Reddit's Organizational Shift

Reddit announces that it would be moving around the organizational ladder and taking on the identity of reddit, Inc. The fast growing social media community previously acquired by Conde Nast, is now owned by Advanced Publications, which to me, doesn't really make that much sense because Advanced Publications also owns Conde Nast. Go figure.

Danny on Google+

As confusing as it may sound, the group iterated that this would mean more "operational freedom" for them.

Reddit is also looking for a new CEO. Requirements: Post a picture of yourself hold a shoe on top of your head while giving a Powerpoint presentation.

I'm a new member of Reddit and I've seen that it's really on its way up both in terms of traffic and in terms of membership. They're now claiming to have 700,000 page views every 15 minutes.

Recent Controversies
Like any other Internet company which is based on a community, reddit has had its own fair share of controversy. One of this is the allegation of fraud that is transpiring in one of their subreddits (groups). Though not entirely representative of the community as a whole, such instances taint the community's otherwise healthy interaction.

UPDATES: From the rumor mill
Apparently, talks of dissent over Conde Nast's management has been brewing for quite some time.

Free Adsense Webinar Invitation

I Got a Free Google Adsense Webinar
from the Email

You need this, I need this. There's nothing like the real thing when it comes to these free and official webinars.

As much as possible, we want to get to the original source of information and that's why these free adsense webinars from Google remain an invaluable resource and a much appreciated solution for small bloggers like me.

Danny on Google+

The last time I attended any of these online business related webinars, it was conducted by Jay Berkowitz a well known and well connected Internet Marketer from Canada. His collection of FREE internet marketing podcasts (50 episodes in all) remain an invaluable resource for beginning and intermediate marketers who'd like to get a feel for the online business environment. 

The man is really accommodating and still holds free and regular Internet marketing webinars which you could find on their company website. (See: Ten Golden Rules) 

What Should I Ask the Google Adsense Team?
The webinar invite that I got from Google Adsense offers us the chance to ask a question to their expert. As a newbie in this sphere, I really have no intelligent question that I could think of right now. If you like, you could tell me what I should ask them and I would write on my blog after the webinar.

I'm really excited about this and would love to learn more from the Google Adsense team.

NetworkedBlogs Premium Upgrade

It's time to take this blog to the next level by subscribing to the Premium listing service of NetworkedBlogs. I haven't used it before but I've been seeing a lot of bloggers use it lately so we'll see how this baby will fly. Networkedblogs' tag line was straightforward enough to merit my attention as it specifically targets over a million blog readers from Facebook. Though I'm increasingly becoming a Google+ addict, Facebook is still very much the Alpha of social networking with over 750 Million users.

I'm looking forward to meeting all you awesome NetworkedBlogs people and learning from you guys. I hope that you'll find something useful from me too.

By the way, did you know: that there's a blog service out there in the wild which charges $9.97 a month so that they'll provide you with something to write about on your blog?

See: THIS

Tell me what you think, would you buy into that? (I'm not an affiliate of this, just checking)


Danny on Google+

Do You Talk to Google?

Danny on Google+

Google knows what you want and what you don't want.   

Nightsky Theme Fix for Blank Space - Free Blogspot Themes

I suppose that one of the things that are driving droves of blogger bloggers away from blogspot is the perception that there aren't many good themes when compared to Wordpress. I admit it but that's only half true. There are many free awesome themes for blogspot but the problem is not really the themes, but the things that you can do with it.

The widgets, php and other fancy scripts that make your audience go wow simply break when you add them to a theme that somebody else has made. Moreover, the picture elements for such free themes may disappear if the image hosting provider of the theme maker exceeds its bandwidth.

WIDGETS
For instance, one of the things that I am seriously envious about from Wordpress bloggers is the Top Post Scrolling widget which scrolls an uber big and gorgeous picture right at the top of the blog. We don't have that in blogger and the theme makers who are attempting to make these have to make do with workarounds.

Insightful Adsense Tips Worth Looking Into

--> James Colin is a guy I met a few years back on a website called shetoldme.com. He now owns several similarly themed sites including best-reviewer.com among many other things. I recently talked about him on a semi-feverishly written Goodblogs blog post where I engaged in my little hobby of analyzing website strategy and monetization.

Disclaimer: This blog post should not be intended as a matter of fact post. The opinions here are mere conjectures that may or may not help me in my quest to sustain the income generated by my blog. I am not endorsing anybody or anything for that matter. I am merely writing this for my reference.

James and I had an interesting conversation on Google Plus about how he focuses mainly on websites that rely on user generated content and promotion. He gladly gave me some tidbits and wrote about it twice - once on his blog and the other, on his other site. 

