47. SingaporeDirectory1
I do hope that the above can be a useful and time-saving resource for you to submit your site to second tier Search Engines and Directories.

I will try my level best from time to time to continue updating and adding more resources to the list.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Internet Business expected to slowdown in June

A recent survey conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings shows that active Internet home users worldwide decreased by slightly more than half a percent in April 2006 compared to the previous month. The decline followed a 2.16 percent increase reported in March.

The dip, which amounted to a drop of about 1.8 million people, was due to fewer users in several countries.

The largest loss in terms of number of home users was recorded in Germany, (-841,310 difference over March data) followed by the US (-762,132), Brazil (-675,226), Spain (-412,608), and Australia (-74,655).

In terms of percentage loss, Brazil led the pack with a decline of 4.79% followed by Spain (-3.40%), Germany (-2.55%), Australia (-0.73%), and the US (-0.53%).

To explain the shortfall is not an easy thing to do. After the encouraging increase of just a month ago, there is no other development that can said to have a significant impact in the decline a month later. The Internet does not necessary has a standard seasonal low period per se especially for home users.

All I can deduce with some degree of confidence is that the above data could very much be an indication that the World Cup 2006 (i.e., football, or soccer as it is called in a handful of countries) is nearing fever pitch.

Firstly, Germany (i.e., the host nation for the World Cup) and Brazil (i.e., the football mad country and the defending champion) recorded the largest loss in terms of users and percentage respectively.

Secondly, all the top 5 biggest losers in terms of home users are countries that will be competing at the coming World Cup, which kicks off on June 9.

What can be assumed is that a significant number of Internet home users cum football fans are already in Germany, and most if not all, will not be too inclined to surf the Net. They have already done all the necessary shopping at home. Any more shopping will be reserved for Germany, and it's not likely they will shop for memorabilia and souvenirs via the Net. Most may access the Internet, if required, at a Cyber Cafe or at their hotel's business center.

Germans themselves may be too busy putting the finishing touch before the opening match, entertaining or making sales from their guests from all over the world, catch a glimpse of the superstars practicing, or simply awe by the sudden influx of people of all colors and cultures in their neighborhood to do any surfing at all.

And what about the Americans, which make up a sizeable portion of Internet home users worldwide? Yeah, they might not fancy the sissy game of soccer although they were a semifinalist in the last World Cup. But I wonder how many Americans of Italian, Hispanic, Latino, German and other descent will also be tuning in to the tube rather than surfing the Net.

On the other side of the hemisphere, don't expect the Asians to do much surfing at home either. They might very well prefer to catch up with some sleep than access the Internet. Don't be surprise that even office users will dip as most may be too busy talking about the early morning matches or just steal some shut-eye. In fact, productivity is traditionally down during a World Cup year.

As for the Australians, after a wait of 32 years to qualify the Finals once more, I don't think most of them will prefer to ignore the World Cup completely and surf the Net as usual. Even their own "footy" (i.e., Australian Rules football, etc.) may be affected as the nation's pride is at stake in Germany.

I'm not even going to talk about the African nations much. Internet access is still extremely low in the continent and could reach record low during the World Cup. Three African countries will be competing at the Finals for the first time, and you can expect all eyes will be glued to the tele. They might even declare a public holiday after each win.

What this means is that you can expect active home users to be on the decline during June and at least the first half of July. During the month-long World Cup competition, most fans worldwide would prefer the TV to the Internet. TV still beats the Internet hands down when it comes to watching a live football match. Thus, surfing activity should be down.

If your Internet business is not in the football or related niche, you can expect a slowdown in terms of both visitors and sales. After all, football has the largest following of all sports. Don't expect a Brazilian, an Englishmen or a Spaniard to surf the Net at home very often during this period. They will be either watching the matches on TV or debating with their mates on how their team will fare in the next match.

So, do prepare to suffer a little hiccup during the World Cup. You can either ride the storm or change your niche to everything football. But if you are a football fanatic, God bless your business.

Personally, as an ardent football follower (I won't call myself a fanatic) the World Cup period will be one of the most challenging times of my Internet Business endeavor, especially as I'd just started building my SBI! site.

We shall see...

Friday, May 19, 2006

How's your SBI! journey going so far, Rich?

A little update on my Site Build It! adventure...

It seems that I may have lost a bit of focus with building my SBI! site in the past several months, especially with my recent Greed and Laziness Disaster and this week, my little experiment with building an Adsense site on Credit Card.

Yes, I might still have that GnL feeling BUT...

Rest assure that my SBI! journey is still going strong. I might stray away once in awhile, but only to "take a break" away from SBI! so that I can feel more recharged and refreshed.

