Internet Marketing Tips » Tips

How to Enable Google Analytics Site Search For Google Custom Search?

Shabbir — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 06:17:52 +0000

Almost every webmaster uses Google Analytics but there are very few who can use it to the full potential and I will share one of the secret trick in using Google Analytics that can help you understand your site audience and what they are looking for. The feature we will enable is called Site Search feature which tracks the site search terms for your site and you can use it to give your audience what they are looking for when they visit your site.

What Is Google Analytics Site Search Tracking?

If you’re a webmaster, you probably have a search function on your site. If don’t have search feature, you should definitely add one because it is an easy way to allow your site visitors to find content on your site. Once you have the site search feature on your site, you can track what people are searching for on your site using Google Analytics and this is termed as site search.

How To Benefit From Google Analytics Site Search Tracking?

Most webmasters and bloggers have site search option on their website but they don’t track searched terms and use it to their advantage. They don’t track what their site visitors are searching for and though the tracking can be enabled with just few clicks in Google Analytics. Today I will explain how you can understand what your visitors are looking for.

How To Set Up Google Analytics Site Search?

Access your Google analytics new interface account and click on the settings button in the top right corner.
Visit Google Analytics Website profile where you want to enable search tracking.
Click on Profile Settings tab of your site.
Scroll to the end and enable the Site Search Option with Do track Site Search radio button.

If you are using Google Search on your website, your query parameter will be q. If you are using WordPress internal search, your search parameter will be s.

If you are not using Google search or WordPress, you can find your query parameter by making a search on your site. When I search for the term “shabbir” here at IMTips, the URL in the address bar is http://www.imtips.co/?s=shabbir. Take note of the Query Parameter (?s=shabbir). For your search results page, identify the searched query parameter. If you are not sure, post in comments below and I will try to help you find your searched query parameter.

Once you have the query parameter, Apply the changes and you are all set to tracking what your visitors are searching on your site.

How To Analyze Google Analytics Site Search Report?

If you just have enabled Google Analytics Site Search tracking, you will need some time for data to start accumulating. If you don’t have enough visitors that are actively doing searches on your site, it can take even longer. Let us take a look at my Site Search Report for Go4Expert and try to understand. Click on the image to enlarge.

Go4Expert Site Search Report

The term that is searched most often on my site is “Facebook” and when they do that search, they don’t find what they are looking for and so 80% of people leave. Approximately 4% of people refine the search to add few more terms to the keyword Facebook.

Conclusion: Need more content related to keyword Facebook. Similar conclusion can also be drawn for the term hacking. Obviously, people are searching go4Expert for information on Hacking Facebook but there are very few articles to actually hacking Facebook and most of them are threads asking how to do that. .

The next search term on my site is “C”. Fortunately, Go4Expert has a lot of content related to C Programming and so only 47% of people who do that search leave the site, and 18% of the people refine search to find more content on the site.

Final Thoughts

Google Search along with Google Analytics Site Search provides valuable information about what your site audience is looking for. This data provides two action items. The first is obvious which is making more content that people are searching for. Secondly, making search box much more prominent on websites. The more visitors use search, more you know what people are looking for.

Have you set up the Site Search reporting capabilities in Google Analytics? If so, how are you using the information? Share your thoughts in comments below.

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Multiple Income Streams

Shabbir — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 12:21:41 +0000

Most webmasters think advertising as the only moneymaking option from websites. Advertising is definitely the better option to monetize your content-based site but remember it is not the only option. I have seen many bloggers and webmasters who have advertising as monetization strategy in mind, misses out on the other monetization option to multiply income streams. I am going to share what other income streams you can have along with advertisement for your content site or blog to multiply your income.

#1 Consult to Increase Income

If you have a good content site, you’re already helping your readers. If you provide them for more option like a personal one on one consultation, they will be more than happy to hire you for a fee because they already know you are an expert in the domain. On my Technical Analysis Blog, I share my views on Indian market and though I don’t have any consultation services option on my blog, there are readers who have hired me to get a personal consultation from me adding one more income stream to my blog.

#2 Affiliate Programs to Increase Income

Do you often recommend products or services on your site? Why not earn a commission from those recommendations? I use lot of products for my websites. I share my experience with those products or services and I recommend the same here on IMTips and some of those products earn me a commission.