Danny on Google+

The James Colin Approach
The approach that he mentioned on his post on best-reviewer is one that I have seen done by many bloggers and most notably Indian SEO companies and some Filipinos too. This involved the extensive usage of Google Insights for Search to try and predict what people will search for on any given day. It's not that accurate but may prove to be useful when it comes to quite obvious seasonal occurrences like holidays.

Basically, you leave the fields in their default state except for  "specific date range", "country"  and "categories" which are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th boxes. You will then choose one topic from a category every day by clicking on search. The trends that appear should then be the focus of your blogging endeavors.

For his example, he set the country to United States, Specific Date Range field to the last 12 months and the category to Sports.

Second category should be United States

This is what appeared.





This was embedded on August 31, 2011. Just in case the information on the graphs have changed, here are the topics that have been mentioned:

Top Searches 

• football 100
• nfl 70
• basketball 65
• golf 60

Rising Searches

• Super Bowl 2011 +3,450%
• Miami Heat +250%
• fb +180%
• Bulls +160%

II. Choose a keyword from the list of Top Searches and Rising Searches

• Use creativity in choosing
• If a keyword is present in both categories choose it as the first keyword
• For the second keyword, again choose another keyword that appears in both. If there is none, choose anything
• In James' example he chose NBA and FOOTBALL

III. Repeat II but change Specific Date Range

• Last 90 days
• Last 30 days

He now has 3 pairs of keywords

• NBA, FOOTBALL
• GOLF, PGA
• FOOTBALL, FANTASY FOOTBALL

IV. Enter 5 keywords from the list derived in III. 
UPDATE: JC Corrected me about this, I'm posting his correction.

"In your blog post at IV. Enter 5 keywords from the list derived in III

It seems you think I got the keywords directly. No I once again picked one keyword from each list from each keywords.

For instance the first couple of words, NBA & FOOTBALL, for NBA I had two lists from which I picked one in each, that gave me NBA DRAFT and ESPN, then for FOOTBALL once again, two lists and one keyword picked from each one and that gave me FOOTBALL SCHEDULE and COLLEGE FOOTBALL

From your post it didn't seem like you got that part right."

• The following modifications in the fields apply
• Web Search
• United States
• 2004-Present
• Sports

This is what appeared in my search:

These are the results of James' query (I pasted them to avoid confusion)

• NBA & FOOTBALL: NBA DRAFT/ESPN 
• FOOTBALL SCHEDULE/COLLEGE FOOTBALL
• GOLF & PGA: GOLF COURSE/GALAXY GOLF & PGA TOUR/PGA SUPERSTORE
• FOOTBALL & FANTASY FOOTBALL: NCAA/NCAA FOOTBALL 
• RANKINGS & YAHOO FANTASY/ESPN FANTASY

• If I understood James correctly, what he wants to achieve is to write articles purely based on topics that are breaking out or Rising on Google Insights. 
• His results are quite different than mine, so feel free to visit the original post that he made.

V. Create 3 original articles every day

• Must be original and well researched. 
• "Write 500 characters minimum (that's characters not words) piece of text about those topics."
• The title must include the keyword pairings that you've made.

His sample:

TITLE: Is football better than NBA for TV?

TEXT: I watch a lot of sport on TV and yesterday I found myself asking an old buddy of mine: "what do you prefer watching? Football or NBA?"

He then came up with an interesting theory, that college football was far more superior to any ESPN match on TV because of the length of the number of players and the action.. The fact that those NBA Draft guys are so tall and the court so small make for too heavy TV action with wide angle and zooms, it gives him headaches. Instead the football schedule is very easygoing, well he ended his theory rather confusingly and we then talked about something else..

What do you think guys? Do you prefer to watch NBA or Football on your big screen TV? 

Keywords that he used were all from the 1st and set of keywords:

• Football
• NBA
• College Football
• NBA Draft
• Football Schedule

VI. Rinse repeat

• The website should have categories.
• 1 category - 3 articles each day
• Share those 3 articles on Social Media
• Google Plus
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Stumble upon
• Digg
• Reddit
• Delicious
• Do this for 27 days

VII. On the final day

• Check out Google Analytics and see the exact phrases or search queries that people are making to get to your site
• Get the top 3 queries that you have not yet written about and make a new post about them. 