The past week, I have been re-reading the SBI! Action Guide on using the "Upload Your Own HTML" tool instead of "SiteBuilder" to build my own web pages.

That's the beauty of SBI!

You can build your webpages "from scratch," using your own HTML editor - as long as you follow the SBI! Integration Guidelines (if you are already an SBIer, then you need to read their help section on this very carefully if you intend to drop SiteBuilder).

Or like me, if you already have started a good-size SBI! site, using SiteBuilder, and now you're ready to graduate to using an HTML editor (e.g., FrontPage, DreamWeaver, etc.), that's also fine.

But I take seriously a note from SBI! "Help and Strategy" section which stated:

All successful SBI! sites are built upon the solid foundation of research and preparation outlined in the SBI! Action Guide. Most critically, the use of your own HTML editor pages does not diminish the importance of the preparatory work required for a successful site.

In other words, please don't rush into building your site without a thorough understanding of the process that makes SBI! the foundation of so many successful Web sites.

Provided you are familiar with the SBI! process, have read the Action Guide, and are confident that your site has all the makings for profit, you're ready to continue...

Couldn't agree more with the above statement.

Even though building your own web pages using your own HTML editor provides much more flexibility and creativity, as well as increase productivity (i.e., you can certainly create more web pages faster in comparison to SiteBuilder), my advise for new SBIers is to ALWAYS use SiteBuilder first to create at least the first 20 or so web pages even if you think your HTML skill is pretty good.

Why?

Because it will help you to understand better the SBI! block-by-block process of building a proper and quality web page. It will help you understand more than just SEO, but more on how to create a web site that SELLS!

I certainly recommend using SiteBuilder. In fact, I've yet to decide whether to shift away from SiteBuilder.

Will keep you posted...

In the meantime, do have a great weekend.

Optimizing your website for high rankings is dead?

Check out an excellent and brand new article from Jill Whelan of the highly regarded6 highrankings.com, called Say Bye-bye to Rankings and Hello to SEO Success!

Jill Whelan, one of the best Search Engine Optimization consultants out there today,6 wrote about why optimizing for high rankings is dead and why SEO success is the only meaningful and useful indicator of SE6O today.

I found the article one of the best articles on SEO I'd read this year. It's highly entertaining too. Check it out for yourself and see whether you agree with Jill.

I certainly did given my own personal expereince in the last few years...

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Does an Adsense site makes sense?

Sometimes I wonder whether a site build completely to monetize from Google Adsense affiliate program makes any sense as far as the amount made from the program is concerned.

I know there are many books out there talking about how to make $500 per day from Adsense.

But these books are basically talking about focusing your web business strategy almost entirely on Adsense as "the" source of income (which is not very smart - what if Google stops their Adsense program or ban you?).

If you have an online business selling your own products or offering your own services, then, Adsense does not make much sense. This is because an Adsense ad offers your visitors a chance to click away from your site (for some cents to a dollar) that will devoid you from earning much more if that visitor turns out to be your customer.

That is why I don't put up many Adsense ads at my quite established my non-SBI! site.

I have even yet to add Adsense ads at my SBI! site as I want visitors to my site to stay focus (but I'll add some soon on certain pages).

In any case, since I have some free time on my hand, I somehow "whipped out" an Adsense site on Credit Card in 2 days (several hours a day) and just upload all of the pages yesterday.

Today, when I checked on my Adsense stats, I was amazed to find that there had been over 600 hits and 4 clicks at my Adsense site totalling almost $3.00. Nothing to shout about I know but this is without any advertisement or submission to the Search Engines yet, and it's only been a day since the site went live on the Net.

All I did was allocate some of my credits from two or three Traffic Exchange programs (yes, Traffic Exchange is still one of the most effective ways to generate fast and free hits to your site, if used properly - use a splash page to promote your Adsense site; generating direct hits from the TEs is against Adsense program's terms - refer to Google AdSense Program Policies).

Anyway, I'm not going to conclude anything going by just a day of stats. But I will keep you inform of my little experiment to see whether Adsense makes sense in some ways.

And don't ask me why I did not spent my free time on building or promoting my SBI! site.

I just don't know. Maybe, I just want to take a break away from SBI! for awhile?

But if you are interested in Google Adsense, then you should take some time to visit and read thoroughly the Art of Adsense. No, I'm not talking about making $500 a day from Adsense, but more on a detailed introduction to Adsense and how to use it effectively (and in the right manner) as another complementary source of income for your online business.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Choose It! - decision-making made easy

If you are in a fix about your ebusiness direction, there's a new free online tool that can help you make tough decisions - fast and easy.

It's simply called Choose It!

Choose It! is, quite simply, very USEFUL decision making software.

Examples?

Let say that you are still looking for a suitable web host for your Internet business endeavour...

