Recent Custom Designs
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phpld templatesRecent Site Launches
Health Portal Launched June 1, 2007
Custom Bid Web Directory July 2, 2007
Music Portal Launched August 15, 2007
Finance Portal Launched September 28, 2007
Top Directories Portal Launched October 9, 2007
Canadian Web Link Portal Launched November 1, 2007
Famous Quotes Blog Launched December 9, 2007
Travel PortalLaunched February 6, 2008
My experience and skills
I am a business oriented, self-motivated professional with a solid computer, internet and marketing background. With my unique skill-set I have found myself at the cutting edge of online marketing and search engine optimization for the past seven years. I began selling virtual properties and then moved on to online marketing, advertising, search engine optimization, webmastering and web design. I have strong team building and management skills and enjoy the fast-paced, ever changing world of the Internet. I am skilled at handling multiple and diverse tasks simultaneously and under time constraints. I am experienced in creating and implementing marketing strategies, contributing to ongoing projects and analyzing market and data research.
I truly have a passion for this industry and take great personal gratification in my work. I feel the World Wide Web is like the Wild West of old, where the possiblities are endless and those with the drive and creativity will help shape the future landscape of the web. Right now the Internet is where retail shopping was 20 years ago, there are a few large players but ample space for bright folks to make their mark and that is what I strive for. I am an active and well-respected member of many online communities including http://www.discussnames.com/, http://forums.digitalpoint.com/, http://www.namepros.com/, http://www.webmaster-talk.com/ , http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/ and more.
For more details on my work experience view my resume here.
Feedback I have accumulated in this industry:
iTrader Feedback (DP Forum) My Ebay Feedback Trader (DN Forum)
Trader Rating (NP Forum) My 2nd Ebay Feedback
Business Testomonials
"Fast response seller, very organized. Thanks!"
"Pleasure to buy from. Always a great experience."
"Very quick turn-around - excellent service."
"Quick follow thru. Superb service :-)"
"Easy to work with - will do business with again."
"Transaction completed with ease. Recommended!"
"Just excellent! Fast and quality service!"
"Great seller. Fast and responsive."
"Fast and easy transaction. Creative implementation. Many thanks."
"Thanks Jay, smooth transaction a nice follow through."
"Great seller, very fast response, honest DP member."
"Excellent Service. Fast and Reliable!"
"Perfect business transaction, thank you."
"Very Reliable and extremely professional. AAA++ Service."
"Will buy from again. Totally trustworthy! Hope all online sales go this smooth."
"Very helpful and speedy deal, thank you!"
Current Projects - Case Studies:
New Study - Power of 'no-follow' links
Oct. 21, 2008 - Quick update, I have not had time to check into the results of this experiment. I hope to have some extra time over the Christmas holidays.
August 8, 2008 - Matt Cutts has been quite clear that using the no follow attribute tells Google that any links are 'advertising' in nature as opposed to 'paid links' designed to manipulate page rank. My thoughts are that if someone wishes to advertise on my sites, I will first review their site to make sure that it meets my standards then I don't see anything wrong with the search engine algorithm taking that as a vote of popularity. Unfortunately the no-follow attribute has a bit of a tarnished reputation because originally it was used to block the search engines from following untrustworthy links and Google nor Matt Cutts has been very forthcoming in exactly how or if Google counts these links.< xml="true" ns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" prefix="o" namespace="">
This idea/hypothesis has been percolating for a long-time and I finally decided to do some experiments. I placed a post in the local webmaster forum to solicit some help from those that I felt would benefit from being involved in this type of case study. have been pleasantly shocked to find out that many webmaster are interested in helping me. So far there are almost 300 views of the thread and it contains 18 posts, in addition I have received over 20 private messages regarding this study.
I won't go into too much detail here because I don't want to influence the outcome of this study. The first term chosen is SEO related and I created a webpage with the exact title phrase I will be targeting. The competition for this exact phrase is low, but with enough competitors to gauge the effects of the backlinks. I will build backlinks one-at-a-time and see what effect they have an the SERP's on Google.com - my assumption is that no-follow links don't pass on page rank but they do in fact count towards your link popularity. By building a new page with the exact title I am targeting and building backlinks one-at-a-time I should be able to judge whether the vote counts and it will also give me an idea of the value of those votes.
