August 22, 2007 – Got a Couple of Bites on Free Calculators

Our website (www.WebCalcSolutions.com) began offering free calculators a week or so ago. It was exciting to get a couple of emails showing some sign ups! If your site could use financial calculators, health calculators, health quizzes, or parenting quizzes go check out what’s free.

I’ve really got to focus on links, after all, “Content is Queen, Links are King”. I’m not comfortable with a link campaign and apparently there’s plenty of other stuff I can distract myself with. It’s time to buckle down and stop making other things more important.

Google gadgets continue to set new records for us. We’ve been working on some gadgets that will do nothing but boost our author status – and they’re kind of fun.

There just seems to be more to do than time to do it.

August 16, 2007 – Blogging for Business?

Blogging for my website product was the furthest thing from my mind early on in my attempts to promote my site. What would be interesting to blog about? There was no doubt in my mind which blogs get attention – sensational, passionate, controversial. My product is useful to most people, but kind of boring to talk about. Now I’m not so sure that’s true…

I started another blog where I ramble on about whatever’s in the news, on the web, or just anything. I started this blog just to get my feet wet, see if I could write a little, and start to understand how the whole blogging world ticks.

I found myself all worked up one day about a story of a gang shooting and how the accused basically blamed his actions on the words spoken by someone else. I was cruising along, passionately spilling my outraged guts about this story. I just about had it wrapped up when it hit me… “I have an assessment or quiz to teach parents the warning signs that a teenager may be involved or interested in gangs (http://parentingteens.bizcalcs.com/Calculator.asp?Calc=Gang-Involvement&Group=Parenting-Teens-Assessments).

“I can write a passionate blog, a sensational blog, or a controversial blog and include  links to the tools I have created to actually help people with this.”

If you’re interested in that blog, it’s http://offthetopofmyhead.wordpress.com . Today I’ll create an entry about the preacher’s wife, Mary Winkler, who was just released from jail after serving about 60 days for shooting him in the back while he slept. Her defense was that he was abusive and the jury apparently agreed. I happen to have a few assessments or quizzes to help evaluate the warning signs of an abusive relationship (http://socialhealth.bizcalcs.com/), your own or someone you care about. I’ll mention it and include a link to it as well.

Now all I need is time to blog more and create all these great links.

August 11, 2007 – Reciprocal Links: the Scam?

Something is going on with reciprocal links that feels like a scam to me. Here’s the scenario…

I find a place that allows me to submit my link to their site. They often require a reciprocal link, which is fine and fair. But what about when they require me to add their link and give them the page reference before I can even submit my link to them? Even that may not be so bad, after all, somebody has to put theirs on first. But somewhere on their submission page there’s usually a reference to the fact that they get such a huge volume of submission requests that it may take weeks or even months to get around to evaluating your link. Now that starts to feel a little unfair! Their link will be on my site for those few weeks or months – just long enough to get soundly picked up by the search engines as a link to them – and I get nothing in return. I almost never hear from them again and eventually I remove their link, but perhaps the damage (or benefit to them) is done?

Do they really have such huge volume of requests? There was one I saw that actually showed how many requests were pending approval – a grand total of 50. Yet there’s that message about huge volume and weeks or months to get to mine. How slow are these people? And how dumb is that to put the number right on there?

That particular message has become a red flag for me and I usually move right along and don’t waste any more time on them. But I’m sure there are others doing the same thing, they just don’t bother to tip you off with a message.

What is supposed to be a win-win situation turns into a win for them and a waste of time for me.

If it looks like a scam, sounds like a scam, and smells like a scam, most likely it’s a scam.

August 9, 2007 – A Routine Week

Most of this last week was just working on the ongoing items… 

I’ve been creating gadgets from Digg.com widgets. While they are not related to calculators, they are easy and quick to create and it helps with author ranking. 

I’ve been continuing to submit links to sites and directories, learning to use the software and getting a feel for the whole process. It’s kind of discouraging because I haven’t heard back from a lot of the ones I have already done. It’s also hard to remember if you’ve submitted already to them. You would think it would be easy to search the site and find out, but it’s not always the case. (Makes you wonder how effective that directory is, huh?) I have heard that it takes many sites a couple of weeks to get your link added. I’ll just have to keep myself busy so the time will go by faster. I’m trying to remember that I only need about 100 backlinks and things will start to happen. That sounds overwhelming from where I’m at right now, but it’s really not so bad.

We have managed to do a couple of new things to the sites: 

www.WebCalcSolutions.com now has tabbed section on the home page for rss feeds for articles and blogs.

www.BizCalcs.com allows users to submit comments. It’s not live yet, but should be before the weekend is over. Check it out and leave your comments. We’d love to hear from you.

August 2, 2007 – Getting Out There With Google Gadgets

Over the last couple of months, we have created about 40 Google Gadgets from our calculators. Of all the things I’ve done to promote my websites so far, Google gadgets has brought by far the most exposure to our product – and it was almost immediate.

In case you don’t know, Google gadgets are miniature tools that can be added to your Google desktop at igoogle.com. Anytime you log in, on any computer, your gadgets are available.

The way gadgets work, the exposure of our calculators hasn’t necessarily translated into traffic to the website, even though the links are there. I’m hopeful that the familiarity of the look and branding will, over time, lead to more direct results.

There are gadgets out there that function fully (as ours do) and some that partially function (a teaser). Some are simply RSS feeds, quotes of the day, tips of the day, video clips. There is a lot you can do with gadgets. I think most every online site can offer some kind of Google gadget to help generate exposure and traffic to their site.

Your site can, and should, feature your gadgets. You just have to add a link that looks like this  on your site next to your products that have a gadget. You can go to http://exercise.bizcalcs.com/ to see how we are using it.

We have also added a Google Gadgets page, http://www.bizcalcs.com/GoogleGadgets.asp , where we show the same image you see in the igoogle directory and provide an  link for each one.

Using  links and creating a Google Gadgets page from your main site can help send traffic to your gadgets. Maybe that’s all someone needs right now, but your product or service will be in front of them every time they see their Google homepage.

You can create and host your gadgets completely within the Google environment with tools they provide or you can create them with your own environment (Visual Studio, etc.) and host them yourself.

I have also found some information that is supposed to teach you how to turn your Google Gadgets into Yahoo Widgets, which actually run on the Windows desktop. Keep an eye on the Google Gadgets category (on the menu to the right) and I’ll report what I find on that.

We have more calculators to make gadgets from, not to mention the assessments or quizzes. So I’d better get back to work…