Minterest | Blogging, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Tech, & Web 2.0

The 100 Best Tech & Marketing Blogs You Should Be Following

by MAHESH MOHAN on December 12, 2016

I have always wanted to create a list of blogs that I love to read, share and link to because I think it’d be nice to see them in a listicle rather than just adding them to Feedly (my favorite RSS reader). Moreover, I didn’t want to add tons of blogs to my RSS reader as I hate to see hundreds of unread items.

And hey, you should also have a list of your favorite blogs. You know why? Because if you are a blogger, or marketer, or whatever you are supposed to stay updated about what’s happening in your industry. The idea is to stay focused all the time.

By the way, you DO NOT have to follow hundreds of blogs in your niche. Just a dozen of them is pretty enough. Because you will see yourself landing on more and more related blogs and blog posts as you go.

For instance, it’s been a month since I checked my Feedly feeds and now it’s got over 600 unread items (and counting). The problem is I was reading less and less all these days and weeks as I already had enough research stuff in my Evernote and saved for later articles in my Pocket.

And yet, I was landing on a lot of interesting blogs and blog posts and whatnot. In fact, that’s what inspired me to write this very blog post.

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ProRankTracker Review: Track Your Keyword Rankings Everywhere

by MAHESH MOHAN on November 30, 2016

Image Credit: Flickr

I do not track my keyword rankings that closely, except in a broad way. And that’s to know whether my overall organic traffic is up or down. A few years back, I have listed a bunch of free Google rank checkers but realized later that free rank trackers do not work.

It may work at times when you randomly check it but free rank checkers are not something that you want to rely on especially when you are managing a lot of SEO campaigns or personally want to track hundreds of keyword rankings.

Meanwhile, if you want to track only a handful of keywords then the best way to track them is to do it manually. For instance, I use the Google Chrome extension SERPTrends when I want to track individual keywords without actually tracking.

That’s right. SERPTrends is just a lightweight tool that shows the ranking changes of the listed URLs within the search result itself. So when I don’t want to track any keywords, I just deactivate the extension and it’s that simple.

On the flipside, if you want to track hundreds of keywords and is looking for a premium rank tracker tool then ProRankTracker could be your best choice.

Today, I’m reviewing this nifty rank tracking tool that allows you to track the rankings of your keywords on almost all the major search engines on the planet.

And I’m happy that this is a sponsored review as otherwise, I wouldn’t have come across this less-known (oh, at least I didn’t know) SERP tool.

As of now, I’m using my complimentary SEMrush account for all things SEO (including rank tracking) as it’s an all-in-one SEO suite. And as I mentioned earlier, I use SEMrush’s Position Tracking to monitor the overall organic traffic trends (like this) and since it supports “Competitors” I will know whether it’s a broad-based change or not.

However, SEMrush’s SERP checker is not as comprehensive as ProRankTracker. Moreover, SEMrush is good for tracking only Google SERPs. So if you want to track your keyword rankings on all search engines then you will need a premium rank checker and ProRankTracker is worth a try. [Read more…] about ProRankTracker Review: Track Your Keyword Rankings Everywhere

Over 71 Ways To Repurpose Your Content Over And Over Again

by MAHESH MOHAN on November 17, 2016

You know, you should really repurpose your content. But the disclosure is that I haven’t started it yet. I first came to know about repurposing content when Darren published How to Repurpose Your Content [and Why You Should Do It!].

However, I wasn’t that interested as I didn’t have plenty of blog posts on my blog then. Even today, I have less than 300 blog posts but I realize that it’s time to diversify the traffic sources. And that was among one of my goals with Minterest Level 3.0.

First things first.

What is content repurposing?

Content repurposing is all about extending the life of your original content (blog posts in most cases) by leveraging more mediums. Submitting a blog post to a dozen of social networks or updating/republishing one of your archived blog post is not exactly repurposing. It’s just sharing and resharing.

Repurposing is done by taking an existing blog post (or content) and using it to create something else on another medium (in an easy to consume way) thereby reaching an audience who wouldn’t have found your content otherwise.

That is, it involves reusing your own content to serve a different audience or the same audience in a different way. The good thing about content repurposing is that you are actually getting more traffic by creating less content — as these mediums are already known to have millions of active users. [Read more…] about Over 71 Ways To Repurpose Your Content Over And Over Again

The 100 Most Useful Websites For (Almost) Anyone And Everyone

by MAHESH MOHAN on October 27, 2016

Google search, Bing search, or Yahoo search. But have you ever tried the DuckDuckGo search? It’s a search engine that doesn’t track you and has everything (like suggestions, image search, video search, etc.) you expect from a search engine.

