Entries Tagged 'Xenyo Developments' ↓

Article Directory Launch

I’m happy to say that our article directory script is 90% ready and its mostly the site admin stuff left to do. Therefore, we are launching the client side today, located at http://www.xenyo.com/articles/ .

I expect there to be a few bits and pieces missing for a couple of weeks as we work to perfect it for the product Launch.

Affiliate marketing wise things have really improved and have already broken my 2008 target. The majority is through PPC affiliate marketing and I really need time to scale things up more and fine-tune.

Time being the keyword here as we are also about to launch an upgrade to one of our existing projects. Its all good I suppose as things are getting crossed off in my to-do lists.

Take care, I need to go do more research on what products to promote on our first proper PPC affiliate marketing project.

2008 First Half Targets

Happy New Year everyone!

As you know, i am a firm believer of setting targets so this post will be about our targets for the new year. We’ll break it down to 2 sections, first regarding my general targets and then the second part about targets for some of our projects.

Matt’s targets
1. By First Quarter - Finish off or drastically reducing time spent on consulting and freelance work and focus on our projects.
2. By First Quarter - Double average 2007 monthly income. This will be tight but hopefully will see progress by March.
3. Spend more time looking into affiliate marketing - Depending on no.1., hoping to break into 4 figure monthly income on affiliate marketing by April or thereabouts.
4. Start steady membership subscription income on IRateThis by first half.

Projects targets
Xenyo - Articles launch in January along with Article Directory script in BETA. CMS script BETA launch by end of first quarter.
CheckSaveBuy - Finish first phase development by first quarter along with steady monthly income.
IRateThis - Site upgrade to be released in January 2008 and continued growth in first half 2008.
ArticleGOLD - First Quarter target is to continue working on making everyday administration hands off for myself. First half target for the directory will be to brand it as one of the top 3 article directories.

Not setting any firm targets on our other stuff as I think we are over-stretching our team with the above already but if anything comes up, maybe we’ll need to increase our team or get some freelance help in.

Blog Directory Submissions

Today, I have been a good internet marketer and took some time to submit this blog to blog directories. Below I will list the directories that I have submitted to.

Best of the Web - Paid USD39.95

2RSS.com :: RSS directory
Directory of Internet Blogs
Blogarama - The Blog Directory
FindingBlog - Blog Directory
Continue reading →

New Direction for Xenyo

Just a short post to inform our readers and visitors that Xenyo will be taking a new direction. We will not be taking on any new SEO clients on with our current model. The main reason behind this is purely a business decision as our profit from our own projects far exceed that from our SEO service. The decision was made so that we could free more time to devote to our projects.

Existing clients have been informed that we will continue to provide our service to them as if nothing has changed. In fact, we will soon streamline and improve our SEO offerings and tailor them to companies that already have some Internet marketing knowledge, more on this on later posts.

Oks, so what of Xenyo.com …….

Continue reading →

Article Directories are wrong?

Regular readers will know that we run an article directory called ArticleGOLD . What started out as an experiment using an ArticleDashboard script sprinkled with some SEO powder grew quite rapidly to becoming one of the more successful directories on the Net.

It will be soon growing pass 2000 uniques a day and brings in handy Adsense revenue at a high CTR. The articles that we approve are all reviewed and of comparatively good quality. Many many submissions daily. So whats wrong with it?

To me it just doesnt seem right … this last couple of days I have been thinking of a direction change for ArticleGOLD to somehow put it right. First we need to find out what is wrong.

Putting it through TropicalSEO’s Is your site Defensible Quiz , ArticleGOLD scores quite well actually and I would say it passes 8 of the the 10 items.

7. Does your site have some sort of remarkable value?
Hes got me …..

We always try to make our sites have some value but well because of the nature that ArticeGOLD started, its just an articles directory. An article directory with good content but nevertheless, an article directory out of the countless hundreds out there. Worse, its still uses the AD script, taken nothing away from the great script (P.S. please lose the encrytion.)

I mean, how many article directories does the world need? This number I presume is considerably less than the number article marketers think they need. Alot of directories auto approve articles and seeing as ArticleGOLD rejects over half the articles submitted, thats alot of useless and wrong information on the Internet.

The ratio of quality articles submitted against articles written for the sole purpose of having 3 links in the resource box is less than ten to one from my experience of doing editorial duties for ArticleGOLD.

If we are making an articles directory for marketers then it needs to be something different because I see them going down the route of link directories if not already. Do a google search on an article you find on any directory and you’ll see what I mean.

We move swiftly on to item 10 of TropicalSEO’s list - Are you thinking about/working on defensibility?

I want to make it clear that I am not trying to turn ArticleGOLD into a Wikipedia because its an article directory. To me, a typical articles directory should service 3 types of users.

Authors - Its should help authors and article marketers get their articles and resource box seen.

Webmasters - ArticleGOLD is a free articles directory so webmasters should be able to easily find articles that they can use or refer to.

Visitors - This includes the visitors from search engines and feed subscribers that arrive at the article. The directory should make sure that the article is of quality and not be misleading.

Does your article directory give value to these people?

To me, I dont think that the current build of article directories do and there is room for improvement. Let me finetune a few ideas and I’ll post back on here when we’re ready.

A new venture

A nice weekend brought me chatting to an old friend. One thing lead to another and a partnership of a new website was forged. Funny how things happens.