New Study - The Power of Social Media
July 1, 2008 - My conclusions thus far is that social bookmarking is a good way to get a buzz going about a website and it can even drive some ok quality traffic, but in order to see long-term benefits I will need to study these techniques further. I did notice that a couple of my sites from this test got picked up by www.alltop.com which is a nice for some additional exposure and traffic but I am not sure if it is a direct result of this case study. It is also worth noting that the post on www.allweirdnews.com I mentioned below also received over 1,100 visits the next month, in June.
May 6, 2008 - I have had a few posts with images up for approximately 20 hours now and there are some noteable short-term results. This post on www.allweirdnews.com has generated the most interest. So far I have had 2,163 visitors enter on that page . Considering this blog had a healthy 4,000 visits in total last month, this windfall of instant traffic is very impressive. I decided to make a new post with another image but this is of one that has been around for a while, see the post here. This one has only been up for 45 minutes and has already generated 486 visits, amazing, this one might do better than the first. It seems I have another winner with this post, so far 375 visits in just 25 minutes.
Here are some of the other results, for this post here in the past 45 hours I have received 581 visits, that is not great but it is to a blog that had only 400 visits total in the past 4 months. Another one that did not do very well is this post here, bringing in only 74 visits in the past 45 hours.
So far my conclusion is: this type of promotion is quite powerful but very unpredictable. I will update these stats to see how thing progress and will not do any link building on these sites for the next 4 weeks to see if the social media promotion brings in backlinks.
May 2008 - I have decided to do some testing on driving traffic and building backlinks using social media sites. I am a member in good standing on some of the most popular sites, StumbleUpon, Digg, Milk and Cookies, Reddit and Del.icio.us - I am going to leverage my social media accounts and see if I can drive traffic and build backlinks virally. I am going to test two methods, one is using older popular content (I will be using images so I can also test out and optimize for Google images) and one is using more unique content from a photoshop editing site (with permission of the authors). I know the results won't exactly be scientific in nature but they should give me a good idea on the effectiveness of using social media in SEO and SEM. I should mention a couple of things, social media traffic is generally know for not clicking any ads (so I won't expect any) also their bookmarking ratio is much lower, so instead of 1 in 4 it might be closer to 15%-20%.
New Study - Search Engine Rank Comparision
Oct. 21. 2008 Good news - after a bit of a slow August, Sept. and Oct. are doing great and I am averaging more than 450 visits a day. I am also happy to say I moved into second spot (on most Google data centers) for the term "crazy news" and I am also pleased to see tons of search traffic for a wide variety of long-tail keyphrase - see image below and be sure to notice that 'other' accounts for over 25% of the total searches.
July 28, 2008 - I finally did it, I tweaked the title so the term 'crazy' is there now and I also took out the .com after 'news'. It will be interesting to see how this effects my rankings.
June 1, 2008 - Last month was a real break-out for this site (www.AllWeirdNews.com), visits per day sky-rocketed to an average of 329 per day. One really positive development is that traffic through my RSS feed has increased to almost 2k for the month. I am also starting to notice traffic coming in through the categories which is a great sign and I will try and build some relevant links for those over the Summer. My work on the term 'crazy news' is paying off with 36.5% of my search traffic coming from that term and an additional 3.6% coming from the term 'crazy news stories'. So far this case study has shown fantastic results and it would be really amazing to have two similar sites dominate the search results for different high traffic terms. One note is that my main keyword 'crazy news' is a lesser percentage of the total searches but the number of visitors is way up, that simply means I am gettting a good mix of keyword traffic which is very important for the long-term stability of a website.
