Like most people in the web industry I got several personal eternity projects waiting for execution.  As unlikely as it may seem my recent 3 week sick leave (due to frontal sinusitis) provided me a change to finally tackle a project I had been planning for several years.  And since I usually like to weave my projects together to get maximum efficiency I think dealing blog related SEO & marketing issues in SEOMoz would make a fun-to-make/read article series. 

Without further introductions (they come in later) I would like to introduce Ringtone Search – a blog about mobile information society & technology.

I originally had an idea to make a ringtones search service similar to one we operate in Finland but since we couldn’t find appropriate partners the project was iced.  The domain was purchased about a year ago, but it has never been used or promoted online (for some reason it has dummy page indexed by Google, most likely due to a misspelled link) . So this could make a nice sandbox example...

This is also a good candidate for possible geo-location issues. The server locates in UK.  I come from Finland. And target audience is mainly US. So it should have a very varying base of incoming links by the time all is done…. I believe Google has no problems with this equation but If MSN follows the same track as with our main site, this blog will be MIA in everywhere else but MSN UK.

Since this is more or less a sidekick project (I do have to work with client sites and run my business)   I have made few very simple guidelines I follow with this site: 
 

• make quality, not quantity. Limited time means low post count. This should however be equated by higher quality.

• make it interesting. Everything begins from the title like (I just love How to Get Lots of RSS Readers to Click-Through entry by Rand) and ends up on having real content issues.  Since I have a very long work history with mobile devices and applications development/marketing I think it's time I share some of my views with rest of the world.

• Don’t count. This project has zero goals / expectations when it comes to revenue. In terms of desing, SEO etc. I would consider this to be very close to "average blog"  (ie. zero budget).

Before I started writing this article I sent an application for Google AdSense. Now, approx. 33 minutes later the application is approved and the site is serving public service ads… It will be interesting to see what kind of revenue this site can provide and in which time range. It is also possible that at some point I switch over to Yahoo or MSN offerings and make some level of comparison.

Below are listed few topics I have in mind for future blog topics, but if you have ideas be sure to ad yours to the list (but before that, please read at least one entry in the ringtone-search.net blog, so you understand the nature of topics/content I’m working with):
 

• Studying the markets and selecting topics
• Selecting the right blogging platform for the job
• Keywords in domain name – do they matter
• Sandboxing
• Geo-location issues
• Relying on quality content vs. link/publicity campaigns
• Search engine traffic vs. other sources of traffic
• Ad positioning