well yes you read it correct. Till now people keep talking about alexa ranking, alexa traffic ranks, etc etc but no one ever told you that there is actually a way to get traffic from alexa.

But before i come to that let me tell you a bit about alexa. Alexa is a ‘site monitoring’ service that monitors your site statistics, such as traffic, geo-analysis, page views, age group of traffic and many more things. It then ranks your website among all others based on your traffic in a particular month. This is called a alexa rank.

What is the use of traffic rank?

Alexa traffic rank is of no direct use to you. Unless you are a web analytic of course. However it does effect your sites popularity and income indirectly. When advertisers look for websites to advertise on then they consider few factors, alexa traffic rank is one of those factors.

Alexa is very popular among all webmasters, there is absolutely no webmaster that don’t use alexa to monitor his site and improve his rankings.

Tell the secret already!

ok alright, there is no big secret. Its a very simple thing which the smart savvy people have noticed and are taking extensive advantage of it. While others might not even know of such a feature.

You must be wondering what this feature is which you can use to get traffic ‘from’ alexa? Well let me explain you in easy words. Alexa has a feature called ‘reviewing’. Everyday thousands if not millions of people look up on sites such as google, yahoo, msn, twitter, youtube, facebook, amazon….. the list is too big. But you know what i am talking about, the big guys with the traffic rank 1-100 get lots of views on there profile pages.

Won’t alexa care?

That is the sad part unfortunately. Alexa as a big reputed company should be more considerate about its own site. I find many people writing ‘useless’ reviews on sites with good traffic rank. Sites such as google, yahoo, etc. Not only does they write useless reviews, they actually SPAM the hell out of them.

Take a look at the screen shot below on reviews for yahoo.com or go directly to this link. Make sure you go to the ‘review’ section though.

You see how people simply just spam like that? But worse off, there are others who actually pay a visit to those links. This has been tested in fact, if you go and write a review with a reference to your product then you get lots of targeted visitors. But your product must be relevant to the site you write a review for. That works even better.

Now wait! I am NOT asking you guys to spam there. Now that you know of a way to do so. But i told about this basically for everyone to know more about the services they use. Informational purposes only. I didn’t try yet but i wonder what effect it will have on my site in terms of traffic.

I also noticed some people write reviews multiple times and some do this on daily basis to try and keep their reviews on first page. This is hilarious and am rather disappointed in alexa. I mean don’t they have any maintenance? How can they allow so much spam on their reputed site? If that wasn’t enough, but these reviews also hurt the image and reputation of the sites about which they are written. For someone who is new to facebook and if he reads such Spam reviews about it on alexa, do you think that person is going to join facebook? I highly doubt that.

Is there another way?

In fact there is. There are 2 ways you can get traffic ‘from’ alexa, legally and spam free traffic. But how?

1. You can use the above method ‘without’ spamming, meaning giving your honest reviews with a link to your blog or site under your name. Such reviews won’t be considered spam and would actually get you traffic and people won’t even call you a spammer. So review writing on alexa is a new traffic generation method on my list.

2. You could do it like how the others do. Make your site popular, gain higher rankings. No don’t worry, rankings in top 100 or even top 100k is very hard. But you can aim for higher traffic ranking in a particular country or on a particular topic. I mean there are 190+ countries in the world [not sure how many total, damn i am not good at geography] and each country has its own ranking sites.

Once again please don’t spam and i do HOPE someone from alexa reads this message and actually employees someone to remove off those Spam comments and reviews. I had the notion that they do have staff who does that, but i guess they get too much spam reviews daily. In that case how about ‘moderating’ the reviews before publishing them?  That won’t be hard to implement i guess. Folks at wordpress might be helpful too. It will certainly reduce the spam.

And sorry for the late post guys, i was busy with lots of work. Take care and don’t spam. good luck in this new adventure, do it legally though.

Till then have a great day,

SJ

If that’s your worry, then have a look at what i discovered recently which i would like to share.

What if you could use the viral powers of toolbar? without having your visitors to download and install anything?? how amazing would that be!

Well you can do that with wibiya – a very interactive free toolbar from wibiya but wait not just any toolbar its loaded with features and i can bet its going to be the next big thing for every online marketers once the beta testing is over. They are free currently for their beta testers but they might not always be so and every week they release new amazing features so i am extremely lucky to be able to be a part of their beta tester team and if you own a website or blog [basically blogging platforms are much easy to use] then you can too get on this amazing opportunity!

Have a look at the dashboard below

But let me tell you that its currently invitational based only, my invitation was accepted in 2 days so i guess yours will too and their support staff is amazing – answers to your problems and questions within minutes.