Note that I don’t recommend products only for commission but I recommend products that I use which I think will be useful to my readers and some (not all) of them earn me commission.

#3 Referral Programs to Increase Income

Consider creating a referral program and reward your existing customers for sending new customers to you. I used to follow this a lot when I was new in freelancing. Remember one of my client responded that I don’t sell my friends for cash and yes you will see such responses but it is then when I decided to give my existing clients discount for sending new clients my way.

#4 Add Services to Increase Income

Another way to boost your income is to expand your services. If you are providing web designing, you can think about adding web development, or even web hosting service.

I use to provide vBulletin services when I started and I added few extra services like server management for large sites or forums and as I added more services, I was overbooked with lot more work than I can actually handle.

#5 Membership Programs to Increase Income

A membership program provides you with a consistent monthly income. It helps you make more money each month. If you have a product where you are charging your client a one-time fee, you can look about expanding your product to add some membership type program where you can make lot more monthly consistently over the period of time.

Apart from advertising, what other income streams you use on your sites? Share your income streams in comments below.

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How to Track Social Media Traffic in Google Analytics

Shabbir — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:31:52 +0000

Search Engine Optimization is no longer just confined to

Create unique content
Get bunch of backlinks

Definitely the above things needs to be done but then you have to add one more factor of Social Media to your SEO efforts these days and so tracking your social media efforts is very important.

The most used statistics tool by webmasters is definitely Google Analytics but in Google Analytics you don’t have the Social Media Tracking added as default option and understandably so but using the advance segments you can track all your social media traffic in Google Analytics very easily.

Create Social Media as Custom Segment in Google Analytics

Under Advance Segments Create a New Custom Segment. Advance Segments Link can be found just under the navigation menu.

Add an OR condition for each social media site as source of traffic.

Give a name to the segment and save it. Once saved you can compare your custom segments you just created with the default segments provided by Google Analytics.

And track vital statistics for your social media campaigns.

Update: In old Google Analytics interface you will find the Advance Segment Option is in the left panel. Rest is pretty much same as new interface.

What are the other ways to track social media traffic? Share in comments below

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Why Google +1 Will Fail in Google SERPs

Shabbir — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 06:26:46 +0000

As Google’s +1 Button gathers more data it will become part of Google search results algorithm but according to me Google +1 will fail drastically when implemented in search algorithm for multiple reasons.

1. +1 requires Google profile

Making a Google Profile a requirement for +1 buttons is a move on Google’s part to match Facebook’s user profiles. The aim of Google is to have more Google profiles which mean Google has more personal and demographic information about user than it has currently. The motivation for Google is obvious. It needs more user personal data to show more and more related ads to you.

2. +1 May be for SEO Spammers

Google Panda update took a big toll on search engine spammers but with +1 Google will open doors once again for spammer. Google +1 is clearly showing signal that it can give you search ranking benefits where as with Facebook like button, user only recommends the content to their friends. The more motivated user of +1 would be a person intensely interested in search engine ranking.

3. +1 in Google SERP’s May be useless

I am not sure if I could ever judge from Google Results (Read Google search result excerpt) the quality of a site or content. If a user doesn’t know the quality of a page before a visit, how can they honestly click on +1 for it? In short, Google needs other ways to gather data before they can show recommendation and so they need to convince webmaster’s to have the +1 button installed on their site.

4. Google needs Friend Information

Google is focusing more on getting user profiles but for +1 to work on search results page they also need to find people I know i.e. my friends. If I click on +1 it does not make sense to have the same recommendation shown to me again because I anyway know it is good but it makes lot more sense if my friends see my +1. How will Google gather information about people I know can be tricky and I hope it’s not using the GMail’s address book?

What Google +1 means to you? Share your views in comments below.

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How to Transfer Domain out of GoDaddy

Shabbir — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:12:16 +0000

I am moving my domains out of GoDaddy into Namecheap and I did not found a clear article with clear instructions to transfer a domain out of GoDaddy and so I am trying to give you 3 simple steps to get your domain out of GoDaddy.

1. Unlock Domain and Get Transfer Authorization code

Unlock the domain if you see it as Locked. See 1 in screenshot above.