Anyways, this guy has decades of experience in the Hong Kong construction industry and has written an indepth book for his own interest. So I introduced him to the wonders of internet marketing and Construction DB was born. A few more telephone calls and we have enough quality content to be busy for months.

Its pretty exciting for us to be involved too as we have big plans for it and if it follows the success of our other projects then things will be great. Most of the content will be based for Hong Kong construction at the beginning which will grow internationally as we get more contributers in.

The site will start off using Drupal as a backend as its sufficient for the current purposes and we have already got the first parts of the Construction Site Handbook up and also set up the Construction Forums using the standard Drupal module.

So anyways, if you are yourself in the construction industry pop over to ConstructionDB and say Hi.

I claim thee

Discussions in the Internet Marketing World still revolves Google’s Paid Links are naughty talk, the long awaited pagerank update and Webmaster tools upgrades. I sense something big brewing and its the calm before the storm at the moment.

However, the real purpose of this post was for me to cunningly embed a Technorati code to claim the blog - Technorati Profile

Site downtime and Server change

First, let me apologies for the downtime over the last two days for the site, this was due to a server change we had to do because of some problems with the old hosting company.

We are happy to announce that Xenyo is back on track now bigger and stronger than before.

Development wise, we are hard at work on our Main Xenyo Tool which is shaping up nicely and I’ll update you guys nearer the time. The tool is actually pretty much complete for first phase but we are going to implement a much requested Links Marketplace into it so some back end changes needed to be implemented.

So thats me out for the now, need to check my emails.

I just want to rank no.1 for my Keyword!

Another question commonly asked from us is to give them a price for getting them to first spot for a keyword on within . Whilst we realise that some SEO companies commit to this, we try to explain to our clients, the things to consider …

1. Each keyword phrase is different and the cost to achieve a top ranking vary immensely depending on how competitive the keyword is. For example, for a keyword like insurance, I would not even be concenred about the price initially but rather how long it would take to get the search engines to trust the client’s site to rank it anywhere near the top. However, for less competitive keywords, we have even achieved no.1 ranking for a client for free.

2. Some keywords may sound good but in reality brings in little traffic. Keyword research is a field that is crucial to a successful search engine marketing campaign and one based on sounding cool is rarely the ingrediant for success. The client I mentioned in item 1 now realises this and is currently enjoying his second year of business with us.

3. The algorythms used by the search engines are constantly changing and likewise the competition for the keyword phrase. Providing a reasonable quote for a moving target is like a gamble on roulette rather than a sound business quote.

The above are the main reasons why we do not quote for getting a keyword to no.1 so if thats what you are after, then Xenyo Internet Services is not right for you. What we do offer is to bring you more and more converting traffic via the search engines over time by getting you top rankings in search engines for keywords that people search for to find your products and services.

The SEO service in my opinion that can commit to getting you no.1 rankings for a keyword for a set fee without analysis of your site or competition is either a very brave company, about to make a very good deal for a low competition keyword or about to get an angry client.

As a tip from me …. if you are still inclined to get a quote for a specific keyword, please do a check on your competition for that keyword.

Say you want a top 3 ranking on Google for ‘Public Relations Specialist’

Do a search on Google for Public Relations Specialist

You will see that the current top 3 (As of today) is

No1 - www.bls.gov/oco/ocos086.htm
No2 - www.princetonreview.com/cte/profiles/dayInLife.asp?careerID=171
No3 - online.onetcenter.org/link/summary/27-3031.00

Looking into a bit more detail for these 3.

No.1 is a government page has 660,000 backlinks, Pagerank of 6 and is over 10 years old
No.2 is also over 10 years old and has 18,200 backlinks
No.3 is a 9 year old PR5 site with about 10,000 backlinks.

These 3 also has a very high number of backlinks from education and government sites.

Now, your appointed SEO company needs to convinve Google that your site represents a more trustworthy resource of information for ‘Public Relations Specialist’ than those 3.

In my opinion if your site is a new site, it ain’t going to happen within a month and certaining not for less than USD100. By the way, I personally, dont think its a hard keyword to target for but I reckon from that keyword alone … you maybe will get 10 visitors a day.

But then again … I could be wrong.

Xenyo Webmaster Tool

Well yesterday was an exciting day, in fact so exciting that I didnt get time to post.

What happened was that we released the first phase of our webmaster tool .

We sat together one day and started brainstorming on a tool that would be cool. Sometime between just finishing the Big Macs and finishing off the Milkshake we agreed that we needed something to manage the links to and from our sites.

Most of us run sites on the side and apart from using excel, we couldnt find a good way to manage the hundreads of expiry dates and URLs to and from our sites. So after finishing the shakes, we further developed the ideas into what we would call a very exciting new path for Xenyo … I think we called this part Xenyo Webmasters….. What we envisage is a complete hands off approach to managing your links and even selling or finding link partners.

Back to the release though….. this phase is the outbound links bit. We create Xenyo Link groups which are groups of links, be it sold links, link exchanges or your interlinks between your own sites. Plonk your links into your link group and the tool helps you manage them .. features like reciprocal link checking and auto notifications are in already.

We havent started to market the tool yet as we are still adding features to it. Hopefully the brought links phase will be complete within this week too. All in all, a very busy and exciting week for us.

Try out our Webmaster Tool.