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.

July 31, 2007 – Adding an RSS Feed for Articles and Blogs

I hear that offering something free is a good way to get traffic and links. So the last couple of days, we decided to add the ability to offer calculators free. We already had the ability to handle it in the data, but we have to decide which ones to offer for free, make sure the shopping cart and renewal system handles everything correctly, and feature on the site the idea that some are free and add an icon by the ones that are fee. I still need to test it a bit then it will be ready to move it live.  

If you would like some free financial calculators, health calculators, health assessments, or parenting assessments for your site, visit us at www.WebCalcSolutions.com in the next day or two and check it out.

I’m also trying to concentrate on the idea of changing content that gets scanned often by the search engines. We have added an article RSS feed of relevant topics to the home page. I have some articles I want there all the time, so I’ve got to figure out how to make them look seamless. I also want to add a blog feed to this blog and a couple of others that are on topic. Then I have to decide how they act and where they go when they are clicked on.

Of course, I continue to submit links every day. So far I have mostly focused on directory listings. That has become familiar and comfortable now, so I guess it’s time to branch out and find some relevant sites to request links from. I keep coming across this magic number of 100 backlinks or inbound links. 100 inbound links is now my goal and I’m assuming things will begin to happen once I reach that magic number.

I found some neat tools yesterday. And best of all, they appear to be free. Future entries may report on how effective they really are, how free they really are, how hard they are to implement or use, etc. (Find all relevant entries by selecting ‘Webmaster tools’ from the Categories section in the sidebar.)

• http://www.master.com/texis/master/app/apps.html - Free tools like an RSS Aggregator, Feedback Manager, Message Board, Search, Poll Maker, Form Maker, and more
• http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/ - Free webmaster tools like Backlink Checker, PageRank Prediction, Link Popularity, Search Engine Position, Link Price Calculator, Broken Link Checker, Reciprocal Link Checker