Once the domain is unlocked, click on the Send by Email link to get authorization code for your domain. You will get the following email from GoDaddy with your transfer authorization code.

2. Initiate the Transfer from other Registrar

Now you can transfer the domain to any other registrar of your choice. All you have to be doing is initiate the transfer process and add the domain authorization code you have from step 1. In Namecheap you can do that at the time of initiating the transfer and they term it as EPP code.

Once you have made the purchase expect a series of emails from both the domain registrar.

3. Accept Domain Transfer Request

You should see the following looking email. Approve the transfer.

Once the transfer is initiated expect the following email from GoDaddy.

See the text I have underlined in Green. Ideally you can do nothing and transfer will complete in 5 days but you can visit your GoDaddy Domain control panel and accept the pending transfers to transfer your domain immediately to the new registrar.

After you accept the transfer you will get a final confirmation email from GoDaddy.

All done from your end but at times it may take some time for the domain to show up in the list of domains in the new registrar list.

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How to Integrate MAXCDN With vBulletin 3.8

Shabbir — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 04:02:17 +0000

If you are trying to optimize vBulletin for better user experience, content delivery network can definitely help especially MaxCDN which can help make your site load faster and boost your SEO effort.

MaxCDN plugin for vBulletin is for vBulletin 4+. If you are using vBulletin 3.8 or lesser and have no plans to move to vBulletin 4, you can still use MaxCDN.

If you have any issues you can always post in comments and I will be more than happy to help or else you can even hire me at Elance to get it done for you.

1. Creating Pull Zone in MaxCDN

We will create two pull zones in MaxCDN – One for images and the second for clientscripts.

Images will be pulled from your forumroot/images folder and clienscripts will be pulled from forumroot/clienscripts. Once you have created both the pull zone verify that you are able to browse through the images as well as the CSS files

As an example:

www.mbaguys.net/images/misc/mbaguyslogo.gif

Becomes

mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/misc/mbaguyslogo.gif

Make sure both the URLs are working.

Remember you need to create the CName record for your domain.

Once you have the images being pulled into MaxCDN create the second pull zone for the Clienscripts folder. Nomenclature I follow is 1 for Images and 2 for clientscripts i.e. mbaguys1.g4estatic.com for Images and mbaguys2.g4estatic.com

Once you have the pull zone part done, we will make changes in vBulletin to use the new image and CSS paths.

2. vBulletin Image Paths

Admin CP > Styles & Templates > Style Manager > and select StyleVars from combobox. Edit the Image Paths to the new URLs

images/buttons becomes http://mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/buttons
images/misc becomes http://mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/misc

And so on for all the image paths.

3. vBulletin Replacement Variable

We will need few replacement variables to be configured to change the other Image paths like Post Icons. Visit Admin CP > Styles & Templates > Replacement Variable Manager and create the following Replacement Variables.

Search for Text : src="images/
Replace with Text : src="http://New_Images_CName_Path/

For me it becomes

src="images/ to src="http://mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/

Similarly for Clienscripts Create 3 more replacement variables.

href="clientscript to href="http://New_Clientscript_CName_Path
src="clientscript to src="http://New_Clientscript_CName_Path
url("clientscript to url("http://New_Clientscript_CName_Path

Once you have the above replacement variables in place browse through your forum to see everything is working fine. You can check the source of you HTML webpage to see all the images and clientscripts are being fetched from the new URLs or can wait for few seconds to see the hit reports in MaxCDN as well.

If everything is working fine we will move to custom avatars and other images which needs to be moved to the images folder for it to be using MaxCDN.

4. Custom Avatars and Images

To Move the custom avatars and other user images to be served from CDN all you have to do is move them under the images folder and everything will be taken care of automatically by the replacement variable. Make sure you have the URLs Relative to your forum home.

Visit Admin CP > Avatars > User Picture Storage Type and change the

Avatars to be served from the filesystem at ./images/customavatars and URL is images/customavatars relative to forumhome
Profile pictures to be served from the filesystem at ./images/customprofilepics and URL is images/customprofilepics relative to forumhome
Signature pictures to be served from the filesystem at ./images/signaturepics and URL is images/signaturepics relative to forumhome

Similarly change the Social Groups > Social Group Icon Storage Type and User Albums > Album Picture Storage Type under the forumroot/images folder

Hope this helps fellow forum admin’s. Share your views and feedback in comments below.