The best part about wibiya is that users don’t have to download anything and they can have access to all your features like twitter, RSS, random posts[generates good page views], face book community, games[for blogs related to gaming niche], blog notifications [pop ups that don't annoy], flicker gallery and a whole lot more all in a single toolbar right below the browsers screen, just like the one on the blog. Its very customizable and easy to install as well specially for wordpress all you need is a plugin which is generated for you automatically from the dashboard!

I love the blog notifications feature, i can send a new blog notification everyday whenever someone visits the site and i can just interact directly with them!

And the toolbar can be minimized into a small tray without interfering with any other features of your blog or annoying the visitor or your readers or taking too much space on the browsers screen! this is good because it won’t mess your blog up and won’t give your visitors irritating feelings of running away from your site lol, in fact it does just the opposite.

As you can see you can easily customize it to go with your current blog, using your own logos and all you have to do is click a single button and the changes appear on your website.

Get in the boat if you want to take advantage of this next generation blogging technology! And a big thanks to the wibiya team for the active support and awesome features they provide for the community!

kudos to wibiya and the team

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

For me twitter is very time consuming and after twitter made few updates a while ago, we are no longer able to see the ‘mutual’ or those people who we follow that do not follow us back and worse of all you can no longer remove them directly via twitter in bulk.

This made it very hectic for me recently and i slowly started losing followers, because people tend to take advantage of this and remove the people they follow because they know we might not be able to find out about that for a while.

And to make it worse, its impossible to manage multiple accounts and to analyze my twitter status, trend and followers.

Out of all these painful issues the most annoying one is the amount of spam direct messages that i receive from twitter followers and friends, most are automated, but imagine getting 500+ DM every day because that’s the amount i get and then deleting them all one by one takes a lot of time.

Due to all these problems i started searching for solutions and since twitter is exploding and their a app or script for almost anything in twitter, just like their are for facebook and iphone, twitter apps are amazing and can enhance your usage of twitter. I found few of them and used them for a while, and out of those all, i found 5 of them most useful.These apps,bots,scripts and services helped me save tonnes of my time on twitter. And i felt like sharing those for all of you guys who have similar problems.

1. Huitter (no longer works)

Huitter.com provides some very good twitter apps and scripts, one of those called ‘Mutuality’ is my favorite

Using Mutuality you can automatically ‘unfollow’ all the people who you follow and who are not following you back, their is also an ‘exclude list’ where you can add people who are important to you and you don’t want to unfollow them.

All this within a click of a button so you don’t want to miss this.

2. Friend or Follow

Friend or follow is a quick service which shows you how many of your friends are not following you back and how many of your followers your not following, its a good tool to find out the mutuality when you need it. An excellent tool for those who have lots of followers and friends.

3. Splitweet

Splitweet is a amazing tool for those who have multiple accounts on twitter. Its the ultimate solution to managing multiple accounts with ease, its also good tool to monitor your brand.

You can use it to tweet on multiple accounts at the same time and follow the tweets of your friends from all your accounts at the same time, all at one place! Check them out.

4. Useqwitter

Twitter always send you a message to your inbox whenever someone starts following you or sends you a direct Message, but does it send you a email when someone stops following you?

Useqwitter is one such service, it will send you email updates when someone stops following you, its a good tool to monitor your twitter account, but if you lose lots of people daily then you will gets lots of messages in your inbox!

5. DM doctor

For those of you who get tonnes of Direct messages and waste lots of time trying to delete them and empty your inbox, this is the solution for you!

The DM Deleter is a script, you need to bookmark the script and go on your inbox and then select your options and click! And your messages will be deleted automatically. You can read more about it here.I deleted 1843 messages with it today, and it took me few minutes to do that and i wasted 30minutes + yesterday to delete around 200 messages manually :S wish i knew about it sooner.

Anyways hope these tools are useful and enhance your twitter experience, their are many more tools out their for twitter and i will be making a list of all of them very soon.

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

This is my personal review of Moola.com, a program that pays you to play games with a potential to win up to $10 million by risking it all – SJ

Get paid to play?

Is that really possible? well if it was any other gambling site then i won’t write about it, but ‘get paid to play’ is turning out to be a very hot concept currently with many sites turning up, inspired by the ‘get paid to industry’ i think you guessed it already you are basically getting paid to do something which you already do. The concept is a mix of casinos and get paid to, but unlike casinos you don’t have to risk money form your pockets in order to climb up the ladder to earn big.

Well yes, but with a twist, Moola is one such ‘get paid to play site’ with a twist, Moola gives you 1 penny when you first join it and it gives you the ability to bet that penny against other users of your level on a game, their are many games you can chose from, the winner doubles the amount since he gets to keep his own penny and the losers penny, while the loser starts all over again with 1 penny, but according to Moola if you win 30 consecutive times then the amount you make is $10,737,418.24!!

