June 7: Website Marketing Hands-On Tutorial

To all SME and Corporate members of the DigitalFilipino.com Club, we shall be having a Website Marketing hands-on tutorial session this June 7, Thursday, from 9 am to 5 pm. This will be held at Alfox Internet Cafe (beside Chowking), Kamuning Road, corner Edsa, Quezon City.

Topics include:

1. Writing good page titles
2. Meta tags
3. Proper text formatting
4. Creating a sitemap
5. Search engine registration
6. Blog marketing
7. Internet Advertising
8. Website traffic monitoring
   

SME members can send 1 representative while Corporate members can send 2 representatives. Please confirm for food count purposes.

Interested non-members and individual members are requested to sign up as an SME or Corporate member prior to June 7 and confirm attendance for food count purposes.

We hope you can join. Thank you.

InnofoneLab launches JackpotSpy

One of our club members, InnofoneLab, just sent me a message about their new JackpotSpy service. They are now giving a 30-days free beta trial that lottery enthusiasts can subscribe to.

JackpotSpy monitors the game for subscribers and sends alert through the mobile phone when the amount desired is reached. This is useful for those who are interested in buying tickets when higher prizes are at stake.

According to InnofoneLab, anyone can subscribe to JackpotSpy, during its beta or free trial period, which is not limited to a particular country. Lotto alerts for US lotteries are the ones that get sent out at this time.

Once the official version with paid subscription is launched, JackpotSpy will offer alerts from international lotteries as well.

Organizing an online writing project

Last week had been fairly exciting as I joined a group writing project for the first time. Although I did not received any monetary prize, the value of getting to discover new blogs, the link love, ideas inspiration, and website traffic (even for a short period of time), made it all worth it.

There were a lot of posts I read citing that majority of blogs today are bound to fail. I believe that the reasons behind it can include:

• Unable to build a readership base.
• Had a hard time in earning some link love. It seems that link love is easiest gained by participating in some online or offline social activities.
• The blogger starts getting lost and ponder as to why they are blogging in the first place.
• and there are many more (please feel free to add your thoughts)

Last Saturday, I acted on this lingering idea of initiating a writing project, The Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs in 2007, but with emphasis on recognizing new blogs that are out there today. What inspired me to do it includes:

• I noticed that majority of connections and community members in MyBlogLog have blogs that are less than a year old. This is a good opportunity to put the spotlight on them.
• Getting bloggers to recognize the new ones may perhaps contribute in lessening the percentage of blogs that lose inspiration, fail, and die within a year.
• New faces! Sometimes it gets tiring to see the old ones being mentioned again and again and again.
  
• Take this project as a means to promote some of our corporate club members and other sponsors during the activity.

I'm conservative on the number of entries this effort will generate. However, in the years to come, I hope it will gain momentum.

Monitoring Filipino Top 100 Blogs

Davao-based club member Andrew dela Serna monitors the Philippines Top 100 blogs through his new project, Ratified.org. Perhaps Pinoy would be more accurate as the bloggers that get ranked are not necessarily Philippine-based. (as long as they are a Filipino)

• Aileen Apolo believes that this is a great tool for measuring one's blog performance.
• J. Angelo Racoma has reservation as Technorati.com may not be the most efficient tool around to rank one's blog as its system can be abused by those who own multiple blogs.

The additional metrics that Andrew included, and be adding, will be helpful in coming up with a more realistic rank. It will be interesting to see how Filipino blogs fair in the months to come.

My challenges in measuring my blogs and site performance includes:

• Majority of my blog readers are not bloggers nor feed reader users. They are my DigitalFilipino Yahoo Group members where I disseminate blog updates.
  
• My reflection and Ituloy AngSulong blog got a high Technorati rank due to participation in events like Blog Parteeh and iBlog3. However, the number of visit it gets is nowhere near my Philippine Internet Review blog that has a lower Technorati rank. I wonder which one will matter more?
• My DigitalFilipino.com site is indexed in Technorati but is not exactly a blog, more of a hybrid. I wonder if that can be included in Ratified.
  
• I believe template creators or web host owners have an advantage in Technorati as they can include a link, in a mandatory manner, to their blog site at the footer. Of course, that doesn't necessarily result to readers.
• As I'm running a promo in my blogging book blog, it will be interesting to learn how its metric will shape up in a month or two. The same goes to my web awards blog as we will be ramping up the feature of winners in the weeks to come.

More power to you Andrew and may you inspire more developers in building creative applications.