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Clickbank Multiple Sales Page

Shabbir — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 05:52:21 +0000

Clickbank does not allow you to have different sales page for your affiliates especially the super affiliates. I wanted to have a different sales page for some of my super affiliates and so created this plugin. I have gone through the Clickbank terms and condition where I did not found anything that is against this plugin provided you redirect users to new sales page which follows Clickbank’s sales page guidelines.

If you would like to get started with Clickbank check out Step By Step Guide to Start Selling With Clickbank

Installation

Download the Zip file. Extract the php file inside it and Upload the file at wp-content/plugins.
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
Open the plugin configuration page, which is located under Settings -> Clickbank Multi Sales page and enter the Redirection URLs one affiliate per line in the form of affiliateid|URL.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get the affiliate id of my affiliates?

There are multiple ways to get the affiliate id of your affiliates.

Ask them. You can ask your super affiliates what is their Clickbank id so you can customize sales page for them.
Use your clickbank reports to know who your super affiliates are? Offer them a custom sales page.

More queries, Can you help?

Yes I will be actively helping on any issue you have with this plugin so just post your questions, feedback or anything else you want to share in comments below.

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Tracking Clickbank Sales into Google Analytics E-Commerce

Shabbir — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 09:08:20 +0000

Let us track Clickbank Sales into Google Analytics e-commerce tracking platform without using Goals. Make sure you have selected e-Commerce profile as Yes in your Google Analytics Website profile. If you have not opted for an e-Commerce site profile edit profile and select e-Commerce.

Once you are done with the settings, grab your Analytics code for the site. The sample code looks like

Now let us follow Google Analytic’s e-commerce guidelines to add Clickbank transactions into Google Analytics. Let me quote the basic process from the link.

Create a transaction object – Use the _addTrans() method to intialize a transaction object. The transaction object stores all the related information about a single transaction, such as the order ID, shipping charges, and billing address. The information in the transaction object is associated with its items by means of the order IDs for the transaction and all items, which should be the same ID.

Add items to the transaction – The _addItem() method tracks information about each individual item in the user’s shopping cart and associates the item with each transaction via the orderId field. This method tracks the details about a particular item, such as SKU, price, category, and quantity.

Submit the transaction to the Analytics servers - The _trackTrans() method confirms that a purchase has occurred, and all data that has been built up in the transaction object is finalized as a transaction.

First we will need to grab the transaction details that Clickbank passes to our thanks page. I will use PHP as sample but this can be extended to other web languages very easily.

Note that you need to change the $net_amount to your product price in Clickbank.

If a sale is done through an affiliate you can adjust the amount as well. I give my affiliates 70% commission and so for an affiliate sale I reduce my net amount accordingly.

if($cb_affiliate!='0') $net_amount = 0.3*$net_amount;

Once you have the needed variables in your code you need to prepare the transaction as per Google’s guidelines.

_gaq.push(['_addTrans',
    '', // order ID - required
    'XXXXXXXX',                   // affiliation or store name
    '', // total - required
    '0',                          // tax
    '0',                          // shipping
    'Any',                        // city
    'Any',                        // state or province
    '' // country
  ]);

  _gaq.push(['_addItem',
    '', // order ID - required
    '999',                        // SKU/code - required.
    'XXXXXXXXXXX',                // product name
    'ebook',                      // category or variation
    '', // unit price - required
    '1'                           // quantity - required
  ]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackTrans']); //submits transaction to the Analytics servers

Once we have the code for the transaction we will insert this Code into the Google Analytics code we generated before. So final code becomes -

If you are copying the above code make sure to replace XXXX string with appropriate details.

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AWeber Footer SlideUp Installation Instructions

Shabbir — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 02:04:53 +0000

The installation instruction in AWeber Footer Slideup plugin is not very detailed and so I am going to create a very detailed installation instructions with screenshots to help you get started with the plugin.

If you have any issues you can always post in comments and I will be more than happy to help or else you can even hire me at Elance to get it done for you.

