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In a previous example, we showed how power the web presented a collection of websites without the sites themselves becoming monotonous. In this very short story, we present another website which does an excellent job of portraying a collection of sites. This time though all these sites belong to a common niche - cooking recipes. The site we are going to look at is Agape Technologies. Read the rest of this entry »

Old timers will remember Google Cash, the ebook by Chris Carpenter which explained how there was easy money to be made using Adwords and affiliate programs. Basically this book/report explained how there was money to be made by making low bids on keywords and pocketing the affiliate commisions. A classic example given by Chris was the eBay affiliate program which used to pay $4 per free registration. Usually the cost per click on Adwords worked to less than 20 c. Even if one out of five people signed up, then you still made a profit of $3 per registration. Extrapolating, if you got 100 people to sign up, you made $300. Read the rest of this entry »

When we spoke about directories being past their prime, there were some upset webmasters who approached us to contest our claim. Some of them put their views on this blog while some others sent mails and even told their views in no uncertain terms to me personally. This made us think that probably the way we put forward our opinion was ambiguous. We rephrase it in this editorial. When we say directories are past their prime, we talk about the hundreds and thousands of directories whose main purpose of existence is to sell a few links to unsuspecting webmasters. These ‘past their prime’ directories take no effort that their directories will be useful to people looking for information. To make it more clear, we are not talking about directories like Yahoo, Alive or DirJournal. Read the rest of this entry »

Elegant Directory is a general web directory on the lines of Yahoo! or DMOZ. This means that categories are widely distributed in niches and everything from pins to planes is covered as part of some category. So you have multiple categories like Blogs, Home, Regional, Science, Sports etc. We gave these examples so that you get an idea of the variety of categories and obviously the listings within. There are webmasters who do not prefer general web directories precisely for this reason - that they do not target a niche. But designed, maintained and marketed properly, even general web directories can be successful. Read the rest of this entry »

Somehow having a directory at every nook and corner have reduced their importance and effectiveness. Our faith in them as an effective advertising platform has also gone down. Now we feel that for a directory to survive, it has go beyond a ready made script and be ‘out of the box’. Regular readers of our blog know we say this continuously and also know that whenever we find sites that do things differently, we showcase them. Today we looked at a directory, the HighStuffs business directory, which we feel deserves a mention. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an ancient saying that even honey taken in large quantities is poison. What this means is that however good something could be, if done at inappropriate levels can be harmful. Probably directories have met that fate. Even a couple of years earlier, the number of directories were fewer and were of a much higher quality. This was a win-win situation for all. Users found useful information and links to websites via these directories while webmasters made good profit from these. And then the gold rush started. Suddenly you had every person on the internet having a directory of his own. This resulted in quality taking a backseat. And directories, for a lot of people, have started dying a slow death. Not that there are not enough good directories around which still provide value for their users. Read the rest of this entry »

The blog world is evolving - and it is for the better. The days of vanilla blogs are over. Now it is about more value to the reader. In the older days (and we are talking about an year or two earlier), writing a couple of posts a week made you a dot com king. Now you have to continuously improvise to retain and gain new readers. Obviously good content helps but so do the number of new tools and resources available. One of them is the free blog email service that we will review in this post. Read the rest of this entry »