There’s a very good chance that we end up using only the most popular websites on the web because they are just everywhere. However, it doesn’t really mean that they’re the best websites on the Internet.

Needless to say, “popular” isn’t necessarily the best. And that’s how I decided to come up with a list of extremely useful (and probably less-known) websites on the web.

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The Fantastic Hundred Websites

Whether you’re a student, a professional, or a homemaker, I have hand-picked one hundred most useful websites for you — to get things done, or to spend time with, or to find something interesting. And no, it doesn’t include the Facebooks and Amazons of the world. [Read more…] about The 100 Most Useful Websites For (Almost) Anyone And Everyone

Over 61 Microsoft Products, Services, & Apps You (Probably) Don’t Know

by MAHESH MOHAN on October 26, 2016

Microsoft Products

I have always wanted to list all the Microsoft products and services (just like I did Google’s). But Microsoft’s products are really diverse in nature and a good percentage of them are actually targeting companies and business users. Therefore I found it difficult to list all the products in an organized way.

Microsoft’s products were mostly desktop applications until a few years ago. Now things have changed substantially and Microsoft has been launching a lot of standalone web and mobile apps for individual consumers. This is why I (finally) decided to list all the Microsoft products and services.

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A List Of (Almost) All Microsoft Products, Services, Tools, & Apps

Over 400 million Windows 10 devices. Over 1.2 billion Microsoft Office users. Over 400 million Outlook.com users. Over 3 billion Skype minutes a day. Over 669,000 Windows Store apps. That’s the stats of Microsoft.

Credit: Microsoft by the Numbers
[Read more…] about Over 61 Microsoft Products, Services, & Apps You (Probably) Don’t Know

Over 101 Hand-picked Web 2.0 Sites To Get Instant Backlinks To Your Blog

by MAHESH MOHAN on October 14, 2016

I previously wrote a blog post where I featured over 30 web 2.0 sites to drive traffic to your blog. It focused on traffic generation using social media and web 2.0 sites. So today I’m going to focus on link building using web 2.0 sites.

As you probably know, if content is King then links are Queen. Link building post penguin is all about quality so the traditional link building methods like article submission, directory submission, press releases, RSS submission, etc. rarely works today.

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So I’m featuring over 50 quality websites where you can list your blog/website. These websites may not drive huge traffic to your blog but they increase the backlinks to your blog in several ways.

Most of these websites allow you to enter your URL as a bio link and it means you get a backlink in less than 5 minutes (Tip: Use your Facebook/Twitter/Google+ account to sign up). And you can multiply the number of backlinks from these websites by becoming an active user.

For example, when you create your YouTube profile you can add a link to your website from your profile page and also from your uploaded videos.

Likewise, you can join community-driven websites like Digital Point, Microsoft Community, Yahoo Answers, etc. and can link to your website from profile pages and also from discussions by adding your link in a relevant topic.

Over 30 Hand-picked Social Media (And Web 2.0) Sites To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

by MAHESH MOHAN on October 13, 2016

Social Media websites can drive insanely great traffic to your blog if you have a good social media marketing strategy. But it can drive fair amount of traffic if you just submit blog posts regularly to your social media profiles.

Social media traffic is as important as organic traffic from search engines as we can’t rely on Google alone. They continue to push algorithmic updates like Panda, Penguin and who knows the next could be Giraffe.

It means that we must diversify the way we get traffic. I’m going to list the top social media and other websites that you shouldn’t ignore or must use as part of your social media marketing strategy.

I’m NOT going to list all the stupid social media or the so called web 2.0 sites out there as I’m going to focus only on sites that can drive traffic to our websites in one way or the other and not for building backlinks.

Though the traffic quality of social media can’t be matched with that of organic traffic, it is still important. It helps us to keep the bounce rate low which is assumed to be one of the many ranking signals used by Google.

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Minterest Level 3.0: Go Premium!

by MAHESH MOHAN on September 30, 2016

Minterest Level 3.0

I see three Levels whenever I think of my blogging journey on Minterest.

Level 1.0 was the beginning phase (2006-2012) and it was apparently my learning phase too because Minterest was my first WordPress blog and it started as a personal finance journal.

And then I started getting very obsessed with writing and spent many, many hours to compose a single blog post and that was Level 2.0 for me which lasted until 2015.

That was the time when I started experimenting different blogging strategies and blog post types and design elements and many, many, micro things that’s in one way or the other related to blogging.

I loved that blogging phase. Totally! [Read more…] about Minterest Level 3.0: Go Premium!

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The Fantastic Hundred Websites

A List Of (Almost) All Microsoft Products, Services, Tools, & Apps