The Rawpinions Weblog

Free, reciprocal and paid submissions, registration is not required.

SITES SUBMITTED TO THE WRONG CATEGORIES WILL BE  REJECTED~!

Demm.info Web Directory - www.demm.info
JJSC.net Web Directory - www.jjsc.net
Losom Web Directory - www.losom.com
Oroop Web Directory - www.oroop.com
Nipii Web Directory - www.nipii.com

The following is a very effective method of getting targeted traffic in your forum (and getting active members to start posting).

Let’s assume that your forum is about Entertainment. You need to find people who are not only interested in entertainment, but people who love to talk about it. Where do you start???

One very effective method is by “attracting” members from other entertainment communities. I know that the following method might be questionable in terms of ethics but I believe it makes perfect sense:

1 - You will need to start a list (you can use notepad) of online Entertainment communities & forums, or forums that have entertainment boards & categories. This can be done by Google searching or using directories to find these communities.

2 - Take a note of members who have participated in these entertainment boards and categories. Search for their profiles and if they have enabled receiving emails from the public, you may send them an email telling them about your new forum (don’t forget to send the link to the forum, and another link to the registration page).

If you’re searching a 100% Entertainment-related forum, do this: Many forums allow guest access to the member list. Find all these members who have enabled receiving emails from the public and send them emails about your new entertainment forum.

Technically, This Method Is NOT Spamming
People who question the ethics of “taking” other people’s email address to “spam” them should certainly understand the difference between sending them unwanted emails (which IS considered spamming) and sending them emails that they might be interested to receive (technically not spamming).

The method explained is also technically not against any law because these members have enabled receiving emails. Which means you have every right to send them emails. Remember that you are sending them an announcement that they might be interested in anyway (especially since they were found in an entertainment community).

How You Should Do It
- Send mass emails using Bcc (so nobody else in the list will be able to see anyone else’s email)
- Compose an email that sounds like it is directed to one person, and tell them that they are invited to join your forum
- Tell them to forward the invitation to friends who they feel might be interested in the forum
- Use a level of language according to your type of forum. E.g. if it’s an entertainment forum the email should be lively and fun, if it’s a business forum the email should be formal, etc.

What You Should Not Do
- You should not give anyone these emails, as they should not be over-exploited.
- Do not ever send them another email to remind them that they should come join your forum (unless you want to be in their junk mail folder).
- If your forum is about Entertainment, do not send mail to members from Webmaster forums or any other forum unrelated to Entertainment because you will definitely be crossing the line.

Note:
If they reply telling you to do something useful with your life, you should either ignore them or reply with a very apologetic but sincere tone (or writing style obviously). Ensure them that you only believed that they received the email because you assumed they would have been interested in your announcement.

Current Mood: Bored

A few days ago I submitted rawpinions.com to some blog directories. Here are the reciprocal ones that have accepted this blog so far:

Top of Blogs
Blogarama
eBlogzilla
Go Blogz
Blog Flux
Blog Catalog
Bloggapedia

I’ve placed them and a few others at rawpinions.com’s footer.

To those other reciprocal ones that haven’t accepted this site, I’ll be patient enough and wait for a bit. Rawpinions.com is a personal site, and many of them had the ‘personal site’ category. If rawpinions is rejected it might be due to the fact that I had accidentally added ‘www’ in the URL (so the auto-crawlers might not be able to find the link to their site).

BUT, if they reject my site for any other reason…esp. one that isn’t good enough for me (e.g. “sorry, we’re just feeling a little nasty today”), I’ll have to remove their link(s) from the footer of this page…and throw them a “thumbs down” Stumble. That ought to compensate for wasting my time. *rolls eyes*

Update: 20th January - Apparently, www.aveblogs.com already had my blog on their site. Except it was “unsearchable” so they really ought to fix their search box…

Title pretty much says it all. So if anyone’s interested in joining, head over to the link below:

http://forums.ukwebmasterworld.com/39205-post1.html

To read what it’s all about.� Briefly though, the contests begins on the 1st of February 2008, and they’re only letting 300 people sign-up for the contest.