You can easily use Choose It!, free, to...

a) List all hosts you might be considering.

b) Enter your own factors, weighting them according to your own situation.

c) Score how well each host meets each factor.

It's truly like magic! A complex question is reduced to bar graph answers. And no, there are no tricks involved. This really will help you find the best host FOR YOU.

You can also use Choose It! to find out:

* What ebook/special report to write

* What type of AdSense sites to build

* What autoresponder courses to create

* What theme for your new blog to start

* What forum/discussion board to start

But what is really neat about Choose It! is that it is not all about deciding upon important strategic business directions.

You can use it to solve all kinds of other non-business questions from romantic questions to vacation destination!

People have used Choose It! to..

* select career paths for their adult children

* find the right person to marry

* select which employee to hire

* decide upon vacation destinations, and even to...

* make the monumental decision about what to have for lunch (bacon sandwich or cheese sandwich or bacon AND cheese!).

Give Choose It! a try. It will assist you in making your own decisions based entirely on the information you type into the software. No trickery, no force-feed answers.

And the amazing thing is that..., it doesn't cost anything to use.

I'm sure you are going to love it..., like me and a lot of other people.

Monday, May 08, 2006

Online Videos Vs Content

One of the biggest mistakes that is still currently being made on the Net today...

Webmasters are more obsessed with graphics, audios, videos, and other gizmos, instead of crafting effective content.

This has been mentioned many times, by many Internet experts, many years ago.

But many do not heed this advise because it is simply too time consuming and difficult to write compelling eye-ball-riveting copy.

Just record an audio or video and post it on your site is much more easier and less work.

I'm sure you can see the trend starting last year, and more visibly so this year.

A lot of "gurus" have also been touting about the so-called advent of online videos replacing content on web sites, and sell you some software to easily make videos for your web site.

I must admit that videos do have some advantages over words in some instances - your site is a video making or related, or you or your business is already well established and you can attract hundreds of surfers to a web conference call or download your talk/presentation.

But...

If your site is a sales-oriented one and you are just an average netrepreneur, I can't really see how videos can have more advantage or be more effective than words in selling.

Firstly, you'll definitely lose out in the SEO (i.e., Search Engine Optimization) war.

Secondly, although it is much faster to take a video of yourself talking about Internet Marketing than writing an ebook on the same subject, how many people do you think prefer to take the time to wait for your video presentation to be downloaded on the screen, even if it's free? It's already difficult enough to get people to download your ebook.

Thirdly, The Internet is after all an information medium. People search for information - the free and fast ones. And words are still very much faster than videos on the web (especially in most parts of the world). Simplicity rules!

If people want to watch TV, they just switch it on.

At best, videos are complementary tools to your web site (i.e., to complement your words/content, not even to sell/presell your product/service).

Still doubtful over what I'd said? Try this experiment - go to a prevous posting at my SiteSell eBusiness Philosophy blog.

Good luck.

Friday, May 05, 2006

Top 5 at MSN for my top keywords

Amazingly, my SBI! site is currently ranked no. 3 for my top keyword (i.e., my theme), "tropical vacation" (out of 4,233,802 results), and no.4 for my other targeted keyword "tropical island vacation" (out of 1,207,682 results).

And no. 1 for...

* "tropical vacation beaches" (out of 1,639,163 results)

* "tropical vacation resorts" (out of 1,195,425 results)

* "tropical vacation getaways" (out of 90,472 results)

This is excellent..., to say the very least about SBI!

Now, I just hope that it will stay put, as from past experience with my non-SBI! site, MSN picks up and ranks my site for certain keywords highly, and then over the months, it gets ranked lower and lower.

But I guess it may turn out to be a different story using SBI!

Let's wait and see...

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Web Traffic Summary for April 2006


My April traffic summary for my SBI! site compared to the previous month (courtesy of Traffic Stats, which is part of Site Build It! TrafficCenter module) is as follow:


Monthly Totals ( Visits / Visitors / Pages )

Apr 2006 - 2122 / 1373 / 4233
Mar 2006 - 2039 / 1356 / 4240

Daily Avg ( Visits / Visitors / Pages )

Apr 2006 - 70 / 45 / 141
Mar 2006 - 65 / 43 / 136

Nothing spectacular. Although the number of monthly unique visitors had increased slightly to 1,373 in April 2006 from 1,356

in March 2006, the number of web pages visited had dropped slightly to 4,233 from 4,240 in the previous month.

Not much to shout about but I've to be realistic here - I virtually did nothing much in the first quarter of 2006.

I'm confident that starting in May 2006, my web statistics will look much better given the more "man-hours" I'd put in last

month - like submitting my site to second tier search engines and directories, as well as added several more pages.

Phewww...., there's no short cut I have to confer.