Step 1 Generate Inline AWeber Web Form

Opt for In-Line Form Type (marked as 1 in the above screenshot)
Select the basic form design template (marked as 2 in the above screenshot)
De-select header, footer, privacy, counter, powered options. (marked as 3 in the above screenshot)

Step 2 Grab RAW HTML code of the form

Change the form settings as you normally do in the step 2 of web form creation in AWeber and when you reach step 3 i.e. publish your form opt for Raw HTML version of the code and un-check the check box to get the unformatted basic HTML code.

Sometimes the un-formatted checkbox malfunctions and if it does not work as expected make sure you save the form and then come back to the publish page again to generate the un-formatted html form.

Step 3 Upload and Activate the plugin

You can use the WordPress plugin interface to install the plugin or else you can download the plugin and manually upload the aweber-footer-slideup folder under the wp-contents/plugins folder. Once uploaded activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu.

When the plugin is active you will see AWeber Footer Slideup options in the bottom left corner under the settings menu.

Click the link. The link is http://yourblogurl/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=awfs

Step 4 Configure the Plugin with the HTML code

Once you are in the admin options panel for the plugin you see 3 fields.

Tagline is the content shown as heading which can be anything you want to display as message to your user.

For Hidden AWeber Form Fields (Required) we will use the Raw HTML AWeber code. Search for Hidden Div. i.e. the code between

and

. I have marked the code as 1 in the screenshot below.

Copy everything between the div and paste it in the text area you have for Hidden AWeber Form Fields. This is the minimum you will requite to do for the plugin to work.

Optional Fields

To add the tracking image find a second hidden div (Mark 2 in the above picture) where AWeber has the image to track views of the form and calculates statistics like submissions to unique display and submission to display.

Copy the image src url and place into the Tracking Image URL of AWeber Webform (Optional) field.

I completed all the above steps and yet I don’t see the plugin in action?

Your plugin should support the basic hooks in header and footer for the plugin to work. Make sure you have

somewhere in the header.php file. Ideally in
somewhere in footer.php file. Ideally just before the tag

I hope the installation instructions are more clear now but if you still have any queries or questions don’t hesitate to post them in comments below. I will be more than happy to help.

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How to Track AWeber Conversions with Google Analytics

Shabbir — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:00:49 +0000

Tracking conversion is an important aspect of any business and web is no difference. It is important for any webmaster to track conversion because tracking helps webmaster’s in understanding what’s working and what isn’t. So today I will explain how to track conversions with Google Analytics goals and use AWeber as an example because I personally use AWeber but this can be very easily extended to GetResponse or mailchimp.

Note: It cannot be extended for Feedburner because Feedburner’s RSS to email don’t allow custom thank you pages. If cost is a problem for AWeber or GetResponse, use MailChimp. They’re free up to 2,000 subscribers.

So now let us begin.

Setting up AWeber

When people subscribe, you redirect them to a thank you page. Most autoresponders offer default “Thank You” page, but to track conversions you will need to create your own thank you page on your site. Once you have your thank you page you can set the URL of your “Thank You” Page in Aweber

Aweber provides 2 types of thank you pages which you can use for conversion tracking

When user subscribes to the list using any web form.
When user confirms the subscription to your list. (Assuming double opt in is enabled)

1. AWeber Submission Tracking

I personally do not prefer tracking the web form submissions but just in case you want, you can do it as follows.

Log in to your AWeber account and go to Webforms, and select the form you’d like to modify for tracking.
Click Settings tab at the top and you will see an option that says “Thank you page”. Select the custom page option and enter the URL of your “thank you” page.

As the form submission is not much of a value I prefer tracking the confirmed subscribers.

2. AWeber Confirmed Subscriber Tracking

Log in to your AWeber account and go to List Settings.
Click Confirmed Opt-In tab at the top and you will see an option that says “Success page”. Enter your URL of the “thank you” page.

Setting up Google Analytics

Once we have AWeber settings we need to setup Goals in Google Analytics

In your Google Analytics account, select the website profile and click ‘Edit’ under the ‘Actions’ column.
Under the ‘Goals’ section, click ‘Add goal.’
Give a suitable name for the goal and opt for URL Destination as goal type.
Enter your thank you page URL in the Goal URL field. Remember unlike AWeber Google wants only the non domain part of the URL. If your thank you page is www.mysite.com/thank-you, enter “/thank-you” into the Goal URL box. Reaching this page marks a successful subscription.