April 2008 - This past month saw another nice bump in traffic with the average visits going to 140 a day. I currently rank number 3 on the first page of results on Google for the phrase "Crazy News", number one is the site CrazyNews.com and just below me is CrazyNews.net - I will embark on some more link building this month and see if I can grab that number 2 or 1 spot so I can compare the traffic results. My main keyword phrase 'crazy news' is at a healthy 49.9% and I am pleased to see that 'other phrases' accounts for 29.5% of total search engine traffic. What that means is that there is probably some 'keyword gold' in there and I should be able to leverage those in the future. A close look at 'other phrases' can reveal patterns of keywords that can make a huge difference in overall traffic. There are a lot of SEO's that will tell you that the holy grail is first position for one of your industries top 3 keywords and they are right, but achieving that can be just like the search for the holy grail, long, frustrating and more often than not leading to failure. A website can be very successful by looking for quality search engine traffic in more unlikely (and less competitive) places.
March 2008 - Average daily visitors is over 100 now and my keyword phrase 'crazy news' accounted for 42% of my search engine traffic. Because of my expanded targeting of keywords the phrases "weird news stories" and "strange news stories" have moved into second and third place with 7.9% and 5.9% respectively. I am making a note of a couple more categories drawing some traffic, weird criminals and crazy people, those could be important on my 6 month SEO review.
Feb 2008 - Analyzing the statistics for February I saw a solid doubling of visits to an average of 60 per day and I also started to see some search hits entering on internal category pages like, 'odd animals' and off-beat stuff. I made a note of that so I could do some further research on those keywords and perhaps leverage those internal categories to bring in more traffic. A good SEO will always pay attention to an entire websites and not just the home page, that is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made. Search percentages for my two main keyword phrases held steady. My percent of search engine traffic was a tad below 25% and my keywords 'crazy news' (22.9) and 'crazy news stories' (4.2%). I decided to target a few other keyword phrases in this genre to try and improve overall traffic. I still wanted to concentrate on my new main keyword 'crazy' because I wanted to be able to compare my results to my other site www.VeryWeirdNews.com but I also want to use common sense and make this project a success.
Jan. 2008 - I have decided to launch a new blog with a similar topic to www.VeryWeirdNews.com, this one is called www.AllWeirdNews.com - My idea was to launch a similar site but to target a different set of keywords and see if I could duplicate my success. I used a similar posting pattern of basically one or two new posts per month and also built backlinks in a similar way using free and paid directory submissions, blog comments, blogroll links, content links and a very limited number of paid ads. I also submitted a few stories to various social bookmarking sites. By the end of the first month I was getting a small amount of traffic (averaging around 30 visits a day) and was getting search hits for my new keywords 'crazy news' (23.7) and 'crazy news stories' (9.4%).
New Study - Search Engine Rank for Comeptitive Keywords
July 28, 2008 - I fiddled with the title of the blog and added 'crazy stuff' hoping to capture a bit more traffic from that term since it is doing so nicely for my other blog, It appears Google re-indexed sites on the 26th and this one took a big drop to page 5/6 for the major terms it was ranking for. Now to do a little link building and see if I can prop it back up and also get new traffic for the added term/s. I also decided to add the term 'of the weird' because 'news of the weird' gets a lot of searches. I probably should have done only one extra term then waited six months for results but my logic is that I have dropped in the SERP's anyways so I might as well go for it now. Even with some aggressive link building I will likely have to wait 4 months or more to see what results come from this test. Part of me is a little sad to leave the home page and all that traffic behind but I can't learn if I don't experiment.
July 24, 2008 - Ok, things seem to be back to normal I am in position 5 on the first page for 'weird news' and position 3 on the first page for 'strange news'. June was a great month (maybe a record) averaging over 665 visits a day. It seems my work on Google images is also starting to pay-off because I see they refered almost 500 visitors to my site in that month. So far July looks to be very strong also with an average of 670 visitors a day. I have been building a few more links for this site and will continue through this Summer, hopefully in by the end of the year. I can have a go at cracking the 1k per day visitor threshold.
May 3, 2008 - Wow quick action by Google and quick results. I just checked the search position for my top two phrases and I am back and looking good! For the phrase 'weird news' I am at the top of page 3 (other data center showed me 17th and on page 2) and for 'strange news' I am in 8th spot on page one. I will keep a close eye on these for the next few days and probably do a bit of link building this month to ensure I continue to hold solid positions.
