Darren Chow Personal Blog

Time flies quickly – 2009 is about to end, and a new year comes about. Now is a good time to come up with some New Year Resolutions so that when the year starts, you have something that guides you along.

Forget about those meaningless resolutions that we don’t really mean to keep. Focus on realistic resolutions that mean something in our lives; those that we really want to dedicate our time and attention towards.

To help identify these resolutions, I’ve come up with a little exercise that you can complete. At the end of the exercise, you will have a clearer idea of what your resolutions are. I won’t dwell on the details here because the template includes all the instructions on how to use it.

Here, I’ll just post an example of how to use this template. I won’t be posting every single one of my New Year Resolution because I believe resolutions are meant to be personal.

So, here is one of mine (you will find the download link at the end).

Q: What is one quality that I can work on this year?

The quality that I want to work on is outsourcing.

I want to work on this quality because I really want to free up my time so that I can focus on running the business, instead of being caught up with all the operational stuff.

More importantly, as I continue to grow my online business, I find that I’m working longer and longer hours. Sooner or later, something will have to give. I’m afraid that something is my health. I do exercise regularly, and I keep a close tab on my diet. But I don’t think that can ever replace proper rest.

Like everyone else, I have a limited number of working hours. My realization is that time is a limited resource. So the only way to move forward without sacrificing my health is to pick up some outsourcing skills.

I understand that outsourcing entails hiring, and the process of hiring is something that I’m not familiar with. And I intend to change that. I want to learn how to conduct interviews, and how to identify good candidates who will carry out the work that I have been doing responsibly.

I also want to learn how to train new hires so that they can perform their duties effectively, with minimal intervention from me.

Therefore, my new year resolution is:

Learn how to source for new candidates, interview them, and train them.

Now it’s your turn:-

Download the Template (Right click, save as – 78k)

Oh, before I forget. If you think that this post may benefit anyone you know, please spread the word. See that little “Tell a Friend” button below?

If you click on it, you will be able to share this post via email, instant messenger, or social networks. Email, of course, would be the most direct and convenient method. Do try it out!!

I’ve been designing and testing a new blog commenting service that achieves the following:

Keyword based – Just enter a keyword phrase with each URL that you wish to promote. We will then identify a set of 15 URLs and post comments to these blogs. This means that for every URL that you promote, the blog entries that we post to will be different (i.e. keyword dependent). We avoid the problem of posting to the same blog entries over and over again.

Human written comments – All comments are written by human writers. So that’s 15 comments, for 15 blog entries. All comments are recorded in your account, so you can see the actual comments that we have posted in your account. This is to ensure that we include on-topic comments that are relevant to the post.

URLs recorded – All the blog entries URLs will be recorded in your account, so that you can go back and check if the comments have been approved to gauge the effectiveness of our blog commenting. You can always visit the blogs at a later date to network with the blog owners if you like.

Wouldn’t that be comment spamming?

Please note that if this service is to be launched (if it launches), it wouldn’t be a blog comment spamming service.

A spamming service does the following – use automated software to spam irrelevant comments on hundreds and thousands of blogs. For instance, posting “Good post.” to a thousand blog entries will be considered as spamming.

We don’t do that. We hire human writers to post intelligent comments to blogs that are handpicked (URLs are selected by human beings based on the keywords that you enter). You are also free to network with the blog owners based on the URLs that we have included in your account.

Are the blog URLs DoFollow or NoFollow?

A lot of information has been put out by the Internet marketing community about DoFollow and NoFollow links. The common perception is that the search engines only count DoFollow links. So everyone has been asking for DoFollow blog commenting.

This has been a difficult decision for us because our own tests show that NoFollow links are counted by the search engines as well. How do we know? Well, the links show up in our Webmaster account, and our sites have been ranked (and some have acquired page rank) in the search results.

So rather than go with the flow, we’ve decided to follow what works – participate actively in the blogs, and be rewarded with higher search rankings.

I also noticed that the focus on Dofollow and Nofollow takes the fun out of blog commenting. Blog commenting is never meant solely for SEO purposes. That is why I don’t encourage blog spamming, which arises out of SEO. There has to be a participating element involved, which is why we have chosen human written comments.

Since our test results show that NoFollow links are counted, we are going to go against the flow and include both Dofollow and Nofollow blogs. This may mean an uphill climb for us in terms of marketing, but in the long run, I hope customers can see the value in the work that we do.

Current development stage.

As of now, the prototype of the service has just been developed, but it is far from being a full fledged service. I am able to accomplish all of the above – identify blogs, write comments, and post comments. That’s about it. Right now, that’s good enough as the prototype allows me to test the effectiveness of the service. I can also monitor the approval of the links.

Commercial viability.

I’m having a lot of fun with the prototype, and have yet to decide whether to release it as a service or not. Well, the purpose of this blog entry is to determine the commercial viability of this service. Although I’m convinced that the service will benefit me, I’m not sure if you are convinced as well.

You should stop reading the rest of this post…

• If you are looking for a blog spamming service that will spam hundreds of blogs with irrelevant comments, then obviously this service isn’t for you.
• If you are only looking for high page rank DoFollow blog posts with 100% approval rate.
• If you have a lot of time on your hands and would like to post comments on your own.

Read on if you are looking to hire someone to represent your Company and participate in high quality blogs…

The key challenge when developing this service is to have intelligent blog comments that are relevant and on-topic. As it stands now, there is no software in the market that can read a blog post and then generate an intelligent comment that’s on-topic. So comments will have to be written by a human writer.

To engage a human writer means there is a cost involved. To get a person to sit down, read the blog post, and then write something intelligent can be time consuming. We can hire someone to do that, but how much are we going to pay that person?

So if you are using our blog commenting service, it’s as if you are hiring our staff to post blog comments on your behalf. Of course, we do all the dirty work. All you have to do is to place orders with us.

After doing our sums, we realize that for us to offer this as a commercial service, we have to charge at least $30 for each URL that we promote.

That means for $30, we will identify 15 blog posts that allows blog commenting, and post 15 unique comments on your behalf.

The problem is, I’m not sure if you will find such a deal to be attractive. Of course, you can hire your own staff to do blog commenting. If they can do a better job than we do, for less than $30, then you should hire your own staff.

But if you want to do away with having to hire staff, handling staff, identifying blog entries, writing comments and then posting those comments, AND you don’t mind paying $30, then you may wish to consider hiring us.

So before I take the prototype further and develop this into a full fledge commercial service, I’d like your feedback on this.

Do you think this service will be useful to you?

Send us your feedback by leaving a comment below. If you’d like to send us a private email, use this contact form.

If response is good, we will continue developing the service. If we receive a poor response, we will just continue to use the prototype privately, to promote our own sites.

So let us know what you think. I look forward to hearing from you

Best regards,

Darren Chow

P.S. If you don’t think blog commenting is for you, you can always continue to use our blog posting service.