Now you should start seeing your conversion data in Google Analytics but keep in mind that Google Analytics is not real-time and so you may experience some delay.

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How to Submit AWeber Form Instantly?

Shabbir — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:11:39 +0000

Have you ever wondered when you see an AWeber form (See my AWeber Review) submit data to AWeber in a fraction of a second without leaving the page? Have you ever wanted such forms on your site as well? I will tell you step by step to get your AWeber form submitted exactly like that.

Generate AWeber Form and grab the HTML code for the form.

1. HTML

In the HTML code Find

And after the

target="AweberFormSubmitFrame" id="before"

So finally out code will look like this.

...


If you already have a target for form in the code by AWeber as target=”_new”, you can remove it.
Now when user submits the form we want to hide the form with a message to the user.
So just after the closing form tag i.e. 
 add the thanks message to the user.
Thank you
You can customize the message content as you want.
2. JavaScript
We need to add JavaScript code to the submit button code i.e. when user clicks the submit button we validate the data and then send it to AWeber.
So after 
onClick="return _submit_form(this.form);"
so it becomes.

Now finally at the end add the following JavaScript code

This is it and you can see the working example of my AWeber form here.
If you come across any issues getting this done right share your issues in comments below but do mention the URL where you are facing the issue and and I will be more than happy to help.

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How to Make Google Spy on Your Competitor’s Activity

Shabbir — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:55:02 +0000

You can waste hours keeping track of your competitors’ activities but it can be done without any activity from your end and let Google do the job for you. Google indexes pages on internet and provides a very nice feature – Google Alerts where you get email updates of the latest relevant Google results as they happen.

Let us take a very simple example. I want to know who all are saying what about my site Go4Expert and so I create a Google alert for the following terms

Go4Expert -site:www.go4expert.com

Anybody mentioning my website name Go4Expert apart from my own site and the alert will be triggered. This way any website, blog or forum on the internet when they mention my site I am notified.

I prefer to have the frequency of email to as it happens but you can also opt for once a day or even once a week.

The disadvantage of these alerts is you can do the same for your competitor’s name as well. All you have to do is create a Google alert for your competitors name instead of yours.

Marketing is all about being smarter. Share your thoughts in comments below.

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Internet Helps Me Save Time & Money. What About You?

Shabbir — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 16:29:36 +0000

Have you ever asked yourself – How Internet And Web-Enabled Devices Save Time & Money? If your answer is no don’t worry I also did not ask this question before today, but when I thought about the list kept growing. I am sharing my list here but do share your list of online things that saves you time and money.

Don’t worry I am not going to talk about internet as a business and money making opportunity but more on how I use internet to save time and money.

In random order

1. Skype Calls

I use Skype for international calls and that saves me lot on my telephone bills.

2. Scan & Email instead of Fax

I work with lot of clients (See How I Make $10,000 Freelancing) and even many advertising networks that require me to send signed contracts. Instead of faxing those documents I prefer to scan and email them. It not only saves me fax cost but my little effort to save paper as well.

3. Google maps instead of Old Yellow pages

Ohh yes. Do I need to mention anything more here about how and why I use Google maps?

4. Less Paper Books

No. No. You are taking it wrongly. I am not talking about free e-books from torrents but Kindle books. Kindle books are lot cheaper than paper books and it saves me a lot on the shipping cost for Amazon.

5. Cheap travel offers

We (Read My wife and my kids ) travel to my in-laws place frequently, so I purchase tickets online from sites like Cleartrip.com.

6. Movie tickets

When I plan to go for any movie, I don’t need to stand in a queue to book tickets because I can get that done online at bookmyshow.com. I rarely book movie tickets this way but for few movies I have done it in the past.

7. Paper Photographs

I normally do not prefer to get snaps in paper form but my mom does not like to view them in PC. She always asks me to get her a traditional album, so I use Picsquare to get the snaps delivered right at my door step and at much cheaper price.

8. Investing

I do lot of mutual funds investment online. It not only saves me lot of paper work time but also makes it much simpler to invest with a few clicks. BTW I also share my investments online @ shabbir.in

9. Online Tax Filling

How can I miss this? I did advance tax filing online recently and see how I managed to find a bug in the Income Tax India E-Filling site as well.