May 2, 2008 - January, February and March saw average monthly visitors of around 16,000 - I have not been spending anytime on this site recently and was letting it run on autopilot. While check stats at the end of last month I noticed a 50% dip in search engine traffic, mostly from Google and became concerned. It seems my home page was dropped from the index. I started investigating and found that someone had uploaded a large block of hidden text into my header file. I contacted Google with a reconsideration request and so far things are looking positive. They were quite understanding and replied quicky to my concern. They quoted me another block of hidden text in one of their replies and I have been manually searching through every single file on my server to find it. I suspect it was part of the original spam I found but I did not notice that particular block because the whole thing was so huge. In retrospect I should have pasted it into a word document so I could examine it further, but I was so upset at that time that I just deleted it. This is my first reconsideration request so I will document it closely as I am sure many others will be interested in the details and outcome.
Dec. 1, 2007 - November turned out to be a monster month with over 18,000 unique visitors. A combination of traffic from Stumbleupon and Reddit were the catalysts. My promotion of the anchor text ‘odd’ and ‘odd news’ started to show a little upswing last month but I should see more positive results this coming month. I have moved up to search rank spot 12 on Google for the term ‘odd news’. And I moved into 7 spot for the term ‘weird news’ and am holding the number 2 spot for ’strange news’. I am very pleased with these results and will continue building links for all three keyword phrases.
Nov. 3, 2007 - My SEO work on www.VeryWeirdNews.com has been very successful. In Sept. I had a healthy unique visitor count of 2,234 with 4,090 total visits. But after a few weeks of hard-work which included directory submissions, link exchanges, a few purchased ads and some on page SEO I was rewarded with the following stats for Oct. - 6,016 unique visitors and 8,927 total visits. Search engine traffic accounted for 31.8% of my total visitors and the term 'weird news' accounted for 1,106 of those search engine hits. To further illustrate the success I have had with my SEO work on this blog I am now on page one in rank 8 of Google for the search term "weird news" and that is out of 1,340,000 results (in quotations). For the second best term "strange news" I am in position 5 of the first page out of 1,480,00 results (in quotations). The next competitive term I will try and rank for is "odd news", I am currently in spot 23 overall and my goal will be the first page for this term by the end of January. My site is averaging around 350 visits a day and if I continue to hold my spots and move up with a couple of new terms I should be able to level off around 500-600 a day by early next year. For reference in Oct. the searched word "odd" accounted for around 2% of total searches and the terms "odd news" .5% and "odd news stories" another .5%.
Sept. 16, 2007 - I have been keeping an eye on one of my more successful blogs lately and am ranking well for a decent traffic term but after some research I decided there is another better term I would like to rank for and I have began building links using some alternate anchor text, which is quite easy since the new term is actually part of the domain name. The blog is my Weird News Blog and the term is Weird News. I also noticed some traffic for a few lesser keyword phrases so I will be mixing up the anchor text with those extra words to try and nudge them up the SERP's.
New Study - Search Engine Rank for Web Directory
Sept. 9, 2007 - I have decided to sell this directory since I have been spending a lot of time on my new directory based portals. This directory has been a good monthly earner and is quite popular with regular submission but I will use the money to invest in my new network of niche portals.
Aug. 19, 2007 - Made it to spot 41, these keywords are very competitive and I estimate I will have to spend around $500 and quite a few hours of work to move another 10-15 ranks.
July 30, 2007 - Today I broke onto page 5 in spot 49, still a long-way to go but I am moving in the right direction.
July 20, 2007 - I have added a couple more anchor text over the past few days via directory submissions but I am not going to do much more until after the toolbar page rank update, I think Google is in the process of updating backlinks so maybe that will move me up some more. I am in position number 51 today! And that is great news.
July 16, 2007 - I am back and cracked page 6 I am result number 59, looks promising but I have lots of ground to make-up if I want to get anywhere near the first page.
July 10, 2007 - I managed to get a couple more anchor text's changed over by contacting folks that have my link up on their site. I am gone from the search results or at least from the top 100, I did not look any deeper.