WoW, that’s what you must be thinking but i don’t think anyone has reached that goal their yet, even tho their are some members who have successfully cashed out, the lowest amount with which you can cash out is $10.

Moola is not a gambling site but it is very very close to being one, since you don’t risk any money from your pocket its fun playing on the site, currently it features 4 games and has many features including lots of exciting competitions and games, if you want to see an entire list of moola’s services then search for moola on wikipedia.

What else is new?

Moola along with its exciting features and service also has ‘paid to shop’ offers, where you get good amounts of discounts based on the merchants affiliated with moola.

Moola was invitational based only, means only current users could invite you to join moola but recently moola started sending invitations from the site itself so that everyone can join. Moola also has the ability to invite your facebook friends to play moola from facebook.

The best part about moola is that even if you don’t really make anything out their you will definitely have fun or pass your time, maybe that’s why it was featured as no.11 on pc-worlds ‘15 best websites to waste your time‘.

What the people are saying?

Moola is great but it is limited, mostly because moola is a Canadian based company allowing only American and Canadians to register on the site, so others from around the world cannot participate on moola.Why am i reviewing it? because of the feedback i got from my friends who have used moola so i think its worth a mention.

secondly moola will show you advertisements from anywhere between 10-30 seconds each time you play a game, this means that you will have to let the video finish in order to proceed, this gives the advertisers benefits of making sure their videos are seen but it gets very annoying at times.

So that’s it for moola, if your from the US or Canada make sure you check out moola! Moola can make your ‘make money online‘ dream come true.

Update: Moola now accepts international members? I haven’t checked this personally but read a review on another site. So try it if and do leave a comment or your own review.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

This is my personal review of Hunch.com, a recommendation engine that helps you make good & informed decisions – SJ

Can’t decide where you should go for summer holidays?

Or what jobs to apply for? Which new car would you buy? Where to invest that money you have been saving for awhile? What gift to buy for your relations? So many questions but hard to decide, right?

There are times when you are unable to decide what to do and those times are really stressful. Many people have a hard time making the right choices, some go for what they want to do while others chose to follow advices, but nonetheless when it comes to decision making we really wish that life could have been just a straight road but unfortunately its not, it has many turns, twists and surprises and ultimately we have to come to a decision. I consider making informed decisions as part of personal development.

Most of us are likely to follow advices or do the same as others around us do, but have you ever wondered if that’s the best suited choice for you? Need guidance?

Well look no further, introducing Hunch.

What president should i vote for?

Hunch is a very smart platform which helps you make the right choices regarding anything and everything, once you find your issue using the huge database, the hunch bot will start asking you questions related to your problem, these questions will have different answers attached to it and each answer has a different follow up question attached, so in a series of steps after you completed the questionnaires the hunch bot will search and match your results with the solutions database and it will give you the best options you should go for, in case you don’t like those it will always provide you with alternatives.

Based on your activities, the more you use hunch the better the hunch bot will get to know you and the better it will respond to your decision making. When you first visit the site, hunch will ask you few questions and those answers will be saved to your browser, the next time you visit hunch it will automatically detect you and it will get as close results as possible for you based on your location, personality, hobbies and more.

So if their is something you can’t decide about, make sure you check hunch.com their smart robot will definitely help you in your needs and best part about it is you don’t even have to sign up or create any accounts to use hunch system, even tho if you do create your account then hunch bot will perform a lot more better!

Go ahead and give it a try, Ask Hunch, enjoy your results and good luck decision making.

Update 2011: Hunch has grown incredibly and has helped thousands of people so far. They also have a goodies section & a very large community. You will now need to register at hunch for more.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

WordPress just announced the release of v2.8 which they officially call as ‘baker’ named after chet baker, the new version if out and beta testing is over so you can download it now and upgrade your wordpress blog.

The new version has around 790 bug fixes!, themes and widgets have also been improved along with new features and improved speed!

One of the new features include the ability to browse the entire wordpress theme gallery from your blogs dashboard and install any theme or plugin with just a single click, their are also newer options on each page and the widget interface has also been redesigned.

If you want the complete list of the new features and fixes then head out to the wordpress codex pages. That’s one hell of a list!

and to read more about this new release head out to the wordpress blog make sure you watch that video.

but before you upgrade i would advise you to test it differently with your current theme and plugins as some people reported few plugin problems i am still using 2.7 and will wait a few more weeks before upgrading it, anyways enjoy this new release.

Keep up to date with wordpress on wordpress blog here and get all the information & help you need by going to wordpress codex site here.

Update: the latest version of wordpress currently as of may 2011 is v3.1.3 while the beta for wordpress v3.2 is also out. If you are blogging with wordpress then please update it to the latest version.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS Feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