My Comment on the James Colin Method

This is actually the first time I've heard of this method applied to the barest of details. I think that this is a very good guide if you want to put up a multiple user site just as James Colin has. Otherwise, you would be hard pressed to write about many topics that you may not be familiar with. Here are my concerns:

• SEO companies with news websites may be doing this already. So you're basically competing with big companies and even full time media outlets.
• I'm not so sure if I have done the queries correctly. I would have to do it again later. 
• I need to know whether this can be done with a one man operation or with a full time crew. James may be right and may be earning all those money - but why hasn't he improved it. Anyway, he mentioned that it was a theory and I don't know whether he has actually done it - or maybe I missed that part. 
• This is the second day I've written this particular post and my right eye is closing a little bit. LOL, I don't know why. So I might do this once I get better. 

FINAL WINNER for AUGUST

And the 3rd #Winner in the dannybuntu.com best blog comment contest is

Linda Wensel 

Linda recounts a very fascinating story about how she had a friend and how she made a scrapbook of all the pictures of the places that her friend wanted to see. She posted this on my blog post entitled The Gift. I think that your gift is pretty awesome Linda and one that I'm sure your friend will appreciate for a long time :)

Here's a copy of her entry:

"You are heard I had an elderly friend who had many stories to tell, but no one listened. I thought they were wonderful. She told of her days growing up 3000 away in NJ during WWII. She always said she wished she could go back just one more time before she died. A plan was forming in my mind, since I would do anything for her. Every time I went to my car, I wrote down what I could remember and would look up these places she mentioned on the web. I had friends in NJ who loved to take pictures. They photographed all the places mentioned in her stories, and sent me sand from the shore....with a shell and a crap leg in a jar. Among those photo's was the home my friend was born in and it showed the window of the room. My mother was great at scrapbooking, and before you know she was totally involved in my project....the project had now become a group of 4. I did some genealogy research and put that together also. On her birthday, mom and I presented her with the huge photo album. She couldn't speak. We gave the gift of going back to her home. She looked at that book every day there after. When she passed away, she had the book next to her side. I will never be able to give a gift like that again, and it will be in my heart that I sent someone home one last time."

Congratulations Linda! Your $5 is on its way in prizes.org.

Danny on Google+

Investing on Your Readers

The Internet is a haven of trust, honesty, candor and truth.

Alright, let that sink in.

Be it on reddit, on a blog, Yahoo, Facebook, Google Plus or what not, we can trust people on the Internet simply because it's the Internet.

Where else would you see people who would promote books, products, themes, belief systems and advocacies wholeheartedly and commit to put everything about themselves online? 


"I wrote a book about trust therefore I am trustworthy." False.

But really, nowadays, this is exactly how it looks like:

And The Winner Is....

Dain Binder is the winner in the dannybuntu.com $10 comment contest in prizes.org. But before I write a whole post about the dude, I would just like to thank all the awesome participants who all gave thought provoking answers to the challenge. Special mention goes to my dearest twitter friend @SusieKline who also participated in the contest. Rob Louie, Peter, Cheryl and Eric's participation are also very much appreciated.

The contest question was this:

"This is going to be a short comment contest 5 days only. I've been blogging for 5 years now and just about to get my very first adsense check in a few weeks. Now, it took me that much time to earn a few dollars. 5 years.... 

I must be doing something wrong right? 

Can you tell me how I can improve my blog revenue and traffic?" 

Steve Jobs Daughter, Life Compared With Gates

Traffic spikes give me goosebumps and scare the shit out of me. Like, after getting used to a certain level of regular traffic in your blogs, the rush of discovering that somebody mentioned a blog post from way, way back to oblivion and then discovering that you have way more traffic than you can handle is like, "Oh, shit. What did I write wrong this time?" Don't get me wrong though, whoever you are thanks!

By: Danny Garcia

Anyway, the offending blog post seems to have been inspired by a piece I wrote about Bill Gates donations back in 2010. The context of which is being compared with the achievements of Steve Jobs now that his life is probably flashing before him. I know I tackled the topic of Steve Jobs daughter before, but don't know how they linked to that particular blog post. Reddit is a strange creature...

So yes, Steve Jobs has a daughter and it would be best if you checked out the wikipedia entry and watched the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.

What? You want me to link to a torrent on Piratebay? Buy the movie for a couple a bucks and you have yourself entertainment and history combined. Takes you to Amazon bubba:

Good Morning Adsense!

The day started with the dark clouds of a typhoon passing on the horizon. The news agencies declared signal number 4 in the Cagayan provinces - which really is an overemphasis on their part because we normally only have up to signal number 3. My prayers go out to those in the Philippines who would be affected by this typhoon. As I write, hurricane "Irene" is also set to traverse the Eastern part of the United States. Stay safe my friends.

 By: Danny Garcia

I got this in email today and I really can't hold back my joy so I'm blogging about it:

My first Adsense