July 4, 2007 - I have changed the anchor text that I have control of on my various websites linking to www.submit4backlinks.com and I have purchased two blog posts for the site and each uses the anchor text Web Directory. I am up to spot 64 now but I know it will take a couple of weeks or longer till I probably start to see any noticeable results. I am also prepared for the possibility I might take a big tumble at some point because I have heard that can happen quite often.
June 28, 2007 - My newest case study will involve Google SERP for keywords. I have decided to use my web directory (www.submit4backlinks.com), the term I am going to compete with is "Web Directory". I have guesstimated that this search term gets around 800-1200 searches a month and if I could make it to page 2 (top 20 listings) it would be a nice little boost in targeted traffic. As of today I am in position 67 which of course places me on the 7th page of search results. I would love to get to the first page but the competition for those spots is fierce but you never know. My first step was to find all my backlinks and check on the anchor text I am using. Secondly I am going to review my on page keyword optimization and last but very importantly I will look at my meta tags and see if they are optimized for this keyword, I am a wary of changing my title because I have had experience with that causing you to lose page rank on the altered page but I want to look and make sure everything is good.
New Study - Unique Use of New Google Product
Aug. 29, 2007 - So far this month I have had 355 searches completed and a grand total of over 2,100 since inception. I am basically letting this site grow organically from now on but I will still do a little promotion once-in-a-while. I am very pleased with these results and will start doing some SEO after the next Google update to see if I can score some good positions for related search terms.
May 16, 2007 - It has been three months since I began my project of incorporating Google Co-op Search and Googlepages. I have just cruised past the 900 search mark today and the google page site now has a page rank of 4. I have decided to add some more content to the site and also step up the promotion. I am now only including search results for my own sites and those of my promotional partners. I don't really have a way of tracking how many conversions I get from searches performed through my search box but I am guesstimating the rate should be fairly high because of the specialized nature of the search. I am also updating the project page with further details at this time.
February 16, 2007 - I began doing some research into a new and interesting product Google is offering called Co-op Search. I was trying to think of how I might be able to leverage this powerful (and free) tool to help increase the income on my other sites (mainly my directories). I decided to create three different types of co-op search engines and use Google Pages (another free Google service) to aid in promoting them. I already had success with my very first Google Pages project, Best and Worst of the Web. This site has obtained a page rank of 4 and recieves some regular traffic and has earned me a few bucks through Google Adsense and other text link promotions. Thus far I have only really been able to concentrate on one of the co-op search engines, you can see it here. More details on this case study can be viewed here.
New Study - Viral Videos Drive Traffic
November 1, 2006 - My newest case study involves an idea I had in September about leveraging my in-depth knowledge of the internet community and viral marketing to drive traffic to my new site www.Blog4Video.com. The part I love about this study is that I use other sites resources and other folks creativity to bring traffic to and benefit my own site. It is sort of a "best of" creation with my judgment and a little commentary added for flavour. The results have been really impressive and can be viewed here.
New Study - Viral Video Success
August 1, 2006 - Recently I have been further developing my viral marketing techniques mostly through social bookmarking sites. It has taken a few months to develop a solid base reputation on my various accounts but it has started to really pay-off well. I recently decided to further promote one of my blogs www.2BlogGadgets.com. Good page rank has been achieved through aggressive backlink building and I have been able to sell over 85% of the available advertising to generate revenue. Traffic has been building slowly but steadily for the past few months but I really wanted to achieve a new (and substantial) influx of first-time visitors. It was the perfect opportunity to leverage my viral marketing techniques. You can view the results here.
My Directory Projects:
My Websites:
One of my most interesting projects is the site www.WjNj.com/forum is very exciting because I have never really developed a forum, so I am getting a nice range of experience from the initial set-up and the ongoing moderation.
www.TotallyFunMedia.com www.2BlogSports.com
www.PopularTag.com www.Submit4Backlinks.com
www.2BlogHealth.com www.iPod-Playlist.com
www.WjNj.com www.HelpDepression.info