Should be quite interesting to see what the SEO experts can do. Good luck!

LOL I’m not even a member of that forum so I have no idea why I’m advertising the contest. :S

Current Mood: Cool

I spent yesterday (morning-afternoon) submitting rawpinions.com to a few free directories. So I’m expecting to have a lot more search results for “rawpinions” in the days to come. Might spend this weekend doing more submissions. This’ll all be worth it in the end.

Helping me with the manual submissions is the wonderful Firefox add-on ‘InFormEnter’. It’s very user-friendly so I really recommend it! Visit: informenter.mozdev.org

For a very long list of free web directories, check out: info.vilesilencer.com, where they actually have this excel sheet you can download where they list hundreds of free directories.

Speaking of search results, Google will now come up with 4760 search results for “rawpinions” (read rawpinions.com’s first post when we started out with 0 google search results. So 4760 is pretty cool. We also have 524 indexed pages (Google).

For a little bit of personal humour: type “sabrina {my Ex} seychelles” and you get rawpinions.com! LOL.

HAPPY 3RD MONTH RAWPINIONS.COM!

Current Mood: Alarmed

I just visited dmoz.com and suggested that rawpinions should be added to the directory. I don’t really know why many sites tend to be rejected - but this site deserves to be on that directory!

I wrote something like this as the description: “Humorously sarcastic but resourceful journal entries of a cynical bi-racial female experiencing quarter-life crisis on a foreign land”.

I spent a minute coming up with that and now I think about it, why didn’t I take 5 minutes? But I hear it’s really quite difficult to get your site up on there so I’m glad I only took a minute.

Speaking of ‘resourceful’, I’ll have to start adding a few more things on this site…

* Also submitted to Yahoo Directory…keeping my fingers crossed now!

What is social bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is actually a very general term, but for now we’re mainly talking about the latest internet fad…a term to describe using special sites to bookmark your favourite websites. In many cases you can keep these sites private, or you can also choose to invite your friends and everyone gets to share their bookmarked sites with each other. Some social bookmarking sites offer lots of space for website description and entire articles. So technically, you can do a whole lot more than just bookmarking sites online!

Who is it for?
Social bookmarking is for everyone really! Here are some
- Constantly having to reboot your PC or you just have far too many bookmarked pages on your browser? Social bookmarking can keep your favourite pages intact, and when you need to find one of your bookmarked pages, bookmarking sites have search boxes that allow you to search for keywords/tags for your bookmarks, in case you can’t remember the URL.
- Need to advertise (SEO) your blog articles, web pages, your favourite website or simply a great site you just found? Social bookmarking allows you to save these articles and URLs. So, not only will you be able to easily locate them again, but it also allows others to find your bookmarks and check out your sites or articles!

Here is a list of several social bookmarking sites which I think is pretty cool and user-friendly.

Special mention to Linkagogo, they send backups to your email address about once a week, so that’s just awesome!

http://www.digg.com
http://www.stumbleupon.com
http://del.icio.us
http://www.diigo.com
http://www.furl.net
http://www.backflip.com
http://www.simpy.com
http://www.linkinn.com
http://www.zlitt.com
http://reddit.com
http://technorati.com
http://www.linkagogo.com
http://www.shadows.com
http://www.excites.com
http://bluedot.us OR http://faves.com
http://www.propeller.com
http://de.lirio.us/bookmarks
http://ma.gnolia.com
http://socialogs.com
http://www.mysocialbookmarkers.com
http://gruks.com
http://www.plugim.com
http://www.4sur.com
http://www.blurpalicious.com
http://www.thepligg.com
http://www.socialho.com
http://www.bibsonomy.org
http://www.folkd.com
http://slashdot.org
http://buddymarks.com
http://www.bmaccess.net
http://www.a1-webmarks.com
http://claimid.com
http://www.corank.com
http://cloudytags.com