10. Internet Banking

I don’t need to visit bank branch for things that I can do online. It saves me lot of time and money. I think I should also mention that once when I visited the bank I had horrible experience with investment advice (See here).

Share your time and money saver part of internet in comments below.

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vBSEO Review – Is “Google SEO” Only Off-Page Optimization?

Shabbir — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:47:14 +0000

SEO experts and especially Google SEO experts will always suggest working on off-page optimization factors more than on-page optimization for better organic ranking.

C Programming Forum was something I never had the time to work on for quite some time until recently in the first week of September I started working on it. Upgraded vBulletin, then gave a whole new look, Installed vBSEO and other relevant plugins.

After the new look I started with my marketing efforts and soon I saw traffic picking up.

I thought the traffic was because of marketing efforts but to my surprise it was not only marketing that has worked in my favour. It was Google Organic Traffic that has tripled.

As you can see from the screenshot I installed vBSEO on 5th September 2010 and hours after installation my traffic from Google organic started to rise. Remember this is was one of those low traffic forums and yet I started to see results.

Now let us see a day to day to comparison of Google Organic traffic keeping 5th of September as the pivot.

You can clearly see the effect of vBSEO.

According to me vBSEO is one of the best plugin for vBulletin which makes your forum more search engine friendly. It has some handsome lists of features but my personal favourite features are user friendly url’s (Read SEO Friendly url’s ) and guest enhancements features that lightens HTML code by removing some not so used features by guests. Features like forum jump dropdown, member DHTML menus and many others…

So after looking at the charts finally my question is – Is “Google SEO” Only Off-Page Optimization? Share your views in comments below.

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Payoneer Review – An Indian’s Perspective

Shabbir — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 07:49:13 +0000

After Issues with PayPal Withdrawal in India this February many Indians have opted to go for Non-PayPal based payments methods and so am I and after testing few alternatives the one that is working the best for me is Payoneer.

I have been using them for more than 6 months now and am going to share a detailed review about Good and Not so good things about Payoneer.

So Let us begin.

Positive things about Payoneer

1. Faster Cash in Hand

You get the cash in hand much faster than PayPal or any other alternative payment methods. Apart from that if you have a Virtual US Bank account the payment from sites like CJ which takes couple of months (1 month of check arrival time and next 21 business days for funds to get cleared) to get credited in your account now takes hardly 24 hours.

2. Virtual US Bank Account

Indian’s can opt for a virtual US bank account (There are some minimum eligible criteria which you need to ask your account manager). Having a virtual US bank account means you can withdraw funds from PayPal, CJ and many other merchants and get the cash in just few hours.

3. Works in All ATM’s

Payoneer provides you with a Master Card Debit card and so it works with almost all ATMs in India and World Wide.

4. Sending & receiving money is very simple

Sending money to anyone is as simple as few clicks. See the Load Money form for yourself and if you wish to send me some money the link is even simpler – shab.in Just kidding but the link to see how you can use the link to ask your clients to pay you.

Not so positive things about Payoneer

1. Costly

I am not sure if this should be an advantage or a disadvantage but let me first put few numbers and then you can decide for yourself. Receiving money costs a fee depending on your account type, withdrawal costs per transaction charge and forex rates are bit lower than expected.

Now comparing to PayPal which costs roughly 4%+ per transactions and PayPal USD rates as we all know are worst for PayPal I think Payoneer costs me less for higher valued transactions of $50+. You may need to make your own calculation as fees can vary depending on your card type and merchant through which you get the card.

2. Forex rates are low

The have a low forex rates. Unlike PayPal they have this mentioned on their fees page and so I am fine with it.

3. Support is ok but not great

Support (Not services) is not that good. Once or twice it took 2+ days time for getting a reply to few questions. I have not tested the phone support as there has been no need for me to do that.

4. Must sign up only through channel partner

I am not sure why but unless you find a site like Elance or some other channel partner you cannot own a prepaid debit card. Though I must say they have quite a few channel partners to choose from.

5. Private payments have upper limit

When working for clients at times I get few high payments but they have a restrictions of 1000 USD that can be sent privately at any given point of time and there is no way you can raise this amount.

Final Thoughts

I think it is a must have for all self employed as well as freelancers. Share your views and experiences of Payoneer Debit Card in comments.

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